#bc we have all been burned but a hundred interesting concept but ends up being shitty harem isekais

[doerot]

I really want other people to watch slf, but it's so hard being like, yeah, it's another mmo isekai with characters that look like well that, BUT I promise it's actually good this time 🙏

[chaosflight]

my take on the Nerdjuice au inspired by @upperstories

more below the readmore bc i imagine i’ll get very, very rambly.

okay!  so, we all know and love the stinky bug man!  he’s a stinky bug man!!  so how oh how would he possibly turn out as a huge nerd?

the answer: he’s already a huge nerd and you all know it.  his interest in canon is just in Being Scary!  (and i think that’s true across movie, cartoon, and musical!)

The difference in THIS au, the world is mostly musical with influence from cartoon and movie.  He’s a demon, born dead in the netherworld to the demon Juno.  She’a  piece of shit alcoholic mom, BUT!  instead of the netherworld being an eternal, bottomless abyss where the dead spend their eternity in solitude, there are areas of population, construction, ‘life’ as much as it can be beyond the Living World. Juno, instead of keeping BJ around and being terrible to him directly, often left him at places that were public and open where she could more or less safely not give a fuck about him.

His favorite place was the library, because the librarian there (based perhaps on Movie! Juno- a helpful and kind individual) was astute and kept watch over BJ, and nurtured his obsessions, tempering his constant fascinations with the nature of his being (i.e. being demonic and therefore supposed to be frightening) with texts on demonology, the nature of being dead and/or undead, and general education as well.  he didn’t care much for, like, maths and history, except where it applied to, say, the history of demons and ghosts.  he appreciates statistics like how many people die yearly, minutely, by what means, etc. but this is not his main fascination.

He has access to the living world, but in the same way as the movie/musical, where 99.999999 repeating % of people can’t see/hear/interact with him, and his ability to touch or interact with the world is highly, highly limited.  For a time he had a passion for getting people to see him, and spent a lot of energy putting his name where people would see it/speak it.  it didn’t end up being as successful as he’d hoped, and gave up.  he might be a pariah in the netherworld (having been born dead and being a demon to boot) but at least he could READ BOOKS without waiting for some slower-than-shit reading breather to turn pages (and also imagine only having access to wait that person happened to be reading- no amount of Living Knowledge is worth the inability to choose the knowledge, no thank you!)

and thus he has spent several hundred years in the the Unliving Library in the Netherworld, researching to his own delight, and little more.

flash forward to Lydia Deetz.  She and her mom, as in the musical, love spooks and scares and pranks.  Lydia is also fascinated with demonology and keeps a ‘grimoire’ thats more a collection of her favorite (possibly real and possibly fictitious) demons, ghosts, and other assorted spectres.  When her mom dies- and she knows it’s coming- she goes on a personal researching binge.  She preps ‘secrets’ and things for Lydia to discover, hopefully long after she’s gone, including what she hopes will be Lydia’s favorite.  It’s the name of a demon that she’s never seen in any other book, and she’s not even sure she can read it properly, the book is so old and worn and in a dialect of a language she only half understands.  

Most of what she thinks she understands is obscure, odd, and overall not fitting with her understanding of what and how demons should be, so she assumes it’s fictional, and considers no harm in preparing  a fake summoning ceremony that’ll represent lydia’s ‘graduation’ from this fictitious course Emily’s prepared.  

Emily dies.  Lydia mourns.  She, in proper, manic Lydia fashion, burns through the material her mother prepared and gets to the ‘graduation’ in just a few months.  Her dad doesn’t understand and the life coach he hired is way overwhelmed, and so she’s mostly just allowed to Do It.  They move to the Maitlands’ house, and like the movie, they simply chose to stay and fell in love with the Deetz’s, allowing them to stay in their house, and it was much less dramatic than either movie or musical (mostly bc of bj’s lack of a presence in the diplomacy period of the maitland/deetz relationship aha WHOOPS).  

barbara and adam agree to help Lydia, because while they don’t know much about demons or even being ghosts themselves, they’re also under the impression it’s mostly a way that Emily designed her daughter to be able to grieve, and not actually possible to succeed.

but it does.

