#because I'm just words on a screen.

[springtrappd]

not trying to sound rude or aggressive or anything i swear, but what exactly Is it abt like. eclipse and ruin in general that you have critiques of? i'm still trying to figure out exactly what i think of it myself - it wasn't ANYTHING like what i was expecting, and to be perfectly honest i was also one of the Book Doubters(trademark pending) so that was a huge culture shock to me as well. idk i go in-between being really impressed and really liking it, to being salty that it wasn't what I think a good chunk of ppl including myself were expecting? looks like there's gonna be more down the line as far as this SB storyline goes so i'm curious and cautiously optimistic. i'm not totally sold on the mimic yet but thats probably bc I haven't been reading the tales books. guess i should start now lmao

i should make it clear that i actually haven't finished ruin yet, which is why i've been holding back on talking about it -- i'm up to bonnie bowl! so i'll refrain from commenting on that, except to say that the gameplay is a massive improvement from sb and only has more minor design flaws vs the base game's... fundamentally broken, lmao. they listened to criticism, refined their ideas and executed them with the resources available, and they did it well! i have mostly positive things to say on that front, which is nice. :)

eclipse is harder to talk about because... like, to give you an idea of how badly it effected me: it pissed me off so bad i started dissociating for the rest of the night, gave me stress stomach-aches when I refused to stop playing and then woke me up at 6am this morning nauseous and in pain. and that's not me being a wimp, that's me experiencing somatization, which is a real thing that i struggle with a lot, so hopefully you can understand why I'm not exactly keen to talk about this? especially when literally every time i even try to someone gets mad at me for breathing. please keep this in mind as i go on to say: eclipse is ableist as fuck and completely inexcusable.

as presented within ruin's visit to the daycare, the dca is left in a state of disrepair after the earthquake and subsequent abandonment left the pizzaplex to fend for itself. they're trapped between their two personalities, with both of them insisting that they are the one who knows what they should do; sun wants to be a good boy and do arts and crafts and whatever, and moon wants to send everyone to bed, blah blah you know the drill. as you complete the segment sun and moon regularly argue with each other, with sun holding the upset moon back from attacking cassie as she reactivates the generators, turning the lights on and stunning moon long enough for her to whack him with the faz-wrench, forcing a system reboot... and he's immediately reborn as eclipse, a lovely and kind figure with no memories of anything that happened who gently escorts you out and wishes you well. he's fixed now, you see! you did it! you got rid of his evil split personality, you've made him normal again, and without the aberration that is plurality he has not a cruel bone in his body!

the implications of this are incredibly fucking obvious and deeply deeply upsetting, and why i'm gonna point-blank say i'm not entertaining further discourse over whether this is reaaaally ableist or if they reaaaaally meant for them to read as a system or... nope, it's done, we're not fucking going there. it doesn't matter what they intended -- what they intended is pretty obvious, actually; they've decided to tackle a subject they're incredibly ill-equipped to handle, and the result is a character -- descended from the visual language and cultural canon of tales like split and psycho -- whose arc concludes with the reveal that it was being a system that made them violent. and the boss fight was dumb and bad and ignored all the previously-explained mechanics of this character to do this. it is aggressively stupid fanservice that turns what was once simply "poor taste walking the line of good faith" into "actual offensive caricature with zero room for doubt", and the only thing more despair-inducing than this twist is the community of people gleefully eating it up as their yummy angst fuel for their ultimate comfort character. and i shouldn't be surprised, considering it's coming from the "how dare you ask me to examine why i find it scary when the dca experiences altered identity states" crowd, but i am, unfortunately, an idealist doomed to be let down by normies. huzzah.

as for the mimic: I'm perfectly fine with afton getting laid to rest (he deserves it!), I'm not one of those guys, but in its current iteration (and from my understanding of it) it suffers immensely from having literally zero reason to be doing any of this shit and being yet another rejection of the supernatural in favour of sci-fi bullshit. because it's from the novels and the novels are allergic to ghosts. and having your entire story drip-fed in mediocre spin-off novels filled with blatant fetish content marketed to naive twelvies is so obviously bad storytelling that i don't even think i need to get into the piss-poor prose and legitimately cruel messages to explain why i hate that one

[rachiebeee]

they are best friends and siblings and i love them both so dearly. featuring piercings bc i stand strong in my belief that they would

[rotisseries]

i know everyone already talks extensively about how detailed arcane is, but one of my personal faves is the attention to gun safety, especially like. finger in the trigger well. which is the one aspect of gun safety that really falls through in most media. you do not put your finger in the trigger well until you are ready to pull the trigger. a fundamental that most media fails to showcase. but it's intentional in arcane. like, jinx always has her finger in a trigger well. if she's holding a gun she's got her finger on the trigger. which makes sense!! she's unstable and deeply unsafe and even she doesn't know whether or not she's gonna pull the trigger most of the time. whereas caitlyn, trained for years, is very methodical with her gun. we pretty much always see the moment of intention where she moves her finger into the trigger well because she's ready to shoot. which of course is one of many details that helps showcasing how much more erratic she's gotten in season 2

[zishuge]

I'm supposed to be working but instead I'm thinking about Li Lianhua growing vegetables and how, once upon a time, he was so happy that he almost cried when he finally managed to grow some turnips.

