#bc the questioning of identity and what makes someone ‘real’ or ‘original’ is

[velvetjune]

is there a reason or theory to why Tom Zane in Alan Wake 1 (who presumably is someone Alan manifested to be a bright presence guide) introduced Scratch and, later in the DLCs, stopped answering Alan after he questioned Zane for writing a page about his childhood

[ca-suffit]

I hated the revisiting of the abuse scene that didn't even sound like louis ik he's still the victim of the situation even if he fought back but lestat looking worse and bloodier than louis i don't believe that the scene just felt unnecessary and a way to appease the fans what did you think of it

It sounded like Louis to me. We saw parts of this in 2x5 when he confronted Armand (while on drugs thru Daniel's blood but still) and we saw what kind of mother Florence was to him, which is the origin for a lot of this. This is the side of Louis that he doesn't like to be conscious of. Louis is a great, complex character and this only adds to it. It seems like a lot of the fandom struggles to understand these characters as they're a spectrum of emotions and actions, alongside the faulty memory issues. This is real life tho? U are the villain of someone's story just like ur the angel in another. None of us is ever a static identity of "good" or "bad." Emotions are neutral things. Anger is not a negative thing, but the actions taken while angry can have consequences (just like actions taken when happy can have that too, it's across the board).

I knew how the fandom would react to the scene, so I didn't like it for that part, but for itself as part of the story I didn't mind it.

It's again another Rorschach test for the audience. We already generally know what happened and that Lestat is the one responsible for crossing the ultimate line. The fine details of who did what otherwise don't matter at all. Lestat having injuries as well and Louis yelling at him don't change anything of what we already knew. A lot of the audience is looking for a way to actually tally the fight step by step or dumb shit like "mutual abuse" when that's not the thing to be looking at.

A lot of ppl want Louis to be more guilty just bc he's black, lbr. Lestat is the fandom favorite, this goes beyond the show into the book's histories. He's Lestat and he's white and the books don't hold him accountable for much of shit so the show doing it makes ppl feel a lot of things. The ways they want to lash out and defend him is similar to what these different angles of the fight are commenting on too. When u feel hurt, scared, unlovable, whatever, does that mean ur anger is justified to come out in ways that attack others? Especially if u think they're beneath u somehow or just wrong? Is there ever justification for hurting others? A lot of Lestat defenders are not asking these questions and instead are still seeking reasons why Lestat couldn't have been responsible for this himself, why Louis "had" to provoke him more or maybe have started it first after all. Ppl need to look at why they're bothered by this scene and ask what they're rly looking for in it, what feelings they're trying to soothe by doing that, and whether racial biases color those feelings too.

[noisyghost]

Ooo you fed me so well, I wasn’t even sure if I would get answers! So now I’m gonna try my hand at asking who bit Ark, what happened?! This is so juicy (rubbing my gremlin hands together).

oh rest assured, I will answer any and all OC related questions with overwhelming fervor and I will not be cool about it at all <3

The person that bit Ark was Josie! She's what the girlies like to call "a hot mess" <3

im so sorry this reply is so long. I started typing and kept failing to summarize things until it was. way too many paragraphs lmao. TLDR; Ark and Mira were attempting to rescue a woman named Josie who'd basically been manipulated into servitude by a very shitty guy. Josie also happens to be a werewolf. At some point during the attempted rescue, Josie had to watch someone she cared about a lot be killed, and she immediately wolfed out and attacked everyone around her, including Ark <3

I did not proofread this after typing it and it's 1am so i'm sorry if some things dont line up correctly, im stupid :)

Josie got bit when she was 18 on a camping trip with friends and it subsequently ruined her life. She survived bc a monster hunter killed the werewolf before it killed her, but she still got bit and ended up running away from home bc the aforementioned monster hunter told her to (it was either "run away and never come back" or "im killing you right now for real") everyone in her family thinks she died except her sister, Rose, who saw it happen and - upon never finding the body - spent the next 10 or so years looking for her.

Because Josie never really had anyone to explain to her what was going on, or support her in any way, she spent a lot of time alone, and subsequently fell into some pretty dark places. She eventually finds herself stuck in a monster fighting ring bc shes been conditioned to think that this is literally all shes good for. At the very least, she makes "good friends" with another werewolf girl stuck in the same spot as her named Cleo and theyre basically the only thing keeping each other alive for the next couple years.

At some point in all this, her sister Rose manages to track her down, but worried about her and her sisters safety, gets in contact with Mira (who is functionally the lynchpin holding the entire cities supernatural community together whether anyone knows it or not lmao) to ask for help rescuing her from the guy basically keeping her prisoner.

Aforementioned guy keeping these monster girls prisoner was named Dekker, and he was basically the scum of the earth. He dealt in monsters and magic and took advantage of a lot of peoples inability to get help (EX: 'you're a werewolf. what are you gonna do? who's gonna help you? no one. theyll just think you're crazy, and then youll end up killing innocent people because you're a monster and that's what you do). Josie and Cleo were his favorite girls and he showboated them around as both arm candy and bodyguards.

The thing with Mira and her work is that she likes to help people as best she can, but she's not like. A superhero with all the latest tech. She's a woman with a smartphone and a handful of 30 year old weirdo friends that share a group chat where someone will text "do we have plans this weekend?" and then someone will reply 3 days later with "i forgot what day it was". They're not exactly the justice league.

All they were trying to do was find Josie and rescue her for her sister. Mira has a lot of power and can do a lot of things, but this Dekker guy was notoriously slippery, and no amount of brute force was going to get them into one of these monster fights without notifying Dekker and giving him a chance to escape with the girls.

So, after tracking down one of these fights, the plan was to sneak in, find Josie and then convince her to leave with them. Originally, it was just supposed to be Mira doing all the legwork. But Ark, who was going thru a fucking crisis of identity at the time and also saw a lot of his own sister in Rose, essentially demands Mira lets him help under the guise of "I'm human, I'm way less likely to draw unwanted attention". Esp since Mira is a 6'4" goddess who attracts attention everywhere she goes lmao (Of note, they had several friends who also urged Ark to Not Volunteer To Do This, but outside factors made it unrealistic for this plan to work without getting caught with anyone other than Ark oops).

So Ark went in to find Josie and Mira was anxiously playing support, ready to rush in and save him if need be. And, to be fair, he did in fact find Josie! He told her who he was and who sent him here (Rose) and told her all she had to do was go find Mira and she would get her out. But Josie was skeptical and, frankly, afraid. She didn't believe that Mira had the power to keep her safe from Dekker, but she also didn't want to believe that her sister had been looking for her for 10 years because she was so disgusted with herself she would have preferred her sister just think she was dead!

However - Cleo, who was with Josie, did not share her fears. Cleo had had Enough, and wanted to run away with her. Josie panicked, afraid that if they ran, they were going to be hunted down and everyone involved with her was going to be killed.

So she ran away to a back room to calm down. Cleo went after her, and Ark kind of followed, but at a distance. Cleo did manage to get her settled a little, but the both of them got caught by Dekker, who harassed Josie into admitting that there was someone there trying to get them to leave, hoping he would respect the honesty. He did not.

To try and mitigate some of the flack, Cleo claimed she was the one the guy was talking to, so he would chew her out instead. Josie and Cleo both felt bad that they'd fucked this guy over, but if he was with someone as powerful as he claimed to be, he'd be alright, surely?

Apparently this was not the first time Cleo has been distant from Dekker recently. It was clear she wasn't as afraid of him as he thought she should be. So he made the executive decision to make an example out of her.

The thing about werewolves and the full moon is this: the full moon is the only time when a werewolf is forced to turn. However, they can technically turn whenever if you supply enough trauma. For Josie, that line was watching Dekker kill the only person she'd loved in the last decade.

He'd expected her to fall in line because that's what she'd been doing for the last few years. He didn't really know what Cleo had meant to her, so he hadn't expected any retaliation. But something snapped in her brain and everything kinda went red.

Josie's a particularly large werewolf - at least 13'; there's a reason she was a fighting champion - so when a beast like that gets let loose in a relatively small arena, things tend to go bad fast! She just blindly started tearing people apart (including Dekker, of course).

Ark had heard the muffled gunshots over the music and the crowd and he just went in on instinct, knowing immediately he was fucked regardless of what he did. Things escalated very quickly after that. It couldn't have been more than 30 seconds that passed inbetween Josie wolfing out and her clamping her teeth into his shoulder. And maybe it was just a moment of grief-stricken clarity, but she wavered just slightly - what the fuck was she doing? She hated him because he'd tried to help and if he'd never shown up, they would be fine. But Cleo had trusted him without a doubt, like she just intrinsically knew something about him. And no matter how much she hated him in that moment, It's not what Cleo would have wanted. Dekker was dead.

Josie gently let go of him, mostly sure it wouldn't matter because he'd die either way. She took Cleo's body and she fled. Mira saw Ark, and she saw Josie run - she could choose one or the other. She, of course, chose to help Ark, immediately struck with the guilt of knowing that he was here because she couldn't talk him out of it, and because she thought she'd be strong enough to keep him safe anyway.

The next couple weeks are a blur for everyone. Mira hates Josie and she hates Rose for coming to her in the first place. Ark hates himself, mostly, because he was tired of being the weak little human everyone had to dote on so he decided to get in over his head playing hero. Well, at least he didnt have to worry about the human part any more.

Josie buried Cleo in the woods. She marked the grave and visits often.

Anyway.

Would you believe me if I told you this very sad series of events somehow ends in Ark marrying a professional wrestler? Or Josie going on to become a lawyer with a house-husband who is also part demon? Because it somehow gets much, much weirder.

[femme-enby]

“Aro and/or ace characters can still be in relationships!”

Correct! But here’s a question-

Why do folks put aro/ace/aroace characters in relationships that end up being virtually indistinguishable from romantic/sexual relationships when y’all do put them in relationships?

“Popular” example at the moment (bc let’s be real we have so few characters as it is) is Alastor from HH.

Iirc he is canonically asexual, and seems to be aromantic (although that could be that he just has no interest in anyone we’ve seen or the fact that bro is much more invested in his own entertainment than romance, but still) and yet when folks ship him… bro has a whole new personality half the time.

All of a sudden dude is blushing and shy, bud is DTF, simply put he seems like someone who definitely experiences romantic and sexual attraction.

Now sure, aroace people can seem like that.

But don’t y’all think it’s a bit disheartening for plenty to see the few characters that represent us seemingly having that aspect of their identity ignored? Essentially turning them into characters that are aro/ace in name only yet not seeing that in any of their actions?

If you want the character in a relationship, that’s one thing.

But for example, let Alastor still be like “haha, NO.” When even whoever you’re shipping him with makes a subtle or blatant sex joke/pass at him. Let his physical affection be a pat on the head and a twirl around the room while he’s busy yappin about his grand new idea for some entertainment, as he then moves on to fiddling with his radio or using his powers to give a little show of what he’s talking about so his partner can better envision what he’s saying.

What I mean is- love and affection can be shown plenty of different ways, it doesn’t have to be all cuddling and sex. It can be interactions like the character has had with others in the original material, just with the added knowledge that while they don’t really do anything “more” physically, they do still care deeply for whoever you’re shipping them with. The character lets the other person in on their actual plans or lets them know a little more about their actual plans, the character puts in that little bit more work so their partner can better understand their plans or ideas or feelings, without that meaning that the aroace character is either uncomfortably putting up with a lot of physical affection or even freely choosing “out of character” ways of showing affection such as cuddling, kissing, and sex.

Another option is, give them semi-logical yet still non-romantic/sexual ways to show their affection. If they’re typically more meek or something, then perhaps with their partner they just speak wildly outta pocket. If they’re always kinda just letting folks talk over them and typically almost overly polite, like “oh no, yeah no you’re right your idea is better my bad” then maybe with their partner they’re like “naw my idea is amazing, don’t be a chicken we can definitely outrun an emu while cutting through this field” and they are just… incredibly sure of themselves and they stand their ground bc they feel SAFE with their partner, and that is how they show love.

