#ark survival stories

[puppetmaster13u]

Have a Short WIP

for the Ark/DC crossover. How much sleep do you think Bruce has gotten so far?

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   “Day three in maybe-ancient times on this island,” Jason said dramatically, poking at the fire with a stick. “Robin has already started a dodo uprising, Batwoman is the best at catching fish, her stride can’t be broken, and I think Signal is going to go mad with the power of the sun soon. Spoiler has made a statue out of leaves, and I am pretty sure she’s going to sacrifice Red Robin to it, what do you think?” 

   Bruce sighed, shaking his head as Cass gave a thumbs up to her brother. Harper, who was carving out some wood to make a bowl, tilted her head. “Why do you say island huh?” 

   “Because it sounds better, obviously.” 

  “Mm… fair.” 

   “B, Nightwing is hanging upside down in the trees again!” 

  “Red you traitor!” 

   Bruce sighed again, pinching the bridge of his nose as he took a deep breath, holding it for a moment before releasing. He set down his armful of branches and logs, slipping over towards where Tim had shouted, already feeling exhausted. “Boys, don’t fight,” he called, looking up to indeed see his oldest hanging from several vines pouting at one of his middle children. “Nightwing, get down until your equipment is fixed.” 

   “Aw, c’mon B!” The ravenette whined but did do as he asked, even if it was with an unnecessary flip. “I’m not going to fall that easily!” He knew that, but his anxiety was high enough already and it wasn’t like he had brought his medicine which… ugh. 

   “Hm.” 

[nobrainforthoughtsphantomh]

I love and hate Ark Survival Evolved. It so my least favorite favorite game. It’s like smoking cigarettes accept it doesn’t make you look cool or give you lung cancer. It appeals to the part of me that wants to have So Many Creatures. It is glitchy and unbalanced, it makes my computer scream out in pain, the game - with all the dlcs - is over 400 gb. It is hideous and beautiful and unfair. I have nearly 500 hours in the game and expect there to be more. Every time my friends play Ark Survival Evolved, we give them our pity and condolences as if they had fallen on hard times. It’s like a toxic ex. It’s like a skeleton with bones only gilded with illustrious metals. It has horses and funny fish and dragons and snakes. You can ride and tame all of these things, and have a menagerie of creatures big and small, beautiful and horrible, terribly destructive and utterly useless. Until I feel brave enough to buy Ark Survival Ascended, I will continue to accumulate hours in this game. For better or for worse. Or for that red and green horse I tamed and named Nausea. I love ark survival evolved

[whiskingskin]

Holy fuck why isn't the ARK: Survival Evolved animated series driving yall crazy. Love me some canon POC lesbians. Love me some found family. Love me some unhinged and a little fruity old evil scientists. Love me some queers on dinosaurs. Love me a nerd that finally gets to confirm or deny her theories on dinosaurs. LOVE me some ASIAN BUTCH LESBIANNSSSSSS LETS GOOOO

[kumquats-are-gay]

*immediately gravitates to the most obvious morally reprehensible character*

Nah but he’s always been a character I found fascinating throughout Ark’s lore. Interesting to see him in the animated series.

Used the Ark TSA character sheet for reference. You can tell the exact part I used lol.

[rhodeybugg]

Tonight's Artemis Ark Adventure Notes:

I tamed a raptor!

Her name is Sapphire and I love her so much. She's my new favorite mount and i plan on going back to get the other raptors once i get some more chitin for better armor.

However! This excitement was short lived, as i started looking around for a lone, aesthetically pleasing triceratops because i got a trike saddle from a supply crate. Hell yeah!!

I stopped on a little cliff overlooking a forest near my home base [and all my beloved dinos- my iggy and parasaur couples, tek stego, and my pteranadon], and see THIS fucker.

That dino with the red aura? I just barely gor close enough to tell but i'm 99% sure that!!! Is an alpha raptor!!! In what is essentially my backyard!

The gears are turning in my head. This thing is standing between me and the forest i need to start exploring in order to: A) get another raptor [a boyfriend for sapphire], B), find more sources of chitin and other items to help me progress and build better items, and C) FIND MY FUCKING MEGALOCEROS'.

[the-admin-but-dumber]

Silly little AU kinda

SrGrSo I know I usually post MCSM here but like, I LOVE Ark, it’s one of the many games I play and its definitely my favourite in terms of survival aside from minecraft. I love playing with mods and so on. Anyways I wanted to show off my most favourite tames and I guess ‘tame’ I have.

Rudy and Ech0! They’ve been with me for a few months at this rate, I’ve been playing a huge mix of mods and I was lucky to get them. 

