#because i do want to support the devs

[myautisticpov]

Sorry, no, just for context, I put in my OG tags that buying one of the outfits would cost £50, assuming you were only getting the guaranteed 4* items (admittedly, you will likely get more, but that's not guaranteed, I'm just calculating what's guaranteed)

But that was based on the bundles, and I had assumed that the most expensive bundle would work out cheapest, but then I glanced at them again and realised that wasn't right, buying the cheapest bundle would actually net you twice as many crystals for the price

But then I saw that the bundles were limited, so you could only buy one of each

So I was like, okay, people are definitely paying for these outfits though, so how are they doing it?

The way I'm getting crystals is by earning diamonds through gameplay and buying them (again, perfectly possible, as I'm doing it, but I'm still in the early game, so I'm getting a lot through progression and exploration that will probably dry up later, and I'm also putting an autistic amount of hours in while I'm off work for xmas and before I'm busy with holiday stuff)

So, one crystal costs 120 diamonds. There's a button to buy diamonds, so I click that. You buy diamonds with the premium currency (stellarite) and they seem one to one. So 120 stellarite per crystal. You buy stellarite in set amounts, but those amounts do at least divide by 120. I double-check that the most expensive one works out the best, and it does, so that's £99.99 for 6480. So £99.99 for 54 items. There are ten items in the outfit in question, and you're guaranteed one of the items in the outfit every five times you use the crystals. So you're guaranteed the entire outfit in 50 crystals, which works out at £92.58

And I imagine a bunch of people are scoffing, like, "omg, what? are you new to gacha?" and going to name a bunch of other, much more egregious examples, but, like, yeah, I am new to gacha because I have ADHD and am really susceptible to microtransactions that are, like, £1.99 each, going, "that's not a real amount of money", and then buying fifty in a month

And I'm double-y susceptible if they're loot boxes and I'm like "but if I buy one more, I might get the thing that I want"

So I haven't touched gacha before because it looked like the same thing

But I'm actually not susceptible to premium currency hoops that try to hide the real amount you're paying because I'm too nosey with the calculator, and these prices are so egregiously bad that I didn't even need the calculator to notice it was a bad deal

So, yeah, maybe the game is just being held aloft by whales who have a spare £93 to drop on a new outfit every so often

But if it was, what would be the harm in being transparent with that number? Instead of forcing me to be nosey with the calculator?

On the one hand, the value proposition of paying for the crystals for the gacha mechanic in Infinity Nikki is so bad, it cancels out my ADHD susceptibility to those kinds of mechanics

But on the other, like, the existence of the ability to pay for them at that price suggests someone more susceptible than me, and that's worrying...

(also read my tags before arguing with me, i've just realised i've basically put an essay in there)

[fisherrprince]

You have made me interested in balloon smp but I feel so old and of touch because I cannot find the past streams on twitch. Cannot figure out where and in which order to watch...can I ask where you've been watching the videos/streams?

ok, so, there’s ~36 people all doing it concurrently, which is a lot. But! Here is the list of players, if you know someone you like on that list pick them and just watch sequentially day 1->finale. if you don’t know Anyone on there and you want a point to start at for just. Getting most of the plot, pick someone from A B or C. Or E. Team F has a really great plot but they stay a bit out of the overarching plot until the last weeks, and I haven’t gotten to team D yet so I don’t know what they know im sorry team d 🥺

Many of the players have VOD channels up on YouTube or playlists of balloon vods specifically, lots of people who don’t have the streams in their twitch archives somewhere (like, “past broadcasts” usually), look for player vod channels. Some don’t have saved archives and some didn’t stream it! I know for certain sophie robby skull kuu gibson buggle and jame have up to date vod channels because I’ve seen them… woops and skullvolver are making edited videos rn but theyre Both team a… and im not sure who else is planning on it!

tldr, pick someone and watch them in order and peek in on other peoples’ vods from time to time when something Happens because sometimes seeing it from another angle is cool. Also, sometimes seeing it from another angle is Important because there’s Lore no one else got to see. Search “playername vods” on YouTube and it should direct you to the right place.

more specifics that kinda get into spoilers:

Here’s some plots of interest that certain people see and others don’t (ONLY BASED ON WHAT I KNOW I am not a lore master I don’t have 36x8x32… uh… good gravy 576 possible hours. of content. I DONT HAVE 576 HOURS TO SIT AND WATCH STREAMS someone was going to put together a lore doc somewhere though):

woops: tries to keep track of lore, goes on ghost knight swordquest

sophiebaybey: unwitting accessory to world murder, sees WAY more of PG and balloons lore than most people on account of The Events.