[dervampireprince]

do you have any tips for making n$fw content? probably specifically audios tbh. i want to get into it but i don’t even know where to start and it’s hard to search for tips and and stuff bc the site blocks searches.

oo okay so this of course is just my personal experiences and thoughts and all that. and i don't know if i can give the best advice but i will say what i can.

in my opinion there's sort of three types of n-sfw audio creators. i would think about which one of these types of audios you want to make or what platforms you want to use, but there's nothing saying you can't do multiple of these.

there's people who make regular audio p0rn which is real recordings of them actually participating in sexual acts, whether alone or with others, usually these are posted on reddit and places like p0rnhub. essentially regular video p0rn but audio only.

scripted and improvised audio content that are made up scenarios being acted out and not actually happening, like the kind found on r/gonewildaudio (shoutout to my favourite inactive audio creator who i hope is doing well u/msa_andeh, he is the reason i got into making audios, seriously go to his reddit or soundgasm). i crosspost all my public n-sfw audios on this subreddit, and where relevant also to r/GoneWildAudioGay and r/GoneWildAudioTrans.

asmr voice actor youtubers who make sfw content on their youtube but nsfw exclusive n-sfw content on their patreons, whether this be original scenarios, original characters or fandom characters. this is the type of content i make and so do creators like CarlinAudios, YuuriVoice, Dark & Twisted Whispers, Kink Radio, and more.

so firstly if you're trying to learn about n-sfw audios you need to knwo about r/gonewildaudio. it's a sub reddit just for posting scripts and audios of n-sfw audios. i assume you've seen the tags i use in my audios, the ones in the square brackets like [M4M] [Comfort] [Praise], well these are using r/gonewildaudios tagging system. gwa is also how i discovered soundgasm as an audio hosting site that allows n-sfw audios to be posted to it. this subreddit contains anything from someone recording themselves getting off, to scripted fantasy audios about knights and kings, to 'boyfriend helps you relax'. anything and everything n-sfw audio related. there are writers who post their scripts on there and the purposes is for people to 'script fill'. a script fill post is where a person on there reads off and acts out one of the scripts. so if you do want to get into n-sfw voice acting but are struggling to write or come up with ideas, you could start out by trying out script fills but make sure to abide by the the subreddits tagging system, and as with most subreddits its no self-promo policy (which makes reddit a hard place to promote your other social medias or patreon on).

there are also a couple more subreddits for the same type of content but more specific, there's r/GoneWildAudioGay for M4M n-sfw audios (male 4 male, and yes this includes trans and cis men), and r/GoneWildAudioTrans for any n-sfw and sfw audios where the listener is trans (which means any identity under the trans umbrella, eg trans men, trans women, non-binary, genderfluid, etc).

but also wait there's more. there is g/GWABackstage which is another subreddit for n-sfw audio and script creators to share other projects unrelated to n-sfw audios but also for asking questions about how to make audios, tips, feedback, how to post audios online, how to make sfx, what microphone to use, anything and everything you might have questions for! there's also r/GWAScriptGuild for script writers to share their work, ask for feedback, ask questions, advice, etc.

if you want to post audios publicly you can here on tumblr put there is a size limit on audio files that i quickly discovered that made my audios compressed so badly they were inaudible and that's why i stopped putting the audios directly on here and instead just embed the youtube videos. but if you want a proper n-sfw audio hosting site there is soundgasm (which i use) and also erocast. there might be more, but those are the ones i know. some people also just use p0rnhub to post the audio as a video with either no visuals or just one picture the entire video.

if you are wanting to make money out of doing n-sfw audios the only way i know is by putting stuff behind patreon. 237 out of my 288 patrons are part of the n-sfw audio tier. that is the majority of my income at the moment. if i posted n-sfw content publicly more often or had all those patreon exclusive audios public i wouldn't be making a living. though i don't know if it's possible to use something 0nlyfans or fan$ly instead as i don't know if they allow you to make audio posts. i know that ko-fi doesn't allow audios posts, you'd have to post them as videos. of course you an always take commissions as well, but you have to be the one to market yourself and try and reach people who are interested in custom n-sfw audios.

i guess basically my advice has been don't search on tumblr, go to reddit. that's not saying you can't post your audios on tumblr, you can, hell i started by posting my things on tumblr. and there's a different in how you'll grow and what audience you attract depending on whether you want to do original p0rn audios in which case you might want to use reddit and 0nlyfans, or if you want to make fandom audios in which case well what better place can you find fandoms and people in love with fictional characters than tumblr (don't be offended guys, this is a self call out)

i don't know what else to say uhhhh. i hope that helpsss. if you have any more specific questions you can shoot them my way and i'll try to answer and if i can't maybe try the r/GWABackstage subreddit

[kalamity-jayne]

hey, i think what you said about afab trans women is a really good point, but i wanted to bring up intersex people bc they’re often erased, and many afab intersex women identify as transfem for various reasons—this is an important convo to be having and we should include them!

You're right, and I am truly sorry for leaving them out. I really wasn't trying to exclude anybody, nonetheless my apologies to any intersex folks who felt slighted by my oversight.

When I wrote my take it was specifically in regards to people who ID as an AFAB trans woman because "the ideal world is one in which you can be whatever the fuck you want forever! so call yourself anything you want as long as it makes you happy, you can be an afab trans woman if you want it's all made up :)" which is what the original post was talking about. When respectfully asked good faith questions about their identity these people will often very haughtily respond along the lines of, "it's all made up, you can call yourself whatever," in such a way that makes clear the underlying message is, "if you [a transfem] can call yourself a woman then I can call myself a trans woman [gotcha]!" The goal of this rhetorical strategy is to turn our own community's way of talking about gender identity on it's head and use it against us.

The intersex folks I know tend to use CAFAB and CAMAB (Coercively assigned X at birth) but perhaps the reason I have yet to encounter an intersex person who IDs as an AFAB trans woman, who I know definitely do exist even if I haven't met them, is because the terfs I described in the above paragraph take up so much of their oxygen. Cause again, in my personal experience encountering people claiming to be AFAB trans women, when asked respectfully and in good faith whether they're intersex or multigendered or a woman who wishes she had a dick or any other reason that would actually make sense the response always given is, "I can call myself whatever I want" or "I relate to my womanhood in a trans way," and when pressed as to what they actually mean by those statements you just get circular answers that all dance around the premise of "words no longer have real meaning because of big trans™." I don't think an intersex person in a safe space shared with non-intersex trans folks would feel the need to obfuscate or prevaricate with circular logic when explaining their gender identity to a trans person who said, "I believe you when you say you're an AFAB trans woman, I just want to better understand what that means to you."

Like, here's a thread that I think demonstrates this pattern really well. Here you have a ton of trans folks in this thread bending over backwards to be respectful, taking her at her word, but their attempts at understanding her are met with hostility and circular logic. And for me the mask slips off when she starts throwing around accusations of "mansplaining" and point blank calls one of the trans girls a man. Everytime I have encountered someone in an online space calling themself an AFAB trans woman and the inevitable questions they get, it always looks like that thread I linked to. I would not at all be surprised if that trolling terf rhetoric and the defensiveness it sparks in trans women were stifling intersex folks, multigendered folks, or any one else legitimately IDing as an AFAB trans woman from talking about their experiences.

[cowboymantis]

Started this pretty much immediately when I saw the post! :D

So here is my journey so far! Decided to stop for today (well, it's already tomorrow technically...) since it's 4 am, but I had a lot of fun already :3

I wrote this separately in a notes app, while I was playing, so I'll be just pasting it here:

First of aaaall, I'll give a short comment on the extra PDF:

Advanced Documents for the Board Overseeing Archaeological Research Department

As someone who is familiar with Blade, I tried to put myself into the shoes into someone who has never heard of it, so I think even with this bias it looks very understandable for newcomers to Blade!

Okay, now to the main thing!

I loved the description of the Undead as furries, realistically people would totally first think they are furries (goes with any Tokumon really) 😭

Before I started, I was getting ready and making it look all aesthetic, fully knowing I won't use my epic Oneus card deck from the Trickster album bc it's not a full suit, also fully knowing I won't need all the other dice but they just cool for the photo :3

(Future note: My notebook here has a lot of random information in it, like world times, different currencies of the world, a world map, etc, which is really cool! But now I noticed oh wow it actually lowkey influenced me in my character creation, love the subliminal messages from my own equipment)

Creating a character

Since I am writing those notes, in real time while I am playing the game, I just want to say, the "Thoughts on anti-homeless architecture?" questions in the character creation was a jumpscare. 😭😭 Well we'll see how relevant this will become in the future, I guess... But you're on thin ice 👁👁

Anyway, for the character I tried to make it a bit quick, since I wanted to get to the game fairly quickly to test it out. But the questions about creating the character gave me a lot of inspiration so I sat a bit longer on the making! I guess it's just like the character creation in video games, you end up spending way too much time on it. 😭

He's got some characteristics from me, but at the end everything else, like abilities and origin are mostly OC, in general just more focus on existing in a Kamen Rider world!

So yeah, my rough character sketch:

Put it in more of a cute almost chibi style so I don't spend too long on the drawing kdjdjd

Btw... The name is a BIIIT of a refference to Ravn from Oneus, bc I had to think of them with the card deck staring at me, and I love Ravn, so yay!

His last name's meaning is something along the lines of "peaceful warrior", which I think fit perfectly for the character :)

Also, I tried for the first time to draw an OC Kamen Rider design, I'm not sure yet if I will even go that route, but I just thought it would be cool to have :3 Loosely inspired by the Cobra Undead, since I love snakes and it's my Chinese zodiac funnily enough, and going for the obvious (Mantis Undead) felt kind of weird given Hajime exists lmaoo 😭 He stole not only that humans identity, no, MINE TOO!!! I AM MANTIS!!!

Anyway, let's get to that character lore:

Raven Humphrey

[he/him, aroace which is completely unrelated but I just want to specify it so there is one more aroace character on this planet 🙏]

Age: 34

Origin: Alaska

BOARD:

- just newly joined BOARD as a Kamen Rider in training

- saw weird people in suits fighting monsters, was immediately intrigued, so he followed them, ended up being the one attacked by an Undead, actually tried to fight back, until he got rescued by the suited people and got ridiculed for doing such a dangerous thing. Wouldn't stop pestering them until they told him what they were and now he somehow ended up training to be a Kamen Rider

- is very fascinated by the Undead, thinks they're actually kinda cute! Thinks fighting them looks fun, but is kind of sad about the only option to interact with them to be hostile, so he likes to imagine different possibilities how to interact otherwise

Even has a small notebook where he has a lot of sketches of the Undead he encounters

- is, like any decent person, very much against anti-homeless architecture and gets kind of sad whenever he sees it

Before BOARD/backstory/overall character:

- grew up in Alaska, was always rather quiet, but easy to make friends with once you get to know him. He's rather introverted though, so he never really went on too many activities during his childhood

- doesn't have the best relationship with most of his family (probably bc they want grandchildren or something), but is still in contact with his older sister from time to time

- nowadays generally prefers peace and quiet over everything else, but has been doing Judo from an early age, later on started fencing, then archery. So while he is regularly more of a pacifist, he can get heated in a fun battle and his old battle spirit gets ignited!

- actually got heavily in trouble in high school for knocking out someone cold in a battle THEY started and didn't expect him to fight back. From then on spiraled into a bit of a street fight phase, got thrown out of his Judo team due to that

- normally is rather logical and tries to see things through, but also always tries to see the best in things and the best in people, since he went through a rough depressive episode during his teenage years (probably the major factor of his more aggresive behaviour during that time) and since then managed to come out more positive and controls his anger well now

- worked a bunch of different jobs you can do from anywhere (like writing books, doing journalism or photo/video editing, which back then definetly wasn't something just anyone could do!), so he could travel the world a lot, in the countries he stayed he would also sometimes work in random establishments, primarily works with heavy lifting since he's quite strong and also doesn't need to talk too much in those (helpful when you're introverted and not an expert at a language)

- in general is just interested in many things and loves to learn about new stuff

- really liked it in Japan, always loved different movies and shows from there, especially when they had fighting, and decided to study the language more in-depth and live there for a while (since all of this Kamen Rider stuff is happening, seems like he'll be staying there for a bit longer!)