Rock Drakes are my FAVOURITE dino on the game, they’re so fun to glide around with and are just so cool, anyways onto the AU thing. Would you call it an AU? Meh. Anyways, I started thinking about a possible Ark AU with MCSM a while ago, when in doubt use the portal network for your weird AUs and make it a new adventure. I love the portal network and its sad we only saw so much, but anyways the whole gist of the story is they get caught in the portal network and end up in a world with dinosaurs and all these funky creatures, cool right, not too special. Anyways, the portal leading OUT of the world is actually right beside them when they step through, but it is horribly disfigured and needs to be repaired. The entire worlds is inhabited by survivors and tribes who’d already long since made their claim on the world, one of these tribes attacks Jesse’s gang because well new people.       They’re rescued by this other tribe that takes them back to base on this floating rock in the sky. They’re given a run down on what’s going on with the world, all of them came from the portal network to be faced with a destroyed portal. The tribe they’re in has a pink flint and steel thats grown damaged in the years they’ve been there.      They’re told that the only way to possibly figuring out how to get home is to find all these artifacts and fight the one that basically made the realm. The world’s admin if you will, I imagined her as a dragon or one of the main boses.   They stay in the tribe’s camp for a couple days/weeks, learning how to make stuff, new crafting recipes, how to tame the dinosaurs and so on.       Kind of a list of what creatures the order mostly use. This is all really off the top of my head since I never really made a solid list. Lukas; Sabertooth Jesse/Jessie; Argentavis (?) Or Wyvern? Petra; Griffin (?) Axel; Maybe a large apex? Like allo, or Carchar, Dire Bear? Olivia; Deinonychus/Raptor Radar; Rock Drake, but def wanted a dire wolf Characters that might NOT be in the AU but could be? Jack;  Def smth that can passanger carry for Nurm (Shadowmane? He seems badass enough to successfully tame one) Romeo; Rock Drake too? Kind of had an idea that he and Radar were the ones to fall into the abberant area together. Minus the deadly radiation LOLL Xara; Also seems like a Shadowmane, or a snow owl. Ivor; Griffin maybe, he and Petra can having matching LOL (Gimme your ideas of what you think they’d have, this was just a sudden choice with not too much thought put into) Anyways, I was thinking of making this into a fanfic which could be fun, would that be an interest to read. Ark and MCSM are some of my biggest hyperfixations and I would LOVE to make content of the two games combined in this fun little AU.

[vampyricangelx]

As soon as I got a pair, I started breeding the new carchars. Finished up the stats earlier this week and finished up my colors + stat combos tonight. As usual, I couldn’t decide on just one, but the first one is my favorite.

[auduux]

I'm starting an ark the animated series hate club

I wanted note accurate lore not whatever tf that shit was, Wazhui and Mei Yin's giga wasn't even in it

[isoddtosay]

the ark machinimas make me so happy because i havent seen a fanmade project like that for ages... makes me feel like a kid again. HOWEVER with ark:tas coming up i can see a very funny conflict popping up there: im 67% sure that the ark series will diverge from the ingame lore (helena's tek rifle for one thing) and if it werent for the machinima series i dont think anybody wouldve noticed.&thats very funny to me.

theres something so community-building about fanmade projects for games/books/shows/etc, and in this particular case i think theres a chance that the community is going to prefer the fanmade machinima over the series, even if the series is good.

im honestly surprised that ark hasnt done something similar already -- or at least, hired people to narrate all of the notes. i could see that being expensive, ESPECIALLY when multiple languages are involved, but i think it would pay off. nobody reads the notes as is (unfortunately most people arent going to take the time to read 2 paragraphs of text when theyre surrounded by raptors and carnos...) but if they did, it would make the game a lot more immersive. i know leaving the machinima audio on as background noise made me wayyy more fixated on ark

[whitewintertiger]

Ferra

This is Ferra, she’s a Ferox (From Ark: Survival Evolved), she’s one of my characters from some of the Ark stories I’ve made.

I was originally planning to post Ferra's story on AO3, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Despite that, if anyone would like to read it please tell me and I might be able to find some time to put it on AO3

[puppetmaster13u]

Y'know, re-looking at the story of Ark.

Hypothetically do you think an Overseer or whatever the AI behind the Arks and ship could create hybridized creatures? Like there's already things like the dodo rex and the dodo wyvern, but I'm talking about human hybrids.

Could they mash some humans and creatures together into one being?

[tsamired]

perhaps above average temperature ARK take survival evolved looks far better than ascended

[buchstabennetzwerk]

Fanpage: Neues Projekt

Die neue Fanpage Webseite ARK Story mit Sarah ist heute live gegangen. Es geht um das Spiel ARK: Survival Envolved. Sarah ist die Geschichtenerzählerin für den Singleplayer, die die Spieler über die Karte begleitet, um die Story zu meistern. Schaut gerne vorbei 😁 die Webseite ist im Aufbau. Jede Woche kommen neue Inhalte hinzu. Ich lade Spieler ein, gerne mit bei der Geschichte mitzuwirken und…

[canmom]

The themes of NieR Reincarnation

A post about the recurring elements of Drakenier and the use of branching timelines as a storytelling device. I'll be discussing spoilers for basically every DoD/NieR game.

