#because of what i honestly see as sunken cost fallacy — so many of them had devoted themselves to miquella that even after the charm broke

[glassrunner]

been replaying pretty much all of elden ring so i could show my partner the dlc and i think what gets me so much about the SOTE npcs is that, if you’re someone who wants to help as many npcs as possible, the narrative effectively punishes you for it

i got really attached to moore and didn’t want him to be sad forever so i convinced him to continue on and keep his chin up. i aided freyja in her confusion and persuaded her to ride on into battle, living up to her redmane glory. the story is a little different with thiollier and ansbach, but they stuck to their convictions just as the rest of miquella’s followers did with my help.

and the end result was death. such is the price of blind devotion and the desperation to escape the pain of uncertainty.

[cptsd-skywalker]

"...possibly sexual abuse given his relationship to Palpatine included going to bars and sharing the same sleeping quarters during that time. He also touches Anakin in super creepy ways in ROTS novelization that recalled me to my own abuse..."

You don't want to know how long my internal screaming and sick feeling over seeing Palpatine touch Anakin (who did NOT want to be touched) on screen took to click. Because I honestly confused being molested with being physically abused as a child. But once I realized...I.

And Palpatine KEPT putting himself alone with children too. No one saw. And for Anakin coming from Tatooine? It could have been worse he thinks. It's just the cost of social climbing. It's what HAPPENS to people like. He would have normalized it because of his history of trauma. And no one thought to check.

As a trauma survivor, watching anytime Palpatine touches Anakin in a frankly sensual way on the shoulder or arms in TCW or the Prequals always makes my stomach churn. It’s very predatory. It always reminds me of my own abuser. It’s part of the reason I headcannon him as explicitly sexually abusing him, though in cannon the covert sexual abuse is bad enough.

This is the definition of child grooming.

Palpatine purposefully exposes Anakin to sexually explicit and inappropriate situations to destroy his boundaries little by little, while also cultivating a relationship of closet close secrecy. He makes Anakin feel safe with him while slowly turning up the temperature in Anakin’s pot until he is boiling and none the wiser. As a child, he knows Anakin is desperate for a real connection to family after being separated from his mother. He knows that Anakin is vulnerable and that he has the Jedi at his mercy, so he uses that power to get Anakin alone to have private talks with the child in his private rooms. Deeply inappropriate at best and blatant CSA coding at worst.

You are not the only one to notice inappropriately sexual undertones in thier relationship. Just look at their exchange whenever Anakin is turned to the darkside. Anakins boundaries have been so thoroughly destroyed that he feels totally culpable with Palpatine even though at this point he has only actually attacked 1 Jedi. He technically speaking could turn back, but because of the grooming and secrecy and the isolation that Palpatine has inflicted on Anakin; Anakin feels as though he is just as guilty when in reality he is a victim. That is exactly how child predators keep their victims from telling. They tell their victims that they wanted the abuse and that they are just as guilty as the abuser, that they won’t be believed or will even be punished, that they will loose everything they love. In this case for Anakin it means loosing his place in the Jedi Order, loosing Obi Wan as a friend, and loosing Padme his only love. For Anakin, he is choosing the option where at least he can save one of those options, while the other two are a foregone conclusion. He believes because of the conditioning he’s been under since he was 9 by both the Jedi and Palpatine that he is a lost cause the moment he so much as toes the line of the darkside, which is of course a sunken cost fallacy that he has already sold his soul to the devil.

The sexual imagery in the scene wherein Anakin is on his knees and in total submission to Palpatines whims is not lost on me @komikbookgeek. It smacks of the power dynamic of an abuser who has completely subdued their victim into emotional slavery, and it is not a coincidence that many 18+ fics have interpreted the scene after as a sexual one. It’s a clear coding of their power dynamic reading to me the same as when my father sexually abused me. He told me that I had “done it once and liked it” so the other times made no difference. He had already sullied me, so me telling him no was a mute point and entirely unreasonable. I believed him much like Anakin believes Palpatine. You are already worthless to them. But you have great use for me. It is so heartbreaking to me that Anakin remains trapped in that horrific cycle for the next 20 years.