Beetlejuice is in the middle of a several day research-binge of his own, gruff and tired and furious that his precious research has been interrupted by a CHILD- except that the awe (and mild fear, though it is very, very mild) stops him from erupting in her face.  A demon!  A real demon, and her mother let her summon him!

The situation is absurd; and for a time, despite his instant liking to the paranormally obsessed kid, he’s still angry that it took THIS MUCH TIME for someone to summon him, so so long after his interest in the living world has passed.  The Maitlands don’t trust him, and he resents that, but time and again Lydia summons him with a never ending series of questions about life, death, and the Beyond.  

in time he becomes her personal tutor into all things paranormal, dead, or undead, finally having someone just as passionate as he is that he can share his now centuries-deep understanding of it all with.  the Maitlands eventually (slowly, SOOOOO slowly) come to trust him, and if it were a fic that i’d write, at this point it would be a cartoon-esque slice-of-life episode-by-episode adventure! The first half of the fic, or perhaps just the first installment would be them getting to become friends, lydia getting to mourn her mother, with BJ, the maitlands, and even charles and delia to help her get through it, and the second half/installment would be less dramatic and more fun/lighthearted! BJ and Lydia are the best of friends despite the absolute absurdity of the nature of their knowing each other.

and that’s it that’s the idea!

maybe later i’ll do a color concept or draw the library but we’ll seeeeeee

[oodlyenough]

aight... here’s a pretty long yet tip-of-the-iceberg collection on my overall thoughts on bl3 now that i’ve finished the damn thing, every main mission & every sidequest (dynasty dash don’t interact). 

obviously mega spoilers

the good

aside from that one infuriating difficulty spike when i arrived on promethea, i had a lot of fun playing. i found the gameplay a lot smoother than the others in the series (as it should be), i liked being able to climb stuff, i liked having an easy mode tbh!!

i really liked playing amara and i like the flexibility of action skills and being able to swap on the go without having to respec. the brawl tree ended up being very well suited to my type of play, it hindered me only during boss fights and even then at least i could switch to phasecast y’know

i had a lot of big fears about what this game would do and it managed to not do anything that makes me want to, like, burn and salt the earth, so that’s a win

i thought it was pretty funny! or at least on par with the other main games, which always kind of ride the line between funny and obnoxious and sometimes misstep

i enjoyed a lot of the cast, both new characters and characters who were returning but who i had no particular feelings about before, hammerlock, zer0 and ellie as particular examples

hammerlock and wainwright were cute af and it’s nice to see a gay couple in a triple-a game 

thought the twins were fun and funny af i liked them. because fandom is Like That i was a little exhausted by troy before he even showed up but even then, like, idk i liked them as a duo and i liked the break from jack honestly 

a lot of the new gun quirks were fun. i’m not like a big... gun person... but i found some cool ones i enjoyed playing with. 

loved getting to see different planets, it was a nice break from pandora all the time. and skywell was super fun! love the low-grav playfulness from TPS without the infuriating oz kit nonsense

the little quality of life improvements from previous games were great, like fast travel from anywhere, auto-refilling ammo, etc

some of the side quests were really fun. i liked the ratch quest for rhys, the birthday party quest for mordecai, the claptrap dancing quest was sweet, the buff movie buff quest was fun, the quest where i killed grandpappy 2 seconds in and got a reward was funny as hell esp because i drove off a cliff by accident, etc

lots of people had really bad glitches and stuff but... honestly can’t relate the game ran very well for me. advantages to not marathoning it before they’ve released their first couple patches, i guess, lol 

the less good

i played a solo amara and there are some bosses that seem like they would’ve been pure hell to do alone... i was lucky and able to phone a friend for a lifeline in those scenarios (shoutout to @heavybreathingcatt and @valoscope) but if i couldn’t do that idk i would’ve just broken my controller in rage i guess lmao 

why is resurrecting each other so hard? i don’t think i’ve ever done it successfully, because it takes too long and more importantly bc while i’m doing it some enemy will just toss a grenade or punch me and i get knocked away from the ally, rendering it useless

rest in peace maya, the best res AI in the whole damn game, got me through the rampager fight her damn self

there were a lot of characters and themes and ideas that i liked in theory more than in practice... because in practice they felt like a first draft. very often i felt like i liked a thing, and then on reflection thought about nine hundred ways it could’ve been better, deeper, more emotionally resonant, more developed, whatever. 