Thinking about how he must've been at rock bottom then - sick, injured, heartbroken, having just lost in one fell swoop everyone and everything he's ever cared about. His shixiong, dead. He believes it's his fault. His shifu, dead. He believes it's his fault. His sect, in ruins. He believes it's his fault. His people no longer believe in him. A-Mian doesn't love him anymore. It's all his fault, it's all his fault.

He doesn't have Hulijing yet. He's alone. He's heartsick. He'll be dead in ten years, or much sooner than that if he can't find some food and shelter. His Sigu Sect leader token is only worth 50 taels of silver. It turns out everything he has built his life around is worth only 50 taels of silver. I can hear his self-deprecating laugh. How foolish he must've felt, having his life's ambition put so violently and abruptly into perspective.

Have you ever been so despondent that you cling desperately to just one thing, anything, that you can focus on in order to not think about everything else? So: turnips.

Tending, weeding, watering, counting, day by day by slowly passing day. The vegetables grow and he survives. And finally, one day, he discovers that against all odds, he has turnips. These hands which he believes have caused the destruction of all that he once held dear, somehow managed to nurture creation and support life. Everything and everyone is gone, but here in his hands is this one small glimmer of hope that perhaps he is not only capable of ruin. How happy he must've been. Was it the first time he felt joy since before the East Sea battle? How he must've wanted to tell someone, but there was no one there.

You know who he must've most wanted to tell? His shifu. His shifu, who once told him that he didn't care about Xiangyi becoming any great martial artist. Just eat well, drink well, and live well. Maybe kneeling there in the dirt, gently cradling his small misshapen turnips in his hands — maybe that's when Li Lianhua finally understands what Shifu meant.

[bonefall]

Do Clerics have like. Doctor-patient confidentiality in general?

[Shrek meme: "They don't even have HIPAA"]

Nope. ZERO protections babey, the Cleric is a tiny Pope without a funny hat. They can do whatever they want unless the OTHER unaccountable religious cult leader decides to do something about it.

Cats like Featherwhisker, Spottedleaf, Runningnose, and Jayfeather are hit with realizations about this. For a few simple restrictions... you have nearly unquestionable power. You answer directly to StarClan. The amount of influence you have over a Clan is actually kind of insane.

The "Leader's Rights" and "Cleric's Vow" commandments were attempts to reign in the power of Clerics, with a lot of collateral damage. The Cleric is only overruled by the direct command of a leader, which means that the Cleric can ALWAYS act first unless the Leader pre-empts them.

Pearstar was a Cleric who violently overthrew Morningstar, before the invention of the Leader's Rights. The Leader's Rights were created in response to Larkstripe's Cleric Strike.

[fisheito]

snakes have something called a jacobson's organ that allows them to smell. they stick out their tongue, and then when it enters their mouth again, the jacobson's organ processes what they just smelled with their tongue. i say this to propose that, after yakumo licks eiden's dick for a good 10 minutes, he closes his mouth and processes it all like O_____O

when i TELL YOU that this message left me bracing the wall like

(overwhelmed with positive affect)

[15lehna]

Covid is homophobic because me getting it the week we got What doesn't break, WBN, Zerxus and the Mighty nein is absolute hell. Did I still read/listen/watch most of them yes was I dying while doing it also yes

[bleaksqueak]

Insomnia is letting up off and on, but I'm still super jelly brained from it case in point, I want to continue back with posting WIPs for the aired pages, but I can't remember what page I left off on now lmao (guess I'll have to dig through my blog to check... eesh. at least it's decently organized by tags?) Not a result of goo brain, really, but equally "AUGH" is that I let my screen protector go for too long without replacing it and now it's slick as snot and I don't have a replacement handy to put on it. This isn't a resulting consequence of goo brain but it does mean I'm going to be trying to draw without any traction while I'm already loopy. Good times ahead!

