#bandit and the blorbos

[soepwashere]

Some tiny people came over and hung out with my dog

Version of the first photo without motion blur below the cut!

[wileycap]

Imagine you're a big wrestling fan. You follow this one really dominant wrestler and you absolutely love her. You keep up with all the drama and you're super invested until one week there's just Bomb after Bomb.

First your fave dominates an event - duh, obviously, she's the best. Then during the part of the show where the announcer is like "anybody in the audience want to challenge her for a fat stack of cash", somebody actually does. (Obviously a tourist.) It's some kid wearing like a beginner outfit from a McDojo... and he actually wins?And gets the cash! And then the event just ends!?

You're buzzing. It's clear that this is like a storyline or something. You can't wait for next week's show. Except that there isn't one, because - as you find out through the gossip mill - your fave was actually the local billionaires' daughter who was competing in secret. And also kayfabe might not exist. And now she's gone and the billionaire is blaming a demigod (who's back from the dead? I guess?) for kidnapping her.

So, how come that means no show this week or possibly ever? Well, the billionaire hired the promoter (and a random McDojo sensei) to go after the demigod to get back his daughter (your fave wrestler!) and the guy just... packed up his entire promotion and left.

Some months later the war that's been going on since your great-grandfathers days ends. You go to a peace parade. And there she is: Toph Beifong, the Blind Bandit, giving the new Fire Lord a noogie.

Insane fucking storyline.

[plutobody]

Trigger finger

[knucklebl4rt]

Smoke Bomb

Gonna splatter yer blood across the violet pastures of Sky Meadows, partner.

[aparticularbandit]

Just saw Until Dawn.

It was fun! A good movie! Enjoyable! Fun!

That is not intended to be thought about very hard so don't do that.

(Also I loved the game easter eggs I caught!)

[who-do-i-know-this-man]

⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️

[harpyladyval]

It's the boi's birthdaaaaaaaaaaay

You know what that meaaaaans

No one's gonna post anything so I'm gonna make a bunch of memes for him. (Seriously. I looked on his tumblr tags and as of rn, no one's made any posts today ;-:)

SO YEET THE BLORBO MEMES!!!!!

[queenerdloser]

i'm rereading fushigi yuugi for the first time in ??? probably at least 15 years. i think i forgot how many of my favorite manga just straight-up had a crossdressing man in it for ???? reasons lol. and i sped through the first three books because even tho i do actually really like miaka and tamahome and the rest i couldnt rest easily until my blorbo tasuki was in the picture. the cheer i made on his arrival is UNPARALLELED. my inner 10 y/o jumped out immediately.

[icednebula]

I'm proud enough of an oc drawing to share ! and also to hopefully start to properly introduce him to yall, hes my little bandit guy with a big heart <3 <3 <3

[thecosmicsailor]

Yeehawgust Day 9: Masked Bandit

“Hope ya don’t mind me bargin’ in, fellas…”

[king-lazzo]

Been really into printmaking lately

Particularly obsessed with my pretty pearlescent pink cowboy. Girlboss

[officialcynicore]

First Looks: Rat 🐍

That's a LOT of hair. How does that skinny body support the weight of all that?? Well he's surprisingly resilient, and will go through anything to have what he wants (which is fuckass long hair in this example).

[nickythehickey]

*emcee voice* hello sfth fandom, by the request of myself and literally four people (hi @not-an-idiot @very-confused-alpaca @chaostributary97 @bbatcat), i give you

my best attempt at a list of disability representation in the sfthverse

*for the purposes of the list, "disability" includes physical/mental/developmental disabilities, neurodivergence, chronic illnesses, and mental health conditions

*i went through and added as many as i could think of but easily could've missed some. also i can't get the patreon rn so there's no patreon exclusive characters, sorry. if you know of some more feel free to reply/reblog and i'll add them!

canon (either explicit or heavily implied)

bubba (inside the mysterious cube) is stated to be an amputee with prosthetic legs

peter steven (the milkman) is stated to have adhd; granted its a throwaway line but i think it's true. since adhd has a large genetic component, that implies that either janet or david or both likely also has it- my money's on david since peter seems to mostly take after him

post mortem, L (the creak in the attic) is mute and uses mime/sign language and possession as forms of aac

donnie (the detective vs. the christmas tree bandits), my personal blorbo, is explicitly stated to have adhd and a seizure disorder- likely photosensitive epilepsy based on the mentions of the lights in the strip club. "i was never good with numbers" could be interpreted as dyscalculia as well. frankie may also have adhd bc again genetics, but if he does he can mask like a motherfucker

chip (the cardboard stegosaurus) has an unspecified seizure disorder (although i can't find one that turns you french), and while she isn't present, we learn that his mother marie-claire was suicidal

queen of representation that she is, amanda (clarissa's diy wedding) is all but confirmed to have prosopagnosia, or face blindness

according to divorces and teddy bears, the entire north pole elf population has adhd. congrats on the diagnosis luke i mean snowdrop