the angel stuff was kinda nice but... also... my longest deepest sigh ever @ Poor Sad Jack Some People Terrorize Entire Planets And Abuse Their Daughters To Cope With Their Fridged Wife

like the siren lore... wish i coulda heard it without having to backtrack across every map post-game

while i found the game generally pretty funny,  almost all the emotional scenes fell completely flat for me and there were a number of scenes that SHOULD have been emotional that just were not 

for eg i am actually not upset about maya or lilith dying (or turning into the moon as it were) -- i am ok with those beats for those characters, especially lilith getting a heroic sendoff. however... both of those scenes could’ve been more impactful than they were. maya’s i think was better than lilith’s, but both of them felt flatter, either in the moment or in the aftermath, than those characters deserved. 

related: NPCs reacting to major events is fun. i liked to do the tour and check in with all my buds to get their couple custom lines after a big plot thing happened. HOWEVER... those lines are obviously timed which is *mostly* fine but in some cases really, really weird? the lines about maya should stay in rotation for a lot longer. ava shouldn’t go back to LOL LET’S STEAL two seconds after maya’s gone. i missed zer0′s maya lines entirely bc i didn’t track down zer0 on time lol. stuff like that 

the bad

i miss my girls :( we really did keep only the white men huh

the last act felt severely underbaked. i have to wonder how many rewrites this game went through, and how much the back end was slapped together last minute, or cobbled together from various drafts. a lot of this felt very first or second draft, where the characters and themes are *there* but not refined at all, or they contradict each other. the family theme that goes basically nowhere and says nothing. the way the story handles atlas vs the way the story handles jakobs vs the way the story handles corporations writ large. 

for the twins -- lack of proper emotional resonance or development for them is one of the biggest failures imo, because i think they WERE very enjoyable villains and the core concept of like... evil video game streamers is honestly on-brand and funny af for the franchise... but as soon as troy died everything went downhill? tyreen’s non-reaction to her brother dying isn’t even a reaction, it’s not even “tyreen doesn’t care she’s evil lol” which would’ve been a boring direction to take anyway) it’s just.... “we barely wrote a response don’t worry about it”. her endgame is to be a big monster because... she’s ... fame hungry? huh? her motivation fell apart.w whether they went with “troy and tyreen are shitty people who get caught up in a power struggle but ultimately love each other” OR “troy and tyreen are shitty people who turn against each other in individual bids for power” could both have been interesting stories but they did neither. 

i’m def missing some echos on the twins which brings me to another thing i hate although it’s endemic to the series and not to bl3 specifically -- hiding important lore and characterization in random echos in random places on the map without even an indication of how many there are total, how many you’ve collected, where to find them... frustrating as hell. a lot of those echos are some of my favourite material in the game! at LEAST tell me “1 of 5 echos on this map” if you don’t wanna tell me where they are! why is major lore like the twins’ backstories hidden?????? 

and bc i haven’t heard them i don’t know if it’s fandom doing what fandom always does, or if it really is the game implying tyreen is The Evil Mastermind and troy is poor manipulated brother, but either way fuck that entire noise lmao of course the women of colour in the series are just Born Evil but jack and troy and whoever else are just Sad :( fuck off actually 

typhon... sucks... what an irritating character. irritating to retcon him in as The First Vault Hunter, irritating to have him talk about shit and sex all the time, irritating to have every established NPC be like oh wow my HERO typhon deleon what a HERO i LOVE him, irritating that we skate over his parenting failures, irritating that he has a fridged beloved wife, ESPECIALLY irritating he gets a memorial sidequest and maya didn’t . just. bad.

aurelia is evil now cause reasons... bad... 

vaughn also bad lmao i can’t believe they made amara yell “blood feud”... disgusting... 

the playable had no role in the story. they’re just a fly on the wall in every cut scene. this is whack in general, and a crit i can apply to all of the main borderlands games, however it is extremely jarring to play amara in a siren-heavy game and have no one acknowledge it. 

OVERALL... I guess like a B-? Maybe a B. I had fun playing it and I’m still having fun running around in Mayhem Mode and I am def looking forward to the DLCs. Gameplay is great. But while I had hoped this installment would take the storytelling of the main games a step further, it actually felt like a step back in virtually every respect.