#as for my future in the fandom: i honestly dunno how active i’ll be going forward

[calamitydaze]

long tag ramble below u have been warned

[rockingrobin69]

Hello there I just have an question will we have more followers for the drarry fandom like we had in 2018/ 2019 in the future and more active content on it ???

I know there is a lot of things to worry about but I wanted to ask 😓

Hi there dear Anon, and thank you for this ask 💖 I’m not sure if I can answer your question completely, but I’ll give it my best try. It's going to be long, I apologize in advance.

Let me just start by saying: I’ve not been here long. Not to bore you with the details, but for example, I’ve not really engaged with Tumblr until maybe April this year (I actually checked – the first time I posted my work here was this June!) so the whole fandom thing is still new to me. I really don’t know how it was in the past, and of course I can’t say what’ll be in the future. What I can say though is, look at all we have now.

Because, really, just wow. I could not have imagined the wealth of writers and artists and fans that exist here. There are so many of them, I seem to find new drarry writers and artists to obsess over every day. (Or reccers, or headcanon-ers, or rebloggers, or commentors). Every. Day. And I’m not even exaggerating! There’s so much goodness it blows my mind on a regular basis. People are giving us their time, their passion, their enthusiasm, and like – honestly, I don’t have the words to say how amazing it is.

There’s more, still. So many projects and fests and endeavors ran by wonderful people (angels?) that spend their own personal time to give us mortals more joy to read and see and love. I don’t even know if I’d have posted anything here if it wasn’t for @drarrymicrofic – seeing the support they give and all the amazing fics they share. @the-starryknight has TLC Tuesdays, a next-level-god-stuff of encouragement. All the wonderful reccers out there doing god’s work (like @thedrarrylibrarian or @sitp-recs [who doesn’t do new reclists at the moment, so please no asks about it], @drarryspecificrecs, and so many others). People who comment on fics/art. People who share them. These are all reasons for people to engage with fandom (I know they are for me!), and more and more of them keep coming (@drarryboosterclub , @drarryshorts, every fest ever, and so so many more!). my honest, non-professional, newbie-who-even-let-you-speak, knows-nothing opinion is this: as long as we make sure to hold on to the joy in fandom, it’ll keep.

The way I see it, when you enjoy fandom, and express it, it creates more joy. Maybe it’s naïve to think this way, I dunno, but it's worked for me so far.

To your worries I’d say this: seeing the bright side can be hard, I know. There are things to worry about, in the world, in fandom (trolls and hate and why??). But the bright side here is so freaking bright – keep looking for it.

I can't say if all the INCREDIBLE people we have here now will stay in the fandom, or if more will come. Who knows? this world is full on crazy. I never expected to be here, honestly. I never thought I'd have the courage, for one. But these things happen, and now I know for sure I'm not going anywhere. I'm actually planning another one-shot-collection series that'll come out soon, so yay for future fun!

There will always be other people who like what you like. The internet is massive that way. Find them, support them, and keep positive. There’s so much joy to be had in this fandom, and my firm belief is, it won’t go anywhere. People may come and go, numbers can go up and down, but the love we all have for this won’t disappear, I don’t think. I came back to HP after over a decade, if that’s any sort of proof.

Btw, if you need a list of people to follow – sounds like you’ve been here longer than me but I do spend a good many hours on this haha – of creators/ reccers/ rebloggers of drarry content, please let me know. I’d be more than happy to comprise a list, although it could never be comprehensive enough.

Wow, it really came out long. Sorry. I just wanted to say - try not to worry about what will be, and enjoy what we have now, because it's amazing. I know I am continuously astounded by it (objectively I think we have the best fans 😜) and will do what I can to contribute to it.

Robin ENOUGH okay okay I'm sorry! just lots and lots and lots of love 💖

[fangirlauthor]

vld season 8 [SPOILERS]

Okay, so these are my thoughts on voltron season eight and a little bit on voltron in general. I’m not here to hate on canon, or the voice actors, or the writers, or hate on anyone, really; they’re just my opinions. If you haven’t seen season 8 or don’t want spoilers or don’t want to read my opinions, stop here. 

I’m going to split my thoughts into sections, so here goes. Sorry this isn’t lok themed, I promise I’m still writing things for lok, but I guess I’ll be writing things for other fandoms now as well; my brain can be kind of erratic, so what I’m writing depends on what I’ve been doing recently. 

Also, if you have different opinions or thoughts or anything you want to ask about my opinions on Voltron, feel free to send me an ask. 

Characters

Hunk - Honestly, I thought he was pretty cool. I liked his ending mostly, and how he got to continue to do the things he loves while spreading peace and promoting cooperation between people and using his cooking to accent that. I also don’t have any particular headcanons or anything for him as of right now, but maybe in the future. 

Pidge/Katie Holt - I didn’t have any problems with Pidge’s ending either, I actually kinda liked it, and headcanons... she definitely pursues a career in a STEM field, and I think she goes on to do super cool science things I wouldn’t understand. 

Shiro - I didn’t hate his ending as well, I do wish they hadn’t killed Adam though, so maybe I’ll pretend he’s alive somewhere. I dunno. I’m really glad they made him happy, and let him finally find peace. I kinda have a headcanon that he’ll run a space orphanage or something that works with the Blade of Marmora humanitarian relief thing or whatever they are now. I hope he gets to take all the naps he needs.

Keith - I also liked his ending a fair amount, I think it’s cool that he’ll get to help people and I think that it’s in alignment with his character arc from what I can tell. He went from suffering to helping make sure no one else does, and that can a difficult jump to make, from what I understand. 

Lance - Okay, so this is a hot topic. Honestly, I don’t agree with him being a farmer forever; I think at some point he’s going to start to heal and grow again and that he’ll start travelling the galaxy. Maybe he’ll continue to teach about Allura, but in different places and in different ways, all across the galaxy, like I said. Maybe, at some point, he’ll discover that happiness doesn’t have to be something to remember, but that it can be something to discover once again, even if it’s different then before. At some point, he’s going to continue to grow and spread light and love and maybe even find his own. 

He could have definitely had more character development in the show, instead of them spending the last season focusing on changes due to romance rather than other forces (or even the effects those romantic feelings had on him after could have been handled better). That’s why, in case this wasn’t clear the first time I said it, I think that he’s going to go around the galaxy, maybe even with Keith and the Blades, to teach not only about Allura but about other heroes, about missions he’s been on and the things he’s learned from war. I don’t think he’s going to be a farmer forever, but I think that some time to rest before he gathers the courage to start growing as a person again will help him/is necessary. 

Allura - Okay, I’m going to say right off the bat that I don’t think she should have died. I do like that she was designed as a strong, brave character who makes her own decisions. Yeah, I really don’t like that she died and I don’t think she should have, but she did, so yeah. I think that she was smart enough to find another solution and that her death was unnecessary, like I’ve said, but I respect that her sacrifice was on par with her character/character traits/personal values. I’ve got some other things to say in a minute, but we’ll get to that. 

As a group, after the show ended - I definitely think they saw each other more than once a year, and that they all still treated each other like the family they claimed to be during battles. Bonds made in war are hard to break, and theirs is most certainly unbreakable. They’ll be a team for their lifetime, even if their jobs take them to different places for a time. 

Ships

Okay, so this is also a hot topic from what I can tell. I’ve gotta say I don’t a) ship Pidge with anyone and b) I’m not here to hate on any ships unless they’re legitimately abusive or wrong in the manner of, y’know, pedophilia and such. 

Allurance - I don’t hate this ship, and I don’t hate it being canon. I don’t actively ship it and I don’t think that, even if Allura had lived, they would have been endgame anyway. I do disagree with people who say that they don’t have any chemistry at all, because I think they have at least some. I definitely don’t ship it as an endgame ship, but I think they were/could’ve been great friends. I do feel like it was a little forced in the beginning, and I feel like it sends a slightly negative message about men being overly persistent after a woman says no and negates Allura’s individual strength a little bit. I do think that if it had been done slightly different, it would have seemed less like Allura was guilt-tripped or practically coerced into the relationship and could have shown that people don’t need a significant other to make them whole because people are their own, whole person; it could have shown that bonds between people make two whole people stronger, in a sense, with both people respecting that the other person is their own person and makes their own choices/has their own opinions. (As long as those opinions aren’t harmful to the other person or to other people.)

Klance - Okay, so if you couldn’t tell, I ship klance. I personally think they have a lot of chemistry, especially in some scenes, and I think that (in accordance with my Lance headcanon) that they’ll eventually start working together in humanitarian relief efforts/teaching trips and either end up together or even just be friends. I think they have a great relationship either way, and that they support each other really well; Lance being Keith’s impulse control guy and Keith being Lance’s confidence. Like I said, they definitely have great chemistry but as long as they end up working together some way and benefit each other, I’m good if they stay friends. 

Shay and Hunk - Is there a ship name for this? I haven’t seen one, but I might’ve missed it. Anyway, I think their relationship is pretty sweet and I don’t ship it aggressively but I really do think they’re cute. 

Shiro and Curtis - I think they’re cute as well, I’m glad Shiro’s happy and hopefully he gets lots of time to rest while still helping others.  I do miss Adam and I’m sad he’s dead; I’m also cool with a ship with Shiro in a relationship with both of them or all three of them in a relationship with each other. I’m sad we didn’t get to see Curtis and Shiro interact with each other before the wedding, but again I’m trying not to be salty even though I don’t like that we never got to see a dynamic between the two. 

The Ending

Okay, I’m a little confused on what happened at the end. I’m pretty sure that the lions are circling the planet, minus the blue lion which is not, but I can’t tell. It is a little bittersweet to me that they don’t still pilot the lions, but I understand that things have to come to an end for other things to take place. Still bittersweet though. 

Overall

Overall, I’ve gotta say I didn’t hate it. There were a few things I would have preferred to be canon (like klance or better character development for some characters) or preferred not to be canon (Allura dying) but I came in with low expectations so it kept me fairly entertained. Like I said, not here to hate on anything just my opinions. 

So that’s all I can think of right now, I might talk about my thoughts on Lotor later, maybe on lotor x allura as well, but I’m running out of time so that’s all for today. Also, sorry for the long post.

[davidmann95]

Obligatory "DC Fandome reactions" question

Anonymous said: DC Fandome?

Anonymous said: so. suicide squad kill the justice league, huh.

jcogginsa said: So, thoughts on Fandome night 1?

In order from what got me least to most hyped (leaving out Milestone, because I didn’t grow up with it other than the great Static show, and I understand the behind-the-scenes stuff with McDuffie’s family is contentious):

Suicide Squad Kills The Justice League

Pros: Trailer’s funny, the “screw you, not only are we doing this dumb thing instead of anything anybody wants, we’re actively pissing in your face about it!” standoffishness is at such a level I honestly respect it, Superman has trunks

Cons: I don’t even care about Evil Superman in the sense of “No, they’re doing it again!” - it’s very clearly a controlled by Brainiac deal and the whole League is going to be along for the ride - but playing it for shock value at this point is laughable in a very different way than the rest of the trailer, I don’t care about a Suicide Squad game in the first place, and over half the women working with Rocksteady collectively reported various types of harassment. No thanks, sorry you pissed away 7 years, better luck next time.

The Flash concept art

Hot damn, the movie Flash costume is no longer a wretched, vomitous, shamelessly criminal monstrosity! And Keaton Batman! Extremely cool! Also remember how Ezra Miller choked a lady on camera all of a few months ago? Like, obviously you can take DC to the mat for any number of things (hell, I just mentioned another one of those reasons), but I don’t want to scold anyone for enjoying individual products of a system as broadly broken as any corporate enterprise of that scale is pretty much inevitably going to be. But they choked a lady on camera a few months ago! We all talked about that! They shouldn’t be here!

Also, obviously sorta pales by comparison, but I don’t like that the multiverse is discussed less as “here’s a cool storytelling opportunity we can do a lot with!” than “Here’s how we can have different versions of our characters at the same time, because we think our audiences are so dribblingly stupid they need that explained to them”. Star Trek ‘09 and Days of Future Past have a lot to answer for for bringing “We need to explain the reboot as we reboot it” out of the realm of comics. Oh, and I know you gotta put the source material over, but “I fell in love with Flash when I read Flashpoint”? No, ma’am, no you did not. That is not something that has ever happened to anyone.

Gotham Knights

That’s an incredibly cool, bold concept, and it’s gonna have to do a lot of heavy lifting because everything else about this looks like absolute ass. Hopefully at the very least the finalized game won’t have damage numbers, and also why is this not an Arkham sequel when the premise directly springs off the concept of the cliffhanger of Arkham Knight, acting as a spiritual followup without actually answering any of the bizarre lingering questions there (especially when Suicide Squad *does* take place in that universe, albeit with a totally different Deadshot)? Why does this lead with ‘you have limited resources now’ and then immediately introduce invisibility and teleportation tech as mechanics? And far more importantly than any of that, why can Robin’s suit best be described as “tactical combat raincoat”?

Black Adam

Yeah I don’t care. I’m sure I’ll watch it but I don’t care. And that’s fine! These certainly don’t need to all be for me. But whatever.

Wonder Woman 1984

This didn’t rev me up in the same way as the previous trailer, but this still looks like an across-the-board improvement from the already quality original and I expect I’ll very much enjoy it.

Against my better instincts, that Snyder Cut trailer

Is black suit Superman still dumb? You betcha. Does Darkseid also look bad? Most definitely, in ways that are hilariously pointed for me having just read The Pact for the first time. Did Snyder act like a total dick on Twitter minutes before the panel?* Yup. And did I have what I can only describe as an utterly childish degree of indignation at the use of a Morrison JLA line (but with gods and Heaven swiped out for demons and Hell, because of course) because my immediate nerd-ass gut reaction was “You don’t deserve to use that!”? Absolutely. But dammit this looks visually magnificent, especially with Flash time-travelling, it’s clearly a substantively different movie in a way that feels like it doesn’t play into the traits he’s weakest at as a creator compared to its predecessors, and it’s still a Justice League movie. I dunno, scratches something in my lizard brain, even if it blows that this + the SS game represents the sum totality of Superman here.

...did he seriously invite a fan organizer on who apparently notoriously called a black guy a monkey in a Twitter argument though? Was that really a thing or some photoshop nonsense? Because I saw someone mention it and apparently a LOT of people immediately asked what she was doing there.

* To be clear, he’s still the good guy in this situation relative to Whedon, Johns, and Berg by all accounts.