Special skills:

- martial arts, different weapon fighting skills and also quite strong

- skilled in first aid (very useful and needed when you're travelling alone all across the world)

- very cold resistant due to growing up in Alaska

- I guess it is kind of a special skill, stays cool most of the time (no Alaska joke inteded) and its very hard to rile him up nowadays

- speaks a bit of multiple languages

- different computer skills

Relationship to the other characters:

Kenzaki:

- thinks very positively of him, while they haven't talked too much, he thinks Kenzaki is a good person, maybe even a bit too good given how naive he seems, but appreciates that there are people like this

Shiori

- probably interacted with her the most so far, since he's very interested in the Undead and their story. Overall the easiest to talk to for him, maybe because she almost feels like a little sister

Kotaro

- thinks he's a bit silly, but alright other than that (but the obsession with milk is, no offense, kind of disgusting)

Hajime

- thinks he's an alright guy, but they never really talk. Probably all of their conversations would just consist of silence since none of them would want to be the first one to talk

Tachibana:

- isn't so sure how to feel about him, since he seems a bit unstable, but trusts him anyway, since he and Kenzaki were the ones saving Raven back then from the Undead, so in a way he feels like he owes them trust

Mutsuki

- thinks he means well overall, but sees him as a bit annoying, but that's just how teenagers are. He'll hopefully grow out of it

Everyone else not named: neutral

Position in house:

Second floor, his room is filled with different bits and bops from all the places Raven has visited and immediately looked very lived in!

Now, finally getting into the gameplay!!!

Already like the system with different tasks and how cards are being used to determine what you're going to be up to for the day!

Also damn!! Started off with some great RNG, get to do 3 tasks!

For those, I pulled K, Q and Joker!

(Live Mantis reaction:

Okay let's see what task K is- OH MY GOD)

Anyway, Day 1 from the perspective of my character now, imagine him reminiscing or writing about the day in a journal:

"This day was certainly off to a rather weird start! I finally finished packing all of my belongings in the temporary farmhouse home, and it seemed like a quiet moment for once, so I went out for a walk to get my mind off things. So much happened all at once, it's only natural you need a bit of a time out, right?

Well, seems like the universe had other plans... For some reason, this weird guy claiming to work for the IRS just kept on bothering me. Not sure how he knew me, IF he even knew me (I didn't ask about my name at all) or if he even was IRS.

It was rather annoying, but thankfully, I just started to talk English, which he didn't seem to understand, and act like a confused tourist. Which probably just confused him more in turn, since he just completely stopped trying to annoy me at all.

Guess that's one way to get rid of the IRS (don't try this at home kids!)

Being sure that weird man went away, I continued my journey around the city. And I went down this really idyllic forest path, when I set my sights on an absolute abomination. Such a beautiful bench, ruined by an ugly metal bar in the middle. Surely, this was just to prevent homeless people from sleeping on it. Not even that, it also looked absolutely hideous.

Now, I normally try to stay calm, but I just couldn't, it infuriated me so much, I just HAD to get rid of those. I'm sure I'd be doing a favour to everyone.

Thankfully, it wasn't to hard for me to get them off the benches, but when I was just finished with a second one, an officer spotted me! And I was so stupid and held the other one still in my hand, thinking I could recycle it into a cool makeshift weapon or something else. But it just ended up exposing me further and the cop watched me put both of them back again... Ah, well I guess all I got was a warning.

Eventually, I decided to just give up and go back home anyway, away from scammers and police."

Adding to the Joker Task: Omg this reminds me so much of one of my favourite dramas, SPEC: Birth, where one of the protagonist always throws a bunch of paper in the air (it has a point there but the mental image I got from this task just reminded me of it!)

Also, just trying to make sure, but I'm fairly certain this isn't canon/included in the story, since it is a "safe", aka a joker task?

DAY 2

Exciting, my first Undead Encounter!

Also, I keep accidentally writing Unded 💀 My brain is rotting from the internet I swear

Omg, I got a King of Clubs 😭 Tarantula Undead... Guess that's probably the most fitting first encounter for my character (well, Shima to be more specific bc he's also rather chill)

But that also means no fighting!

"Yesterday I pretty much just fell into my bed, exhausted from everything and then those weird encounters on my walk. I'm not gonna lie, I was feeling a bit down this morning and just wandered around the house a bit.

Eventually I started to get into a little chat with Shima, who also was around at the time. I never really actually got to talk with him, so I didn't know he was so chill! If anything, it just further proves my theories that Undead don't necessarily have to be fought. It makes me wonder if there are any other Undead like him..."

DAY 3

I didn't roll an Encounter, so I thought it would be a fitting idea to make my character look for an Undead, after a conversation with Shima he might be encouraged to try and look for Undead to potentially befriend.

And...Oh boy we'll see if this will go horribly wrong or if he gets lucky for once!

And yes, I actually got an Encounter and pulled 7 of Hearts. SO CLOSE to 8 Hearts! Why do I care about 8 Hearts? Bc now I have Welcome To Hell stuck in my head, aka the boss theme of 8 Hearts in No More Heroes Travis Strikes Again... the boss also likes to say RIDER KICK when attacking you, so I guess it's all connected somehow-

Anyway, I got distracted again!!!

"Today, I was feeling rather optimistic! Talking with Shima gave me some new hope again, and especially ensures me that it's not impossible to get along with different Undead. Obviously, since my training isn't complete, it's not recommended I go and look for Undead myself, so Mutsuki was sent by Tachibana to follow me, since he somehow knew my intentions for leaving. Ah well. I mean, the kid isn't bad (I think), but edgy teens like him are the exact reason I don't ever want to be a parent. No offense, but I just couldn't handle this all day.

One day though, I guess that's fine. Or rather, part of one day.

We were walking through a park, when suddenly, I felt like something held me back! And there I noticed, something was tangled around my ankle, I could just about stop myself from tripping.

Didn't take me long to realize it was an Undead, because it revealed itself, probably trying to squish me, thankfully Mutsuki quickly reacted and punched it away.

This encounter definetly didn't start off friendly, but I tried my best talking to it! I'm... honestly not sure if it understood me or just chose to ignore me, but I felt like talking to a wall. I guess it was annoying even Mutsuki, since he told me to just leave it to him, eventually defeating the Undead and sealing it.

Honestly, I was a bit frustrated. I told him we could've tried harder, he answered it just won't listen. Eventually, he just threw the card at me and told me I can always try and talk to it this in there, not that it would know.

Now I'm home again, staring at this card while writing... I'm... not sure how this made me feel. I guess, some Undead just have to be fought because they have a more violent nature.

It definetly sucks, but I'm also not saying no to an exiting fight..."

Having the Plant Undead as an encounter while Raven was trying to look for one to befriend was definitely kind of funny. I was trying to think, but I just don't think that's an Undead you can befriend. Not saying it's impossible! Just maybe for my character :'D Also it's a good character development moment where he learns early on how different the Undead can be!

DAY 4

Another day with tasks, 3 again and... JOKER AGAIN??? Like damn I know the Joker Undead is one of my favourite designs ever but damn...

Anyway, I got Joker, 3, 6!

"I guess I woke up rather early today, I just was very exhausted after yesterday, once again! But I decided to do something nice for everyone and prepare breakfast today!

There was this dish that wouldn't leave my mind ever since I tried it in a breakfast menu in Germany! To be honest, I had to look up what it was called in my journals: Kaiserschmarrn.

But I absolutely wanted to try and recreate it, so more people can experience it.

It's basically like a scrambled egg for pancakes, if that makes sense.

And, well, I guess it smelled very good because everyone was commenting on that, but once we tasted it... Yeah, I think I definetly mistook the salt for sugar...

I mean, because of the cinnamon sweetening it too, it wasn't aaawful, but it also wasn't good either. Funnily enough, I think Tachibana really liked it, which, I don't know if he acted like he did, out of sympathy, or he actually just has a weird taste.

Either way, I think in theory this recipe would've been nice, if I actually added sugar. Ah well, we'll see next time!"

Fun fact: I tried making Kaiserschmarrn the other day for the first time and I was amazed at how easy it was and everyone absolutely LOVED it, I inhaled everything off my plate in record time it was so good. So it went the exact opposite from what my character here experienced lmaooo this poor guy man 😭

I got the baseball practice next, and I just want to add: this is actually such a creative way to implement that training into this game!

"Later that day, Tachibana asked if I wanted to do baseball practice with him and Mutsuki.

...I knew exactly what that meant and no, I am not good at it. I don't even know why, with my skillset, hell, archery especially! I technically should be good at it, but it seems almost impossible to me.

But with everything, practice creates the master.

So I did join them, and I would say I was very average at it. And with average I mean about how good a regular person with no fighting experience would be at it.

I mean, I did guess some of them.

But I always impulsively punched them away, and I might've accidentally hit Mutsuki on the head with one!

Now, I am not one to start a fight or hold a grudge but all I'll say this is payback for him being so stubborn with the Plant Undead. Yes, I am still thinking about that. Yes, I do think mayyybe it was possible to befriend it.

Either way, I think all things considered, and the unfortunate happenings aside, today was quite fun."

It's funny, the ONE character my character was a bit negative towards (Mutsuki) is now one he keeps on having to interact with, like a kid having to babysit his smaller brother 😭😭😭

NEXT TIME ON OWO, THERE WILL BE AMONG US... (Yes I rolled that task)

But for now, it's sleepy time.

As a last visualization, page 1 from today and my setup dkdjdj

Hopefully me going through my experience like this kind of shows the thought process of someone who did not make the game and just goes after the instructions, however here are some things I haven't explicitly listed during my playthrough, and just thought about later on:

I started to kind of question this when my first real fight started:

Does your character have Kamen Rider abilies in the fights?

Or just the characters that help you?

When an Undead gets sealed, does your character get the card? (aka can you freely decide?)

If your character has Kamen Rider abilities, do you just make up a new Category Ace Undead card for them (however that would work logically)?

Obviously, a lot of things are open for interpretation, since it's all about telling your own story with vague instructions, and at the end of the day you can literally do what you want, but I was just very unsure about those points personally, and if they were intended in a certain way, or if you're completely free to go Kamen Rider fighting route (wether it is from beginning on or during your journey)!

Version 1 of the Kamen Rider Blade Solo Journal RPG project is now up!

I'll be posting the link in a reblog of this post in a second. This is my first time making one of these, so any constructive criticism is very, very much recommended. I hope you enjoy trying it out! And if there's any issues with the gameplay, please let me know immediately. Thank you!

[clambuoyance]

Could you do an analysis of Conner's character with the song "I'm Still Here (Jim’s Theme from Treasure Planet)"

Because there is some correlation there but my mind ain't thinking of the words to form a sentence about it. And I've been listening to it for days- and want to hear someone talk about it. My favorite cover is Annapantsu's.

Just imagine Conner mumbling the lyrics under his breath and fumbling his fingers on the strings of the guitar mimicking its melody. He'd be so sad but finds comfort in a song that reflects his hope and his situation he was in. Like brrruuuhhh, cause I get that feeling when a song relates to me a lot and still wishes hope for the listener. Anyway got songs that makes you think of Superboy?

GOD. it's been AGES since i've seen this movie but this song is giving me brainworms. Jim even has an undercut and an earring and a cool jacket in the movie im getting ideas uh oh...

anywaysss this song is very fitting in general for like young ppl trying to grow up and form their own identity but it fits so well with kon like.