[blazethecheeto]

if they don't want us to see frost and mark's 'relationship' (it's in air quotes because whatever the fuck they have i refuse to call a relationship) as a joke, then they need to stop treating it like a joke in canon.

the time skips are appalling, genuinely, like how did we go from frost not giving a shit about this man to her crawling head over heels and crying over him and NO in between. there was never an in-between checkpoint for their storyline, it was all or nothing and i have no idea what's going on anymore, it's the INCONSISTENCY for me. i'm on 8x07 rn and the last time we saw mark, he made her vulnerable and believed this could be real, almost kissed her, then jumped out a fucking window.

she was mad for literally half a season.

let's just say i was a huge "frostblaine" fan. the last time i saw them was in 7x15 where they had their only serious moment in their whole story, only for it to be a lie. now, maybe i would want to see one episode where they AT LEAST reconcile and apologize?? instead of hearing about it after the fact?? nope, the next time we see them they're skydiving and singing karaoke and making out like their kiss wasn't a huge build-up for nothing. i'm so with caitlin on how quickly and weirdly their relationship progressed.

honestly, maybe i would be less hateful about this ship if they even TRIED to give them a good love story. it's clear the writers forget about mark (like they forget about frost and caitlin) until they realize, oh yeah, frost has no plot this season so we need to make her only lines per episode about her boyfriend who ditched her! it makes me mad that they reduced her character to that in s8. she can provide so much more than just the edgy 'teenager' that talks about her boyfriend all the time.

i haven't watched the rest of the season and i heard it does get better for her plot wise, but i also know she fucking dies so ofc they would do that.

there has been no serious moment in this whole 'on-again off again' bullshit. it's literally 'oh mark has abs!!!!! guys i have such a silly girly crush on him haha oh he's evil i'm gonna be pouty for half a season- oh wait he's back!!!' they've been treated as the comic relief couple. even in armageddon, caitlin wasn't even there at the fucking party but oh! right, we forgot frost! she's...oh yeah, she's having sex with mark in the bathroom bc that suits her character and the only thing we care about :333

they treat them like a joke, so how do they expect us not to see it as just that?

[skrunksthatwunk]

why the fuck did i write about birds this fucking sucks. i just found out birds only sleep for a few minutes at a time, hundreds of times a day. do you know what this is going to do to my structure? the logistics of their road trip? this is already like three days late and i've been fighting for my life to get A Plot Like Any Plot That Makes Sense out and now the birds fucking sleep for 5 minutes at a time.

[ourstochoose9]

"Write the story you want to read" is all well and good until you realize that you have no idea how to write people in romantic relationships

[sysig]

Btw, this is what editing on this paper has been like (Patreon)

[mint-mumbles]

Gonna use this image any time someone says something low key sexist about Sable (ie "she's showing too much skin" regarding a fucking bathing suit 😭🤦)

I don't hear you complaining about Spirit 😭

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...

[anto-pops]

I miss you. <3

Do you maybe, possibly have a list of future wips/requests for us :>

There were several requests from months ago that you seemed super stoked about.

wuv yew~

I MISS YOU TOO LOVIE 💕💕

I don't unfortunately, my old WIP list is definitely out of date. I finished like 4 of the things I had on there but never updated it with anything new. Meanwhile my inbox is... uh......

Crowded. To put it mildly. I feel really bad about it but I horde requests like a dragon hordes gemstones in case I get any sudden inspiration to write one of them. I'll try combing through everything this weekend and dusting off the ole' WIP list to get it updated though !

[ginnyrules27]

You know how people say 'write what you know'? Yeah, sometimes writing what you know might seem completely insane and completely implausible.

Take for instance using things that happened in my family. If I were to have a scene where characters got into a feud over one character using another character's enema bag, people might think that would be too out of character for anyone to be that stupid. Such a thing has happened in my family's history. It devastated my late-Great Aunts because you can't get rubber-tipped enema bags anymore, only plastic.

Or if I were to have a character sneak out in the dead of night to save a china cabinet from other characters who wanted it for themselves even though said cabinet was several miles away, it might seem insane. My father drove from Fairfax VA to Buffalo, New York to claim my great-grandmother's china cabinet that my grandmother wanted my mom to have but my great-aunts also wanted it and my grandmother sobbed on the phone to my mother about it.

Or if I were to have a character shout 'dad, dad, mom's gonna show her feet' when her mother is about to show her gnarled, bunion and hammer-toed ridden feet to her daughter's boyfriend who was there for the second time...yeah I don't know how people would react because it seems like something no one would do, doesn't it? Replace 'character' with 'my mother' and you have the story of the second time my dad met my mom's parents.

I have more stories about how out there my extended family is but this post is getting long enough. So if there's a moment in my fics where a scenario seems unlikely to happen to someone in real life...I give you my real life lol :D