5G Batman

I don’t know Ridley’s work for the most part - I’m a cinematic philistine, so I think all I’ve seen/read of his was a decent The Authority OGN and cowriting Starcrossed in Justice League - but I have little doubt he’ll do very well here, and hot damn, Nick Derington art! And hot DAMN, that Ladrönn cover! And a riot to watch everyone go “Look, this is before the formal 5G announcement so we’re not saying it’s Luke Fox, but c’mon”. Definitely grabbing this bad boy.

The Suicide Squad

Ok I actually didn’t watch the behind-the-scenes video, but why would I need to? Saw the cast unveil montage, and yup, it’s got the goods.

The Batman

This is actually gonna get a post all its own, but the long and short of it is that trailer was better than the entire DCEU combined up to this point. And that now includes Birds of Prey and Shazam! I am almost embarrassingly in love with everything here, most viscerally I’ve reacted to a superhero movie trailer in I don’t know how many years.

[franeridart]

Anon said: YOU DREW SERVAMP AS WELL??? JUST IN HOW MANY OF MY FANDOMS ARE YOU OH MY GOD I FEEL SO BLESSED I COULD CRY

Aw man, sort of, yeah!! I can’t say I’m actively into the fandom anymore, since I’ve lost track of the translations for the manga and I’m definitely behind at least a dozen chapters, but !!!!!!!!!! yeah man I love servamp it’s such a good manga TT^TT

Anon said: Ok since you like fire force *slides $20 bill* can you draw some Shinra x Arthur?

Whoops, sorry but I don’t ship it just yet! (might happen? might not?? we’ll have to wait and see what Okubo has planned for my poor heart this time around) but! hold that thought and the $20 cause I might actually open up commissions soon enough if my money situation doesn’t change, so!! >:3c

Anon said: do you think kirishima would be taller and bigger than bakugou in the future?

My ideal adult!KrBk are the ones I posted a few days ago, so!! Not really, I prefer them remaining more or less the same size as each other, just different body types - exactly as they are right now in the manga, just !!!! adult!!!!!!!!

Anon said: I Just want to say: I totaly love your content! Your Art is amazing and full of life 🥰 You are my fav. KiriBaku artist on hole Tumblr. My fav. part is your Fantasy AU art. I fucking love dragon Kiri and his king. But i really like your full content. Pls keep going!

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!! (TT^TT)<3<3<3 I’m glad you like my stuff this much!!!!!!!!! 

Anon said: Just wondering, do you like any femslash ships in BHNA? If so, which ones!!

I do!!!!! MomoJirou and MinaJirou are def favs of mine, and I dunno the ship name but Kendou and Yui got my heart beating really fast, ngl <3<3 there’s something in the aesthetic of it, it just gets to me! Also Nejire and Yuyu, such a good ship (oTT^TT)9

Anon said: Heya, sorry for this stranger call. I just wanna ask if i could use your Kiribaku Comics for comic-dubbing. If i post it on social Websites i will give credits to you of course. I'll wait for a answer. I couldn't ask you that per dm so I need to doing it here

I’d prefer it if you didn’t, sorry!

Anon said: Reading your essay about bakugo finally things into place!! Thank you!!! I guess I just didn't fully grasp the whole "he expects you to just get it". He IS a character that requires more than a cursory glance to figure out and i love that about him! And i love the endearing things he does like you said, especially his unexpectedly great fashion sense. Personally another thing that gets overlooked about him is how smart he actually is. He doesn't just go BOOM BOOM all the time. He a smart boi.

I find like the whole “he says one thing and expects people to understand another” is made pretty clear in the arc right after the overhaul one, even if I think it was present enough before then too - but in that arc he says one thing, and then another character says a thing that has nearly nothing to do with what he said, and he goes “that’s what I said!” and when he explains what he meant with the first thing he said it makes it clear that he just, has a terrible, horrible way of expressing himself that’s way more aggressive than what he actually means? He’s been doing this since the start, going around yelling die and I’ll blow you up at things and people and then when he goes to act on it his actions turn out to be way milder than what he said ????

but yeah!!! it’s made more clear the further we go in the story and that’s one thing I really really love about him hahaha

Anon said: It's not that you put Baku's ring on the wrong hand, is that Baku is too much of a rebel to use the ring in the traditional hand! :D

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’ll take it!!!! 

Anon said: I seriously just come back to your blog sometimes to go through your art and it's like straight up drinking happy positive energy I'm in LOVE with the way you portray both Bakugo and Kirishima and their relationship and the rest of the boys and it's such a blessing and a delight and I feel like I will never be able to be thankful enough. Thank you for sharing your beautiful art with us, thank you for sharing your throughts, thank you for sharing your love for these two boys. Thank you 💕

You are!!!! Too kind!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (TTATT) thank you for being so genuinely wonderful to me!!! and thank you for liking my stuff this much, it means the world to me!!!! <3<3

Anon said: I just read your Bakugo answer to that anon and honestly, there's so much love in it to be fair it obviously shows throught your art as well but reading that made me tear up a little. What an amazing character. What an amazing BOY I love him too thank you for sharing your thoughts and your amazing art you are one of my favorite artists in the fandom and I'm so glad you love him as much as you do and I hope it makes you as happy as it makes me when I look at your art 💕💕

GOSH thank YOU for loving him as much as he deserves, honestly!!! He’s such a wonderful character and has been making me happy for so long now!!!!! (TT^TT)<3<3

Anon said: I legit don't understand why people are taking things out of proportions I can assure you nothing outside of the usual squabble is going on in bnha fandom.There are some assholes on both sides but I think that since most of us haven't actually 'seen' it and just 'heard' of it means it's not exactly as prominent as they're making it out to be, probably just the assholes being assholes to each other exclusively, so please don't worry about it,they're messing up their own enjoyment of fandom really

I don’t really know what brought this ask on, to be honest!! But as things stand I have withnessed people being very, very horrible to others lately inside the bnha fandom (and obviously, specifically between ships) so! there’s that! then again it’s also true that the bigger a fandom gets the more easily rude people will find their way in it, so I guess it’s just something you learn to live with if you want to stay in the fandom - personally, I’m just doing my best to stay in my corner and draw my sappy comics without bothering anyone hahaha

Anon said: Just here to say that your art is like, my life at this point because I would be like big depression if I hadn’t found your blog. Not to rant but my week has been an absolute hell and your art makes me feel so much better and just please keep drawing because this means the absolute world to me ok thanks bye.

THANK YOU!!!! SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m so SO glad I can help your mood even just a bit, that’s really all I try to do with my doodles T^T fix my own mood, and maybe if I’m lucky help someone else along the way <3

Anon said: this may be all over the place, but I have the need to thank you? I was feeling very bad and down tonight, full on anxiety but I turned some music on and started going through your account and it calmed me down. I cant even count how many times I've gone through probably your whole account and just... thank you. your posts are so unique and funny and pretty and just sososo beautiful. I love how you built up bakugou and kirishima's characters and their relationship. just sososo beautiful.

Gods, you guys are going to make me cry for real (TTATT) you’re!!!! too nice!!!! again, I’m so happy to hear my doodles can help you feel better!!! I hope your days have been better <3<3<3

Anon said: So I keep rereading your latest kiribaku comic and its so fucking soft and I'm cry. It's so perfect and I just, it makes me so soft and happy every time I see it. It's honestly goals. I love ALL of your comics tbh, like, they're literally all perfect. Please continue to be your wonderful self!!!!

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!! thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! asks like this one are the reason why I keep sharing what I draw!!!!! <3<3<3<3

[galladerocksgamer]

Was randomly brainstorming about Tangled earlier and wound up putting together something way more cohesive than I expected.  Honestly I’m not the biggest fan of the whole “Dark Prince Eugene” thing (not that I think it’s objectively bad or anything, just not something I’m particularly into) and I’m REALLY not a fan of “Gothel was Cass’s mom” (don’t think that’s an unpopular opinion) so my brain started trying to figure out how it could be done better and here’s what I got.  (And I apologize if there’s any kind of AU out there like this already, I’m not particularly active within this fandom)

Instead of Dark Prince Eugene, what if it were Dark Princess Cassandra?  Edmund is Cass’s real dad who sent her away as a baby when the Moonstone was wrecking the kingdom and she wound up in the care of the Captain in Corona.  Come the end of Season 2, all the Dark Kingdom stuff plays out but it’s Cass learning the truth of herself from Edmund and being persuaded to help him out.  She tries to keep Rapunzel away from the Moonstone not just to protect her friend (though it’s certainly still a huge factor), but also because she sees it as her big moment of validation.  Now SHE’S the long lost princess!  Now SHE’S the one with a chance to be the special destined hero! 

By this point there’s plenty of groundwork for Cass’s feelings of being restricted/overshadowed by Rapunzel (even in a world where she’s not Gothel’s daughter, she’s still been “Waiting in the Wings”), so she gets caught up in the magnitude of the new revelations.  She certainly hasn’t had an unhappy life, but she’s not thinking clearly about the good she’s had or the family she’s found; she’s focused on what she COULD have had, the family and home that she never even knew she lost, and a social position that could have brought all of her dreams within reach.  And now she has an outlet for her pent-up frustrations, a tangible target to blame for the childhood she never had.  In her mind, overcoming or destroying the Moonstone will solve all of her problems.  She’ll avenge the life she missed out on, make her mark on the world, and prove that she deserves to shine as much as Rapunzel or anyone else.

So after some conflict and moral dilemmas Cass relents (and Edmund subsequently does too) and helps Rapunzel and the others out, they fight ghost ancestors, yada yada yada.  They finally get to the Moonstone and Rapunzel prepares to stop it once and for all.  But before going to it, Rapunzel thanks Cass for her help and friendship, and makes one last innocently-insensitive remark that makes Cass feel sidelined once again.  And in that moment of weakness, Cass finally snaps; Rapunzel is about to overshadow her again, by fulfilling a mission that should be her birthright.  So rather than let Rapunzel take her glory and vengeance away, Cass grabs the Moonstone for herself, and the rest is history.

I dunno, maybe future events in season 3 will change my mind, but the whole Gothel thing really just feels like a disservice to the complexity of Cass’s character and her relationship with Rapunzel.  By the end of season 2, the work’s already been done to show how Cass has reason to feel tired of being second-rate to Rapunzel when she’s worked all her life to be something more, so I hardly think they needed to resort to “it’s Rapunzel’s fault that I’m nothing because my HORRIBLE MOTHER ABANDONED ME TO KIDNAP HER” as the last straw.  So I thought her being given real tangible hope of being the big hero only for the opportunity slip through her fingers again would be a much more fitting breaking point.

And again, not a big fan of Dark Prince Eugene, so it was easy for me to see Cass in that role instead.  Not holding it against anyone who does like that plot point, I don’t think it’s just sucky writing or anything (and Everything I Ever Thought I Knew is absolutely one of my favorite songs of the series), but I just think of Eugene as being someone whose origins are irrelevant to the life he led after being left alone (which to an extent it still is, hence why I don’t totally hate this plot development).  If there’s one particular thing I don’t like about it, I’m just not into the dynamic they try building with Eugene and Edmund, and the whole “daddy had a good reason for abandoning you” trope at play here.

Funnily enough, I think I would appreciate that more with Dark Princess Cass if only because I think it would open up some fun dynamics with the Captain.  After Cass takes the Moonstone and runs off, then Edmund could go looking for her and run into Cap doing the same.  So they team up but very loosely, they act really catty to each other.  Cap’s afraid he’ll lose Cass to her “real” dad, and Edmund feels superior because he’s the “real” dad but also secretly feels guilty and jealous because Cap is the one who’s actually been there for Cass all these years.  And of course in the end they come to realize they’ll lose Cass regardless if they don’t work together, and they finally recognize that they aren’t in competition for Cass, but that both of them being around just means she gets even more love and support (when they finally find her and try to talk her down, at least).

So yeah I feel like I’m getting into some rambly territory now so I’ll end here, I just felt pretty happy with my ideas and thought I’d actually put them out there to read. I love this show a lot but I’ve certainly had some frustrations with it too, and this was my brain’s response to that.  So I guess for any like-minded people out there, well, this is for you.

[starblossomed]

The answers to the other questions are under the read more because it ended up being very long.

4. Name a muse you have written in the past. What was your favorite thing about this muse?      I used to roleplay as Tsun from KHR and I really enjoyed playing him. The fact that he was so shy and scared, but also a bad ass when it came to protecting his friends? I love that type of character honestly.

5. Name a muse you wish to write in the future. What’s your favorite thing about this muse?      Hmm, I mean future muse I wanna add here is Morgiana. I used to write her before too and honestly I love that boss ass bitch. She is such a favorite character of mine.

6. How is your multimuse blog organised?      I dunno what this question means, but if I answer it the way I think it means. I think my blog is organized well enough? Like, my muses are by primary, secondary and requestable so I think it’s organized really well.

7. Do you have crossover verses for the muses on your blog?      No, but I’d be willing to write some! I’m just lazy and have like basic verses for all my muses until I need to make a new one.

8. Which of your muses deserves better?      All of them. No, but seriously I feel Naomi does. She got the short end of the stick all because a man and that’s why I have her being so canon divergent because I know she deserves better!

9. Which of your muses do you most identify with? Why?      Uh... UHHHH... Maybe Aimatia? Actually, Mitsuri. We’re both kinda air headed sometimes, but we love to compliment our friends and show them so much love, but we find it hard to see the good in ourselves sometimes.

11. Do you have any original characters on your multimuse? If so, tell us something more about them.      Aimatia!!! I was worried about adding her, but honestly so glad I did. Aimatia was my first oc ever made and we’ve been through so much together. She is honestly my baby and I’m so happy people seem to like her!

12. How many muses are you currently writing?      9 muses so far, but I’m weak and will probably add more.

13. In how many fandoms are you currently active?      8, since Aimatia is a fandomless oc and just exists everywhere.

14. What is your favorite fandom to write in? Why?      Hmmm, Death Note I think has become a favorite. I’ve met some really nice people here and honestly exploring Naomi’s character is so much fun!

15. What is a fandom you wish to write in one day?      Hmmmmm... In/Spectre honestly, but I don’t think there’s a fandom for that just yet. It’s such a good anime though.

16. What is a fandom you used to write in in the past?      Blue Exorcist! I used to rp as Renzou.

17. What is your favorite thing when you decide to add a new muse to your blog/when you decide to make a new blog?      Writing their about pages honestly. My about page style is simple and stuff, but each one is different and I have fun writing them up and then thinking up new headcanons for these characters.

18. Share an opinion you have about multimuse blogs.      When I was younger I used to be scared of them, but now I really enjoy them and have so much respect for other multimuse blogs. It’s so much work, but honestly so much fun.

19. Does your multimuse blog have a theme? Do the muses on your blog have something in common?      They’re all cute girls I love. HONESTLY, THAT’S THE THEME I HAVE AND I DIDN’T MEAN IT TO BE A THEME LOL.