"i am a question to the world/ not an answer to be heard" idk but this is like his debut and clone origins in ROTS i guess, like what will the world look like without superman. actually i think part of kon's early character was based on the question "what would superman be like if clark was not raised by the kents when he was young?"

and the next verse is sooo him. "i won't listen anyway" yEAH he never listens he's a bit of a rebellious boy, "and i'll never be what you want me to be" *gestures wildly at his whole schtick* yeah. yeah that fits

"I'm a boy/No, I'm a man" God a major part of his whole character is relationship to aging and maturing and being young and growing up THIS DO BE HITTING DIFF

"And how can you learn what's never shown/yeah, you stand here on your own" he literally only has implanted knowledge and memories but like. He's never shown or taught things and kinda just fucks around and gets himself into messes and SOMETIMES people come in and lecture him

"And I want a moment to be real/Wanna touch things I don't feel/Wanna hold on and feel I belong" ive seen people say that another reason kon acts like That in the beginning is bc he wants to experience everything bc everything in his brain is not his own or artificial and he wants to make it his own. and ugh yes BELONGING T-T

"And how can the world want me to change" everyone telling him to grow tf up

"They're the ones that stay the same" ironically its usually HIM who doesnt want to do the changing

And then the whole "Im not here" to "Im still here" just gives me the vibes of him hating being called superboy and the very thought of being STUCK as superboy and never getting a chance to be superman, to him accepting the title and saying things like "I'm superboy! I don't have a mother or father--all I got is who I am!" LIKE no matter what he will get up again and give his whole heart and everything into things

OKAY I COULD GO ON BUT YES. GOOD SONG CHOICE

as for others that remind me of Kon:

Get Famous - The Mountain Goats (i wanted to make an animatic to this butttt oh well)

Runaway Runaway - Mars Argo

Good Kid - The Lighting Thief Musical (this whole musical fits the yj/teen hero squad but this song in particular reminds me of kon)

Zero to Hero - Hercules

So many Lana Del Rey and MARINA songs...

[bestworstcase]

"so there’s like. gift of the moon is both an erasure of dark and a story that makes him synonymous with humanity" -> it's funny how in the two brothers it's dark who wants to reclaim their power and wipe "this experiment"—a word light used in the lost fable to describe the world—from existence while light offers an option to take humanity's form and walk amongst them as equals if they prove themselves worthy—which he absolutely did not do lmao. like. yeah it's a fairy tale but ngl sounds like someone is doing some pr moves 🤔

also makes me really wonder what dark's endgame is going to be...

reading the two brothers always cracks me up for how appallingly bad ozma is at religious propaganda. this is the wise benevolent god of light whose example we should follow, he got pissy when his brother created [checks notes] tides, weather, biodiversity, and plate tectonics. brother light needs a new PR agent

anyway. what i’ve been noodling on a lot is that… like, the metaphysical philosophy pyrrha shares in v1 describes the soul as self-identity, and the ability to understand both light and darkness. and that’s… that’s dark’s gift. in the two brothers he gives humans “knowledge of themselves and their world […] so they can comprehend life and death” and then the god of light adds free will on top of that foundation (“the power to decide what to do with that knowledge”).

and that has some interesting implications re: the god of light’s disdain for humanity and his approach to immortalizing his chosen one being a never-ending cycle of destruction of identities, both the hosts whose individuality is gradually eroded away and ozma’s sense of self being ground into dust by the inescapable trauma of existing as a spiritual parasite. but it’s also really interesting for what it says about the god of darkness, that he, not his brother, is the one who created the human soul.

(it also potentially has some implications about the grimm—just because humans believe they’re mindless doesn’t mean they actually are, and the god who gave humans sapience is also the god who made grimm.)

and then, like.

light thought of humans as an experiment and treats them accordingly. but in the two brothers, dark agrees to do it because he’s bored and he likes the idea of making something that can “think and communicate like [them]” because “they won’t be as predictable” as everything else the brothers had already made, and once they exist light is “overprotective” and “underestimates” humans while dark delights in their resilience and resourcefulness. similarly, his response to salem before his brother intervenes make it clear that he wants humans to come to him with their problems and he is willing and able to make emotional connections with them, to see his own loneliness reflected in salem’s grief and answer it with kindness because it pleases him to do so. and when he turned on her it was bc his brother convinced him that she lied, that it wasn’t real and she only approached him as a thing to use.

the god of light wanted to rule, wanted humans to see him as an absolute authority and obey without question. (he was furious with salem for accepting that he said no and turning to another god instead. which is just. how polytheistic religions work lmfao) but the god of darkness wanted to be worshipped, in the reciprocal do ut des sense, and treated salem accordingly.

i figure that’s going to be the critical difference in the end. dark isn’t… good, by any stretch, but he does understand the essence of human nature a lot better than his brother (because he’s the one who gave it to them!) and he demonstrably wants people to engage with him the way salem did when she petitioned him originally. he’s not on the same page as his brother vis-a-vis humanity, and if light is banking on him pulling the trigger again… well. i can’t imagine dark has gotten any less resentful or jealous of his brother in the hundreds millions of years since they left remnant, and i also can’t imagine that a god capable of empathizing with a single human’s grief through his own loneliness wouldn’t also be able to see himself and his resentment in humankind’s struggle before the “obey or die” ultimatum light gave them.

[mashkaroom]

Something i think really does get lost in the yentl movie, which in turn affects several more aspects that make the story so compelling, is the ambiguity present in the original story -- ambiguity both in the sense of the ending, of Anshel’s gender identity, and of the general moral values of the story. The fact is, Anshel/Yentl is actually a fairly morally ambiguous character. Barbra Streisand's Yentl is pretty much flawless -- not in any uncanny way, like I can certainly believe that someone like that would exist in real life -- but none of Yentl’s flaws really affect the plot. Other characters are fleshed out and given faults -- Avigdor is sexist and never really gets over it; Hadas is given her own plotline and grows, largely off screen, probably the most of the main cast. Movie Yentl is driven largely by a sense of doing what’s right: she teaches Hadas talmud, bc of course: having been herself prevented from studying on the basis of gender, why wouldn’t she teach her wife as well? Why wouldn’t she seek out a less sexist society (the Amerike ending is its separate thing lol, but that’s not what this post is about -- though while we’re here, Leah Napolin, who wrote the script of the Yentl play, was apparently approached to be a scriptwriter for the movie and, when asked what she thought abt the America ending said ‘Sounds great! She can move to America and get a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory!’). 

But what makes the original Anshel so compelling is the fact that he’s so driven by his own desires, often at the expense of other values. He makes no real attempt to expand who is allowed into the institution of religious education. He does what he does because he wants to study and thinks that he, personally, should be allowed to. In the movie he’s pressured into marrying Hadas in order to keep Avigdor in town and he never has sex with her or even kisses her, leaving Hadas “innocent”, but in the story, they fuck regularly and the reason they get married is he just wants her: he’s attracted to her, and he’s thrilled by the fact that she’s attracted to him too. Though I would argue that Anshel is treated as a likeable character by the narrative, Singer makes little attempt to justify any of his actions talmudically or socially. Leading up to Anshel’s marriage to Hadas, he worries about the sinfulness of it, including about the prohibition on crossdressing. He even thinks of running away, but his love for Avigdor, his growing affection for Hadas, and “a force and a stubbornness he could not overcome” hold him back. Anshel stands on the threshold of having everything he could ever want: he has the respect of the community, his friendship with Avigdor, the possibility of a loving wife and supportive in-laws -- of course he can’t bring himself to give it up. 

By removing these elements, by showing the ending so unambiguously positive -- Yentl in America, Anshel and Hadas in a loving marriage -- it removes that uncertainty that made the original story so compelling. We don’t know what happens to Anshel, and at least on their wedding day, Avigdor and Hadas are deeply unhappy. And yet -- they name their son Anshel.

Singer’s story seems to avoid passing moral judgement on Anshel’s actions: whether they were good or bad remains unclear. Near the end of the story, when Avigdor questions Anshel on how he could bring himself to break so many commandments, and Anshel tries to explain himself, Avigdor understands that he may have the body of a woman but the soul of a man (the exact words used in the story!). But Singer doesn’t suggest that this means that Anshel should be fulfilling the commandments of a man or that this overrules the body -- in general, almost no questions are answered, though a great many are raised. Ultimately, it comes back to desire: the central tenet of a man’s soul, at least in Anshel’s mind, is the desire to study. 

Barbra Streisand also changed Anshel’s general pleasantness: in the movie, he is immediately charming to everyone, and it’s deserved. In the short story, while he is fairly universally liked, I think he's much deeper as a person: at times much more unpleasant than in the movie, at times much more generous. He tells Avigdor that he thinks Hadas is neither smart nor pretty upon first meeting her, and he calls Peshe a cow. He disaparages Peshe in part because he’s jealous, and he generally doesn’t have an issue talking shit to get what he wants. On the other hand, we learn that he frequently buys Avigdor gifts, even before any romantic attraction is implied. He learns Avigdor's favorite dessert and buys it for them to share every morning, never letting Avigdor split the cost, a gesture that reeks of love and affection and something I’d say is never matched in the movie (tho the “this is one of those moments” montage is pretty gay -- but most of the gay stuff in it is driven by Avigdor).

Anshel’s also, well, I wouldn’t say outright cruel, but certainly snippy to Hadas. And Hadas, too, seems to occasionally say things that are meant to provoke Anshel -- both of them are usually talking about Avigdor. This is honestly a quite interesting dynamic -- we know that Anshel has found an academic equal in Avigdor, but there’s something in Hadas that can match him too. And she’s also just less pleasant: Anshel comments on the fact that she spends a lot of time looking in the mirror and is rude to the maid. I honestly don’t think Singer really likes her as a character lol.

Anyway, even if we view their dynamic just through the lens of their respective relationships with Avigdor, Anshel and Hadas are both looking at each other as having what they themselves can’t, or at least believe they can’t, have: Anshel can’t be in a romantic or sexual relationship with Avigdor, while Hadas could but lost the opportunity; on the other hand, Hadas no longer has much if any interaction with Avigdor, while Anshel spends all his time with him. But even beyond that: Hadas represents the feminine ideal that Anshel could never be, while Anshel, to an even greater extent than Hadas knows, represents the ability to stand up for what you want; although her desire is addressed more explicitly in the movie, we know that though she didn't fight the breaking off of her engagement to Avigdor she does protest when her mother hesitates to approve her engagement with Anshel. It’s multiple layers of desire and the classic queer story of “do I want you or do I want to be you”.

What makes Anshel so compelling in the story, both to the readers and the other characters, is how uncompromising he is on his desires. Avigdor and Hadas are both willing to settle. Anshel isn’t. It’s also what makes the ending so tragic, because he literally gets everything he wants and, in the end, has to choose to let it go. Not even because it’s better for others or for himself, but because his desire is not sustainable in the world he lives in: that’s the central tragedy. 

One of the strongest lines in the film imo is at the end when Avigdor asks Yentl “What more do you want?” and Yentl responds, simply: “More”.  This desire is at the core of the character and the story. What’s better: to have everything you wanted and be forced to let it go or to never have had it in the first place? Singer doesn’t answer this either.