"that one gas station man" as @doodle-ratz called him (the pilot's final flight) is blind

mrs jeffery (the milkman) was blind at the beginning of the scene, they ended up not going with that but she probably does still have poor vision

the bartender (the hare who wore a sweater) slut dropped so hard his knees exploded, and that's now a sentence i've said on the internet. im.... not sure what to count this as tbh, but as a person with vague undiagnosed joint fuckery myself, he makes the list regardless

they don't like... SAY IT say it, but john hobson (the creak in the attic) with the whole "thunderstorm killed my parents" thing probably has ptsd. like yall see it too right

based on body language, granddad (wine under the bridge) appears to use a walker, suggesting mobility issues

headcanons (still implied like at least a little bit but mostly up to interpretation, this is mine)

*(this one's messy, its more me sensing vibes than anything else, there's almost definitely some projection in there, honestly you can disregard it if you want. spoilers its mostly autism bc that's me)

frankie (the bard with a scar) says that he can't run fast, maybe implying mobility issues? i like to think so

i don't think their ages are ever established so i may be completely off base and they're just meant to be children, but jimmy (toby's secret pocket) and jeffery (party quirks) are both autistic teenagers/young adults to me. jeffrey specifically bc he reminds me immensely of how i acted the first and only time i threw a party

i get... a vibe. from titch (the unrelenting aubergine). im not sure what it is, but its there

fellow autistic people yk how there's this weird kinda split that happens where when you're a kid people think you're mature for your age but then once you're older people think you're immature? yeah johnny and janae (the neighbor's under the bed) are the extreme incarnation of that dichotomy

someone in the comments of ballet on the battlefield pointed out alexa stimming after she befriends janusz and i love that so im saying she's some flavor of neurodivergent

troll-son (wine under the bridge) probably has some kinda allegory for something idk

because of the way i visualize character designs for sfth, pretty much any character luke played while wearing glasses (like andrew (all eyes on nigel) or fullset o'hands) also wears glasses. im not gonna list them all just know they're included

i've been working on this list for seven hours. i feel like sysiphus (thats a very smart reference). im going to bed

EDIT: if you're seeing this now there's an update in the reblogs!

[aparticularbandit]

thl spoilers beneath the cut re: route i finished this morning and am still. hm about.

let's talk about multiple eitos and the set-up of getting to this route.

takumi chooses to not kill eito after he gets back. takumi chooses not to kill eito after he gets back.

the game is very clear that killing eito when he hasn't technically done anything yet is the wrong decision.

which cool, great, i vibe with that, this reminds me of the marvel comics civil war 2 (generally speaking) and how you can't punish people for a crime they haven't committed yet even if you know they're going to do it because, you know what, maybe they won't.

eito escapes. eito fights for the opposite side. eito is a traitor. eito feeds power to big boss supreme commander v'exhness. clearly eito has done bad things, and it is not morally questionable for takumi to kill eito now. the moral question of whether it's okay to kill eito for things he hasn't done yet is off the table. eito is a traitor. eito intended to be killed by v'exhness and give her all of his hemoanima to make her stronger so she could kill takumi and the rest. and eito is still cool with killing everyone.

i don't think it is wrong for takumi, in this moment, to choose to kill eito.

but if takumi kills eito, he gets posessed by eito, and there is literally no even REMOTELY good end to this route.

either takumi kills everyone else in his attempt to kill eito, or takumi kills some of them in his attempt to kill eito and then has them permakill him, or takumi commits suicide over and over in an attempt to beat eito down and then eito takes takumi's body over anyway, or in the best end to this route, eito is still there, living with takumi, making his life a living hell, making takumi see eito every time he looks in the mirror, but hey, at least he's not controlling takumi or convincing him to kill everyone or himself, so that's okay, right?

and like. i'm all for implementing mercy and second chances and redemption arcs in fiction. i support these. i would rather these. and i like that the game rewards me when i choose mercy. i like that if you choose to let eito live here, he does go through a redemption arc and he does change.

but i don't like that the game says, hey, if you kill eito here, it's only because you SUPER HATE him, when like. it actually is not wrong to kill eito in this moment. takumi might be giving into his hatred of eito when he kills him - and that's the point the game wants to stick - but like. in a war?

nngh.