20. What is the story or explanation behind your blog name?      I go by Queenie, so royalty and I’m writing so written and.. Yeah it’s not very clever.

21. Share a positive experience about multimuses you’ve had in the past.      I don’t remember my past rp time on Tumblr much, but currently I love rping with multimuses!! Legit give me all your muses and I shall love them.

22. List some of your favorite multimuse blogs.      @latibullc​, @feraliix​, @foliateface​, @otomates​, @kyrso​, @galaxythixf​, @theoriesoflove​, @tclesnmirrors​, @rcyalskies​, @sakuwai​, @detectiive​, @protectorrs​ ( Honestly every single multimuse I follow though. )

23. Tag a multimuse blog and write some positivity about them (their blog, their muses, etc.)      @latibullc​ IT’S HARD TO PICK ONE, BUT I’LL PICK FATAL BECAUSE HONESTLY I LOVE OUR BABIES!!! They’re so cute together and honestly I wanna rp with more of their muses!! Like give me them all, give them to me now.

[ikindapreferelectro]

((OOC Post: Life Updates/Future of the Blog))

((Hello everybody! Despite not being active in quite a while, I’m noticing that... I have a lot of new followers! And a lot of people liking my content! Wow! I’m honestly really surprised that people are finding this and appreciating it. Extra so since this blog only has like 500ish posts? I’m genuinely touched. 

So, uh, I guess I’ll talk some about me, my life, this blog, and it’s future! 

I made this blog during a very difficult time in my life, honestly. I don’t know if I ever made it obvious on here, but I was really fucked up. I was trapped in an abusive relationship, I had a health condition that was worsening without any respite, I was trying to finish out my last year of highschool and all my shit-ass advanced placement classes, and on top of it all I was extremely dysphoric with basically no way to feel better. Shit sucked.

This place genuinely was an escape from all of that and helped me cope so much. Electro was a power fantasy for me, but one where I could really let myself feel things as well. I loved how different he was from me. I loved how we were basically the same. It was great, playing an autistic trans guy who had fully transitioned and could zap the shit out of anyone who gave him shit. He could be angry in ways that I felt I was not allowed to be. And with time, I channeled it and finally let myself get angry. I started demanding respect and that really did change my life for the better. I couldn’t have done it without this first step of using Electro though. 

On top of that, most importantly, I made so many friends because of this blog (and my participation in the TSSM fandom). The friends I made from this blog I still have today and I love them so dearly. It’s with all of their help that I got out of that abusive relationship. Furthermore, I met my lovers in this fandom. It’s probably VERY obvious if you look through this blog-- I’m dating the mun’s of @imwhatyoucalledme and @ssdoctopus and have been for FIVE YEARS come July! It’s kinda why I have a hard time reading the backlog of this blog, I see the three of us falling in love and I get so mooshy that I can’t fuckin’ function. Their love has changed my life for the better. We’re planning on being wed as soon as the world falls in line for us. 

Great recent updates about my life though that tangentially is connected to this blog: I got my top surgery last June! My life (and dysphoria) has improved by LEAPS AND BOUNDS since then. I got my name and gender legally changed a couple years ago too. But I’m so excited about top surgery because I’ve been desperate for it most of my life and it’s the most recent Gender stuff lol. And on the other side of the coin, a good chunk of my inactivity on this blog has been due to how busy college has made me. But I have one last summer class and then I graduate! So yeah, that’s happening! 

I guess I just wanted to... Put all of this out there! I’ve always said “oh, I’ll be more active once school is out of the way”, but I genuinely don’t know if that’s true. I won’t make promises. Electro has served his purpose in my life, even though I still love him. I don’t know if I’ll be super active again, but we won’t truly know until I’m in the work force and can see how much free time I have! Maybe walking down nostalgia lane will happen, maybe it won’t. But I’m still so touched that people still love him, this blog, my work. I hope he gives you comfort the way he has for me. Know that life does get better, no matter what’s going on, things can change and git gud. 

This eel’s blog is gonna stay up as long as I can have control over that. I dunno yet if it will be active again, but it holds a very dear place in my heart even if it doesn’t.)) 

[sansloii-a]

coughs so am I allowed to request all of the “salty af munday meme” answers or—

oh my fucking god || @imbruedinfear​

strap in y’all ‘cause someone wants to hear me complain

What does someone have to do for an instant unfollow from you?

if you post excessive ooc in quick sucession, i will unfollow you faster than the speed of light. i’ve done it in the past. i will not hesitate to do it in the future. i don’t care if it’s tagged. if i’m on and i see it, you’re gone, my friend.

What’s the WORST thing that has happened to you rp wise?

uuuuuuuuuuhhhhh there was this one dude that legit tried to monopolize one of my old muses on another blog, got upset when i set a main ship for said muse, complained to me nonstop, was trying to use me to get back into rping with my friend group ( which he called “the popular group” for a reason I don’t understand to this day ), only wanted to ship, got pissy over a fucking pokemon au ( if you ever wanna hear about this, lemme know ), tried to insert a ship into every au we made automatically, tried to tell me how to write smut for no reason ( said he would read it and give me tips and everything ffs ), was an asshole to my sister ( who rped way back when but doesn’t anymore ), made several friends of mine uncomfortable to the point of leaving the rp scene for a bit, blamed other people for issues that he honestly had a part in causing, and a bunch of other things that i’m forgetting right now.

i figure that’s the worst because nothing has topped that. nothing. that happened years ago, though, so i’m good now. no one fucks with me like that anymore.

What was a mildly annoying thing that has happened to you rp wise?

i got about 10 asks from someone when i wanted to do other shit ( my asks that are in the double digits ) ‘cause they wanted me to send them an ask. annoyed me to hell and back and i promptly deleted those asks

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  tough shit. i was not in the mood for games and i’m still not.

 Has anyone ever tried to steal your blog? Your headcanons? Icons? All that jazz?

not that i know of??? i hope not ‘cause i worked real hard on all this and if you steal anything from me, i’m gonna throw a huge-ass heaping of karma your way.

 How many people don’t like you?

i dunno. i’d say none but i know not everyone is going to like me so if you’re out there and you don’t like me, you’re entitled to that. don’t tell me, though, ‘cause i don’t wanna know if you don’t like me.

How many people do you not like?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i don’t really care enough to actively not like anyone. you can annoy me but unless you piss me off and continue to piss me off, you get stuck on the “do not care” list. 

Have you managed to stay away from drama?

i give advice when needed on how to avoid whoever my convo partner is talking about and i avoid getting involved. unless it’s like… a close friend or involves a close friend, i refuse to get in the middle of whatever issue people have. i’m not about to have my ass dragged into problems that do not concern me.

i don’t cause drama either so that’s also how i stay away from it. 100% guaranteed to keep you out of drama.

Have you ever been in the middle of drama?

personal/friend drama? yes. rp drama? see above.

none of that was fun btw. it was a lot of me getting angry, being frustrated with certain behaviors, having to cut people out for doing shit/saying shit that they knew they shouldn’t have and refusing to recognize that they have fucked up and use that to change their behavior, etc. it’s draining and not fun and i’m pretty sure it shaved years off my life but y’know, it is what it is. the most i can do about it is look out for myself and keep out of relationships that will put me in those situations again.

Have you ever tried to bring peace to a situation?

no because i used to be friends with people that weren’t straightforward with shit and made excuses instead of changing their behavior. i don’t wanna go into it ‘cause and i can’t remember all the details but boy, peace was hard to come by and it didn’t last long. i wasn’t going to try to bring peace if people didn’t really seem to want it and level with each other.

How long do you stay mad?

depends on what you do, tbh, but it’s a couple hours at least. a couple days at most.

What’s your rp pet peeve? ( i have a lot of these )

playing “find the links” on someone’s blog. if i can’t find your links, i’ll try “/rules”, “/r.”, “/g.” and whatever else i can think of to get your rules and a couple more things to get your muse’s about. however, i shouldn’t have to and it takes little effort to make it so that your links are easily distinguishable from the background. if i don’t find them, i don’t find them. and i don’t follow/follow back

Have you ever forgiven a partner when you shouldn’t have?

nope. not now, not ever.

 Have you ever been forgiven when you knew you shouldn’t have been?

i’ve never been in a situation where i’ve had to be forgiven for stuff i’ve done so no.

What fads/trends are you so over?

the first thing i thought of was the fucking double ampersands thing that was everywhere at some point. those annoyed me so much and i’m so glad they’re gone. super small text needs to die too. i may not wear glasses but i sure as shit ain’t straining my eyes to see what you’ve written in 3px font. 

honestly, a lot of the excessive aesthetic shit that sacrifices accessibility for #aesthetic

Have you ever rp’d with someone you knew for a fact was abusive but tried to give them a chance/to make up your own opinion on the roleplayer? Did they change or did you understand what people were talking about?

nope, nope. nu-uh. if i knew for a fact that this person was abusive in that moment, i wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole. absolutely fucking not. 

Have you ever made a public call out post?

-loud snort- hell no.

What has made you completely lose your chill?

honestly? look at my worst experience and that about sums up shit that has made me lose my chill. you really gotta push my fucking buttons to make me mad ‘cause i’m usually pretty laid back.

What do you think about public call out posts?

answered here

A fandom that you feel isn't open and accepting? 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i dunno. i’ve only been in one before and that was f.ire e.mblem

 A fandom that you feel is open and accepting?

imma be real honest with y’all--the only fandom i’ve been in that i will acknowledge is f.ire e.mblem and i had a pretty sweet time there. i had some ups and downs but it was an overall good experience for me. it was pretty open and inviting in my opinion but i tended to stay away from the douchebags in the fandom ‘cause i just wanted to have a good time there.

Thoughts on duplicates following you?

 if i have duplicates of my oc following me, i’ll have a whole fucking cow 

Do you agree with reblog karma or is it forced interaction?

i don’t think it’s forced interaction most of the time ( with sentence starters, symbol memes, memes that take literally zero fucking effort to send in ) ‘cause... everyone likes getting stuff, y’know. if you wanna reblog it from someone, just take a moment to send something in if the interaction is feasible. that’s the key thing here. if it’s feasible, then i don’t see the issue with sending something in before you reblog it from someone ( especially if you’re mutuals ). if it isn’t and you just wanna reblog it, reblog it from the source. it’s not that serious.

if someone nitpicks you for rebloging the same meme they did but you reblogged it from the source, i wouldn’t feel too bad. you know what’s best for your muses and if you don’t feel like the meme is cohesive for interactions, then that’s your prerogative and the 

Has someone ever ruined an FC or character for you?

answered here

Has someone been jealous of you?

i’ve only been told that someone was jealous of me once and it was a long time ago. i have never heard that from anyone again ( not that i remember, at least )

Have you ever been jealous of anyone?

mhm! but it usually comes when i’m feeling super down about my blog and doubting my ocs ( which isn’t often ). when i do get jealous, it’s over interactions and the like and my big dumb galactic brain is like “wow, don’t you wish you had those interactions? don’t you wish you were rping with those people?” and makes me feel bad about the interactions i have, the speed at which i reply, my ocs, how many people are interesting in my ocs, etc. however, this shit doesn’t last long ‘cause i have a bunch of wonderful people that motivate me to get out of that funk and just... focus on what i have instead of what i’m seeing on my dash. i remind myself that i’m here to have fun and i shouldn’t try to match my experience to others’

How has Tumblr RP changed since you started?

more formatting, smaller icons, more focus on having a fancy ass theme, more formatting, more callout posts, less communication in some regard, more reminders for communication.more psa posts, more formatting--

honestly, i’ve been on tumblr since 2012 and most of it is a blur lmao. i probably don’t remember everything ‘cause i was.... 15 when i started rping on here. i’m 22 now. i’m sure a lot has changed in seven years but i definitely haven’t seen it all.

Thoughts on the fandom you're currently rping in?

i’m currently a fandomless blog and boy, is it a lot more fun XD i have a lot more creative liberty and i can shape the world my muses live in to my liking, as opposed to following or just adding onto what the fandom universe already is. it’s a lot of work and it takes a ton of time but it’s fun and i’m enjoying every second of it! 

How salty are you feeling right now?

answered here but i’ll just say it again: not salty. just tired and rambly because holy shit this took a while

[julystorms]

Thoughts on the newest chapter of SNK?

I had a lot of thoughts and I feel like I lost them all. But here have a smattering of Thoughts about it!

#1 thought: Falco is such a good and pure bean. I’ve adopted him; he is my son now. I just really, really hope that Isayama gives us a reason for him wanting to outshine Gabi so badly to protect her. I feel we’re really missing something important there.

But for the rest of the chapter in order...

Annie’s disguise was um...interesting but all I have to say about it is that it just makes me feel more and more certain that she’s dead. Something Zeke said in a semi-recent chapter about how he felt that Paradis had at least two powers if not more on their side made me suspicious that the “female titan” was under Paradis’s control, but this makes me feel much more sure that Annie is dead, and that these flashbacks are all we’re going to get of her (i.e., he’s trying too hard).

I also find it hard to believe that Annie managed to spot Kenny? Seems a bit forced, but...eh.

Flocke cameo had me dyin’.

Cute addition with Bert’s poses but Reiner breaking up a fight between Eren and Jean got to me a little bit. Mostly because of the next scene.

Annie. Look, it’s no secret that I’m like half a step from despising Annie as a person, but I’ve been holding out hope that her character would remain appealing and I feel rewarded for that patience in this scene. As it turns out, Annie was working her ass off while Reiner played soldier/friend/big brother to other characters. I don’t like what Annie does at all but this honestly and truly makes me dislike Reiner; after she went out of her way to do all the work while he slacked off, he still made Annie “prove herself” to him? God, Reiner, you’re a bigger dick than I thought you were. :/

I think the part that really gets to me about this scene though is that Annie wanted to cut their losses and run with the information they have, while Reiner is the one who wanted to breach Rose. It honestly makes his attitude toward Annie even more despicable.

This is extra sad if she is dead in the current story; I feel like this narrative is skewed from Reiner’s perspective and we’re meant to see him as looking back on this and realizing what a horrible person he was to Annie. The entire scene makes Reiner out to be awful.

Something I do like about Annie is that she’s an unrepentant bitch but she never ever pretends to be anything else. That Reiner’s suggestion that “gaining the trust of the enemy” makes her want to puke/upsets her? That puts her in better standing with me. At least her character is consistent and she has morals she stands by.