Records

A somewhat understated recurring motif of the Drakengard/NieR series is the idea of stories or memories of humanity being stored in some massive archive.

It's an idea that first entered the series in NieR Gestalt/Replicant. Early drafts of the game focused on the idea of a world built out of stories and fairytale characters, and while most of this was cut, some remained in the Forest of Myth area.

Following NieR's obsessive love of hopping between different game genres, the story here is delivered through prose/text adventure segments. There is a sense that this area of the game exists as prose, with the characters slightly aware of narration - narration which absorbs the characters until you find a way to escape. Eventually you find out - it's rather cryptic in the actual game, but spelled out explicitly in Grimoire NieR - that it's a huge computer system storing records of the deceased humanity.

In your second visit to the area, the story focuses more on distant history, that all these stories are fragments of memory of the lost pre-apocalpytic world. You encounter a Gestalt (human soul extracted from body) that is eating the memories stored in the tree, and kill it, and for Nier and co., this is enough - but for the player, you really don't know half of what is going on.

In the story The Lost World, which was adapted for the additional Ending E added in the Replicant remake, Kainé returns to the Forest of Myth and finds the computer system expanding. She fights clones of herself before eventually speaking to a mysterious administrator and descending into a virtual world that seems like a corrupted version of her memories. But she's able to connect to her memories of NieR, Emil and Grimoire Weiss, and through that connection cause a kind of timeline collapse effect that allows her to resurrect Nier. Terms from DoD3 such as 'singularity' come back again.

In NieR Automata, the idea of the legacy of humanity becomes increasingly central. While the androids believe they are reclaiming Earth for humanity, the Machine Lifeforms' motivation is in large part driven by their efforts to pore over the records of humanity and learn how to evolve their condition, even by blind imitation. Many of the different Machine Lifeforms you encounter are shaped by their interpretations of human society. The motif of human buildings recreated in white blocks recurs at certain points.

In the final sequence of the game, you climb a tower, and inside it visit simulacra of locations from the Replicant/Gestalt. You learn that the machines have infiltrated the androids' network and downloaded basically all the information the androids have, including all their records of humanity. When the machines' 'Ark' is launched into space, it carries their memories and consciousness in data form.

The YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse raid series in FFXIV continues this idea of obsessive, blind reconstruction. The machines you fight here are now all the more explicitly connected to the apocalyptic shit in DoD; they have also been frantically creating duplicates of YoRHa android 2P, the Bunker and so on in corrupted form. Although the story here has mostly other interests, it's another recurrence of the idea of trying to recreate things that were lost.

Along with this idea of the archive comes the idea of preservation of that archive. Whether by accident or deliberate attack, the survival of the archive is not guaranteed.

This is all absolutely central to what Reincarnation is about.

Branches

The Drakenier series has played around with branching narratives pretty much from the start. It's somewhat infamous for it in fact - did you know that NieR is actually a spinoff of ending E of Drakengard, the one where you appear over Tokyo and have to do a rhythm game? Yeah, so...

Most games are fairly cagey (ha ha) about the mechanics of these branches. Indeed, although we speak of branches, the structure of these games is not really a branching one like a visual novel. The branches and 'endings' are usually unlocked sequentially.

Drakengard/Drag-on Dragoon (DoD1) is probably the closest you get to a traditional branching structure. You can unlock routes in certain missions by fulfilling certain conditions. The exact logic of these branches is not really explained - you can go back to a point before you recruit a party member and get a different branch where they're present for example. That said, it's not like a visual novel where you can be 'on' one branch or another - you can always jump to any level from any timeline.

This oddness of the branches is also lampshaded a little more in DoD3, the game that is most explicit about the nature of the branching timeline. DoD3 is, from the player perspective, a linear game. After you complete the first 'ending', you unlock new levels that appear at earlier points in the timeline, and diverging branches appear. In the later branches, the logic of the world is starting to break down. Party members who you'd recruit later in the story are in your party much earlier, in some cases suffering from amnesia, the implication being that it's an effect of the Flower's corruption.

The game is intermittently narrated by a character called Accord, an android 'Recorder' whose job is to document all the different versions of the story for an unknown party. Accord isn't supposed to intervene in the story, though she occasionally talks to protagonist Zero, and in the final D route, she decides to break the rules and save Zero. Otherwise, she's responsible for 'sealing' branches where it seems the world cannot be saved.

This is Accord:

The final cutscene of DoD3, available only after you beat the ludicrously difficult rhythm game that is the 'final song', shows a bunch of other Accords appearing and talking about what a mess this all is.

Accord's other role in the game is to sell weapons. Another series tradition running back to DoD1 is the 'Weapon Stories'. In each game, you can collect weapons, which can be upgraded through a series of four stages. Each stage unlocks another part of a story. These stories tend to be quite brief - each entry is at most a short paragraph. They also, particularly in the DoD games, tend to be comically grimdark.