[lunarbard]

I legitimately think that the first three borderlands (as in 1, 2, & TPS) are good dystopian satire, despite their questionable writing at times. A game/series that took itself more seriously could highlight this better, but Borderlands would lose a lot of its edge if it did.

Handsome Jack isn't just some charismatic villain that garnered a lot of affection from players by some fluke, but rather an excellent personification of the dystopian elements of Borderlands' background setting that make it engaging.

If you look at Borderlands 1, for all its effective lack of plot, the game is about these megacorporation's disregard for the human lives they ruin and their self-defeating obsession with attaining power and control (as seen with Commandant Steele's death). Borderlands 2 took that premise and swapped out the corporate antagonist, but it's not just a new coat of paint/roster of enemies: the motivations change while following similar themes as implied in BL1, now personified in Jack.

In BL1, the Atlas Corporation believes it owns Pandora, and everything (and everyone that primarily DAHL brought), on it is unrealized property they have free claim over. They believe the vault and its contents are owed to them, and it falls on the vault hunters showing up in the nick of time to remedy the potential resulting calamity.

Handsome Jack, meanwhile, has that similar belief that Pandora is "his," just that it's his to "save." He's Hyperion's current CEO because he is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he believes he is owed, one of which is respect as a hero of the people. The people he hates the most are those who deny or deprive him of those things: see his treatment of his daughter, after "what she did to her mother." His ego and disregard for the humanity of basically anyone else, treating them as a character in his story to be stepped on and/or discarded reflects an attitude of the megacorporations that makes the backgrounds of Borderlands so dystopian. I 100% believe that the system that makes a person like Handsome Jack could have produced nearly anyone in a similar mold.

Meanwhile, the Borderlands 1 vault hunters in 2 stand in stark contrast to not just Handsome Jack/Hyperion but also DAHL. Unlike Jack, they don't care about the aesthetics of heroism; they're just trying to protect as many people as they reasonably can from the horrors of Pandora. Unlike DAHL, they didn't abandon the planet and the survivors still there when the thing that brought them in the first place didn't pan out.

I think there's also something to the crude city of Sanctuary supporting plenty of residents versus the pristine city of Opportunity that's almost completely vacant of anything except instruments of war.

Of course, Jack's fall is thematically different from Atlas. Atlas gets defeated when it's claimed "property" slaughters the military sent to claim it; Jack gets defeated by watching his notions of heroism fall apart as the vault hunters cut down the calamity he summoned to "save" Pandora.

Then you get to Borderlands 3, which understood nothing but the aesthetic of the preceding series.

The only difference between the corporations you ally with and those you fight is the former have some friendly franchise blorbos (Rhys, Zer0, and Hammerlock). The corporations aren't fundamentally flawed factions that drive the terrible conditions of the setting for their lust for profit, they're just sometimes headed by someone evil and/or incompetent who maybe wants a merger (The "merger war" between Atlas and Maliwan is a good idea in theory, but it's ruined by going "this one is good" rather than focusing on helping those caught in the crossfire).

Meanwhile, the twins don't present a coherent threat as an element of Borderlands' underlying dystopia. They're just bad guys with lore things (derogatory) and their streamer gimmick. What I think is most insulting about them, though, is that they're just an excuse to use bandits everywhere with no though for an underlying point. The bandits of Pandora are the people DAHL left behind on that desolate rock of a planet, many of whom never wanted to be there in the first place. The twins could have shed some light on how receptive the bandits are to promises of salvation by whatever means because they have no hope otherwise.

I feel like a game that was trying to be more thematically coherent with previous entries would have flipped the villain script: the twins should have been misguided/tragic figures actively striving for a new, redeemed life for Pandora, while their corporate allies use them up and discard them.

[so-i-grudgingly-joined-this-site]

They also conveniently ignore a lot of the other queer characters they could've latched onto, but which all have some quirk that mainstream fandom looooves to hate on

i don’t even UNDERSTAND the appeal of fandom hob tbh. besides the fact that he’s so far removed from canon as to be a different character entirely, what people think is interesting about him in their personal canon is just. not. and i KNOW that it’s PROBABLY just because he’s the easiest for other queer white people to project on but i don’t even have like, sympathy for that. relatability should not be a metric for your enjoyment of media. lol.