Something that fandom argued about was the old man who hung himself. There were a lot of theories about RBA killing him (which seemed super legitimate), but then we have Bertholdt here asking why that old man told them that story right before he killed himself. If Reiner had been saying that I’d say they did it and he doesn’t remember because it’s not his warrior personality in control. But it’s Bertholdt! So...honestly? I think the way the panel zooms in on Reiner is telling us something: he did it.

When you consider this entire scene seems to be showing us some of the worst things Reiner has done, it makes sense that this is another “confession” of his own thoughts that exists in his memories. (Unfortunately things Gabi will learn about him if she takes over, and possibly something Reiner wants to avoid at all cost.)

Then we get the flashback to Eren.

The placement of this panel is wonderful. “Do what you need to do.” This isn’t said with pomp and circumstance. For Reiner, it’s just how things are. “We were just kids. We didn’t know a thing.” I really liked that line because it just hammered home how Reiner feels about all of the things he did and said and felt. He was just a kid and he probably really does regret a lot of things he chose to do.

To the extent that he came really close to taking his own life in this chapter, something I hate to see joked about. I’m not a fan of Reiner’s by any stretch of the imagination; he’s done some really, really awful things. But he knows a lot of what he did was misguided and now he’s trapped in this situation where he doesn’t see a way out that isn’t awful. I feel for the guy. I hate what he’s done to others, but I feel for him.

Then Falco shows up declaring he wants to make a change. He has to. Obviously this is perfect for his future discussion with Reiner but I don’t think his words are what change Reiner’s mind so much as his presence--a reminder that he can still do some good in the world.

My brain: I wonder what Porco would think of Reiner here in this chapter. 

I haven’t seen anyone talk about this scene and there’s not a ton to say but I want to point out the interesting choice to include it even though nothing in particular is going on in it! Artistically I feel confident we’re meant to see the kids goofing off and the adults shuffling to and from work, and we’re supposed to see that these kids aren’t much younger than Falco, if they are at all, and yet Falco walks with the adults/like the adults to. He’s carrying a burden children who are allowed to be children don’t yet bear. Sad. :/

I know this could be a dig at Marley being hollow-souled, but I wonder if the statue being hollow will come up as a strategic thing later in the series.

Willy “The Giver” Tybur. He’s okay I guess. I find him a bit annoying. I feel like he’s the “biggest bad guy” we have to worry about but I dunno. He’s giving me Giver vibes though: an observer who knows a lot via memories but not an active participant in anything that matters. I’m almost hoping he gets eaten lmao.

Theo Magath is not a good man but at least he’s interesting and he’s not a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed dope. Shit’s real and he knows it--makes no bones about it. I can respect that. I like that lumps Marley civilians in with the ignorant masses basically, because the Eldians fear being sent to war to become cannon fodder as titans or soldiers, but Marleyans have no idea what it’s like to be on a battlefield except the few who have actually seen and lived through active combat--comparatively very few. 

This panel of Zeke has me tipping my head. Is he on the phone to someone in particular? Are we meant to think he’s connected to the Tybur family after Magath’s conversation with Willy? Or are we meant to think he’s watching Falco? P:

Mr. Kruger. :)

Eren’s manipulation of Falco is sad, but great It makes me think Eren was waiting to “wander away” to a mailbox on his own sooner or later, and kept the letter on his person to mail at first opportunity; Falco just happened to become that opportunity without knowing it. SO GOOD.

Basically this chapter is the most interesting one in a while. I hope we get to see a little bit of the main cast but I think it might be a while yet before that happens--unless we see another bit of a timeskip (a few weeks or months maybe). That said, I wonder which of his allies are in Marley already! The post won’t send shit to Paradis so I wonder who else from Paradis is in Marley and where they’re stationed at/hiding. It makes me think Eren snuck into Marley with them and then they cooked up the military plan--for him to “sneak into the important areas” via joining the military with an injury; nobody would think twice about another injured soldier they’ve never seen before haha. Good shit. Did Armin think of it? Did Hange? I’ll be excited to see them but honestly I’m kind of happy to stay in Marley because it seems this is where the good stuff is. :3c

[murasaki-murasame]

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 19 [Chapter 6 - Trial]

I was going to make some sort of a vague meme about this ending, but honestly I don’t even want to indirectly spoil anyone about what happens, so I’ll just say that this was fantastic.

This probably won’t actually be the end of my liveblog, since I have some post-game content to do, and some optional bonus things throughout the game I might just google and write about later whenever I get around to that. But this is the ending of the main game.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

[Fake edit: hahahaha holy fuck this ended up being 10.4k words long. Good fucking luck to anyone who wants to read all of it, I guess, lol]

Jesus christ, where do I even start with this??? There’s just . . . so much shit that went down. So much.

To start things off, I wasn’t kidding when I said that this was a fantastic ending, overall. I loved it a lot. It was so ambitious and intense and surreal that I couldn’t help but like it. I definitely have SOME issues with things, but I’ll get to them later.

I should at least say that, as you can all verify from my last post, I wasn’t exactly expecting Tsumugi of all people to be the mastermind. I guess it justified her continued existence in the story, after she felt so weirdly pointless.

Though before I talk about Tsumugi specifically, on the whole topic of pointless characters, Himiko was definitely . . . the weakest link by far. I don’t really hate her or anything, but she just had so little going for her as a character by the end. Even the whole thing with Tenko dying and giving her emotional strength and development and stuff felt like it didn’t really change much. So seeing her alive by the end, especially in the epilogue scene, felt . . . awkward. It’s not like I wanted her to die or anything, but I feel like the epilogue might have had a bit more . . . weight to it, if it was just Shuichi and Maki left. I dunno. I’ll talk about the epilogue later.

On the topic of Tsumugi, I honestly think I might prefer her as a villain over Junko. Mostly because this game’s entire ending and it’s overall theme feels way more interesting than everything Junko represented. I’ve said before that I really do like Junko as a villain, and that seeing her come back yet again would have been totally fine, but I think I liked Tsumugi as a villain even more than her. I’m aware that with how Tsumugi’s character works in general, there’s not much that actually sets her apart from Junko, but still. The things she represents on a thematic level are really interesting to me.

I also just appreciate that it was genuinely surprising to me that she was the mastermind. I really didn’t see it coming until they basically spelled it out for me.

I probably should have guessed where this trial was heading in advance. I said last time that the shot put ball and whatnot confused me, but it should have been obvious that it was hinting at Kaede not truly being the first killer. And the detail of the secret entrance to the hidden room being in the girl’s bathroom should have clued me in about Tsumugi. I could easily see someone else figuring it out if they had a good memory and also figured out that the chapter one case would be relevant again, but I didn’t remember the detail about Tsumugi having gone to the bathroom around the time Rantarou died, so that was a genuine surprise. I really like that they actually planted evidence pointing toward her at the start of the game, even though it didn’t really become apparent until you learn stuff much later in the game.

I also really liked the whole detail of how her talent as the Ultimate Cosplayer connected with her role as the mastermind. It really wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

To dive right into the Big Twists, it turns out that my guess about how this would end was basically the opposite of what I expected. I’ve said before that I expected the reveal to be that the world of V3 was a fictional story being broadcast to the ‘real’ DR world, but in the end, if we at least take the ending at face value, it was the entire DR franchise that was ‘fictional’ in the context of V3′s world. So that threw me off big-time. In general things escalated way more than I expected, and there were way more layers of meta going on than I thought there’d be.

But I love how that all tied into Tsumugi’s identity. Like, I totally believed that she was really Junko, or at least some kind of clone or descendant or whatever of Junko, and I accepted the idea that ‘Tsumugi’ was just a fake identity. But nope, Junko is just a character she’s cosplaying! I didn’t consider it at first because of the whole cospox plot point, but then the big twist happened and it became clear that she can cosplay as Junko because, in the world of V3, Junko is a fictional character.

The whole scenario of her continually switching between cosplays was, to be honest, genuinely disturbing. Especially since they got the original VAs to voice their appropriate lines. So it really felt as if all of the previous characters were coming in, which helped make the trial feel really fever dream-y, in a good way. It really hammered in that feeling of artificiality going on.

It’s interesting to me that, with how the whole ending worked, ‘Tsumugi’ was probably still a fake identity of sorts. Like how every other character’s identity was made up, to the point where it was heavily implied that even their names were fictional. So it’d make sense if Tsumugi’s whole identity was also fake. She called herself the Ultimate Cosplayer, but if we believe her story then the whole concept of Ultimates wouldn’t truly exist in their world anyway. But I like the implication that she was basically just pretending. It’s consistent with everything else, at least, and her talent didn’t really play into her actual plot role at all, just her ‘aesthetic’ as a character, if that makes sense. So I like the idea that she was just a random, ‘talentless’ member of Team Danganronpa who adopted a false identity in order to take part in the killing game. The idea that we might have never known her true identity at all beyond, well, her job position and her personality, makes me like her even more as a villain, somehow.

In general, I love how incredibly meta this ending was. I love how cynical it was. I love how it rejects itself as a franchise, and everyone playing it. It’s great. The fact that they openly talked about the Danganronpa franchise, Team Danganronpa, and the entire fandom, was just great. I totally get why the guilt-trip nature of it might bug people, but I like it. It’s certainly hard to argue against the point it’s making. This game only existed because people actively supported this series. Because they genuinely enjoyed experiencing the emotionally thrills and catharsis that the killing games gave them. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the series just keeps going like nothing happened.

I’m aware that the ending wasn’t really intended to be genuinely spiteful towards it’s audience, especially since the final moments of the game are all about the audience changing their minds and deciding that they want to stop the killing games, and to also save as many of the remaining characters as possible, but there’s definitely still a very clear element of spite going on that can’t really be ignored. It’s very vocally aware and critical of the way that people enjoy violent media, even if it also accepts the possibility of people being able to change for the better and be positively influenced by the stories they read.

It just fascinates me that they even went this far. That they took their franchise to such an absurd point. That they created the idea of this fictional future where their own franchise would grow so big and so popular that they’d start killing real people to continue it. That they made themselves, as the people who made this game, the villains. It’s such an incredibly risky move that I’ve basically never seen before, especially if we take into account that this franchise has been going on for like 5+ years already. It’s also part of why I don’t think this ending was 100% spiteful toward it’s audience. Because, at the very least, it also holds itself accountable in all this. The devs are aware that they’re the ones actually sitting down to make these games in the first place. So it’s not like they’re placing all of the blame on their consumers.

The whole back and forth spiral of emotional tension and cynicism and hopefulness and redemption and self-awareness made the whole ending part incredibly intense and emotional. It really did feel like the people making the game were laying themselves bare and engaging in a direct conversation with the people playing their game, to ask them to consider the idea of violent media, and the idea of the authenticity of lies/fiction vs truth/reality.

Weirdly enough, this whole ending reminds me a fair bit of Nier: Automata, and that game’s entire thematic point. They’re very different games, in obvious ways, but they’re weirdly similar.

I didn’t really see the whole Argument Armament section coming, but oh man that part sure was an experience. Thankfully I’ve been slowly getting better at them, but it was still really stressful. But what truly made it special was hearing the voices of the audience during it. I just love the entire concept of you literally arguing against the voices of people saying stuff like ‘ugh, I hate meta endings like this!’ or ‘I’ve invested too much time and money into this franchise for it to just end!’ or ‘I just want to see people kill each other, death is the entire point of Danganronpa!’. And then eventually it just became a bit of an unending scream of ‘HOPE DESPAIR DESPAIR HOPE HOPE HOPE DESPAIR HOPE’, which was honestly the most perfect way it could have ended. With how obsessed this franchise has been with the concepts of hope and despair, and with how more and more emotional weight and baggage has been placed on those concepts, it’s very fitting that this game basically ends with you facing down a horde of disembodied voices mindlessly shouting out that words, and you telling them that you plan to end the Danganronpa franchise.

And on the whole note of that part, I really liked how Keebo played into the ending. Maybe it would have had more impact if he’d been the protagonist this whole time, but the idea of him being ‘the audience surrogate’ was really cool, if only because it set up the aforementioned scene. I also liked that he wasn’t immediately validated in being obsessed with hope. He wasn’t necessarily in the wrong or anything, but he wasn’t able to argue for hope in the face of despair in the way he wanted to. They also didn’t try and suddenly ignore Shuichi in favour of having Keebo suddenly be the protagonist in the end, so that was nice.

Before I talk about the epilogue and some other assorted points, I should say that the part where they explained the game’s title was AMAZING. I loved it so much. The reveal of this being ‘Danganronpa 53′ was such an effective ‘wait what’ moment. And then we got the incredible parody logos for Danganronpa 4-10. That was an amazing scene. And in general I just love the sorta-dystopian future that whole scene sketched out, of the DR franchise going on for such a long time that they eventually decided to hold a ‘real-life killing game’. But anyway, it also completely validated how weird this game’s title is. I guess on some level it’s still a bit unnecessarily confusing for it to have ‘3′ in the title, but I like that they gave such a surprising yet effective explanation for the ‘V’ part. I may or may not have laughed out loud when one of the random lines of audience dialogue said ‘V is the roman numeral for 5′. I don’t know why that was so funny to me, but it was.

The audience dialogue thing was also an amazing concept that added a lot of unexpected comedy to the situation. It did a great job of encapsulating the attitudes of the fandom. It was hilarious to see random lines of text floating about that were complaining about the ending being boring and them wanting to see an exciting clash between hope and despair. There were too many lines for me to remember, or to have even noticed in time, but a lot of them were really hilarious. I kinda lost it when they started complaining about Shuichi, and when they randomly started insulting him over how he didn’t have his hat anymore. That was great. Then we got some random and hilarious lines like ‘Shuichi is so yummy <3′. I think my favourite one was probably ‘Danganronpa 25 was the best one’. That made me laugh. The writers of these games know us so well, lol.

Though, as I kinda said above, I do appreciate that the audience got their own redemptive moment in choosing to allow the franchise to end by not voting, while also asking Keebo to do what he can to save everyone other than Tsumugi. That was really nice.

Back on the topic of the game’s title, I wish they’d kept the ‘everyone’s new semester of mutual killing’, since they ended up name-dropping it during this trial, but they never really brought up the English game’s subtitle outside of the part where the game’s full name was said. I think that the name-drop would have just had more impact if they’d kept it as the game’s subtitle in English. It’s a minor issue, though.

I kinda want to leave my thoughts on the epilogue for as late in this post as I can, so I should talk about some other points first.