DoD 3 came out after NieR Replicant/Gestalt, but in every game since then, there have been cryptic mentions of Accord. In Automata she's mentioned in a note as a weapons seller; in the updated version of Replicant she is mentioned as visiting Nier's village while the party is away on her adventures, and you see a documention that mentions the 'Accord Corporation' supplying magic weapons.

OK, so, put a pin in that, we'll come back to her later.

The side material commits further to the branching idea. The original Drakengard is established to follow from the DoD3 Story Side novel, while Branch A gives rise to the Shi ni Itaru Aka manga and the DoD 1.3 novel. The YoRHa stage plays spawned alternative versions, namely YoRHa version 1.3a and Shōjo YoRha version 1.1a, with the gender of the casts flipped. YoRHa 1.3a also has Accord in it. The anime NieR Automata ver. 1.1a also presents an increasingly diverging version of the events of the game - notably, Adam turns into a multi-armed monster.

DoD2, something of the black sheep of the franchise, was originally written to follow DoD1 ending A; later it was retconned to belong to its own branch. Just 'cause.

With me so far? ...no? Yeah, that's fair. You can read about all the details I've gathered so far here, but in short, there are lots of timeline branches, and multiple versions of several stories with small or large divergences.

Reincarnation

NieR Re[in]carnation is a gacha game that's been running for the last three years, and is going to be shut down at the end of April. At the time it came out, it was acknowledge for having unusually nice graphics for a mobile game, but rather desultory, grindy, repetitive gameplay. Which remained true throughout the game's life, so I can't exactly recommend playing Reincarnation, especially at this point.

But! I would definitely say it's worth your time to dig up the story on Youtube/Accord's Library if you're into NieR stuff. I won't be going into all the ins and outs of the story and how it all fits together in this post, but I am gonna talk about how it's structured.

NieR Reincarnation places you in a vast stone city called the Cage, calling to mind the environments in Ico. At the outset, you play as a young girl travelling with a weird ghost-like creature called Mama, tasked with restoring the memories stored in objects called 'dark scarecrows' which are being subverted and corrupted by black birds which form into various monsters.

Within each chapter of NieR Reincarnation, you get a short story in four parts, presented in a kind of cutout style, which are the four segments of a weapon story. You collect the weapon and the character.

The Cage is shaped by the content of the weapon stories somehow bleeding into the simulated setting. A character's memories can be used to restore the stories to their proper course. It is possible to interfere in small ways with the worlds of the stories.

The corruption of the stories tends to involve subverting characterisation to make them crueller, more prone to random violence etc. - or points when a character could be threatened in a narratively unsatisfying way. For example, a peace-loving runaway prince could be turned into a warlike king.

Over the course of the first arc, you discover that the girl you are playing is actually a monster who has taken the form of a human girl and, regretting it, wants to give her her embodiment back. The second half of the arc has you playing the girl trying to reunite with her monster friend; at the end, you get her own backstory as a victim of brutal prejudice. After all is said and done, both characters transform into weapons, which Mama picks up and hides away.

The second arc, The Sun and the Moon, deals with a brother and sister from present-day Tokyo. Both of them have been transported into the Cage by more of the weird ghost thingies, to participate in a strange ritual that is allegedly going to restore the Cage. The rules are highly mystical - a significant sacrifice is needed.

In the most recent arc, The People and The World, the characters all emerge from their stories as the Cage becomes increasingly corrupted. We finally get the long awaited point where these characters can interact with each other, and advance the stories from a series of tragic vignettes to something more. At the same time, we get a lot more allusions to other games in the series - from the Lunar Tear room where Emil memorialised Kainé and later 9S memorialises 2B, to a brief appearance Devola and Popola.

There's even a nod to Yoko Taro's other terminated gacha game, SINoALICE, which is going to be made into a movie oddly enough. There's a wry nod to the game being shut down.

And in the most recent chapters we find out that the Cage is actually a server on the moon containing records of humanity - 10H from A Much Too Silent Sea is one of the main characters. 'Mama' is actually the Pod tasked with overseeing the archive, and wiping 10H's memories whenever she learns too much - though it seems at some point 10H learned the truth and affirmed that she'd protect the archive anyway and they stopped wiping her memory.

Over the course of the chapter, 10H helps the gang make their escape from the moon through the androids network, to Earth. But when they get to Earth, they find themselves in a strange white city more resembling the Cage.

We'll finally get some answers, maybe, later this month. Anyway...

So, these records come from multiple diverging timelines, and they take the form of weapon stories. You have a unity of the ideas of character - weapon - memory - world. A record is simultaneously a tragic series of events, a person who can manifest inside the Cage itself, a simulated world which other people can visit, and a weapon.