skullvolver/socksbx: revenant revengequest x2 and soul link plot, also socks is a mod and they get up to some funny business. poke in and watch one of them for the end of day 14 trust me 🫵

robbydude: doomer gnome made me cry but that’s not important. ghostquest continues upon the holy land even if we DONT WANT IT TO. jerry mouse is there

jame7t: sees kind of all of it from a distance, good coverage, citadel time (I like building streams)

shinigamieater: it’s possession clues. What if you were 15 ants of dubious morality in a human body

padabana: instigates the end of the world, once if you’re realistic twice if you’re being pedantic. it’s paranoia clues

kaoiji: there’s time travel, and it gets worse from there but I can’t FIND their vods so im redirecting you to robbydude

renobee: GOD??????????

[fourspiceblend]

It's funny cause for the most part of the game, I didn't really care about people's criticisms of Engage's writing and thought they were just mad the story was straightforward and didn't try to be overly complex... But now that I'm (finally) reaching the endgame, there's a loooot of weird plotholes that 3H would be jealous of lol.

[crowcryptid]

Ah I just found out which gpu my brothers ordered

It starts with 40 and ends with 90.

Wtf um thanks but I’m still paying for it so why didn’t they ask me first 😬

Also my power supply isn’t strong enough for it.

So there’s that

Oh they ordered an atx 3.0 psu too oh okay haha oh wow that is an extra $200 oh ahah ok..

[flamboyant-king]

Magfest was fun! Walked around as Cammy, made a lot of “merch,” talked to a bunch of cool dudes, traded wares, met new friends and finally met old ones, got a jello shot from a Raccacoonie cosplayer, ate so much awful food, learned of new games, and got inspired.

I made so many buttons of cammypus and other funny creatures, folded 50+ origami boxes for the perler bead crafters, and drew on any paper I can find. It was nice and now I have no money.

[amplexadversary]

Maybe this isn't the most mature of me, but I am feeling incredibly smug right now.

A LOT of FR users seem to be assuming that every story about the introduction of a new breed of dragon is the fucking wild west, on the sole point of comparison that it involves two populations meeting.

The devs recently finished rewriting one story that I basically immediately clocked as being (pretty blatantly!) an allegory about autism, but that a very loud portion of users thought was "colonialist"

(Like, I'm sorry, but if you had a kid you couldn't understand but found out about other people just like them and went to them yourself, how the fuck does that compare??? Legitimately???)

So the devs rewrote it to make it even more obviously about autism and I'm just sitting here like "Yeah I fucking called it from the original work, y'all have a skill issue." And yes, I feel VERY smug about it.

[getvalentined]

An open letter to @staff

I already submitted this to Support under "Feedback," but I'm sharing it here too as I don't expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.

The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.

Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.

This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.

This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.

Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.

You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddog here that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed*. Claiming otherwise isn't just a misstatement, it's a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It's not just unethical, it's insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.

Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.

This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you're more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don't work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.

You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it's what we want. It is not. I'd hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn't what we want, but I assume the money people don't care. The user base isn't relevant, just how much money they can bring in.

The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.

You can do so much better than this.

Response to the Update

Under the cut for readability, because everything said above still applies.

I already said this in a reblog on the post itself, but I'm adding it to this one for easy access: people read it that way because that's what you said.

Staff considers the main feed as it exists to be "outdated," to the point that you literally used that word to describe it, and the main goals expressed in this announcement is to figure out what makes "high-quality content" and serve that to users moving forward.

People read it that way because that is what you said.

*The final results of the poll, after 24 hours:

136,635 votes breaks down thusly:

An algorithm based feed where I get "the best of tumblr." @ 1.3% (roughly 1,776 votes)

Chronological feed that only features blogs I follow. @ 95.2% (roughly 130,077 votes)

This doesn't affect me personally. @ 3.5% (roughly 4,782 votes)

[alsaurus-loves-dean]

.

[nickywhoisi]

Okay I was gonna go without saying anything about this, but...I caved. I was planning to go my whole life without knowing anything about what really happens in the Mario Illumination movie, but I both got curious one time, and then just today, I had a trailer thrown in my face. Rant under the cut if you want to know my thoughts.