I talked a bit about how this trial went back over and re-did chapter one’s trial, but I didn’t go into much detail about it. I thought it was a really neat concept, to go back over such an old case and point out how the conclusion everyone came to was wrong. I thought that that whole trial was complicated enough as it was, but I really wasn’t expecting there to be a whole other layer to what went down in it that was being saved until the end of the game. But it actually made a lot of sense. As I said, we knew from the start that Tsumugi went to the bathroom around when the murder happened, but that didn’t seem to be an important detail until we found out later that that’s where the hidden entrance was. They even took the time back in chapter one to go over her cospox to explain how she couldn’t have possibly been the killer, which did a good job at getting us to stop suspecting her. But as it turns out, she was able to kill Rantarou in a way that avoided needing to use her talent at all.

It also addressed the one thing I disliked about the first trial, at least in terms of the in-universe logic and mechanics of it. At the time, I suspended my disbelief about it, but the idea of someone being successfully killed via a complicated Rube Goldberg machine felt a bit contrived. So I love that the big twist was that Kaede’s whole complicated set-up actually ended with her missing her shot, and so Tsumugi had to rush in and beat Rantarou to death with a spare shot put ball to make it look like Kaede’s idea had worked. I don’t quite know why, but the image of Rantarou just being absolutely baffled by the fact that a shot put ball just fell by his feet out of nowhere, and Tsumugi panicking in the background and rushing in to beat him to death with ANOTHER shot put ball was just the most hilarious thing ever to me. It was great. But I do feel genuinely bad for Rantarou. He must have been so confused about all the unexpected things that happened in the moments before he died.

I’m also very grateful that part of the twist was that Kaede was truly innocent [beyond having had the genuine motive and intent to kill, but you get my point], and that, specifically, she wasn’t even related to the mastermind. After the twin sister reveal, I expected that part of the twist would be that Kaede was in on the mastermind’s plan the entire time, or at best was unaware of it but still related to the mastermind. I immediately thought that it’d be too lame and out of the blue for anything along those lines to be the case, so I’m glad that the twin sister thing was just a red herring, and that Kaede was just a random, everyday person. I guess this also means that her moments of being cross-eyed weren’t some sort of a hint at some kind of ‘mental instability’ or whatever. That’s nice. I didn’t really mention it at the time, if I remember right, since it didn’t really feel important enough to talk about, but I’m very thankful that the game didn’t use something like that as any sort of a sign toward someone being ‘crazy’ or villainous or whatever. I mean on some level they still played into that trope to some degree, if only in order to use it as a red herring, but still. One of my own eyes is kind of crossed, a bit, so it would have been slightly depressing to see something like that be used as that sort of plot point. I sure didn’t expect a game like this to give me a reason to bring up that kind of a personal detail, but here we are!

This also gets me onto the topic of Rantarou himself, and . . . honestly, his entire deal ended up feeling really disappointing. He kinda just served to give an example that backed up what Tsumugi said about the state of the world. We didn’t really learn anything new about him. We just got a bit of context for what killing game he was a part of, and why he got roped into this one. Which is fine. I just kinda wanted something . . . more. I think he’s the kind of character who I might want to spend some time thinking about before I make a final decision on how I feel about his place in the story. I’m at least genuinely curious about how exactly his killing game ended up, for him to end up as the Ultimate Survivor. I’m still not entirely sure how that whole concept works, especially when they casually mentioned that if they executed Tsumugi, then Maki would become the new Ultimate Survivor, which I still don’t quite understand, since she was one of the ones volunteering to die in order to let everyone ELSE survive. Anyway, I think the basic implication is that he was the only survivor of his game, so I wonder if that means that he killed someone and successfully escaped. It’s the only way I could really see it ending up that way. I guess the alternative option is that maybe he and one other person survived and escaped because of the rule about the killing game ending at that point. I’m not sure, though, since it seems odd that only one of them would have been called the Ultimate Survivor and forced into this killing game, and not both of them. Then again there might also be something else to it, with how he implied in his video message that there was some trick to the ‘two survivors’ rule, but I still can’t quite work out what that would be. Either way, with what we know now, I feel like his whole thing of saying that he wanted this killing game to happen makes me think that he was taking some kind of genuine pleasure out of it. If it was just a matter of him saying that he needed to win, it might have just been out of a desire to survive, but in that case I don’t think he’s say that he wanted this game to happen. I dunno. His whole character feels weirdly confusing to me, but maybe it’ll make more sense once I spend some time going over things in my head.

And on a similar note, I said before that I expected the Monokubs to be somehow based upon other survivors from his game, but I guess that one didn’t pan out the way I expected. What WAS the point of the Monokubs, in the end? Was the entire running thing of them seemingly having repressed memories like everyone else a red herring? It felt like their characters just sorta stopped existing early on in this trial after they all got blown up and then never mentioned again. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they were genuinely pointless, but it’d still be a bit lame.

I guess I’m on a bit of a roll here with talking about specific characters, so I should take this time to say that I honestly feel kinda bad for Kokichi now. This trial didn’t really tell us anything new about him, but it spelled out a lot of the fairly obvious things being hinted at, and it made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t really a bad person at all. He didn’t have anything to do with this. He really was completely lying about being the mastermind in order to try and stop the game. Even his gang seems pretty harmless. So it’s pretty hard not to feel bad for him, even if he was still genuinely annoying and irritating as a person. Though now that we’ve gotten to the end of the game, I’m still a bit confused about all of the stuff that went down in chapter four that pointed toward him being obsessed with Shuichi, and jealous of Kaito’s closeness with him. I still feel like there were very deliberate hints pointing in that direction, but it never went anywhere. There’s at least the whole ‘when I find someone I like, I do anything I can to make them notice me, even if it means strangling them’ scene, which seems even more confusing to me now. I dunno. Maybe he DID have his own feelings for Shuichi, and it just didn’t get explicitly mentioned in the game itself. Maybe it’ll be elaborated on more in his free time events, and post-game stuff in general. Either way, it still feels like a bit of a strange loose end. Maybe I’m reading too much into things.

Though it’s hard to unironically call anyone in this game innocent or sympathetic after the whole plot twist about them all being Danganronpa fans who volunteered to take place in a killing game. That sure was a twist. A lot of the ending had a more comedic tone to it, even if basically all of it was genuinely kinda horrifying and emotional and involved the characters finding out that everything they knew was a lie, but that part in particular stuck out to me as being 100% horrifying. Although it was kinda amusing seeing the game point out via Shuichi that there’s already been several detectives in the franchise. Which I guess takes on a slightly different context when you think about this being the 53rd entry in the franchise, but you get what I mean. Everything else was just depressing and unexpected, though. Seeing Shuichi excitedly talk about having planned out an exciting murder AND execution for himself, and how neat it’d be to have a detective become a murderer, was really hard to sit through, especially since he still had that little moment of being flustered about not wanting to be too demanding toward the people running the games, that made it clear that it was still genuinely him saying it. Then we got the part of Kaede saying that she has no real faith in humanity, which just hurt a lot. And then they dragged Kaito of all people into it and I started to genuinely wish the scene would stop because I didn’t want to see what he had to say. But then he went and had the most terrifying audition of the three, where he talked excitedly about wanting to murder everyone else in the game. That really just twisted the knife that had already been stabbed into my heart after the first two auditions we saw.

So it’s hard to be TOO sympathetic of anyone when all of them genuinely wanted this. I guess, come to think of it, this also probably ties into what Rantarou said about him wanting this to happen. He probably did genuinely like the idea of taking part in these games. Which puts a really sinister twist on his character, and also every other character in the game.

In general it’s kinda awkward to talk about any of the characters in the way they’re presented to us, now that we know that all of their backstories and talents and stuff are just lies, and that they’re actually just normal people who willingly took part in a death game. We probably don’t even know any of their real names. But it’s pretty clear that a big part of the game’s message is that just because these things might be lies, it doesn’t mean that they’re ‘not true’. These are still the characters we know and love. These are still the people that they genuinely believe themselves to be. At least after having their memories replaced, they became people who didn’t want to kill others, who were horrified by the idea of it, who banded together to stop it. For the most part. You get what I mean. So there’s still value in the characters as we knew them, even if they were the result of taking existing people and then replacing all of their memories and giving them new identities. There’s still value in the experiences they went through, the lessons they learned, the feelings that they experienced, and even the feelings that we experienced because of them. In spite of this trial’s set of reveals, it really was, in the end, a celebration of the power of fiction. It embraced the value and meaning of fictional characters and their stories. It validated the characters, and the experiences they had in this game. So I’m still allowing myself to see them as the people we knew them as, and to feel sympathy with them because of it.

It’s really disturbing to consider that the identities they were given were just . . . made-up identities that had barely anything to do with who they were before. It’s especially depressing to think about how all of their motives and whatnot were thus completely made-up and pointless. All of their backstories and traumas and whatnot were just fictional. Which makes it really depressing to think back on topics like Ryoma’s self-loathing because of his past, or Kirumi’s dedication to protecting the country even if it meant killing everyone else in the game, or Maki’s history with being trained as an assassin and how that basically broke her as a person. In a sense, those things still hold weight and validity because the characters at least BELIEVED them to be true, but it’s still just . . . depressing to think about how much pain was put onto these characters in the name of giving them interesting backstories and whatnot. This also presumably means that Kiyo wasn’t ACTUALLY a psychopathic serial-killer who had an incestuous relationship with his sister. Huh. He sure got the short end of the stick in terms of how his backstory reflected upon him as a person.

[Fake edit: I don’t know how I forgot about it, but there’s also the fact that apparently Kaito was just given a terminal illness as part of his backstory, which is a really fucking disturbing concept. To think that they just casually decided to make things more interesting by messing with his health like that. Especially since it’s pretty easy to guess that they gave it to him because of how enthusiastic he seemed to be about wanting to kill everyone. So it’s like they were giving him the illness as a sort of dramatic irony, to set up a scenario along the lines of him dying from his illness after he killed all of his friends, making everything he did pointless. And of course there would have been the additional angle of it becoming something that the audience at home could sympathize with him because of, which . . . definitely worked, I suppose.]

But obviously the characters weren’t exactly all clean and sinless individuals before this game, even if these depressing backstories and whatnot are fake. They clearly all had their own problems before the game started. And the characters we know now are probably at least nicer, on average, than the people we saw in those auditions.

And as I said above, Tsumugi was probably no different. She clearly knows all about what her life was like before this game, but Tsumugi as we knew her for 99% of the game was almost certainly a false identity. She was still the closest to her original self out of everyone in the game, but still.

At least we know that, on a visual level, it was only their outfits that got changed. So that’s nice to know, I guess, even if it’s not particularly important.

Now that I’ve gotten to the end of the game, I can finally talk about the last major thing I got spoiled about! Which didn’t even technically end up being completely accurate in it’s implication anyway! Yay!

Basically, a week or two before I started playing the game, I was just scrolling down my dash, and one of the recommended posts was a fucking DRV3 meme about Shuichi rejecting both hope and despair, in favour of dying. Of all the ways to be spoiled, I got spoiled via a goddamn meme, and of all the things to be spoiled about, I got spoiled about THAT. So throughout this ENTIRE game, I’ve had the vague idea of Shuichi dying stuck in my head. Which has been kinda agonizing. I’m so glad that it wasn’t actually accurate, and that he lived, but I still hate that I got spoiled about it. I suppose that I only had myself to blame for not having installed xkit by then in order to blacklist the DR tags, but still. Considering that I had never posted anything about DR before that point, I can’t really be blamed for assuming that Tumblr wouldn’t decide to just randomly suggest me a post about it.

That point, and the point of me having seen a screenshot from Kiyo’s execution, were the main things I got spoiled about. I also thought I got spoiled about someone [aka Kaito] killing because of their terminal illness, which ended up being technically untrue and probably just a made-up example of the sorts of motives in this game, even though it still lead me to the correct assumption of ‘Kaito ends up being a killer’. Those are the main things. I also knew in advance that this game has a really controversial ending, and that it has a bonus dating sim mode thing, but I didn’t know anything specific about those things, so the nature of the ending still surprised me, and honestly the existence of a dating sim mode isn’t really a spoiler to me.

So yeah, those are the things I knew about this game in advance. I wish I could have gone in COMPLETELY blind, but oh well. It didn’t end up affecting my enjoyment of the game as much as I was scared it might.

Anyway, the main character left who I want to talk about is Shuichi. I’ve already talked about basically everyone else, including Keebo and Himiko, and I don’t really think there’s much to say about Maki. I still love her a lot as a character, but this part didn’t really give me much to say about her that I haven’t said already, except for one detail [that I’ve kinda already talked about] that I guess I’ll mention again in a second.

Though I guess it’s also worth talking a little bit about the surviving cast. Which I’m more or less including Keebo and Tsumugi in, even though they died at the very end. The fact that Shuichi, Maki, and Keebo lived until [more or less] the very end was pretty predictable since they’re all so noteworthy, although as I said above I genuinely expected this to end with Shuichi dead, so I suppose it ended up being surprising that he actually lived to the very end. In that sense I guess Maki was the most predictable survivor. And obviously Tsumugi staying alive until at least the final trial made sense, in the end, since she was the mastermind. So other than Shuichi who was surprising for his own unique reasons, I’m still slightly baffled by Himiko surviving. Even in spite of her [relatively minimal] development and focus, she still felt really weird as part of the final three characters, next to much more important ones like Shuichi and Maki. But this sorta thing always happens in these games, and it’s probably a good thing that at least one of the survivors was someone who I would never have expected to survive.

Anyway, on the topic of Shuichi. I still adore this boy with all my heart and soul. He’s wonderful. At this point he probably beats out Hinata as my favourite DR protagonist. He’s such an incredibly good boy who deserved a much better life than what he got. I’m just kinda casually ignoring the stuff we learned in his audition, lol. But I kinda have to ignore that whole can of worms if I want to talk about what I like about any of the characters, really. I really felt horrible for him during this entire trial, especially after the reveals started kicking in. Seeing him go through so much emotional pain, until he decided to just accept death as a means to put an end to the killing games, just kinda broke my heart. There’s several points during the overall trial/ending that I nearly teared up at, and him talking about how in spite of the fact that everything he went through might have been a lie, the pain in his heart was still real, was definitely one of them. That really hit me hard. I loved seeing him be so resolute in saying that the concept of the killing games is horrific and deserve to be stopped even at the cost of his own life, but it was still hard to watch.