This scene was no accident in my opinion:

https://cptsd-skywalker.tumblr.com/post/688946571446026240/anakincito-this-scene-is-insane-bc-the

@merrysithmas

@that-gay-jedi

@synapticjive

@rogue205

@gch1995

@komikbookgeek

@tragicfantasy-girl

@fanfic-lover-girl

@ignobleknight

@mynameisanakin

@wingletblackbird

@dashingaudacity

[noco7]

ch.10 ramblings

What I tried to achieve in ch.10/what I want to achieve later/what I think of Sierra

So ch.10 was pretty long, so I’m almost not sure where to start when talking about it. I guess I’ll start with some of my goals (one of them ended up being so long that im putting it in a different post) 1) (Too long see - it will be in the next post)

2) I wanted to re-explain Ch. 9 I feel like ch.9 wasn’t my best work? Lol. Like although people could see the argument coming, there wasn’t a lead up in the chapter itself. And a lot of things Noah said were like. New. And also rlly harsh at the end? Haha.  At the end of ch.5 people were like “oh i see both sides” but at ch.9 people were like, taking sides. Either Cody was oblivious or they couldn’t see where exactly Noah was coming from. So I decided to explain it better, via those flashblack lines, and the conversation with Trent, where Cody could finally really process what had gone down. It also gave me a chance to insert some like second-hand noco fluff, just because it had been so long and also to remind us what was at stake here. Lol. We also see Cody start to like, internalize what Noah was saying. Usually when they’re arguing Cody’s just ... *reacting*. He’s denying, or apologizing, or just figuring out smth to say Back. And not really being like... wait maybe he has a point. Wait. And once he starts thinking about it, that’s when it comes crashing down for him. Oh maybe I am a bit of a problem person. Yikes. 3) I wanted this chapter to rlly be about sides. “nothing is black and white” Courtney is on one side and refuses to see the other. Heather is helping Cody but she’s also helping herself.  Mrs. Morrison sees Cody as a son but Courtney sees him as a project. Noah was right but Noah was also wrong. Cody is innocent but also not. The housekeeper did something bad for the right reasons. There’s Sierra’s side and there’s Codys but both of them are suffering. Sierra doesn’t get a perfect sentence and somehow both Noah and Cody lost the same argument.  4) I wanted to humanize Sierra. Or at least make you feel bad for her In the show she’s always meant to be like “wow she’s WEIRD” and i guess she is. Some people say she’s autistic. My fic gave her the diagnosis of “erotomania” which honestly.. I don’t stand by? Like I have no idea. And I purposefully the psychologist kind of a sucky dude. Like he’s disrespectful, he’s probably just tacking on a label that seems to fit and that the public can ooh and ahh over. And I feel bad for her. There was always something tragic about her to me, that she put all this effort and focus into a guy who’d never love her. And her belief that he did love her... it’s hard not to wonder if it’s just denial. Or Sunken-Cost fallacy. Like she’s done this much for him, she can’t back out now. Honestly, she reminds me of kpop stans. I say this as a person who listens to kpop music and used to be heavily involved in kpop fandoms.. There are so many people wasting hours of their life to stream and buy and provide for their fave celebrities. I have spent over like.. probably $300-500 dollars on that boy group and I’ll never get it back lmaoo. I could write whole essay about fandom culture and how fanwars are ultimately to the gain of the companies, everything goes back to them, but uhh. Not going to. But anyway, Sierra is a person who bought into it, went too far, and now refuses to get back out. And I feel bad for her. Honestly, I think that like Cody, she just has no one else. Like she’s latched onto him as her saviour and she has nothing to fall back on otherwise.  I mean she’s still a huuuge creep but uhh. Still. There is a line from World Tour I can’t get over, in the semi-final episode where she tells Cody that he has to work to deserve fans like her. And that just shows off the entitlement, the fan-culture. And I find that really fascinating, overall. I kinda like her. And not in a “I want to tone her down,” or “I wish she used her knowledge of total drama more and was a smarter contestant.” No. I like her just as a stalker fan. That’s compelling enough. Total Drama didn’t do much with it but repeat the same jokes over and over, but there’s a well of depth behind it if you reach.  I don’t think I really showed that off in this chapter though, just the denial bits. If I make another fanfic that involves Sierra, I definitely will. 5) There’s also stuff I could say here about like. The media coverage, but I think it’s abundantly obvious I am not a celebrity and have never dealt with it so like. It definitely falls short. But smth smth, having no control over your public image is frightening. Cody did control it for a week and that was a great high, but in the end it got away from him. Good attention and bad attention. Cody can never catch a break. I’ll go into it more kinda.. the good vs bad attention in some other chapters. I’m sleepy. I’ll also go more into the need for “control,” that Cody kinda has in this fic. It’s not that he’s bad at being passive or doesn’t enjoy it, but “control” gives him that cool guy masculine rush. So. yeah.  anyway thanks for reading this long post. 