I could have skipped, but my damned curiosity got in the way of my mind. And now I feel like my curiosity in any IP I cherish is getting so irrecoverably punished. Because I saw a Luma, or this fake luma with a mouth, saying the most horrifying visceral things that I know do not belong in a kid's movie. "More meat for the grinder..." "The sweet release of death." In a way that did not convey some cheesy edge, but an actual declaration of violence through the screen. Like that character wad adressing all the viewers, and not at all in contextually appropriate ways. The disturbia, the disassociation i felt wss like reading a horrible mario fanfic but the author was a maladjusted teenager who was earnesy trying to threaten someone they know by invoking death words and mental images too gruesome for the material. If you've seen it, I am sorry, and you maybd have an idea of what I mean.

Just...between this and Bowigi, I am truly never spending money on a movie again. I can't. I just can't condone this. Nintendo has shat the bed for greenlighting this, I feel uncomfortable about how much responsibility Miyamoto and Charles Martinet have in these choices, I feel a deep chasm within myself being cast out from existence and being betrayed, and I wonder for what purpose did I reach out and connect with the Super Mario Bros as a series if somewhere down the line I was not to be repaid for that loyalty. I want Nintendo to just be a game company again. I want my most fond memory of completing Mario Galaxy to be honoured, not shat upon with Spark of Hope and this. Some people who I had respected were surely there, and someone had said yes to all of this...when they should have said no. I hate this so much. I have never known such engulfing hatred as this, and I lived under the thumb of an entire cabal of narcissistic relatives. But I made it out of that, somewhat! What about this? How can i possibly escape and cut ties with what I chose and what provided me such happiness for so long in my life? When did we all decide to stop having standards, and really ask for only the best renditions of what we know to be in our movies? I want Mario to remain pure, and not have that disgusting Pratt voice. I want Luigi and Peach to remain pure too, and not have wrong voices of their own. I knew Illumination was wrong to be collabing with the one company I've cared about the most. I want everyone to stop putting Bowser into uncomfortable forced relations with the human characters. I never liked how Peach was always shipped in porn-y ways with Bowser, and it is no better with Luigi. It may be even worse because I always saw him as so immensely pure a character, cut off from that! It's like crack shipping gone wrong! And do not get me started on the existential travesty I went through having to go through Bowsette.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ALL DOING TO ME, YOURSELVES, AND EVERYONE.

[dualityvn]

I would like to address a recent trend I am seeing pop up in the yandere community. I feel that people are kind of pointing fingers at each other trying to decide who is more morally correct than the other. And I find it a little silly. We're here for hot stalkers. None of us are consuming moral fiction.

I sympathize with Fantasia and the backlash she is getting because of her recent update to her game. I still stand by my belief that devs should write what they want before they let themselves be influenced by outside opinions. It is her choice and her game first and foremost. Not to mention it's her first one and being thrown in the spotlight while you're making your first game is a pretty horrible experience. Because you don't know much about the process of making games or what you even ultimately may want to do with your game. It's a trial and error type of thing. And you can't make everyone happy. I still support her and encourage her on her creative journey and I hope the finished game is something she will be proud of.

I also understand that the game originally looked like a yandere romance game and it did not turn out to be that. So people are upset and feel betrayed. Some have spent money thinking they'd enjoy it and the recent update may have changed that. I understand, but I ask them to be understanding themselves and give their feedback without harassing or insulting the dev.

At the same time, I'm observing some weird new mentality in this attempt to support Fantasia. Now, we are claiming that "realistic" yanderes are superior? And that people who enjoy softer yanderes are delusional idiots who don't belong in the yandere fandom? And don't get me started on the word "romanticize." Can we please stop the holier than thou attitude?

We are all in this pig den together. We are all muddy. We are all consuming dark content. One isn't more moral than the other. You are free to prefer yanderes who are cruel and awful and psychotic, but do not belittle the devs and fans who prefer a softer alternative. If someone outside the yan fandom were to look at us, they'd judge us all the same: people who like toxic obsessive love interests. We all know real life stalkers are bad. I am afraid of them everyday. None of us are delusional children and it's insulting and ridiculous to claim so.

Likewise, it's a little silly to claim you can't have darker content in dark fiction. Dark fiction is here to explore the awful parts of humanity without having to worry about morality. It does not reflect on the type of person the creator is. It does not make them an advocate for murder, stalking or sa.

Please be mature. If you wish to criticize, do so in a well thought out way. Do not simply throw around words.