In addition to the main storyline chapters and 'character stories', each character is associated with two additional 'EX' storylines, termed Dark Memories and Recollections of Dusk. Each one is a much more substantial narrative than most in the game.

Some of these EX stories clearly take place in different timelines to the first ones we encounter. Akeha's story, for example, takes place after her death in the original version. For the brother and sister from the Sun and the Moon arc, originally from present-day Tokyo, their Dark Memories take place in the backstory to NieR Gestalt/Replicant - the period where humanity is dying out to White Chlorination Syndrome and fighting monsters called the Legion. In this one, before the siblings could be torn apart by family drama and resentment, the apocalypse happens. Both of them end up coming into their own as heroic fighters. In the finale arc, the characters learn a bit about these alter egos, and it's made very explicit that this is a different timeline.

The monster Levania's Dark Memory is especially weird. It's the story of a salaryman who plays a monster called Levania in an MMORPG. His MMO character inspires him to live more bravely in the real world, and his life seems to be improving, but he is murdered by a jealous coworker. He wishes for reincarnation as he dies - classic isekai stuff. But the connection to the Levania you encounter in the main story is far from clear. Are all versions of Levania derived essentially from this man's tulpa?

The nature of the 'enemies' attacking the Cage is still not yet clear. They take the form of black birds. The birds are given a small amount of dialogue and characterisation, and they seem to not be malicious, just confused. The girl from the first arc in particular tends to interact with them sympathetically. However, they seem to be connected with the mysterious 'God' who was trying to destroy the world in DoD1, and the Angels and Flower of DoD3.

The birds are able to gathe together to manifest much larger monsters, the largest being giant elk and fish called Cursed Gods. During the finale arc, one of these becomes something that resembles the Mother Angel from DoD1 - and yes, there is a rhythm game - though mercifully a pretty easy one.

In the same arc, the character Yurie, an AI city overlord with grandiose ambitions and a loathing of imperfection attempts to download the entire history of humanity from the Cage and become a more perfect being. She succeeds, only to find the answers disappointing...

This is perhaps the closest thing we ever get to an explicit statement of what all these stories and histories add up to, but despite all this, the throughline is very strongly that these stories are essential to preserve. NieR characters exist in small groups, and it is their intense connections to these others, their treasured memories of travelling together, that motivate them to fight to preserve that thing, even if the results are destructive.

Similar themes emerge for example in Noelle's Recollection of Dusk story, which sees her travelling to preserve a place valued by her sister in crystal. And they also connect to the theme of sacrifice - the recurring ending device where the player must delete their save data in order to help someone (something echoed in Hina and Yuzuki at the altar of the sun and moon, or Levania and Fio). It's perhaps fair to say that nothing is more valued in the world of Nier than memories of a treasured person.

What about Accord? She has in fact made a brief cameo in Reincarnation already...

It seems incredibly likely that Accord originates from the Cage, and the accumulation of weapon stories is accomplished by androids like her. Definitely in the fandom there's a lot of excitement for the idea that Accord - something of a fan favourite - will show up at Reincarnation's ending.

So mystery solved, the Cage exists in the world of NieR Automata on the moon server? Not so fast - there are various discrepancies which seem to suggest that the world of the Cage exists in a separate branch than the one we see in Automata. For example, the androids are aware that the humans are dead and what remains on the moon is a huge archive of their memories; the humans seem to have survived much longer; 2B and 9S seem to have died in different circumstances. There are other oddities which fans have compiled.

And yet, despite being a divergent timeline with a much older point of divergence, some things seem to be fixed. There is still a YoRHa, still a 10H deceived about being on the moon, still a 2B and 9S.

One popular fan theory is that Reincarnation belongs to the NieR Automata anime (ver1.1a), since Adam turns into a monster there similar to the ones in Reincarnation. The black birds are reasoned to be the Machine Lifeforms, since we know they come from Earth. I'm not 100% sure of this, but maybe?

Anyway, that's basically the gist of it.

A story told through permutations

In many fictional series with a shared universe, there is an effort to maintain a consistent shared universe, so all the different events can fit into a timeline with understandable cause and effect and characters living out their lives. Even when this proves impossibly unwieldy, as in comic books or Star Wars, the attempt is made.

NieR does not really take this approach. The creators leave many details of the world, such as place names, incredibly vague - the focus is always on telling an emotional story with characters. There is, as we've seen, an almost gleeful willingness to declare another new timeline.

There is also a certain aspect of repetition, or more kindly reiteration - the same core character dynamic revisited and retold in various forms. (2B9S gets the worst of it). A character is something like a principle or ideal, and each story shines another light on that 'core'. In the earlier storylines of Reincarnation, it became quite frustrating because it seemed like e.g. the character event stories were just rehashing the same idea rather than advance the story.

However, the more accustomed I get to this style of storyline, the more I think this kinda works. It is of course quite similar to the ideas proposed towards the end of Homestuck, or to time loop stories - the idea of varying the contingent circumstances to try to better illustrate the core characterisations and dynamics.