[atalana]

[copied over from my cr blog, also this is gonna get long, i’d apologise but im not sorry]

okay, so

this is a rant probably about 7 years in the making, bc when i first watched lok i had not done any music study, i had not done any composing of my own, my knowledge of music theory was at a primary school level and i still thought tv soundtracks were just made by one person composing a whole cache of music and then the audio editors pick and choose what track to place where

(spoiler alert that’s not how film and tv scoring works, i have now done a music composition course where we had to score a short film, among other things, and i have so much more respect for tv composers jesus christ)

but this one stuck out to me even way back then, bc me barely knowing what a leitmotif was was like “hey this one little refrain keeps popping up whenever bolin does lavabending, and i like it, i’m gonna see if it’s on the soundtrack”

it was not, and that’s sort of where i left it back in 2014, but i actually did a rewatch of lok pretty recently out of nostalgia, and then noticed it even more

and to explain why (and this is also a little bit why five’s stuck out to me in tua, i’ll get to that in another ask), let’s cover, leitmotifs, and tv scoring in general

so a leitmotif is basically just a short musical idea that represents something in a piece of music. when i studied motivic development we were encouraged to make that motif four notes or less, and then develop it into something longer (aka a theme), because if you can constantly come back to a really short idea while keeping the piece moving, that’s what makes a piece of music memorable

(you can ignore those rules on purpose but that’s a different essay)

so the most common way that a leitmotif shows up in soundtracks is to represent a character or a location - you play the motif when that character shows up or when you’re in that location and boom, the audience associates that motif with that person place or thing, and you can then use this to tell the audience things without actually telling them. for example, star wars playing the imperial march whenever someone does something darth vader related - darth vader isn’t on screen, but you can feel his presence, because his music is playing

and if we were a film score, where we have two hours to show one particular character’s development, great! we give them a simple motif, and then as they grow as a person we change their motif to reflect what is happening to them, until we end up with something that communicates on a subconscious level how much they’ve grown. we toss in as much symbolism as we can, and we have a really great soundtrack that’s instantly memorable

tv scoring, is harder. partially because of time constraints (have you ever composed half an hour of original music a week, and had to make sure it fits perfectly with every beat of what’s happening on screen? these guys have), partially because there’s a much larger focus on ensemble casts

so what atla and lok do, for the most part, is not score individual character motifs for everyone. this is fairly common in tv soundtracks, instead we score ideas, concepts, and feelings - these’ll come up a lot more and give you more information than just “oh hey this character’s on screen”

the avatar state, for example, has the strongest and most recognisable theme across both shows. i’m linking an atla track in here because it has the best example but you’ll know this shows up with korra too - and with particularly important moments for wan, for kyoshi, etc. they also appear in the opening of both shows, four strong notes that start and end on the same note (in the case of what i’m linking, it’s an F#)

the first part of this track is the more uncertain, pensive theme that comes up when both avatars are feeling doubt/worry/sadness, but then it transitions into the more recognisable four. worth noting though, those are both basically the same motif. if i write them out back to back, you’ll notice they both have four notes and start and end on F#. if i had to guess, four notes four elements, and it comes back to the start because the avatar is a cycle.

korra has a theme for when she’s fighting, but not an individual character theme. the airbenders as a concept have a theme, republic city has thematic instruments, as do some big name characters, like iroh and his tsungi horn (this is also a cross-series thing, he’s always playing it in atla, it shows up when zuko has to make big moral decisions, and when we first meet iroh in the spirit world in lok, it shows up there too, to let the audience know who this is before we properly see him)

so, if korra doesn’t get a single theme and instead has several for different aspects of her life, and mako and asami follow along with the mood of the story like all the other characters, the fact that bolin has a personal leitmotif at all, let alone a solid, developing one, is pretty remarkable!

now, granted, it mostly starts with book 3, before then he was like every other character, but it has clear symbolism through those last two books! and, initially i thought it was related only to his lavabending, since that’s most of when it shows up, but since my rewatch, i’ve started calling it his hero theme

see, when people wanna criticise mako and bolin, usually the comments they get are that bolin’s too immature and mako’s too serious/uptight. but like, that’s how they work, you can’t analyse either of them without the context of the other. since they were little kids on the streets, bolin chases his heart and mako makes sure they don’t die from it, that is their entire childhood. and neither would have got here on their own because mako wouldn’t take the necessary risks and bolin wouldn’t take the necessary precautions. (like. remove either one from the equation and they’d still be working for the triple threats bc s1 and their flashback miniseries make pretty clear that bolin got them out and mako kept them out)

and then book 2 proves it! because it splits team avatar up, and what happens? bolin is totally taken advantage of by varrick and used as a pawn in his evil plan and mako ends up in jail

so what’s book 3, to them? it’s, being able to find themselves without having that codependency. mako no longer has someone to protect, which is what he’s based his whole life around so far - bolin’s doing fine and he’s no longer dating either korra or asami. and bolin’s trying his hand at some of that responsibility (look at how he immediately adopts kai who is explicitly them but younger because he wants to be the older brother for once). most importantly, they find the rest of their family, and stop being defined by being orphans. they don’t have to be that singular piece of a puzzle, they can just be themselves. and that’s where bolin’s character really starts to shine, because that’s when they bring in the bending plot, and bending, perhaps more than any other character, really gets to the heart of who bolin is

if you want more of my thoughts on that i have an essay here, but tl;dr: bolin’s an extremely powerful earthbender, but he’s not a metalbender because metalbending requires you to double down on the earth characteristics and think like an earthbender, and bolin doesn’t, he’s too fluid for that, which is one of his major strengths, so of course he can lavabend

and finally - to his motif itself! (as a note, i’ve put all of these in the same key to show where it repeats, but there’s a variety of keys used in the show)

as far as i can find, it first shows up in s3e8, when bolin stuns p’li with this well placed shot

[Edit: it first showed up in the s2 finale, but again in a simplified version and again with him doing something heroic with earthbending, so we can still start the analysis here]

mako volunteers bolin for that job, because he knew bolin was capable of it. why? because bolin landed an identical shot earlier in the episode, after trying to metalbend, getting frustrated he can’t, and cheating with some extremely well aimed earthbending. it’s just a short refrain and you barely notice it, but it’s the first connection of this motif with the theme of bolin’s bending

it looks like this, and it’s always played on a trumpet, which is part of why i call it the hero theme, because, if you’re looking at music from a western perspective, trumpets were used to herald kings, and then used to represent military glory, and then when superhero themes started happening, they used trumpets too - it’s basically western music shorthand for hero these days

(it’s also symmetrical so that helps with the good vibes)

and he’s saving everyone here, so it’s linked to his bending, but it’s also linked to his heroism

it ties the two together, and they are tied together.

when’s the next time it shows up? episode 10, when the brothers are in prison in ba sing se, and bolin tries to metalbend them out. again, he’s doing this to save people, and this motif gets a few notes added on to the end in a raising pattern - they’re inspiring, but they don’t go anywhere. which is exactly what happens in the scene, because he’s trying to go about this in the wrong way. mako believes in him, but it won’t (and doesn’t) work

it appears in episode 12 when bolin saves everyone from ghazan destroying the temple, in a more fancy orchestral remake of the first version - it’s impressive, but it hasn’t actually developed yet, it’s just his discovery of it

the book 3 finale already has its own fucking amazing soundtrack, i love that entire episode’s score, but it gets its own moment there too, and the first real development!

because what we hear is not what we’ve heard before. we know it’s the same theme, because it’s using those signature trumpets, but it’s the second part of this phrase, the answer to the question supplied by the first one. why? because bolin’s figured out who he is and he’s starting to use it. it still hasn’t settled yet though, it’s early days and he’s still just turning ghazan’s lava back on him, so again, it raises, leaving it on a question mark

it doesn’t appear in s4e7 when he lavabends as a warning against the escaped prisoners, because he’s using it as a threat, not to help people. but it does later in the episode when he uses lavabending to save them from kuvira. and that’s when we get the first full phrase, question and answer

it keeps the first motif identical, takes out the first note of the second, and ties them together - except now it’s not open ended, now it knows where it’s going - it’s been three years, at this point bolin is confident in both himself and his bending

and then that phrase appears all over the place in the finale, because all bolin does is save people - everyone from the exploding building, he slows the giant mecha with lavabending, he saves opal, he slows the giant mecha again by collapsing a building on it, and most importantly, he’s the one rescuing his brother this time, instead of the other way around (though that one doesn’t get a motif appearance bc admittedly a fuck ton of other things are happening in the soundtrack at the time)

so to that question asked in book three - who is bolin when not next to someone else? well, funnily enough, we saw it in book two as well, just in a warped way, playing nuktuk. it just wasn’t truly him because it was created by varrick, and he needed to get away from varrick too. the question put forward by the narrative is who is bolin, and the answer given by the music is, he is a hero. and i don’t know why bolin is the only one to get a theme like this, but i think it may have something to do with the fact that, while everyone in team avatar has been a hero and saved people, he is the only one who has, from the start, solely been motivated by wanting to help people. he follows his heart, and his heart cares, about everyone. it’s been the driving force behind almost everything he’s ever done. and i love him so much

[animayelmao]

Inumaki and Curse Seals

JJK Chapter 137 Theories/Questions

I noticed something about Inumaki while reading and.... I’m a little confused about what the implications are? So, naturally, I wrote up this super long post exploring different theories, lmao

Spoilers primarily for chapter 137 of the manga, but there are definitely spoilers for further chapters. 

so... what’s going on with the bandages used on Inumaki’s injury?? When I first saw this panel, I was immediately suspicious bc his bandages/wrappings look exactly like a seal: 

I even went back to chapter 1 and the markings on Inumaki’s bandages look nearly identical to the seal on Sukuna’s finger:

The previous uses of these type of seal/talisman have been to “seal curses and mediate cursed energy,” and I can only assume that this is a possible use for the seals on Inumaki’s injuries as well.  

 So, I guess my real question is: why would they seal Inumaki’s injury? I thought about it a little more, and have come up with some possible solutions as to why:

The first (and weakest) theory is:

1. Shoko’s healing techniques use curse seals to function. Or, she just uses curse seals as bandages for injuries done by curses, as a means of preventative care. Meaning, she wrapped Inumaki’s wounds in talisman in order to ensure that no adverse reactions would come from Sukuna injuring him. 

This theory is like, the least satisfying. But it would also be super funny if it was correct, because then it would mean that I’m really just overthinking this whole thing. However, knowing Gege Akutami’s storytelling methods, it feels more important that Inumaki is wrapped up in curse seals than just “Shoko is being a cautious, good physician.” 

Additionally, Shoko’s technique apparently allows her to “restore destroyed limbs” (not sure how true this is, given that we haven’t seen it in the manga), so... why isn’t Inumaki’s limb restored?

This question leads me to my second theory:

2. Sukuna’s Domain Expansion in Shibuya really fucked Inumaki’s shit up (y’know, past the whole ‘cutting his arm off’ thing) and has left him with some bad cursed symptoms. Since his injury is sealed, this theory assumes that Sukuna’s use of his “Cleave” attack during his Domain Expansion is leeching Inumaki of his cursed energy. These paper seals, in this case, would be to “fend off poison with poison by using one curse [the talisman/seal] to seal another [Sukuna’s hypothetical Domain Expansion curse].” 

The issue with this is that nowhere in the manga has Sukuna’s “Cleave” attack left symptoms on its victim.... besides death. Cleave is a slashing attack that adjusts itself depending on the target's toughness and cursed energy level, and it usually cuts its opponent down in one fell swoop. Clearly, this was not the case with Inumaki, who seemed to have barely been in range (literally just his left arm, poor guy) of Sukuna’s Doman Expansion: 

So, is it possible that Sukuna’s use of Cleave on Inumaki’s arm is leeching him of his cursed energy and this is the reason why he needs to seal it? I’m not sure; it seems like Inumaki is literally the only survivor of Sukuna’s Cleave attack that we know of. It’s a possibility, and maybe the most probable explanation? This could also be a great explanation/justification as to why Shoko (or even Yuuta?) is unable to restore Inumaki’s limb (again, this is assuming that the jjk wiki is right in claiming that Shoko’s abilities can restore limbs)

However, I have more theories. My third (and most complex) theory is:

3. The elders/higher-ups of the Jujutsu world are terrible (duh) and are using Inumaki as an incentive for Yuuta to act according to their will. The following pages in the manga (chapter 137) seem to support this idea:

This chapter begins with Yuuta killing curses to prove to the elders that he can be trusted as Yuuji’s executioner, and that he will follow their commands. But why would Yuuta even need to gain their trust? Couldn’t they get someone else to execute Yuuji? Clearly not, if they choose Yuuta over anyone else; in my mind, this means that Yuuta is the only person strong enough to execute Sukuna’s vessel, and so, the elders need to be completely certain that Yuuta will kill Yuuji instead of joining his side. In their minds (and rightfully so, lmao), if Yuuta and Yuuji are on the same side and against them, it can mean serious trouble. 

So, clearly, the elders need to ensure that Yuuta will kill Yuuji. They even have Yuuta enter a binding vow with them to be certain that he kills Yuuji. In my mind, using Inumaki in his injured state is a perfect incentive to make sure that Yuuta follows their orders. As of right now, the specifics of the binding vow that Yuuta enters haven’t been disclosed; so, perhaps Inumaki is part of said vow? 