[gootarts]

as of 8/3, the most recently updated version of this post is here (it's a reblog of this exact post with more info added)

as a lot of you know, limbus company recently fired its CG illustrator for being a feminist, at 11 pm, via phone call, after a bunch of misogynists walked into the office earlier that day and demanded she be fired. on top of this, as per korean fans, her firing went against labor laws---in korea, you must have your dismissal in writing.

the korean fandom on twitter is, understandably, going scorched earth on project moon due to this. there's a lot currently going on to protest the decision, so i'm posting a list here of what's going on for those who want to limit their time on elon musk's $44 billion midlife crisis impulse purchase website (if you are on twitter, domuk is a good person to follow, as they translate important updates to english). a lot of the links are in korean, but generally they play nicely with machine translators. this should be current as of 8/2.

Statements condemning the decision have been issued by The Gyeonggi Youth Union and IT Union.

A press conference at the Gyeonggido Assembly will occur on 8/3, with lawmakers of the Gyeonggi province (where Project Moon is based) in attendance. This appears driven by the leader of the Gyeonggi Youth Union.

The vice chairman of the IT union--who has a good amount of experience with labor negotiations like these--has expressed strong support for the artist and is working to get media coverage due to the ongoing feminist witch hunts in the gaming industry. Project Moon isn't union to my knowledge, but he's noted that he's taken on nonunion companies such as Netmarble (largest mobile game dev in South Korea) by getting the issue in front of the National Assembly (Korea's congress).

Articles on the incident published in The Daily Labor News, Korean Daily, multiple articles on Hankyoreh (one of which made it to the print edition), and other news outlets.

Segments about the termination on the MBN 7 o' clock news and MBC's morning news

Comments by Youth Union leaders about looking into a loan made to Project Moon via Devsisters Ventures, a venture capital firm. Tax money from Gyeonggi province was invested in Devsisters in 2017, and in 2021, Devsisters gave money to Project Moon. The Gyeonggi Youth Union is asking why hard-earned tax money was indirectly given to a company who violates ESG (environmental, social and governance) principles.

Almost nonstop signage truck protests outside Project Moon's physical office during business hours until 8/22 or the company makes a statement. This occurs alongside a coordinated hashtag campaign to get the issue trending on Twitter in Korea. The signage campaign was crowd-funded in about 3 hours.

A full boycott of the Limbus Company app, on both mobile and PC (steam) platforms. Overseas fans are highly encouraged to participate, regardless if whether they're F2P or not. Not opening the app at all is arguably the biggest thing any one person can do to protest the decision, as the app logs the number of accounts that log on daily. For a new gacha such as Limbus, a high number of F2P daily active users, but a small number of paying users is often preferable to having a smaller userbase but more paying users. If the company sees the number of daily users remain stable, they will likely decide to wait out any backlash rather than apologize.

Digging up verified reviews from previous employees regarding the company's poor management practices

Due to the firing, the Leviathan artist has posted about poor working conditions when making the story. As per a bilingual speaker, they were working on a storyboard revision, and thought 'if I ran into the street right now and got hit by a car and died, I wouldn't have to keep working.' They contacted Project Moon because they didn't want their work to be like that, and proposed changes to serialization/reduction in amount of work per picture/to build up a buffer of finished images (they did not have any buffer while working on Leviathan to my knowledge). They were shut out, and had to suck it up and accept the situation.

Hamhampangpang has a 'shrine' section of the restaurant for fans to leave fan-created merch and other items. They also allow the fans to take this merch back if they can prove it's theirs. Fans are now doing just that.

To boost all of the above, a large number of Korean fanartists with thousands of followers have deleted their works and/or converted their accounts from fanart accounts to accounts supporting the protests. Many of them are bilingual, and they're where I got the majority of this information.

[note 1: there's a targeted english-language disinformation campaign by the website that started the hate mob. i have read the artist's tweets with machine translation, and they're talked about in the second hankyoreh article linked above: nowhere does she express any transphobic or similarly awful beliefs. likewise, be wary of any claims that she supported anything whose description makes you raise eyebrows--those claims are likely in reference to megalia, a korean feminist movement. for information on that, i'd recommend the NPR/BBC articles below and this google drive link of english-language scholarly papers on them. for the love of god don't get your information about a feminist movement from guys going on witch hunts for feminists.]