Yoko Taro has talked about how he constructs stories from a very simple idea, typically a moment of high emotional impact at the climax, and then works backwards to figure out what sort of story could lead into that. In Reincarnation, each character gets fairly limited time to establish themselves, so they tend to be defined in terms of a pretty narrow high concept.

For example, Akeha is an assassin in a vague historical Japanese setting; her introductory story sees her decide for the first time to disobey her lord after she finds another person who has been treated as instrumentally as her. Most Akeha stories focus on her assassinations, her relationship to her retainer, and what she sacrifices to perform the duty. Only her Dark Memory lets us see an Akeha who has escaped that life - it's a simple story about preparing food, but that's given meaning by all the other Akeha stories.

Hina and Yuzuki are defined by the same traits in their flashy scifi Dark Memory stories as in the more mundane ones - Yuzuki the quiet outcast, Hina the self-sacrificing star. Fio is defined by kindness in the context of abjection, seeing the good in monsters. Levania stories are about the desire for escape and transformation. Argo is always a shitty dad who only feels alive while climbing mountains.

The staticness of these characters seems on some level to be the point - in that we are told in Hina and Yuzuki's story that the mechanism of the Cage is to sort characters into 'Light' and 'Dark' natures, and push them to inevitable conflict, even if they try to break free. In the final arc, the characters seem to finally approach some resolution as they leave their contexts behind. Given the themes of Automata in rejecting an inevitable tragic fate, similar movement may be at work. There's an ambiguity - the need to hold on to even tragic histories, vs the wish to not be confined to them. (Perhaps it's significant that it's called the Cage...)

With so many balls in the air and so many mysteries still unanswered, it's hard to figure out how Reincarnation can deliver a satisfying resolution in just one remaining chapter, but the final arc has been really cooking so who knows! But I'm also coming to appreciate it as a kind of broader lens to notice all these recurring elements and tie them together.

Stories about alternate timelines and branching narratives are very common nowadays, particularly as a tool for revisiting a nostalgic franchise. Something something effect of the fan wiki era. So I can't exactly say NieR is doing something completely unique, but I do think there is something to its fragmented, collage-like approach to putting together story elements. There's something quite honest about it - an ability to say 'these details aren't important'.

Yoko Taro always talks about himself as an entertainer rather than an artist. And probably it is true that a lot of this eemerged from an iterative design process rather than being the plan from the beginning (the first draft of NieR envisioned it as something closer to what SINoALICE ended up being, about a world of fairytale characters; NieR Automata began life as backstory for an idol project). There's definitely a strong sense that it's being improvised. And yet despite that, it does feel like it is cohering into some sort of picture, that there is an artistic throughline to all this.

Or perhaps that's just the effect of getting way too invested in something. I won't deny that NieR brings out the fan in me.

Anyway Accord had better show up next month. Guys. You've been teasing us for so long...

[heartybubs]

jealousy jealousy

the 100 [ john murphy x reader ]

type: ig angst but it’s not well written enough to ‘hit’

tropes: jealousy, roommates, unspoken but accepted love, best friends to lovers

warnings: violence ( knife fight ), mentions of murder

in which wells jaha is getting help by the only person willing to be around him, who just so happens to john murphy’s unofficial girlfriend, who then has to deal with his idiotic jealousy.

a/n: hii, i’m back! this is based on a request i really really liked but i’m not happy with what i actually wrote so i hope it’s okay to read. i kinda ignored how much of a psychopath murphy was in the first season cause i really couldn’t have justified his actions otherwise and the whole jealousy part wouldn’t have been entertaining AT ALL. so yea, i was struggling a bit ( whilst also blatantly ignoring the timeline, ignore anything that doesn’t match the canon timeline of s1 pls ), but at least i tried right🫣 no pronouns

w.c.: 2040

yours and murphy's relationship was a rather unclear, but at the same time simple one. you weren't officially dating, but during your time on the ark, when you were locked up in your shared cell, where you also met, you definitely did some inappropriate stuff; stuff that friends don't do.

your cell was also the place where the two of you bonded, becoming really really close rather quickly. although he was a very aggressive and irritating person to be around at first, you got used to it and soon he became your favourite person to be around.

now, after months of being roommates and part time lovers, you were finally on the ground, something you'd dreamed of since you first learned about it and therefore were keen on securing your survival. murphy on the other hand, got so bad that even you couldn't deny the fact he was a total asshole and if you didn't know he would never hurt you, you'd be way too scared to share a tent with him, especially alone.

you didn't actively distance yourself but after watching him bully wells, the chancellor's son, countless times for his father's actions, you kind of naturally looked for ways to make some new friends. and as if the universe hated john murphy, you seemed to work really well with wells.

everytime murphy saw you talk or walk around with wells, which honestly happened quite a lot, it fueled his hatred against home even more and made him want to stay away from you too.

you didn't mind not being associated with the provocative behaviour of john murphy and the way he tyrannized the other delinquents, however, it was a very different story when it came to going to bed and waiting for him until you physically couldn't keep your eyes open any longer, leading to you and him barely ever meeting and getting a chance to talk, despite sharing a tent.

yes, murphy was an asshole, that was totally not up for debate, BUT he was also the cell mate you had for the past few months; one who you loved deeply.

you were sitting by the dropship, wells next to you, watching your hands closely.