I hate to keep bringing this point up again, especially at this point, but I still at least like to believe that he had his own crush on Kaito. I’m very aware, especially now that the game’s definitively over [aside from the bonus stuff], that it’s probably not canon, but I still choose to believe it. I’m still choosing to believe in the way that his story and his thoughts and feelings toward Kaito came across to me. And hey, in spite of the guilt-trip-y nature of parts of this ending, it was ultimately still a celebration of the meaning of fiction and the validity of the things that fictional characters allow us to experience, so I don’t feel too bad about sticking to this interpretation. I know that the game made a pretty clear point to address Maki’s feelings for Kaito while not saying the same sort of thing about Shuichi’s feelings, but still. Though I should say that it’s not like any of this meant that I felt negatively about Maki’s feelings for Kaito and how they were portrayed. I still felt bad about seeing her find out that they were more or less a lie that had been written out as part of her character. I mean, it’s hard to call those feelings a lie when they were based upon the sorts of interactions and dynamics that would understandably lead to such a thing, so I won’t dismiss her feelings or call them fake or anything, but I can also see how the game was organized to force her to feel that way, which is still fucked up.

This is getting more into headcanon territory, there’s certainly something appealing about the idea of Shuichi developing feelings for Kaito without it having been ‘written out in advance’. Again, I’m not trying to imply that that whole deal makes this sorta thing less genuine, but still. There’s something both cute yet tragic in seeing things through this lens of Shuichi developing feelings that nobody had expected or planned for. Especially since, in hindsight, even if it might not be ‘canon’, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kaede was literally written by Tsumugi as being ‘Shuichi’s designated love interest’. They were even literally shoved into adjacent lockers, just to hammer in the fact that the game basically shoved them together. This isn’t some kind of ship hate, though. I actually still quite like Shuichi/Kaede as a ship, as I’ve said a few times before. But with how this ending works and what it says about the game in hindsight, it’s hard not to retroactively interpret these sorts of things through this kind of lens. With how many things Tsumugi specifically pointed out as being part of a pre-written script, it’s hard not to wonder just how many character points and relationship dynamics were similarly ‘part of the script’. And out of basically everything that didn’t get explicitly talked about, Shuichi and Kaede’s dynamic seems like the most likely think that was ‘forced’ to happen. Especially if we assume that Tsumugi might have expected her to survive for most of the game, whereas she died basically immediately and then Shuichi spent most of the game interacting with Kaito [and Maki, to a slightly lesser extent].

So even if I won’t really be as bold as to call any of this canon, there’s definitely room to make some interesting interpretations regarding concepts like the sometimes ‘forced’ nature of love interest scenarios in media. In spite of my warm feelings toward Shuichi/Kaede as a ship, I can’t help but me very intrigued by the idea of him not following along with that whole dynamic that was set up from the start, and instead getting cut off from her almost immediately, and instead spending most of the rest of the game with Kaito, in a way that might not have been planned for. I like the idea of a character like Shuichi indirectly rejecting the heterosexual romance set-up that he was basically shoved into, and instead developing feelings for another boy in a way that nobody planned for, entirely of his own volition. It’s just an appealing idea to me. I guess along these sames lines it’d be hard not to also look at Maki’s romantic feelings for Kaito that were explicitly fabricated, but as I said above I have no interest in engaging in ship hate, or denying her feelings. You get what I mean, though. I also can’t help but think back to that one scene where Maki asked Shuichi if he liked Kaede or not, and he just kinda vaguely said that it’d be normal to like someone even in a situation like this, and after that his hypothetical feelings for her pretty much never came up again. Not explicitly, at least. I figured at the time that he ‘obviously’ had to have been in love with her, because that’s how these things work, but after the concept of romantic feelings being fabricated came up explicitly in canon, it’s hard not to look back on that scene and wonder if there was anything more to it.

Another thing along these lines that’s kinda interesting to think about in hindsight was that it was Tsumugi who had that one off-hand line about asking Shuichi if he, Maki, and Kaito, were part of a ‘reverse love triangle’, which he hurriedly denied. At the time I was kinda intrigued by that line’s existence since it, in addition to Shuichi’s whole ‘I shouldn’t talk about another boy like that’ line, made it explicitly clear that the game was at least aware of how romantic his feelings for Shuichi come off as being, but that line certainly gains an interesting new context when you know that Tsumugi is the mastermind who knows everything, including the ‘settings’ of every character. I can’t tell if this somehow supports my whole aforementioned interpretation of events, or if it implies that this whole set-up in my head might have been intentionally planned by Tsumugi. I’m not really sure. It’s hard to tell just based on that one line if this might have been something she specifically wrote into Shuichi’s character. Though the fact that she goes out of her way to basically mock Maki over her fabricated feelings for Kaito, while not doing the same for Shuichi, makes me think that she only wrote Maki as being in love with him.

So for now I’m sticking to this whole headcanon interpretation, partly because I just fundamentally ship Shuichi and Kaito, and partly because I like this hypothetical meta-narrative subversion of romantic tropes in media.

Anyway I think that’s basically everything I feel like saying about the characters, and most of the story beats. Before I talk about the epilogue, and my feelings on the game as a whole, I should probably talk about a few more of my issues with the game.

I think we can all agree that the mini-games were, and always have been, largely pointless and unnecessary. They’re just not very great. They’re definitely more stream-lined and not as clunky as they used to be, but they sometimes feel SO ‘stream-lined’ and simplistic in design that I start to question why they even exist. The Psyche Taxi is probably the biggest offender of that. It’s such a waste of time. It never tells you anything new. It’s just this painfully drawn out procedure of the game spelling out stuff that it just went over a minute ago, and there’s not even any way to make it go by any faster because there’s a limit to how fast the car can go. I never felt like it did anything to help me solve any mysteries, at least from what I can remember. I think that the Mind Mine thing also felt pretty unnecessary, with there being only like one time where I had to think about which option to choose. I also never ran out of time in it or anything. The Hangman’s Gambit was also pretty bad, but mostly just an exercise in frustration where I either know what the answer is but have to figure out what exact wording the game wants from me, or I have no clue what it wants, and I have to awkwardly stumble my way into a solution. Which at least got a bit more manageable when I got the skill that shows the first letter of the answer immediately.

The sword rebuttal game was fine. It’s a neat representation of arguing with someone, though it usually wasn’t too difficult to figure out the logic of what to do, and sometimes the slicing mechanic just felt a bit clunky and hard to control. There were definitely a few moments where I felt stumped by the logic of them, though. The Mass Panic Debates were also OK, though they ended up never being anywhere near as difficult as I expected. I think that they were afraid of them overwhelming people, so they never made the logic of them too difficult. I don’t even think I needed to get that one skill that lets you focus on one conversation at a time. I’m glad I got the skill that silences loud voices, but that wasn’t really part of the inherent difficulty of those parts, and more just an annoyance that I got a skill to get rid of. The Scrum Debates were a really neat concept, but they felt woefully shallow and under-used. It basically always felt like the logic of them was just another Psyche Taxi-esque scenario of the characters rehashing an argument they’d already gone over before, with it just sometimes being guesswork to figure out which keyword was meant to argue against each statement. I really wish that they could have re-worked it so that new sorts of arguments and debates came up during them, that made me think about it from different angles. I also wish that there could have been more than one of them per trial, since that just lead to them feeling really minor, especially since we didn’t even get one in chapter six, so there were only five in the entire game. I think that there was also only one Mass Panic Debate per trial, which similarly made those parts feel kinda shallow and forgettable in spite of how both of them were hyped up as the new mini-game types. I guess I’m glad that they never tripped me up too hard, but it was also a bit disappointing that they never felt very exciting or meaningful.

Also, even though it wasn’t really a ‘mini-game’, I was never a huge fan of the sections where you have to browse your entire list of truth bullets and pick one. Those parts nearly always fell into being either so easy that it wasn’t any kind of a challenge, or so weird in their logic that I almost had to brute-force the answer.

In general the best part of the trials gameplay-wise were just the regular non-stop debates. Nearly everything else feels kinda unnecessary. But the regular debates were really good. They obviously varied a whole lot in difficulty, but that’s fine.

And even though this isn’t a complaint, I should round this section off by saying that the Argument Armament parts were really good and I have no real issues with them, other than that I kinda suck at rhythm games, so it took like half the game before I started getting actually good at them. I can’t really say that they were TOO difficult as rhythm games in spite of my inherent lack of skills at the genre, since I’ve seen a lot worse from regular rhythm games, and I’ve also witnessed the absolute insane nightmare known as Drakengard 3′s final boss, but still, it probably would have been had if they were genuinely difficult as rhythm games, and in practice they were at least difficult enough for me to struggle with them, and they made the finales of each trial appropriately climactic. Plus, as I said before, the one with Keebo was absolutely great as a way of representing the idea of arguing against the entire DR fandom.

The closing arguments have also always been a really neat idea, and I’ve always loved the aesthetic of them. Including the music. They’re always a neat way to end things off in a trial. The puzzle element of them still does feel a little pointless since the entire mystery’s already been solved and so it feels a bit like padding, but it’s not a big deal.

I guess I’m getting off-track in terms of talking about my complaints about the game, but other than the mini-games being largely boring or obnoxious, there’s not much else to go on. Maybe I should go back and quickly give my thoughts on each case’s murder mystery, just to end things off.

Chapter 1′s case is still a major highlight of the game, if not the entire franchise. I love it a lot. I guess it’s probably the most interesting case in the entire game, but most of the rest of them are still very good too, and this wasn’t the one I had the most difficulty with, even if I didn’t see the identity of the culprit coming. I still have general issues with the basic concept of setting up a female protagonist only to replace them almost immediately with a male one, but it still played out in a really compelling and emotional way, and at least fulfilled my desire to see a DR protagonist become a murderer, in a way that I didn’t even see coming even though they laid out hints for it in advance. Though obviously it’s impossible to talk about it without talking about the chapter six twist about how her plan actually failed, even though Kaede herself thought it did. That was a really neat extra layer to that whole mystery. I’m also still kinda sad that they killed off Rantarou immediately, especially since I feel like the endgame did a bit less to develop his character than I wanted it to. He’s definitely someone who I want to learn the most about via free time events and stuff.

Chapter 2′s case was probably the one that at least felt the most difficult to me, at least when I was actually sitting down and going through the trial. It was probably because I was playing it later at night than I should have, but as I talked about earlier in this liveblog, it just kicked my ass. It was the only trial in the game that I had to take a break from and come back to a day later to finish it, though a big part of that was due to me misunderstanding how retrying parts of the trial worked. Either way, I can’t help but commend Kirumi for setting up a mystery that, at least to me, was very difficult to solve. I’m also still sad that they killed off Ryoma early on as well, since he was another favourite of mine, but I liked his role in this chapter so I’m fine with it. This chapter in particular is one of the more depressing ones when you know in hindsight that everyone’s backstories were completely fabricated and forced upon them.

Chapter 3′s case was weird and I think most people also probably see it as a low point of the game. I loved the whole occult aesthetic of it, and the plot twist of killing someone off during an investigation, but it ended up feeling too easy. It was weird, though. Like, the identity of the culprit was obvious from the start, even ignoring that I’d been spoiled about it, but the actual logic behind how the murders happened, mostly Tenko’s, felt surprisingly difficult to me. It was basically at the same level as Kirumi’s case in that sense, but maybe even higher than that since I distinctly remember dying in this trial like five times, but I didn’t need to stop and come back to it later since by this point I knew that retrying parts of a trial if you die isn’t really a big problem. The motive in this case was definitely the most bizarre, not to mention the most unsympathetic. It’s almost weird how in a game filled with mostly sympathetic and understandable killers like Kaede, Kirumi, Gonta, and Kaito, you have Mr. Psychopathic Incestuous Serial Killer thrown right into the middle. It was just bizarre. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the game for killing off Tenko, a lesbian, in a way that was explicitly described as being ‘a pointless waste’. But whatever. I quite liked Angie’s whole sub-plot in this chapter as well, though I’m glad she got killed off.

Chapter 4′s case is still . . . iffy to me. I know that it was intentionally unsatisfying and kinda depressing and out of the blue, but it just really threw me off and felt really disappointing. It’s probably my least favourite case in the game, but maybe chapter three is worse than it. It doesn’t help that this whole chapter happened before Kokichi started getting any degree of redeeming or even particularly interesting qualities, at least in my opinion. I also still feel a bit let down by how the whole climax felt so weird and unexpected that I wasn’t even as depressed by Gonta’s death as I should have been, considering how much I liked him as a character. There were definitely a few parts that got to me, but not too many. I really liked the whole virtual world concept, though, even if most of the mysteries related to it felt painfully easy to guess. This chapter also made me like Miu a fair bit more, and it was pretty neat getting a case about someone’s murder attempt getting turned against them, even if it’s not a completely original concept in this franchise. I also still feel a bit confused about certain aspects of Kokichi’s feelings and motives in this chapter in particular, as I went over before, but it’s not a big deal. [Honestly, my favourite part of chapter four was probably just finishing off Kaito’s free time events.]

Chapter 5′s case was really depressing, and also way more complicated than I expected it would be. I at least remember it feeling pretty difficult, though the effect was lessened a bit because of the weird detail of me kinda-sorta-not-really-but-technically being spoiled about Kaito being a killer, which made the outcome of this case pretty obvious. But it was more about the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ than the ‘who’, in the end. This is where I started liking Kokichi a lot more as a character, which also makes me think back about this chapter positively. And obviously I love every part of the game that has Kaito in it [except for the one obvious exception, lol], so that made it a really emotional ride as well. Having to actively pick him in the vote and have him get executed was incredibly painful.

I guess there’s not much to say about Chapter 6′s case that I haven’t said already, so . . . yeah. It’s obviously not a murder mystery trial like the others so I can’t compare it to those ones in that sense, but it was probably still my favourite trial just due to how incredibly intense it was, and how much of an emotional roller-coaster it put me through. It’s at least easily my favourite chapter six trial in the series.

I don’t think there’s much else to say about the characters, other than that they’re probably my favourite cast in the series, as a whole. It’s hard to compare them to the casts of DR1 and DR2, since they all feel like they’re going for slightly different things, but still. I just love this game’s cast a lot. It probably helps that this was the first game I actually played for myself rather than reading/watching an LP of. There were definitely a few characters I felt ambivalent about to the very end, like Himiko, but for the most part I liked them. And chapter six definitely made me like Keebo and Tsumugi a lot more, in very different ways. I’m still kinda ambivalent toward Keebo, but he at least ended up being more than just pure comic relief, though I still dislike how his ‘persecution complex’ is framed by the narrative, with how he gets treated by everyone in practice. I liked the vague idea brought up of him learning to embrace the things that make him unique, but it fell kinda flat because of how badly his character as a whole was executed. And as I said above, I really like Tsumugi now, after having seen her as boring and pointless up until this point, even though she definitely feels less like her own unique character, and more of a representation of ‘the ending of DRV3′, and all that entails. I still think that I might prefer her as a villain to Junko, but it’s hard to compare them. Again, it’s kinda less about them as individuals, and more about them as the concepts they represent. Anyway, the characters I liked least were almost definitely Himiko and Kiyo. At least with Kokichi he was still a genuinely interesting and complex character who I slowly warmed up to, Rantarou was just sorta disappointing rather than actively bad, and Angie served an interesting plot purpose even if she was hard to like as a person, and pretty flat. Himiko and Kiyo were the ones with least going for them. Mostly Kiyo, whose entire purpose was just to be really creepy and off-putting. I’m more ambivalent about Himiko. I just wish that she felt more . . . interesting, I guess, or had more development. But in general I actively liked the majority of the cast, by the end.