Binding vows with others have to benefit both parties; if Yuuta kills Yuuji (benefitting the elders), then Yuuta must also benefit from the other party in return. Given the fact that Yuuta brings up Inumaki and his injury right after proposing a binding vow, I want to assume that Yuuta’s profit from the vow would involve Inumaki in some way. Perhaps he gets access from the elders to heal Inumaki? The possibilities are endless. 

For a boy who values the relationships he has with his friends (arguably his closest friend?), using a threat towards Inumaki/the promise of helping Inumaki is the perfect motivation for Yuuta to kill Yuuji. 

Personally? This is my favourite theory because it’s angsty and I live for this kind of stuff. Not only this, but it also feels like a possibility because of the strife that’s going on in the Jujutsu world right now. If the elders can’t trust Yuuta to perform his duties as Yuuji’s exorcist, then it makes sense that they would use Inumaki as leverage to ensure that Yuuta does what he’s told to.  

But, then, even more questions are raised at this point: 

1. what do the curse seals do to Inumaki, if they are put on him?

In this case, it seems like the curse seals wouldn’t be used in the same way as the previous theory (which is to fight a hypothetical Sukuna curse off). Rather, these curse seals would probably be used to stop Inumaki from using his cursed energy entirely; just like how they stopped the cursed energy in Sukuna’s fingers early on in the story.  

This theory would explain why neither Shoko nor Yuuta could heal Inumaki’s arm-- assuming that the talisman isn’t there directly because of something that Sukuna is doing to Inumaki. We see in Volume 0 that Yuuta’s reversed curse technique saves Maki’s incredibly mangled leg and fixes it to its original state. Additionally, even more recently in Chapter 143, Yuuta uses the same technique to heal Naoya: 

This theory leads me to believe that Yuuta can (again, assuming that Sukuna isn’t actively leeching Inumaki’s cursed energy or something else) heal Inumaki’s arm, but is unable to do so because of the higher ups in the Jujutsu world. If they are using Inumaki as a pawn to ensure that Yuuta kills Yuuji, of course they wouldn’t let Yuuta heal Inumaki. (Now, this is all assuming that Yuuta is able to fix injuries hours or days after they occur, as we’ve only seen him heal injuries right after they have been done. This could be another reason why Yuuta can’t heal Inumaki’s arm, lmao).

My biggest counter to this is: what happens if Inumaki just... takes the curse seal off? wouldn’t they stop being effective?

So, (and this makes the most sense, tbh), perhaps the curse seals are there because of some funky Sukuna business (as mentioned in theory 2), which serves as a primary motivator for Yuuta to enter a vow with the elders in the first case. In this way, theory 2 and 3 would be combined. If Sukuna is hurting Inumaki in some way, the elders can be using this to coerce Yuuta into a binding vow that would help Inumaki once Yuuta carries out his executioner duties.

One of the possible problems I have with this theory is that it is maybe very contingent upon where the fuck Inumaki is even at. In chapter 144 when everyone is reunited with Maki, Inumaki isn’t there. But, Inumaki is (probably) awake and recovering from his injuries in the single panel we see of him in chapter 137. So... where is he? If he is anywhere besides at Jujutsu High, I assume he is in the possession of the higher ups. Which would explain a lot, and how particularly downtrodden Inumaki looks in the panel (besides the fact that he got his arm cut off, obviously). Yet, nobody seems too concerned about him, which maybe means that he’s probably (hopefully?) with everyone at Jujutsu High-- just offscreen with Panda or smthn). 

But, to defend this theory, Yuuta seems to be in contact with both the elders and Jujutsu High, so maybe it’s the same deal with Inumaki? Inumaki doesn’t necessarily need to be in the possession of the higher ups in order for them to infringe upon him. Especially in tumultuous times like these, in which Gojo and Principle Yaga are not there to protect the students, and there is now some sort of Culling Game going on?? Essentially, what I’m getting at is that the higher ups are extremely in power right now. Even if Inumaki isn’t with them physically, they still may have a large influence over what happens to him.     

One of the actual problems I have with this theory is that Yuuta “killing” Yuuji and being unable to supply his body would mean trouble for Inumaki. In chapter 143, Naoya gets healed by Yuuta in exchange for promising to tell his superiors that Yuuji is dead... but, would they believe this without evidence (aka, Yuuji’s body)? If they do, then good! Yuuta saves both Yuuji and Inumaki, and all is well. But if they don’t believe this and demand Yuuji’s corpse, then Inumaki is definitely in danger once the higher ups find out. Or, if the binding vow didn’t register Yuuji’s temporary death by Yuuta, that would mean great harm would be done to Inumaki, probably. 

I’m just not sure if Yuuta would even bargain Inumaki like that? But, the fact that Yuuta makes Naoya tell their superiors, rather than reporting directly to them himself seems to prove that Yuuta believes Naoya’s word is enough. Regardless, Yuuta seems confident that the binding vow he made with the superiors was completed by “killing” Yuuji-- regardless of whether Inumaki is involved with the vow or not.

Granted, it seems that Yuuta has changed a bit since coming back, so we’ll see. Maybe he is extremely confident in himself now, to the extent that he is willing to bargain something like Inumaki’s wellbeing in a binding vow. Who knows?

Of course, I have to confess that I understand that I am giving little mind to translation when giving these theories; I read the English translated version of the manga, so I can only make assumptions with the material I have. Maybe I’m missing something crucial because of this?

Anyways. These are the theories I have right now! I know this post was extremely long-winded, but if I didn’t write all this out, I was going to Explode. This is literally all I have been thinking about since I saw the panel with Inumaki. If anyone else wants to talk about this by adding to my ideas or poking holes in them, PLEASE do. I need to know that I’m not the only person thinking about this, omg.

[birdsareblooming]

Infinite is connected to Solaris

This is gonna be a long one, strap in.

Infinite, Infinite, Infinite. The most recent in-game villain, and the most powerful in recent history as well. Despite being only around 3 years old, he’s become extremely popular. and half of that is because of the song.

Mephiles, Iblis, and Solaris. Villains over 10 years old that haven’t been used since their original game appearance in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

Or... have they?

Now I want to say before all of this, this all could be coincidences, me being delusional, or something otherwise. It is ONLY a theory, but for something as crazy as I’m claiming I need to preface with this for my own sanity. 

But i’m gonna cut the bullshit. You’re here to see how I am going to bs my way to saying that Infinite the Jackal is connected to a dead god from what is regarded as the worst Sonic game. 

And, like most of these, I need to start with some house cleaning, some things you need to understand.

1. Time Eater is Mephiles

You might have seen me meme about this before...

...But yeah that’s exactly the situation.

I had theorized this before I knew Ian Flynn thought the same thing. Their identical color-schemes, almost identical aesthetic, and completely identical power-set. 

Even the name Time-Eater, that was Mephiles, and Solaris’s goal. To eat time. 

2. Ifrit is Iblis

Now i’m going to assume you have two questions

If Time Eater is Mephiles, than where’s his counterpart, Iblis?

Who the fuck is Ifrit

Long and Short, 

But, more importantly, 

Ifrit is what caused Silver’s Future post Sonic 06.

Ifirit was their retcon for keeping Silver’s future the way it is (even though they defeat it at the end of sonic rivals 2, causing the future to not be that way, hence why Silver was 3 conflicting backstories. Thanks guys.)

So, when it comes to fire demon that destroys the world and causes the future that Silver the hedgehog lives in, that’s a good amount of evidence already, especially with the preface that Mephiles is alive in the form of Time-Eater. If Mephiles was reborn, why wouldn’t also Iblis? and Ifirit is so uncannily similar theres no other candidate. 

also, might I add:

(thanks @zorloser​)

For you who don’t know, Ifrit’s story ended being re-trapped in it’s pocket dimension with Eggman Nega. 

3. The Phantom Ruby

The Phantom Ruby... Oh, the Phantom Ruby.

A very new addition to Sonic, and yet very important. It was the leading mcguffin of two games, and is made out to be very powerful. 

yes I know that’s a lot up there, but you need to understand the Phantom Ruby to fully understand this theory. 

It’s also very important that Eggman didn’t create the Phantom Ruby as he claims. He created Infinite, not the stone attached to him. Despite there being prototypes, which does confuse me, but from what info we’re given from the wiki the Phantom Ruby seems to have come from Classic Sonic’s universe, even retreating there after the events of Forces. This is also confirmed in Episode Shadow:

Although, Eggman did name it, seemingly on a whim.

~Tangent Time~

Despite being CALLED a Ruby by Eggman, the Phantom Ruby doesn't LOOK like a ruby, despite being magenta.

Rubies CAN be dark even to the point of being Black, but never connected. They’re usually just one shade.

(And don’t you dare say “The chaos emeralds don’t look like emeralds bc they’re not green. They’re all TECHNICALLY emeralds, they’re part of the beryl family, and even if only green beryls are called emeralds, they are all the exact shades of beryl.)

But what the Phantom Ruby DOES look like, is obsidian. 

note this for later.

4. Infinite

For those who don’t fully know Infinite’s backstory, it’s expanded upon on the wiki and Rise of Infinite 

Now that we’re all on the same page, lets continue to him now. 

Lovingly referred to as the “Masked Clown.” Infinite goes about the entirety of Sonic Forces revealing nothing of himself, the only things we know about him are from Episode Shadow and Rise of Infinite. We don’t even see his real face in-game. 

Although we have enough to know that his personality changed post Phantom Ruby, it’s even mentioned on the Wiki. Although how much of that change was spurred on by being beat up by a 15 year old, we’ll probably never know. 

Although his goal has always been the same. Starting the planet over as a desolate wasteland. What a fun dude to be around. Probably the life of the party.

5. Connections

(i’m using Mephiles and Time-Eater intermittently, same with Iblis and Ifrit.) 

Alright, now we’re all on the same page. Let’s move on.

I’m going to play a game we’ve played before. I’m going to name something about Infinite or the Phantom Ruby, and add something that’s eerily simmilar to Solaris (Mephiles + Iblis)

All of this Info can be found on the Sonic Wiki

Phantom Ruby: -It is an interdimensional gemstone of incredible power- Ifrit: It is an interdimensional, demonic fire-creature of incredible power- (wow those are, the same description huh)

Infinite: -After Infinite's fusion with the finalized Phantom Ruby prototype, he acquired the ability to generate, destroy, and manipulate virtual realities, which he could turn into virtual reality projections to interact with reality.[32] Said virtual realities are illusions, which Infinite creates by exercising control of one's visual and depth perception by feeding the brain false information- Ifrit: -Described as capable of binding one's soul, the Ifrit can enslave others with powerful mind control powers.- -Ifrit, which manages to use some kind of mind control on Sonic and/or Tails (or Knuckles and/or Rouge, depending on which team the player is controlling), but is defeated by the other teams, and is destroyed.-

Infinite: -Infinite's newfound strength proved so great that he was able to effortlessly defeat figures like E-123 Omega and Silver the Hedgehog, and ultimately best even Sonic the Hedgehog twice. He was even able to single-handedly overwhelm the entire Resistance army during Operation Big Wave. His power was such that not even the Miles Electric was able to give an accurate reading of his capabilities.[31] Time Eater: -the Time Eater has demonstrated immense super strength; even in its incomplete form, it easily knocked Modern Sonic and Classic Sonic unconscious with a single hit. After being completed, the Time Eater was able to effortlessly repel both Classic and Modern Sonic's and knock them out using brute force alone-

Phantom Ruby:  Its powers can also warp the fabric of space-time,[1] allowing it to create pocket dimensions such as Egg Reverie Zone and Null Space, as well as teleport entities from place to place. When used alongside the Chaos Emeralds' time-space powers, it transported Classic Sonic and itself to another dimension, and later sucked Dr. Eggman into a rift- Time Eater: Its signature skill however, is creating "Time Holes",[8] spacial rifts that lead to any point across time and space, including alternate timelines and across different dimensions.