"see, it's really important that you wrap everything tightly, like super tight, since you don't want your arrow to fall apart in the air, alright?", you explained and made sure he understood. you were teaching him how to make an arrow from scratch and although you weren't an earth skills expert, you definitely knew more than wells, who didn't get the chance to attend earth skills class back on the ark. and you could probably count the people who at least tolerated wells on one hand, you included.

"okay and, sorry", he paused, scrunching his nose and forehead as he stared at the arrow-to-be in front of him, "how do i make sure the tip is sharp and everything? i just don't get it, sorry. i don't wanna waste your time y/n.”

you smiled, appreciating his consideration, but clearly declining his indirect offer for you to do something else. there wasn't anything else for you to do and he also wasn't wasting your time, he was just learning and you really liked teaching him; it helped you understand better as well.

"wells, c'mon. i'm choosing to be here, you didn't force me and i don't think it would be okay to produce less arrows, that literally get us food, just cause i'm bored of you", you said, smiling at him, "not.. not that i am bored of you, but you know what i mean!"

he grinned before nodding. honestly, there wasn't anything wrong with wells at all and you truly didn't understand how your fellow delinquents could treat him they way they did. especially murphy.

speaking of the devil, murphy was brutally staring at you and oh boy was he jealous.

he didn’t want to approach you, as he was lowkey trying to avoid starting anything right in front of you, let alone with you. he wasn’t blind and therefore noticed how much more distant you and him were ever since arriving on earth so he was trying to avoid any additional conflicts between you.

when you looked up, your eyes meeting his for a quick moment, leading to you sending a small smile his way, he almost forgot about all his anger and jealousy towards wells. that was until you looked back at the boy in front of you and started smiling hard at the almost perfect arrow he had just put together.

murphy was gonna make wells pay, hard. he just had to catch him away from you, something that was way harder to arrange than he’d like it to be.

“don’t you see you can’t control this?!”, wells voice echoed through the woods as you nervously made your way back. you were wandering around outside of camp, always keeping close to the dropship as you knew you could get los easily. the initial reason you decided to turn around was the cheering delinquents and something inside of you just had you thinking that murphy must have had something to do with it.

“wait”, you heard bellamy yell, making the noise die down for a moment. it calmed your nerves as you were standing at the back of the group, trying to be as tall as possible to see what was going on. “fair fight”, bellamy said before you could hear something metallic fall to the ground.

anxiety increasing again, you tried to push yourself through the delinquents that were proudly chanting for murder meanwhile you had to pray for a miracle; one that ensured that murphy wasn’t part of this.

“this is for my father”, you could make out murphy’s voice fairly quickly right as you were able to watch him attack wells with a knife. a gasp escaped your throat when wells defended himself with ease, pushing murphy to the ground and holding a knife to his throat.

“stop it! are you insane?!”, your feet were moving before you could think about your actions, bringing you right where wells and murphy were standing.

wells dropped his hand. murphy looked at you with fear and regret. he didn’t regret attacking wells, but he didn’t want you to see him like this. however, one had to admit that he hadn’t been trying very hard.

“y/n..”

“no, shut up john. i am so beyond done with your shit. yours too!”, you pointed a finger at bellamy who just rolled his eyes at your tone.

“if this is who you want to be, fine. go ahead and be a dickhead, john. you disgust me”, you mumbled angry words right into his face before storming off.

despite it being really challenging, you decided to ignore murphy for now. you couldn’t believe that he would do something as reckless as getting into a knife fight with wells! of course wells wasn’t innocent either, but it was clear who the aggressor must have been, even without having been there the entire time.

it was kind of embarrassing that you couldn’t even deny the high possible of john murphy, the boy you had lowkey caught feelings for, murdering an innocent boy for fun.

truly messed up, making murphy more and more deserving of the silent treatment you were giving him. at first he had stayed away from you until you didn’t even come to the tent at night, secretly having had asked a girl named harper to stay in hers.

so when you kept ignoring murphy the day after the incident, it angered him so much that he immediately stormed into your tent when he watched you enter it from afar.

“what the fuck y/n”, he said, his voice laced with irritation as he stared at you. his blue eyes piercing yours.

despite being intimidated, you stayed stubborn and didn’t give him any attention. he hadn’t deserved it yet.

“oh i see, you’re ignoring me? are you being serious? for what, scaring the chancellor’s son a bit? you know damn well i wouldn’t have done anything”, he said, rolling his eyes and waited for a reaction. this time you looked at him critically before ignoring him again.