Anyway, I suppose I should finally talk about the epilogue, although there’s not really much to say about it at this point. It was just really good. I was initially skeptical of the idea of the ending ‘backpedaling’ on actually killing everyone off, but at least Tsumugi and Keebo genuinely died, and I really liked the way that everyone else surviving played into the element of the audience themselves having their own redemption moment of sorts. The part where Shuichi says something along the lines of ‘maybe they wanted this lie to become the truth’ was one of the moments in this part that nearly made me cry. I think it put me the closest to actually crying, honestly. It was just a really effective way of tying together this game’s lies vs truth theme in with the whole theme of the power of fiction and the redemption of the audience. The idea of us, as the audience, loving these characters enough to want them to live, to want their ‘lie’ to become a new sort of ‘truth’, really got to me. And on that whole note, I forgot to mention it, but I really loved Shuichi’s whole speech about the love between all of them, and how the love passed onto them from everyone that died has meaning, and can even change the world itself if it could successfully get through to the audience and change their minds. That was a really nice scene. I also couldn’t help but like it when Maki pointed out how much Shuichi was sounding like Kaito, and how obviously Shuichi could do something like change the world, since he’s Kaito’s sidekick. And, of course, the part where Shuichi used Kaito’s catch-phrase about the impossible being possible also really got to me.

It’s interesting that, right at the end, the game basically calls into question everything that Tsumugi said, and made it unclear what the outside world will truly be like. I can see why that might seem unsatisfying and wishy-washy to people, but I like it. I like that, to the very end, you can never tell for sure what the truth is. It really gets across what the game is trying to say about the concept of truth vs lies. And on that whole note, I loved Shuichi’s whole part of saying that you can’t really call either truth or lies ‘bad’, and that lies can be just another way of telling the truth. It’s a simple concept, but it hit pretty hard as the culmination of this entire game. And I quite liked the final line of [from what I remember] ‘If the world can change to even a small degree, then this story won’t end’. That was a nice way to end things off. The whole ambiguity of this ending does make me wonder if they’ll decide to genuinely continue the series. I honestly hope they don’t. Partly just because I really resonated with the whole point about the killing games being inherently evil and needing to be stopped, but also partly because it’d kinda destroy the ambiguity of this ending. We’ll see. I’ll probably be fine either way.

I feel like Tsumugi’s final words about her being a ‘cosplaycat killer’, and her seemingly disappointed or annoyed expression before she died, will nag at my brain for a while. But I think that’s a good thing, that the game’s leaving me wondering about what her deal is, even to the end.

I think I’ve finally, finally run out of things to say, so all I can do is just say that this was a fantastic game. I get why a lot of people disliked it, but I really loved it a lot, even if it had some issues. It was undoubtedly my favourite game in the series, though. I certainly prefer it over DR3 as a conclusion to the franchise. I’m kinda sad that this is the sort of game where you can’t really explain why it’s so good without spoiling people. That sucks. And it’s also the sort of game that only really has it’s full impact if you’ve experienced the franchise up to this point, so I couldn’t suggest that someone go into it blind.

As I’ve said before, I’ll check out whatever post-game bonus stuff there is to do, so that’ll be the rest of this liveblog. I’m not sure how many posts it’ll take to finish it all off, and how much time it’ll take, but we’ll see. I think I might take a bit of a break from the game for a day or two in order to let my thoughts on it simmer for a while, and also so I can do some other things I need to do. Once I’m done with the entire game, that’ll probably be when I allow myself to dive into the fandom, finally. That’ll be interesting. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll reblog fanart and stuff, though, in case I want to keep my followers unspoiled. I dunno. There’s probably a good amount of stuff that’s not TOO spoiler-y that I can reblog. And to be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if I even end up making some of my own fanart. I at least really want to draw Shuichi and Kaito, for obvious reasons. But this franchise in general tends to have the sorts of characters that make me want to draw them, so who knows what I’ll do.

Anyway I need to forcibly stop myself from continuing this post because my brain is starting to melt a little bit and I need to go to sleep, lol.

[eloarei]

Tagged by @chocochipbiscuit to post my current WIPs. Thanks, Choco! (lol this is going to be self-indulgent and painful XD;)  (As with Choco, I also have more bits and blobs and ideas than I know what to do with, but I’ll focus on the ones that have a remote chance of ever getting finished.)  Active WIPS (I have at least opened the document in the past month and I honestly intend to finish them this year.)  In order of recently modified: OP CM BB -- "One Piece, Cobymeppo, Beauty&Beast" I mean, it's kind of what it says on the tin: it's vaguely a Beauty and the Beast AU. (Factoid: this is at least the 3rd or 4th fanfic I've written based on friggin' B&B. It's my favorite fairytale and I'm weak.) Currently at 12.5k (when did that happen?!) out of, I dunno, 18k? I honestly never intended to write this. It just sort of happened-- and kept happening, which is the weird part. I'm liking it though. Factoid #2: there are a lot of dogs in this fic. JD LLW -- "Jak and Daxter, Love Like Winter" 100% inspired by the AFI song, I won't lie. I've been meaning to write this for at least 7 years. I have a lot of thoughts and headcanons about the Jak and Daxter series, and this incorporates my hardcore favorite: Daxter is a Precursor. It also uses a couple tropes I love: reincarnation cycles, and fated lovers. As with any song, I can't say what it's actually supposed to be about, but I always heard it as the story of, well, reincarnation and fated lovers. "I met my love before I was born", and then switching between he, she, and then back to he. The story became very vibrant in my head! And this format especially allows me the opportunity to explore Jak/Keira as well as Jak/Daxter, because while I'm not a huge fan of Jak/Keira, I don't like just ignoring canon if I can avoid it. Currently at 7k out of... maybe 20k? It was supposed to be a lot shorter, but I'm only on chapter 1 out of 3, so less than 15k is probably not happening. Factoid: I think a lot of people only know this series second-hand, so I feel the need to mention that Daxter does, in fact, have a human form. XD FO4NV -- "Fallout 4, Nick Valentine" A very creative document name! XD; The story will probably eventually be titled "Same Heart" unless I come up with something better. It's a Fallout4 AU(ish) centering around Nick having been recaptured by the Institute, getting a memory wipe, and then living there during the years when Shaun is being raised there. Eventually, he and kid-Shaun break out to explore the Commonwealth and try to find Shaun's parents. I swear it'll be a Nick/Nora story if I ever friggin' get to that part, but right now it's mostly a Nick&Shaun story. Currently at 30k out of, I dunno, 70k to 100k? It's on chapter 7 out of 17, I think. I have this one planned out pretty well chapter-by-chapter, so of all my fics it has the best chance of actually happening. (Aside from the length, which sort of counts against it. It was supposed to be shorter, but I apparently couldn't shut up.) I'm thinking about focusing on this one for my NaNoWriMo, since it has about 50k left to it. Factoid: I get more emotional about parental relationships than I do about romantic ones, despite the fact that I LOVE romance. Stories I write about parent-child relationships always end up being my favorite. BttF On Track -- "Back to the Future, On Track" The only one I've actually started posting. I feel bad because I meant to continue writing this through December and January, but I got lazy and distracted, so it didn't happen. The season is just about right to jump back into it though (Fall is a more BttF season for me), so I HOPE to finish it this year. Currently at 18k (holy shit, seriously?) out of probably 30k. Chapter 3 (out of 6 well-planned chapters) is aaalmost done, but I might have to go reread some of IrisBleuFics stuff to get back into the mood of it. (Or maybe Rae's or Edgebug's.) Factoid (actually a question) : does anyone else have seasonal fandoms? Inactive WIPs (there are lots of these, so I'll put them under a cut for you. Still, these are only the ones I’ve worked on in the past year. Again, from most- to least-recent.) 

HP GOtG -- A silly Harry Potter/Guardians of the Galaxy fic I have like a page of. I was mentally explaining the concept of fanfic to someone and this... happened.

HPCM Ways to Live -- Another One Piece Cobymeppo fic, and AU (or UA) about if Luffy had never met Coby in ep.1 and skipped right over to kick Morgan's ass in Shells Town. tldr Coby and Helmeppo become pirates.

FFXV parents AU -- I was REALLY into this one for a while, got a couple thousand words and a good plot outline on it. It's Final Fantasy 15 AU (or, as usual, a UA) in which Noctis is only a baby when the empire attacks, and teenage Ignis and Gladio have to run away with him, and end up raising him on their own. I 100% intend to finish this one, but it's not top priority at the moment.

A modern prometheus -- A magical-world retelling of Frankenstein. Probably gay.

FO4 WFM-- "Fallout 4, Waiting for magic" On the day the bombs drop, Nora's husband is still at war, while she's several months pregnant and working on her legal cases from home. Her friend Nick Valentine has come to give her some documents and check on her when they're suddenly ushered into the vault and frozen. AKA the romantic adventures of Nick and a heavily pregnant Nora out in the Commonwealth. (Inspired by an Ace of Bass song)

Fo4 Sky-- "Fallout 4, Skyrim" Basically a riff off the previous story, but not the same at all, somehow. Set in Skyrim, Nora is essentially sleeping beauty. Wait. Snow white? Er, yeah. Magically frozen in a coffin, yeah. 

MEA Avi -- "Mass Effect Andromeda, Avi: a sci-fi ghost story" REALLY thought I was gonna finish this one, but I got distracted from MEA altogether. The story of Avitus Rix and his SAM unit, which has begun to think it is the late Macen Barro, its previous owner/partner, and Avitus' longtime boyfriend. Still can't decide how sad I want it, but it'll be pretty gloomy even if I go with a happy ending.

DCo side story AU -- A modern mini-fic about my DamselCo characters going on a double date, except Addisson and Hunter are both late so it's just Ellery and Isabelle being kind of awkward.

FFXV Dear Fellow Traveler -- AU, Prompto was raised in Niflheim and meets Noctis and the others on their (very long, winding) trip to Noct's engagement. Promptis, no war.

FFXV mermaid AU -- More Promptis. Noctis fishes up mer-person Prompto. They have adventures. Ignis has to go looking for Noctis later and meets mer-person Gladio.

OW Sagittarius  -- Eheh, posted the first chapter of this in January and then just gave up. XD;;;; I feel so bad. An Overwatch teenage McHanzo AU, where Jesse is a centaur sold into slavery to the yakuza. Trained by the Shimada clan, he falls in love with the heir, Hanzo, who then helps him escape. Many years later, they meet again in Overwatch. I have a GOOD plot outline for this, so I really have no excuse for not finishing it. It's on the to-do list after the first few.

FFXV Firstborn son -- Question: is a person still consider a trans-person if they're born female, but both raised as and identify as male (because patriarchal bullshit)? If so: trans-Noctis, Promptis fic.

FFXV Mirror Sword Shield -- Yet another FFXV AU, obviously inspired by that one Coldplay song that I love. Hundreds of years ago, Noctis defeated the darkness, but was sealed away inside the crystal, only to return when he needed to do it again. Prompto, Ignis, and Gladio have trained as his guardians all their lives, for the slim chance that he does return. (I really like this idea, but if I write this one, it'll only be after I finish the other FFXV fics.)

OW BB -- Guess what? Another "Beauty and the Beast" fic, Overwatch flavored. Except it's really more like, "the beast and also another beast". McHanzo, of course, featuring a snarky dragon spirit that constantly taunts Hanzo about his guilt.

BttF Ashes -- Hot damn I gotta write this fic some day. I have a GREAT plot outline for it, following a chiptune song called Ashes. I love it, it makes me cry. It's a Back to the Future AU, about Doc dying when his house burns down. Years later, ghost-Doc teams up with Marty to finish the time machine, and then (spoiler alert) Marty goes back in time and saves Doc, pulling his corporeal self into the future ala The Mediator and they live happily ever after the end. XD

PacRim Redefined -- Another one I feel bad about, because I have posted most of what I have written, but I don't know if I'll ever finish it. It's a far-future semi-AU about Newt and Hermann. TBH it's one of my favorite fics I've ever written, but I'm a loser and can never finish anything. Hopefully next year??? I've got much of a plot outline, so.

Bttf Dino prompt -- Braincoins prompted me last year to write a fic about Marty and a dinosaur, and I started to! But then I had no idea where I was going with it, so I stopped a few pages in. ^^; I'd like to figure out an ending to it that isn't both boring and bleak.

Bttf Solving for X -- A series of short AUs about if either Doc or Marty (or both) were women. I'd like to maybe work on this one again sometime.

HxH AU Laughter Lines -- A Hunter x Hunter fic that makes me cry when I think about it XDXDXD Based on the Bastille song of the same name, it's an AU in which Gon is like... a tree nymph. A little hard to explain, it's a sad little Killugon fic, and it should be pretty short, so I ought to just sit down and write it one day.

BttF Thirst for Romance -- I love this idea! Why haven't I written it?! In his 30's or 40's, Marty is a nurse at a convalescent home/ hospice, where he meets Doc, who loves to tell wild stories. He tells Marty stories about adventures that the two of them had in the 80's and with time travel. Everyone assumes Doc is just very creative and lonely, and they love his stories. He and Marty become close, and when Doc passes away, he leaves his meager possessions to Marty, including a mysterious set of keys which unlock his old garage, and a strange old car inside... (Really want to write this one eventually!) (Based on the song of the same name.)

BttF Hell Valley -- A sad AU, taking place in the Hell Valley timeline from movie 2. Marty has run away from his abusive step-dad and finds himself living in Doc's garage. They're just two broken people trying to get by. Marty wants Doc to run away with him, someplace far away, but Doc has a better idea, if he can get it to work. (Inspired by the song Fast Car, the sad-sounding Jonas Blue version. "You got a fast car. Is it fast enough so we could fly away?")

BttF SG fusion -- and last and possibly least, yet another BttF AU, but a fusion with Steins;Gate, because time travel is not complicated ENOUGH, I have to make it WORSE. In this story, Marty is raised in the dystopian future with the goal of going back to the past to kill Doc Brown before he can create time travel. I liked the idea a lot, but to be honest I think I even confused myself with it. I'd sort of like to keep writing it, but it'll take a lot more effort than I can foresee me wanting to put in any time soon. Tagging: (if I can remember which of my friends write) um... @braincoins, @nomadsky, and, uh... I know that more of you are writers, so just... take it and pretend I tagged you! 