[dappersheep]

Food Fantasy: An Analysis on what killed a Golden Goose (2/3)

Welcome back. Before we get started, disclaimers again! I do not own the game or its characters, nor do I claim to know the history and future of the game. What I am entitled to are the thoughts and opinions written within this post. You may or may not agree with the points spoken of here. This post also remains untagged from the main foofan tag. Only my followers will see this.

We are now on the second part, so let's go forward under the cut!

Elex

And here we have our beloved global publisher that most of seem to have Stockholm Syndrome for. Don't lie, at least half of us are still playing this damned game due to sunken cost fallacy, sunken time fallacy and the cute/hot jpegs.

In 2018, everything started out fine. Sure, maybe we had some translation mishaps here and there -coughwe'llgettothatwreckagelatercough- but overall, Elex was running the game fairly well. Rewards were on time, we had active social media and support, and a discord was set up!

Hint: Please note I use quite a bit of sarcasm in most everything I say.

And then somewhere along that road, things got derailed. And I mean it like, we're in the midst of a trainwreck in slow motion and we've only cleared the initial collision and still hurtling forward or backward into a steel wreckage ticking inferno.

Problems started cropping up as early as late 2018, just a few months after the game was launched in July.

⦁ Art contest mishaps. You know when you hold an art contest on Facebook out of all places with its shitty tagging system, you're bound to have entries lost to the void, people forced to register an FB account just to participate (seriously, who even has an FB account that isn't just there to appease family members?) and having to wrestle with figuring out how FB's tagging system works. Add to that the panel of judges happen to be Elex staff who don't have a good eye for good artwork (we actually had a kiddy figure drawing win over a well drawn one during the last contest!) and that they ALSO weren't very good at organizing such contests on FB... well, we had several grievances over that.

⦁ Region blocked FB announcements. Strangely enough, I stopped getting announcements around Father's Day of 2019 while everyone else outside of SEA kept getting updates. Turns out that someone on Elex's staff really didn't like SEA players or was just really bad at fixing the settings for the group and never bothered to revert it back. It didn't matter in the long run though, because...

⦁ Abandoned social media platforms. FooFan Twitter, FooFan Facebook... they all floated slowly into the void and was never heard from again. And this was before the 2020 pandemic.

⦁ Remember what I said about Discord? Yeah, apparently, they opened one up a little too early and the staff in charge of it knew zero about how to setup and mod a discord community, and didn't even have the manpower needed to mod the influx of members that came in! Suffice to say, they had to get help from top players and mods from the FB groups to come in and sort things out because someone kept pinging @ everyone every few seconds other than the usual chaos that comes from a server with no filters and people trying to turn the discord into Global Chat 2.0, minus Russian hours.

⦁ Also in line with the point about abandoned social media platforms, they've also mostly abandoned the discord too and only pop in once in a while to check the bug reports or lost accounts. You have a slightly better chance of response with the in-game support. Only slightly. And there's a running joke with several variations on the main discord that the Owner account of the discord server was manned by an intern-kun who never bothered to pass it on to the next unfortunate soul left to maintain this game.