[note 2: i've seen a couple people argue that the firing was for the physical safety of the employees, citing the kyoani incident in japan. as per this korean fan, most fans there strongly do not believe this was the case. we have english-translated transcripts of the meeting between the mob and project moon; the threats the mob was making were to......brand project moon as a feminist company online. yes, really. male korean gamers aren't normal about feminism, and there's been an ongoing witch hunt for feminists in the industry since about 2016, something you see noted in both the labor union statements. both NPR and the BBC this phenomenon to gamergate, and i'd say it's a pretty apt comparison.]

let me know if anything needs correction or if anything should be added.

[mischiefwife]

Hey, think twice before supporting the BG3 Stardew mod.

Saw this nice looking Stardew Valley mod with BG3 characters, pretty quickly knew something was off when you see Halsin/Astarion/Rolan front and center with no mention of Wyll at all.

Then we get this whopper of a cry post, maybe suggesting they can't be anti-black because they're not white? They can't show misogyny cause they're women? They can't be blamed at all because they're just polling their PATREON votes? Fucking do better. Can't even hide behind the usual excuse that it's a free fanwork, it's not.

Fandom's got a racism and misogyny problem. Step up and draw the line with these creators crying victim when asked 'where's Wyll?' (And yes I checked, the replies are 90% positive and 10% where's Wyll, where's the women) when you've already fully developed your random minor npc first. Team members being made uncomfortable translates to being called out for contributing to a lil' racism.

The misogyny hydra and the racism in fandom runs deep i know, but for the love of fuck can we push back against it?

Or you can side with the mod's supporters (this is one of the devs actually lol). Who post things like this.

And the creators don't say a fucking thing at all about it, they just keep playing victim. It would be so easy to approach this system with a SMIDGEN of respect, just acknowledging the racism at all. Seriously BG3 fandom. Demand better.

I don't give a shit if they're the most popular, there's also a REASON why Wyll is not. But if you want to just eat this shit up and contribute making your fandom shitty and uninviting, by all means.

[dairypropaganda]

You do know the lead game dev is a neo nazi right. They literally get money for you buying the game.

Real problems for Jewish people: trump supporters, far right, nazism, lack of democracy, racism, authoritarianism, hatred culture, holocaust denials.

Non jews, filled with hatred and authoritarianism and cancelling basic human freedoms: but a videogame is bad for jews because goblins!

[askagamedev]

There’s a lot of noise online about live service games being detrimental to the quality of games, such as initial launches being bug ridden and with incomplete features. Is there any truth to this last statement? And are the spending patterns reflecting the idea that people are dissatisfied with this model of monetization?

I think that it is true that initial launches are indeed more bug ridden today than they were before day 1 patches were possible, but the reason for this is much less nefarious than most are imagining. I was already working in games before that big change happened and I saw what happened from the inside.

Before we could patch, producers would cut content and features much more mercilessly because we lacked the time to finish that content properly and still pass certification. We couldn't ever modify or add stuff to the disc or cartridge, so we had to make sure that what went out was the most stable thing we could. Stability was more important than scope, so we'd see stuff get cut near the end all the time. There were a lot of features and content that players never saw because we couldn't get them polished and stable before the game had to ship. If we were lucky we managed to save some of it for expansion packs but most of it never saw the light of day. The last few weeks of the project were mostly wasted sitting around and waiting because we couldn't ever risk making any changes that weren't addressing cert-blocking bugs and we would mostly wait around to find out if cert had gone through.

Back then, the burned and duplicated disk sent to retailers was the final pencils-down-step-away moment. The gold master is what got used to duplicate all of the discs and we couldn't make a new one. Further, all of those duplicated disks out in the wild would forever hold the "final" version of the game, bugs and all. The only way a new version was possible was another print run, and that only occurred in very rare cases where the entire first print run sold out and there was enough demand to print a second run... and the publisher felt it was worth going through certification a second time.

With the advent of internet-connected game consoles and networks, we got the ability to push out post-launch patches including day 1 content updates. With the ability to patch came the potential to finish some of that nearly-complete content that we used to have to cut for stability purposes. Instead of focusing on stability, we could actually push fixes later and fit more content into our releases. This meant that we could also shift people to work on post-launch content, rather than simply sitting around and doing nothing while waiting for cert results. We could fix bugs and work on new content and features during that time and we could leverage all the expertise and experience we had earned in the years of development up to that point.