“wait, you do know that, right?”, murphy’s voice softened a bit. he moved so that he could observe not only your body language, but also your eyes. this made you lower your gaze.

soon after, you felt two hands touching your skin. they were cold but the touch was warm, hot even. murphy moved your face so that you were looking at him and he immediately noticed your worried expression. he instantly understood that you actually didn’t know that he wasn’t a cold hearted killer.

“y/n, i wouldn’t have killed him, i swear. yes, i harmed him and i did that on purpose, i’ll be fully honest here, but i was just angry at him”, he explained himself calmly now.

you removed his hands from your face before getting up from the bed you had previously sat on. “what do you mean angry, john? what did wells do to you? you’ve been treating him like absolute shit, are you kidding me, i don’t get it”, you said. you wanted to yell at him but you also tried to hold onto the tiniest bit of privacy you had behind the ‘walls’ of your tent.

murphy slightly rolled his eyes and shook his head, then sat down on the bed and took off his shoes.

he is trying to escape the conversation!

it annoyed you that he had the audacity to ignore your question after everything he had done up until this point.

“what is WRONG with you, john. talk to me already!”, this time, he basically had you begging. again, unbelievable.

he tried to let as much time pass as possible before linking his hands, putting his arms behind his head and looking up. he sighed and licked his lips, trying to find the right words. “i was.. kinda jealous.”

you couldn’t help but stare at him and ultimately break out in laughter. this was absolutely pathetic.

“you were gonna kill someone out of jealousy? are you INSANE MURPHY?!”, you didn’t even try to keep your voice down, he deserved this.

“y/n, i know that it was wrong alright. but i already told you that i wouldn’t have killed him”, murphy was annoyed and you could clearly hear it in his voice. he however, could clearly see that you weren’t just going to let him disrespect you like that. he sighed again.

“do you want me to apologize?”, he asked quietly, his voice barely louder than a whisper. murphy moved his head so that he could look at you and when a slight grin appeared on your face, he let himself fall back into the sleeping bag.

of course you’d want him to apologize.

“yea, to wells”, you said, ruining his mood entirely.

“WHAT?! you gotta be insane. do you know how embarass”, your expression made him halt in the middle of the sentence, the stubbornness you radiated even caused him to groan. “okay.” you truly had him wrapped around your finger.

“good, john”, you said and walked over to him. “y’know what, this is an amazing sign for you to be better in general because from what i’ve noticed, you’ve been pure hell for most people in this camp”, you admitted, knowing he wouldn’t be mad at you for your honesty.

this, once again, caused murphy to roll his eyes at you. he shook his head slightly, not wanting to talk about his own behaviour anymore, he held one arm out to you, inviting you into the bed with him.

you hesitated for a short second, but quickly got down next to him.

“ugh come here”, murphy said and pulled you into his side.

sharing a bed or cuddling wasn’t a new thing to you two, but it made your heart jump, in a very very good way, everytime it happened.

you repositioned your head until you found a position comfortable enough to stay in and took a long breathe in.

after a moment of silence you began giggling.

“so, jealous huh?”

[150en]

Etho who "picked Kakashi skin because it was the most detailed at the time". Yeah sure he did.

I'm convinced it's the other way around. Maybe he watched Nrt, saw Kakashi doing the copy ninja thing and thought "wow, that's sooo me" then decided to LARP as him forever. (See: trolling people on worms by copying their names+teams)

Maybe Etho wanted to be kks so bad that he looked up Kakashi skins then found the most detailed skin available. And then he got embarrassed about being a nerd, so now he pretends he's indifferent about anime (or maybe he's embarrassed that he can't say sharingan properly). Hence the "it's just a detailed skin + i recognized the character" story.

It's funny how he's still trying to convince people that he's not into Nrt, but he does things like call himself a ninja (copy ninja even, + saying it would be his pokemon abiilty), name his ark dinosaurs ninja storm/ninja striker/ninja dancer etc., and name his sword chidori. I appreciate the commitment to the theme.

I know what you are Mr Copyboy Ersatz... It's okay, you don't have to come out and say it. We understand. <3

Etho the cosplayer

Video links + timestamps for easier access ↓

Worms armageddon & Ersatz - Etho Plays Minecraft - Episode 300: Ender Ender 2.0 [45:18]

Can't say Japanese names - OOGE - Spellbound Caves: Episode 10 [26:49]

Copying noteblocks - HermitCraft S7#31: Welcome To The RipZone [28:50]

Pokemon ability: Copy ninja - HermitCraft S8#8: Yes, The Bees [5:22]

Ninja dinosaurs - ARK Survival Evolved #21: Birds o'Plenty [13:43]

千鳥 ie. chidori (Name above hotbar) - Etho Plays Minecraft - Episode 400: Dreary Ville [3:39]