⦁ Favoritism. Funtoy is also guilty of this but they don't publish the game for Global. If you're a top spender the likes of maxing out your cash rebates within the three months or so and you kept spending even beyond that, Elex could possibly invite you to a funky little club where your voice is more important than say... 99% of the playerbase. On top of that, if you keep spending, you could technically also ask for stuff like getting this frame over that frame, or well.... delay certain features from coming to Global for over a year. Now you can simp AND be heard! (Note: In 2021, it's possible that that club may be dead too, as all things shall be)

⦁ SJW Friendly. I don't know if Funtoy themselves have anything to also do with this particular decision... but it's saying something that after a certain little tiddy tantrum from the community side, Elex decided not to announce anything about a certain event's fate and when asked by it by other parties (not me) they either lie through their teeth, or beat around the bush with a non-answer.

⦁ Partial translations, mistranslations. Now, I understand that a lot of Chinese grammar and semantics are confusing to translate properly into several other languages, but you'd think Elex would have given their translators more context to the character or the mechanic to avoid such mistranslations that later set off gender debates or worded the skill/artifact description a little clearer. That is... unless Elex really is hands-off trying to get to know this IP from the start and only gave it the most bare minimum of English where they can cut costs for it, so people can understand it 'well enough' to throw money at an obviously not beta-read quality game.

⦁ No translations. Yes we do have certain parts of the game that are in Chinese since forever since xx patch. Some characters' voiceline texts are still in chinese, especially during the Pledge scenes. More recent artifacts are also in chinese with no announced translation in sight. And don't get me started on the Food Soul bios, or lack thereof.

⦁ Delayed events. Prime example? We had weeks of minor events/no events and still Elex managed to eff everything up for our second Anniversary in July 2020. We ended up getting the Croissant event in late August with barely any apologies and compensation for the delay... and this likely would have never arrived as 'early' as it did if people hadn't been railing about where our Anniversary event was. As it stands, we are several minor events behind CN, at least a year and a half's worth behind. I know Global had requested heavily for more spaced out events (to save resources, not that it actually worked with all the nerfed rewards we get) compared to CN but this is extremely ridiculous.

⦁ Delayed permanent features. Hm... Guild Wars, Sky Tower, Bar, that Wuchang Fish Showdown... several Quality of Life updates.... that new permanent pool update... Food Souls still missing their JP voice packs... Food Soul Bios... *slowly ticking off more than I have fingers and toes*

⦁ Customer Support is whack. You'd be lucky if you got someone who understood your problem/inquiry right off the bat AND did something about it efficiently. You'd be luckier if they answered you honestly if you were inquiring about event updates or other buggy features or reporting hackers.

⦁ The Great Turkey and Apple Incident of 2020. Well, if you were around for that little SNAFU during the Turkey re-run event, you'd know a percentage of people suddenly got logged out of their accounts and had a baller of a time trying to get their accounts back. You were especially unfortunate if you were playing on an iOS account because even if you did bind it (like a responsible player should be doing), you probably still wouldn't get it back in time to rank properly during Turkey. Some Android players also experienced this, but it wasn't as bad as what the iOS players experienced. And then there was the compensation mishap for that too.

⦁ Hacker-chan and not-so-uwu Hacker-teme. Hacker-chan is a meme. Hacker-chan was a harmless player who regularly topped in Top Showdown every week for a time to send a message to Elex just how easy it is to hack the game in certain rankings and invited Elex to ban them every time, just to test how competent Elex is. In the end, Elex has proven to be incompetent and also glaringly stupid about how their published game works. Hacker-teme is a collective of individuals over time who have cheated the game during important ranking events or in somewhat important permanent battles. If you tried to report a Hacker-teme with evidence to prove it -and trust me, people repeatedly have-, Elex would tell you that they're not cheating and/or lie through their teeth that they're 'investigating the case' and then not do anything about it and let them keep their event ranking and thus get the rewards while someone who actually worked hard/whaled hard to get the spot gets denied. In one case, they believe that if an account has rebate points and the player level is at least around level 80, then the hacker-teme is obviously playing the game fairly. Never mind that their units happened to have low to no artifact nodes opened, and not high in ascension.

And that is the end of the Elex saga. I'm aware there's likely more things about Elex that I've missed, but feel free to add on to this analysis post with your own thoughts.

The last part of this trilogy is probably what many of us are waiting for, for obvious reasons.