[sxlverlining-blog]

2, 4, 6, 15?

2. Do you have any controversial headcanons that go againstwhat is generally accepted by the fandom? Do you incorporate this into writingyour muse or keep it to yourself?

{where’s that meme of that dude tapping his head cause it’s just like “your headcanon can’t be controversial in the fandom if you don’t give a shit about the fandom”

at the same time because I just mind my own business in my corner of the fandom, I honestly have no fucking clue how people characterize the muses I have generally. frankly I can’t think of a headcanon I’d hold for any of them that would be considered outrageous/controversial.

but to answer the latter question, I might hypothetically incorporate this in my writing, yes. I’ve had muses where I directly contradicted the fandom’s generally accepted characterization and headcanons. I will use the headcanons I like. I will defend my choices, you know? I’m also the most nonconfrontational person ever but I sure will…. try anyhow…}

4. Have you made any outright changes to the canon material inorder to write your muse the way you wanted (entire scenes you chose to omit,chapters you say never existed, things you assume were never said, etc.)? 

{WELL LIKE…  the characters here at Game Freak tend to be a little barebones in some ways. I never complained, frankly, as the characters were still likable. what could I ignore or change, really?

I think what might come close is the stuff surrounding Silver’s past– because the Celebi Event does kind of imply that he knew about Team Rocket beforehand (in my opinion), something I actively chose not to pursue for a reason I can’t really remember anymore, haha. It really does change the dynamic between Silver and Team Rocket/Giovanni, so that’s a thing.}

6. What is the general opinion of your muse’s fandom aboutthem? Do you agree with it?

{oh man who knows. again, minding my own business in a corner. I don’t think any of my characters are disliked.

I’ve only seen like one person who genuinely didn’t like Silver. I would say he was maybe one of the more popular rivals? but I don’t know for sure, could be my own bias. he’s good regardless.

as for Proton… in the general fandom: “who?” because mannn. no one gives a damn about these execs except for me and like 10 other people maybe, haha. but he’s for sure the most popular of the executives. not that I blame them, he’s my favorite too (though frankly Archer, Ari, and him take up three slots on my top 5 faves and they all kjnda tie…), people love this dude. like I said, can’t blame them. he’s adorable and the fucking worst. I love him,

Nanu would probably be more of a top fandom fave for Sumo if Guzma didn’t exist, I’m sure. but he’s well liked. very well liked. people love the sad man. I do too. he’s a delight. though I feel like people tend to characterize him as a little harsher than I do, maybe? but it depends.}

15. What plots/interactions leave you feeling protective of yourmuse? 

{oh mannn. for Silver? stuff that’s really rough on him emotionally, like the family threads. what a delight to write. my son is so sad. I want him to be happy. but it is really not easy for this kid, you know? and there’s some other stuff I have planned that I’m also like FUCK. this child deserves better than this. and if he gets to interact with a Rocket character I’ll feel similarly. (which reminds me, I really should write a drabble with Proton and Silver sometime about something. I like the potential for their interactions a lot. I feel like Proton would be inclined to call him “little buddy”).

Proton can protect his own stupid ass, haha. but like if I ever got a plot/interaction where I got to throw Proton into some emotional turmoil I might be inclined to be a bit protective (which reminds me, yet another drabble I’ll need to write in the future. gotta dog ear a lot of drabble ideas…. my ass can’t even write replies but I wanna do these… eventually…) for the time being? I dunno. maybe the thread we have since he is kinda capital F Fucked right now, but who knows.

Nanu can take care of his own damn self as well. he’s like that dude from Breaking Bad, Mike. he can handle himself. up until he gets murdered and then he can’t take care of himself, rip. but that’s worse case scenario, right?}

[runicmagitek]

Short version - I'm still here and alive and well. I've been extensively absent from tumblr for a multitude of reasons. I don't know if that will change in the immediate future, especially with maintaining my health as my primary focus.

Long version - Nano happened. I got caught up with that. Then I got sick. Work was busy with it being December and the holidays and nothing says stressed out like being constantly down three to four people every day for a month solid. Once January rolled in, I got sick again and I'm just now getting better.

And I more or less blinked and realized, oh hey, you haven't even checked tumblr in all of this time. Nor did it really occur to me until now that maybe I should, mostly because I have friends here that I care about and maybe they care about me the same way I do for them (apparently I do and yes, I've seen everyone's messages. I'm a little overwhelmed by them right now, but I will respond to them when I'm able).

Though the strange part is that I'm not actually desperate to jump back into tumblr. There are plenty of aspects that I dislike about this site and thus plenty of fandom communities here (I doubt I need to explain this to anyone). Even with being extremely selective of who I follow and being on top of my blacklist, there are still posts that slip through that I don't care about. I find myself scrolling way too much and ignoring a lot of posts. I just want to share awesome video game stuff I find along with share my writing; I don't care for discourse that spikes my anxiety and anger, thus doing little to aid my lifelong disease ("Try not to be stressed," says my doctor, who proceeded to order weekly bloodwork for I don't even know how long by now).

I've been trying to spend less of my time doing idle, passive shit - for a lack of better words - and actually being productive with something. So far, that's been working out well for me.

But there have been positives to tumblr, namely the friends I've made here. I've really connected with some lovely people that I don't want to lose touch with. And I've used this place as a platform for my fanfiction, which while small, has helped me continue connecting and I love that. I don't want to let go of that.

So I honestly don't know what will happen with this particular tumblr. I can't see myself putting the daily attention to it like I used to. In the past, if I was gone for a few days, I felt like I missed so much. Over a damn month? It's weird. I don't even know if bopping on weekly would even be worth it due to how much I miss. The rate that some people post is just boggling (I tend to keep a queue, but still, what the hell. I have a job and a life - I got shit to do). All of this is up in the air. I dunno.

With that out of the way, I want to address some other things, namely questions that have been sent my in my absence:

My health I'm doing a lot better. A lot less dying and a lot more being in remission and actually being a human again. I see my doctor in a couple of weeks and I'm going up to Maine this weekend to see a naturopathic doctor to help aid with my disease. I have to be on medication for the rest of my life. I am not happy about that, but my other option was internally bleed to death. To also help maintain this, I've made a bunch of lifestyle changes, namely adding more exercise to my routine every day. I've been relatively active, though since May, that all stopped, more so when my body stopped functioning in August. I'm slipping back into yoga and my boyfriend is teaching me to box to stay active. So far, so good.

My fics I wrote a bunch during my vacation up to Maine back in December, but I haven't touched anything editing wise since work blew up in my face. I have a lot of WIPs and my goal is to edit and post all of them before I write anything new. A bit of a daunting goal, but I'm up for the challenge. Yes, Darkness/Starlight is still going to be posted. It's completed; I just need to edit it. Likewise, the OT3 fic is done; I just need to format it and send it to my beta. All the drabble collections are - believe it or not - complete; just need to get back into the habit of posting them weekly.

My writing in general I really want to make a dent into my original work again. Last year, my biggest intention was to set up an author's website and establish a facebook page and twitter account for myself. That never happened. I don't want to ignore that. Sadly, I'm not the best at multitasking when it comes to original writing; I'm either working on one project or the other. I know the moment I start focusing more on my original work, there will be a lack of updates in regards to my fics. I want to do both and I'm not sure how I'll do that, but we'll see. I have so many ideas and at this point, I've been taking several AU ideas I've had and morphed them into original works. It's complicated.

My cosplay I am, in fact, still cosplaying. My group and I had plans last summer, but those all crumbled when I - spoiler - got sick. For this year, I'm still planning to go to PAX East (reprising Royce Bracket and if time permits it, I'll debut my Peach cosplay here. if not, probably reprising Midna), Anime Boston (definitely doing Canti (yes, from FLCL. no, I've never made armor before. yes, I'm screaming through this whole process) and Satsuki Kiryuin while Glynda Goodwitch and Julia are pending), and Dragon*Con (oh god, my group and I have yet to pin down anything for this. Potential cosplay groups we've talked about: Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Witcher 3, Mario Kart, Archer, Hyrule Warriors, Futurama, and a few more I can't remember).

My holidays They were quiet and uneventful - a fucking miracle in of itself.

That's kind of it. Please don't worry, guys. I'm sorry if I worried any of you. I promise I'm doing well and I'm happy and healthy. Thank you all for your support  ♥ ♥ ♥

[tardytothepardy]

*blargh*

Lately I’ve been purging all of my vld stuff out, which means a bit of archiving (not a lot because back when i was in the fandom i basically looked at what other people made and didn’t make much of my own) and changing usernames and profile pictures, just to completely wipe vld away. I got all the vld funkos for christmas last year or something, but by now I’ve put them away.

I almost feel bad about doing some of it, because I spent either time or money on voltron-related things (not clothes though, because I was fearing when I would inevitably lose interest and still feel like I had to wear something I didn’t like. Which was still a concern for me when I got a bunch of mha shirts, but I guess I didn’t care as much? Idk) but I don’t think that’s completely justified. I mean, people are allowed to lose interest in things. I’ll admit-- I’m still pretty mad about the way it ended, and I have just a bit to say about it, but at this point I just don’t think about it. 

The more difficult thing to put away are the various posters I got relating to vld. They’re not very big, but some of them are framed. I intentionally framed the first one I got, because I liked it so much, but the next three I got, my mom kinda pressured me into framing them, even though they weren’t nearly as significant to me. Added with the fact that we move a lot, I thought it was extra hassle, but flash to present day, they’re framed. I mean, where can I put those? Probably in my closet, honestly. 

This kind of thing makes me worry a little bit about how I’m going to react to fading out of interests in the future, as I inevitably will. What the ever-loving hecc will I do with all my mha stuff? It’s also not that much, just a few funkos (like 5), three shirts, not a lot. Or what about my spop stuff? I also don’t really have a lot of that stuff, just two very small posters and a few stickers, but usually when I move away from things, I don’t really want to be reminded of it. It’s not really because I feel like it’s cringey or anything, it’s more of “I was into that, but now I’m not”, and so when stuff from vld pops up, I feel awkward, like running into someone that you used to know. Except with vld it’s more like running into someone that I last screamed my head off at while basically having an emotional breakdown because they fucking killed Allura for no goddamned reason she could’ve stayed alive you pieces of garbage-- but I digress.

I think this is coming to mind because the last season of She-ra is scheduled for May 15, last I checked. And after spending the majority of yesterday and today re-watching the previous seasons, I’m actively thinking about all the crazy things that have happened, and how the mighty fuck this last season is gonna go. I’m not sure that I’m gonna leave spop the way I did vld, because I’ve been with spop since the beginning (which I still think is wild like that never happens I’m usually so late to things like that), and unlike vld, there are actually some ships within the community that I actually do ship, rather than just being complacent with what was being chucked at me. (i used to think i shipped klance but since then i have come to the conclusion that i never really shipped anyone in vld except maybe lotor and allura when lotor was a good guy. and that one was a solid maybe sometimes.)

I also watch Dragon Prince, which is pretty cool. With tdp, there is a canon ship: rayllum, but I’ll be honest that I’ve never really shipped that. To me, Rayla and Callum seem like two awkward bumblebees that bump into each other and just pretend it didn’t happen. I mean, I guess for the people that ship rayllum, it’s great, but I’m generally indifferent. I don’t have any ships for tdp, though, in case anyone was wondering. 

Sometimes though I am hesitant to mention my ships, especially because people are notorious for spring-loading their ships onto others and bashing other ships, which to me just seems exhausting. Maybe it’s because being angry in general is just really tiring for me, I dunno. 

Hearing about all the batshit things that people did in the name of ships in the vld fanbase astounded me in how ridiculous (and occasionally selfish) they were. I’ve never felt like a pairing between two fictional people would mean anywhere near the extent it seems to for some people, but I guess that’s just me actively making attempts to keep myself from romanticizing things about some characters that really probably shouldn’t be romanticized. For example, the ship between Hordak and Entrapta in spop:

Hordak is a big nasty meanie who has validation and anger issues, is the living definition of rage quitting, and generally seems to be a very toxic person to be around. The dude’s got issues. He doesn’t seem to be in any particular rush to address them, much less work on adjusting himself into being less of a toxic person. 

Entrapta is much better than Hordak in a lot of obvious ways, such as not having anger issues or any of that. But, due to the fact that it seems like she wasn’t raised by people, or at the very least wasn’t around people for a while before Adora, Glimmer and Bow tried to recruit her into the rebellion, she has some people issues. I think she said at one point that she tried to hang out with the princesses before, but it was made clear that in a group of people who fit in by their inability to fit in, she didn’t fit in. She was too eccentric for them.

So she doesn’t really know how to socialize, and due to that whole thing where the rebellion accidentally left her, she has madddd trust issues with people. She just decides to stick with robots, because she knows how they work and why they do the things they do. She’s also kinda morally grey, at times. I feel kinda like her general neutrality is somewhere along the lines of Double Trouble as far as who’s side she’s on. She mainly stayed with the Horde because 1) more tech, 2) Catra convinced her and 3) lab partnersss babyyy

(I guess I have more to say about Entrapta than Hordak but whatever) 

In general, I think it’s obvious that Hordak has more pressing issues to wrangle, but they both aren’t really great. And it might not be a great relationship. And while I’m seeing all these hilarious memes and fantastic art, I am always trying to keep in mind that hey-- Hordak’s still a big meanie stupid dumb buttface that needs to get his act together if he still wants to even share a lab with Entrapta. (Which as far as I’m concerned is kinda all she wants, which is perfectly fine with me. Go off and do science girly. I have zero qualms.) 

But then y’know I re-watch s3 and s4 and I’m like “Unghh shit. I feel weird about shipping this”, but here I am. The main stuff that gets me is like that one scene after Entrapta basically gave Hordak his new fancy exoskeleton thing and he was all “uh welll hnngh hmm it’s uh very uhh structurally hrrmm sound um uh you’re uh umm very good at uhh this” and Imp screamed at him. That was great.

Complete sidenote-- what accent is Hordak supposed to have I’m honestly confused like sometimes he says stuff like “territory” like “terri-tree” which is like huh okay he’s busting out some British accent or something idk but other times he says things in an American accent but like poshly and it’s weird I’m having a hard time I just get so distracted by the weirdest things. 

Like no one else has an accent. Is it because everyone else is from Etheria, meanwhile he isn’t? Probably. But still. I’m confused. Anyway.

Actually there isn’t really anything else. This thing’s long enough. Plus I unveiled some of my ships, which is basically like posting your social security number and your bank account information. Nasty stuff.