To summarize - in the olden days, we had to cut a lot more content and features that were close to being finished because we needed to go pencils-down for certification. Today, we can continue working on content that would have been cut because we can patch fixes into the game. This results in overall buggier content and features on average at launch but it also results in significantly more content and features on average at launch than before.

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[sp-ud]

Every time I see a "Hazel doesn't really need fairy godparents, she has good parents and friends, so what if she's sad they moved and her brother is off at college? Thats nothing compared to what Timmy or Dev have going on." I want to cry.

Have you considered that maybe that's the point? I know here on tumblr it's mostly people who were fans of the original show and are now in their early adult lives and teens who probably heard of the original but haven't watched it but checked out ANW for one reason or another. But don't forget, this is still a show for younger kids.

Hazel reflects a lot of the realistic internal struggles younger kids deal with, especially when suddenly thrown into a completely new phase of their lives like moving to a new city, going to a new school, or an older sibling going to college.

And that's a good thing, it's good to show kids that even if their lives aren't Horrid they still can have issues. They're still allowed to struggle 'even though' they have good parents, 'even though' they aren't bullied, 'even though' most of their issues are internal.

And that is why it's good Hazel is the protagonist and not Dev. While yes from a fandom perspective I get why people are drawn to the character with the most blatant angst potential, that like. Would be a terrible show. Even if it was meant for a YA audience and not kids.

But back to Hazel, she's so brilliantly written with her struggles because it's like yeah. I can see any 10 year old being in her situation. Minus the whole fairy godparents. Lots of kids struggle with making new friends, or knowing how to deal with being somewhere completely new, and so many other things. Its nice to see, and once again I think this choice by the writers was very intentional.

Also maybe some of yall need to think about possible unconscious biases you have that could be causing you to focus on the sad white boy and not the black girl who has plenty of her own complexities and issues. And why when you do focus on Hazel why you only focus on how she can support Dev.

Hazel is an interesting and well written character and I'm sick of there being like no talk or anything in the fandom about her without it being attached to Dev. It's her show goddamn it. The writers made her the protagonist for a reason and wrote her the way they did for a reason so please don't just ignore her. Go rewatch the show and actually pay attention to her.

And a final semi-related note, some of yall need to stop forgetting Hazel's 10. The amount of criticism towards her that can instantly be countered with "She's 10" is insane. I know for some of us it's been a while since we were 10, but I think we can all agree we were all far from being perfectly logical and emotionally intelligent at age 10.

[knife-eared-jan]

I wanna get over it but I'm actually getting more and more upset the more time passes? I honestly don't want to be, but I feel like I'm grieving for the characters and the world I put my time and love into on most days of a decade now. Like, I really mean daily even if it's not been on Tumblr for the entire time.

For many of us, these characters found us during a really dark time and we don't call them our emotional support characters for nothing. And to have all that history so dismissively handwaved by the devs in their social media posts is actually hurtful as hell on a personal level...

(I get that 117 choices is insane and would take up an unreasonable amount of resources and limit storytelling. But I did expect 8 or 10, even if half of them just lead to codex entries. That would have been fine! I mostly expected that there wouldn't be choices from DAO and DA2 as well, but Inquisition?

How will they even give a throwaway mention to the Inquisitor's romance like they did for Hawke in dialogue in DAI, if you can't even select that Cass is Divine or Bull, Blackwall or Cullen are dead? You can't even say oh they're at home doing this and that. At best romances like Dorian or Josephine will get some content while others get none. At worst the romance choice input is actually just there to ask if you romanced Solas. Yes, I'm hella upset at that even as I am currently obsessed with Solavellan.)

Because most importantly this just makes the whole world of Thedas feel.. idk cold? Knowing that there is nothing to make it feel like we affected anything in the world so far and that so many of the characters we love will never appear again because they once gave us a choice involving them. Like, do I now need to hope I don't get any major choices for the new characters I fall in love with because that means they'll never bring them back again?? Better not get attached?? Is that really what you want to teach your players?

I don't have any hope that they are self-reflecting enough or care enough to do this, but maybe if the backlash is bad enough they'll start working on a patch that at least contains some codex entries and ambient voice lines? That's like my one piece of copium I can try to actually suspend disbelief for rn. Apparently I've entered the bargaining stage..

I've been hardcore hyping about Veilguard since 11 June (which happens to have been my birthday and like that was the best part of it for me) and I really don't want to feel this way, but I do and I don't know how to describe it other than I'm grieving.

This line currently feels immeasurably ironic...