Infinite: When everything you know has come and gone (You are at your lowest, I am rising higher) Only scars remain of who I was (What I find in the ashes, you lose in the fire) When there's no one left to carry on (This is an illusion, open up your eyes and...) This pain persists, I can't resist But that's what it takes to be infinite Solaris: -Much like his two halves, Iblis and Mephiles, Solaris is immortal and virtually indestructible.- -As a transcendent life form, Solaris possesses a unique state of existence that lets him exist in the past, present and future simultaneously, making him omnipresent throughout time and virtually impossible to defeat unless he is attacked simultaneously in all eras-

Possible reach:

Phantom Ruby:

Solaris:

(I’m refering to the odd red-stone in the middle, also that the wings somewhat resemble Infinite’s sword.)

~Tangent Time~

remember the first tangent? Where I meantioned that the Phantom “Ruby” looked more like obsidian than a ruby?

Well someone else looks like a certain type of obsidian, Snowflake Obsidian to be exact:

Alright Reaching time over. 

Now you might have noticed that the Ifrit-Infinite connections seemed to fit just a bit more-Maybe it was just me- even down to the Phantom Ruby and Ifrit’s OPENING DESCRIPTION being almost copy/paste, which i’m still amazed at.

This get’s to the next part of my theory.

6. Where are they (Mephiles/Iblis) now?

Welcome to~ where are they now!

Mephiles, or Time-Eater, So far is undocumented. It’s said they were “Destoryed” at the end of Sonic Generations, but for all we know it was just the machine additions, and Mephiles was “destoryed” over 10 years ago and he started kicking again.

Iblis, or Ifrit, was locked in it’s own pocket dimention along with Nega, and hasn’t been seen since...or have they?

haha that’s a callback! Do you remember the beginning of this post or is it too mindbogglingly long for your brain to comprehend in one sitting? 

7. The Phantom Ruby is Iblis/Ifrit

let’s talk about the power set of the Phantom Ruby. Interdimentional, very powerful, capable of some kind of mind fuckery.

Ifrit is, Interdimentional, very powerful, capable of some kind of mind fuckery, immortal and is constantly on fire,

You may be wondering about this “Fire” thing. “Solaris was a sun god and infinite has no connection-” WRONG! 

sorry that was forceful.

Infinite used a very specific and strange method to destroy the planet. He made an illusion of the sun, and set it on the planet. Out of all the methods, and interesting choice to be sure. But not for a sun god.

also: “What I find in the ashes, you lose in the fire”

“What are you saying you dumb bitch?” You might be thinking. First of all, rude, second of all, I’m saying that the power inside the Phantom Ruby IS Iblis/Ifrit, hence their connection.

Before I get to timeline and other stuff, some minor things:

The decision to have Infinite take on specifically Silver, and showing Silver being able to withstand a fight against him for a good amount of time, as well as giving them a minor repertoire, which no other seemingly “unconnected” Resistance Fighters get. 

the name “Infinite” fitting the naming scheme if “Iblis and Ifrit” and you know how this franchise is about naming schemes.

Now, where we last left Ifrit he was trapped in a pocket dimension with Nega. 

Where we first find the Phantom Ruby is “In Sonic Mania, the Phantom Ruby appeared on Angel Island after a dimensional breach occurred in the atmosphere.” (via sonic wiki)

Now, it is kinda hard to connect those two lines, but the dimensional causation is there. 

(I could add an ENTIRE subsection of me trying to connected Mephiles to the time-traveling nature of Little Planet, therefore connecting Solaris to Classic Sonic’s world ((and “fun is infinite)) but this theory doesn’t need to be any longer and I cannot physically do any more research.) 

it’s possible Ifrit would be trapped, Mephiles was trapped in the Scepter of Darkness, so it’s more possible than impossible. 

But, Imma be fully honest with you guys, Most of this is because of the song.

If you haven’t heard “Infinite”, What is wrong with you. Go listen to it. Oh my god. 

But, some of the lyrics, don’t totally make sense knowing Infinite’s backstory. But it makes more sense seeing through the lens of the added Ifrit influence.

“And after all this time you're back for more“ (If talking about Shadow, it wasn’t a “long time” inbetween Infinite’s defeat and his rise. And Infinite has no stated relationship with Sonic. However, Solaris and subsequently, Iblis, do.) “When everything you know has come and gone“ “But that's what it takes to be infinite“

Even the name “Infinite.”

He chose that name after fusing to the Phantom Ruby and “ABAndoNiNg hIS pAsT SeLf” 

But, the Phantom Ruby has no connotations of immortality. None specified. it’s possible it’s power could be used to trick the user into immortality, but it’s never specified. You’d think he’d be called “Phantom” or, even, “Zero” (his working-and possibly true-name) But no. Infinite.

Now, think back to the connections earlier, and the info I took from Solaris’s wiki.

“Omnipresent throughout time and space”

Sounds pretty “Infinite” to me.

Am I saying Infinite is the new Iblis Trigger? Yes.

Ok my fingers hurt from writing this sorry it’s so long 

bye

[missmoki]

Intro to Chakras

Photo by Danielle Barnes on Unsplash

History

The Chakra system originated in India around 1500 and 500 BC in the oldest text called the Vedas. The Vedas is the earliest Sanskrit literary records and the most ancient scriptures of Hinduism.

What is Chakra?

The term chakra appears to first emerge within the Hindu Vedas, though not precisely in the sense of psychic energy centers, rather as chakravartin or the king who "turns the wheel of his empire" in all directions from a center, representing his influence and power. In Sanskrit the word Chakra means disk or wheel and refers to the energy centers in your body. These wheels or disks of spinning energy each correspond to certain bundle of nerves or major organs. There are 7 main chakras that run along your spine, they start from the root or base of your spine and then up to the crown of your head and it is believed that there are about 114 chakras in the body.

The 7 Main Chakras

Crown or Sahasrara

Location: The very top of the head

Color: Violet or White

Meaning: Awareness, Intelligence

Element: Divine Consciousness

Stone: Clear Quartz, Selenite, Lepidolite

Develops: 43-49 Years Old

Opened: It is thought to help keep all other chakra's open and to bring the person bliss and enlightenment. When you fully open your crown chakra, you're able to access a higher consciousness.

Blocked: Those with a blocked crown chakra may seem narrow-minded, skeptical, or stubborn.

Overactive: An overactive crown chakra often manifests as a desire for material belongings which never seems capable of being satisfied. Greed, superficiality and arrogance often result in a disconnection from others as well as the universe.

To balance the crown chakra connect with the cycles of your body, Contemplate the right question, cultivate feelings of awe and be of service.

Third Eye (Brow) or Ajna

Location: Between the eyes on the forehead

Color: Indigo

Meaning: Intuition, Imagination

Element: Light

Stone: Amethyst, Labradorite, Purple Fluorite

Develops: 36-42 Years Old

Open: When it is open and in alignment, it is thought that people will follow their intuition. So you will have a strong gut instinct. Visions and intuitive hits are common for someone with an open third eye chakra. It allows you to cut through any illusions and drama to see the clear picture.

Blocked: People who have trouble listening to reality or who are not in touch with their intuition may have their third eye chakra blocked. When it is blocked it is also associated with a broad range of issues, including depression, anxiety and a more judgmental attitude. Physically it's said to cause headaches, dizziness and a slew of other brain-health issues.

Overactive: Sometimes with an overactive brow chakra we may even find our clairvoyant skills are so active that they can overwhelm or frighten us.

To balance the third eye try to identity journaling practice, teach yourself to act through your emotions and keep a dream journal.

Throat or Vishuddha

Location: The Throat

Color: Blue

Meaning: Communication

Element: Sound/Music

Stone: Aquamarine, Kyanite, Lapis Lazuli

Develops: 29-35 Years Old

Open: When it is aligned you will speak and listen with compassion, as well as feel confident because you know you are being true to yourself and your words. When it is functioning at full capacity it allows us to express ourselves truly and clearly.

Blocked: When it is blocked this can been seen through dominating conversations, gossiping, speaking without thinking and having trouble speaking your mind. You may also find it hard to pay attention and stay focused, or fear judgement from others, which can further hinder your ability keep it real. Physically, this blockage can manifest itself as a sore throat, thyroid issues, neck and shoulder stiffness, or tension headaches.

To balance the throat chakra you can try the Cat-cow pose, communicate with awareness, sing to yourself as a child and practice a mantra.

Heart or Anahata

Location: The center of the chest above the heart

Color: Green

Meaning: Love, Compassion

Element: Air

Stone: Rose Quartz, Jade, Malachite

Develops: 21-28 Years Old

Open: When it is open you may find that you feel more connected with those around you and you will be open to others. You will also be at peace with spending time alone. You may feel more joy and happiness as well as be more optimistic. You may notice that you will receive what you desire with ease. When the heart chakra is open you will also have an increased capacity for compassion and forgiveness.

Blocked: Someone with a blocked heart chakra will have difficulty to fully open up to people in their life. People with the heart chakra blocked also often put others first, to their own detriment. It can make us feel lonely, insecure and isolated. A closed heart chakra can give way to grief, anger, jealousy, fear of betrayal, and hatred toward yourself and others. You may also be emotionally closed off, and find it difficult to get over past hurts and unable to forgive.

To balance the heart chakra try to pay attention to your posture, most of us walk around with hunchbacks and unconsciously closing our hearts. You can also try writing yourself a love letter, try a metta meditation or participate in service or volunteer activities.

Solar Plexus or Manipura

Location: The upper abdomen, the stomach area

Color: Yellow

Meaning: Self-Esteem, Confidence

Element: Fire

Stone: Amber, Citrine, Pyrite

Develops: 15-21 Years Old

Open: Those with open sacral chakras are free to express their true selves. It's the chakra of our personal power. This means it's related to our self-esteem and self-confidence.

Blocked: When it is blocked people often experience digestive issues like ulcers, heartburn, eating disorders and indigestion. You may not just feel badly about yourself, but also may lead you to outwardly express apathy, procrastination or that you may be taken advantage easily.

Overactive: When it is overactive you may have a rampant ego, be power hungry and egotistical, resulting in manic behavior and hyperactive energy.

To balance the Solar Plexus try working out your core, make friends with your inner critic or practice the breathe of fire (its a kundalini yoga practice).

Sacral or Svadhisthana

Location: Just below the belly button, just above the pubic bone

Color: Orange

Meaning: Sexuality, Pleasure, Creativity

Element: Water

Stone: Tiger's Eye, Sunstone, Carnelian

Develops: 8-14 Years Old

Open: This chakra is linked to how you relate to your emotions of others. When it is aligned you'll likely feel great, you're friendly, passionate and successfully fulfilled while also eliciting feelings of wellness, abundance, pleasure and joy.

Blocked: When it is blocked you may feel a lack of control in your life. You may also feel uninspired, have some emotional instability, you may also experience fear of change, depression or addiction-like behaviors. Physically you may see problems with associated organs like a urinary tract infection, lower back pain and impotency.

To balance the Sacral Chakra try meditation or yoga, work with the color orange, maybe eat orange foods, get comfortable with stillness or maybe try journaling.

Root or Muladhara

Location: Base of the spine, in the tailbone area

Color: Red

Meaning: Physical Identity, Stability, Grounding

Element: Earth

Stone: Hematite, Red Jasper, Onyx

Develops: 1-7 Years Old

Open: This chakra is responsible for your sense of security and stability. When the root is opened you will feel grounded and secure, both physically and emotionally.

Blocked: When the root chakra is blocked it can manifest physical issues like arthritis, constipation, and bladder or colon problems. You may feel insecure about finances, basic need and well being. You may also feel threatened and as if you are standing on unstable ground. Other ailments include anxiety disorders, fears and/or nightmares.

To balance the root chakra try envisioning the color red glowing at the base of the spine where the chakra is located. Start with a simple meditation of imaging a bright red light at the base of your tailbone. Picture this red light extending down to your legs and feet, grounding you to the earth. You can also try yoga, dancing, take a shower or go on a walk, concentrate on your foot leaving the ground and connecting with the earth again with each step.

[whoslaurapalmer]

so i never do this but i put a lot of thought into really specific details about the structure and scene layout of (the three-part folding mirror) and i really really really want to talk about it so here are some of my notes and some general commentary 

-the crux of the fic, at least the way i had envisioned it, is what vfd does to family, how it becomes biological family vs the family created by vfd

-what vfd did to specific families: -physically separated the calibans -morally separated the denouements and the snickets -somehow brought the anwhistles closer together

-in terms of ramona and olaf, ramona was there to stress the distinction of biological family vs. vfd family but also how they’re so inextricably intertwined with each other, and olaf, this is harder to tell bc he doesn’t have a point of view here, but olaf is scoping out potential candidates for his personal group of firestarters – his own sort of “family” (ramona bc she’s a duchess, ernest because he has a similar line of thought, josephine because her husband is working with the mushrooms, the white-faced women because, well they wind up in his troupe and I have very vague headcanons about how that happens)

-related; the reason frank asks olivia about miranda at the end is because, at that point in the fic, frank feels so terrible about what he said to ernest that he’s trying to reassure himself that his family is still okay because (dewey’s right) at least they’re together, compared to the calibans, who haven’t seen each other in years. it was one of the first ideas I had when I was jotting ideas down in april and it stuck with me the whole way through. I really wanted it in there. I went back and forth before I got to this plot, though, on whether or not frank or ernest would be the one asking it. but I think it fits frank. -(ahahahahahaha the kicker being that miranda really was at the party the whole time and olivia didn’t recognize her) -anyway 

-the parallels in the fic were: -the denouements start the fic together, and end the fic alone (by being honest about how they feel about each other) -the snickets start the fic relatively separated, and end the fic together (by being dishonest about what happened during the party) -the denouements start the fic by playing their game, and the snickets end the fic with theirs -frank is mistaken for ernest, ernest is mistaken for frank -frank pretends to be ernest on accident, ernest pretends to be frank on purpose -dewey has never slammed a door in his life; towards the end of the fic he slams the tray -i….think that’s all of them. I think

-character-wise, jacques and frank both see themselves as the people holding their families together; when in fact for the denouements, it’s dewey, which I think is clear in this, and for the snickets it’s lemony, which is less clear here? but definitely something I agree with -dewey and kit see themselves as the most ‘normal’, and they both have relatively solitary positions of acquiring information -ernest and lemony clearly both vibe on a ‘question vfd’ wavelength -i was also interested in kit and ernest, as siblings who feel stifled by an older/perceived older sibling, and dewey and lemony, who are sometimes unnecessarily protected by their siblings because they are the youngest/perceived youngest -this doesn’t show up in the fic bc olaf’s parents are still alive, but I thought ramona and olaf were also interesting foils re: reacting to their parent’s deaths

-some narration notes: -frank never refers to ernest and dewey as his brothers, except in the scene where he argues with ernest. because frank doesn’t necessarily see the split of biological family vs vfd family but has definitely swayed more to vfd family -ernest and dewey always refer to each other as brothers. -similarly, frank refers to the members of vfd as associates, most everyone else refers to them as friends. -ernest refers to vfd as strictly VFD because he’s distanced himself from it, while everyone else calls it ‘the organization’ -frank doesn’t swear even in his narration when he’s thinking them and not saying them because it’s, still his narration. he still wouldn’t quite completely say the words. (oh, he’s like gansey, like that. the raven cycle is still on my brain. i had so many scene sketches where ernest and frank were way too callous to each other bc they kept coming out like ronan and declan.)  -kit’s line at the beginning is “someone in this very room has betrayed us” which is jacques’s line from the building committee meeting in unauto. the clock saying wrong afterwards is because the someone who really betrayed them (lemony) isn’t in the room. 

-the costumes, which i did decide very arbitrarily: monty: clearly a snake. olaf: sigh. wolf ramona and olivia: oh, there was actually a slight distinction that just no one notices because none of them have looked at an insect (and also because describing clothes properly but succinctly is the hardest thing. i've written fic for a long time!!!!! i did my time in block paragraph clothing description hell!!! it haunts me!!!!!!!!!!), but ramona was the butterfly and olivia was actually a dragonfly. their masks are roses because, well 1) I thought that would be cool 2) butterflies and dragonflies land on flowers…. jacques: the boxwood, but a lion otherwise. josephine: ocean widdershins: the octopus with the pirate hat jacquelyn: the gold star suit (because gustav said she should do it for a play on. star. like. actress star.) miranda: uranus’s moon named miranda. it was very vague and I put that in the fic before I decided to have her in the little scene with esme. and then i thought i would put her in that scene too. gustav: phantom of the opera.  haruki: tree frog hector: tree (not because of haruki’s costume but because i literally could not think of a damn thing for hector to be) lemony: uhhhhhh I had vague ideas he was. a cloud or something. like a stormcloud???? couldn’t pan out though. I like him in grey anyway. kit: I really just wanted her in red. with a big cape. and i spent so much time mentally deciding if i wanted her to have glasses or not in the archives that i forgot to mention her mask. everyone has one i swear to god  white faced women: did anyone recognize that was them? :) it’s not mentioned in any way at all but in my head they were all dressed identically as flappers

esme actually doesn’t have one, because I, forgot, to give her one. I’m taking suggestions. 

-references to lyeekha’s fics: -“that which is essential is invisible to the eye” is what frank says to jacques at the end of edge, and also the title of their snicket/denouement series  -it initially wasn’t in there, because I was worried it wasn’t, like, in the right tone, re: what happens in edge vs how I was interpreting jacques and frank? but i liked it a lot. so i put it back in.  -“frank quit smoking, but you didn’t” is a reference to frank smoking at the end of rigged  -guess the guest and the clock alcove are from the end of fragments, with dewey and ernest watching hotel guests. this is my favorite thing in the whole world and something i actually keep forgetting is not canon because it is SUCH the perfect beethoven parallel  -kit’s tattoo, which I was specifically imagining as the giant bombinating beast tattoo from ink on her back, which is definitely not around her neck but that was the only spot of skin she was showing so it was available and my thought was, it was kind of a low-cut in the back dress, and she was wearing the cape to cover up the giant tattoo on her back because beatrice was not there to cover it up with makeup (also bea picked out the dress.) (bea: if I can’t be there you have to make a statement) (kit: I have to what) -lemony being a “powerful, mythical figure” to the sugar bowl gen was actually something I wrote a long time ago, back in 2013, and I put it in the fic because I thought it fit, and then happened to reread double edged VERY late into the rewriting, literally THE DAY after I wrote that line in, and i saw a similar line of thought, and I was like “*cooper voice* sometimes you just get lucky ~ ” -jacques being in a lion costume, from the masquerade outfit sketches

additionally – -yes I am still cackling about ‘angel of my apple’ -angel of my apple -ANGEL OF MY APPLE  -writing olaf is constantly like, he can say the funniest fucking things. and then turn around and say the absolute cruelest shit and the balance can be difficult.  -but, angel of my a p p l e 

-i can’t believe that out of all the people here, frank and jacques are the ones having the most semi-successful romantic relationship. well, ramona and olivia, too, but frank and jacques actually kiss so good for them -i know it was very vague and it’s because writing romance is physically embarrassing, but yes that last line was supposed to be them kissing, i’m so sorry 

-undercover underwater was a last-minute addition because I didn’t want to take the time to try and google something real and good because I didn’t have the time. my guilty pleasure is super shitty hallmark murder mystery movies (I like good murder mysteries as well, thank you.) and my mom’s been reading terrible murder mysteries during lunch (where I was sitting across from her, also eating lunch, but also hiding behind my laptop and writing the fic) so I just came up with undercover underwater on the spot, but my mom came up with the tagline. it was originally ‘sleeps with the fishes’ (especially because i love the godfather movies which also, clearly has a very big stress on family vs The Family) but I thought ‘diving for the truth’ was funnier. -my mom and my brother (who has no interest in shitty murder mysteries, but loves to verbally smack them down with me re: their predictable tropes) and I decided that the plotline was something like, single woman scuba dives and keeps running into stuff (you know, hidden treasure, dead bodies, the like); her love interest drives the boat; her overbearing family member is an aunt; this is definitely like, book four in the series. there’s probably twelve books or something. (she goes on vacation on like book six and still finds a dead body, come on it practically writes itself.) (she probably owns a little fish tank......it’s a small sunny beach town.........etc etc.........) (it’s so easy to do this.)  -oh, fixer upper is the worst hallmark murder mystery series, murder she baked is the best. in my opinion. 

-dewey and lemony were supposed to have an actual conversation at the hors d’oeuvres table but every time I tried to put lemony in earlier he just wouldn’t work. it didn’t feel right. so he got saved for the reveal. -but i’m still delighted by the idea of lemony literally doing the shot of gazpacho.  -dewey uses a spoon because he doesn’t have the composure or the guts to do a shot of cold soup  -lemony was also supposed to have a scene with kit and one with jacques, i’m pretty sure, to lead up to the gazpacho conversation and the commiserating re: siblings. but again, didn’t work out. so then dewey had to fare alone in the scene. -oh!! the line about how lemony hides, in the least likely places, was actually something that was in my initial write of lemony’s scrapped pov of my ellington fic. jacques being responsible for sending olivia to the hinterlands was from a scrapped jacques fic.  -steal from your unused fic. 

-because I had to take scenes with lemony out, I had some, gaps in the night that I had to fill in (especially because this is a party more people are there than the snickets and the denouements), so that was how esme, the herpetology squad, and olaf and josephine came to be. (also olaf needed to show up again somewhere else otherwise he kind of, disappeared awkwardly, I thought?) -also because initially there was going to be a scene of bea and bertrand, elsewhere, but I wanted to keep the fic contained to the hotel, because one of the ideas I wasn’t able to put into the fic all that much was the sense of the hotel being its own world -oh, bea and bertrand don’t know that lemony used them as cover. the assignment they were working on instead of being at the party? planning the opera. the scene would’ve come right after ramona and olaf’s conversation. -the herpetology squad not only serves to highlight that people can’t tell the denouements apart (part of the foreshadowing that ernest would pretend to be frank), but was also me roasting myself because writing like a million different characters I had never written like this before had me very concerned about if their characterization was consistent, specifically for kit. (specifically, her with dewey.) also defining a character down to one base trait can be helpful when writing and creating characters, but for people no it’s not ideal. -haruki’s estimation of the denouement’s traits were not how i was mentally keeping track of them, because i definitely do do the ‘one base trait’ sometimes, but i had a lot more going on when i was thinking of them -but yes dewey is kind. in the way that bertrand is kind, but bertrand’s like, way more smooth about it. 

-lemony does not have his own pov because, for me personally, I can’t fathom writing him in any other way besides first person, and it just would not do to have one scene out of the whole fic not in third person. unless he was secretly narrating each scene, which, he clearly was not. i would’ve had to do it in a whole different style. 

-i love that dewey and kit are like ‘ahaha we’re the normal ones though’ and their normal conversation is them literally going ‘hey these creepy fish are AWESOME THOUGH’ -i looked at so many fish. for hours.  -ALL BECAUSE I came up with the phrase ‘oceanic intrigue’ as a fun phrase and decided I had to commit my soul to it and never look back. -oh, the fairy shrimp are really very cute though. and i think the cookiecutter shark is, fucked up but a neat little guy. 

-i’m eternally going to be laughing about this too  kit: where the fuck is frank frank: /three floors down, making out with jacques

-oh!! 40-49 is unassigned in the dewey decimal system (which I googled. many, many times.), and was previously biographies. there’s another section for biographies now, but because biography was the closest I could come to like, some sort of, identity category, I thought it was more fitting if it was the section that used to be biography but was now as blank as frank felt.

-dewey is the one responsible for the clock sounding like it does. he just thinks ‘wrong’ is a fun word. that, and frank recognizing jacques by sound, were from my earlier scene sketches for this when i thought this fic was going to be much, much shorter. 

[olivemeister]

OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!