#best case scenario their takes are batshit insane but not totally wrong

[rainbowgod666]

(Raising hand) can my "autistic people is the closest thing real life has to PJO demigods" ass sit between the CIA proletariat and the Alien Capitalists lady???

it's been a bad year for essential workers, mental health, small businesses and probably many of the people reading this, but it's been a great year for hot takes

[thehollowstarsaga]

Hollow Star Saga Book Four Predictions

okay so since i've finished agasv it's time for my predictions for the next book:

the CeLeTheo polycule

so i remember Ashley mentioned that there's possibility for a polyam and the moment i heard that i was just immediately like, 'oh, they're definitely talking about Theo, Celadon and Lethe right?'

like i'm not the only one who thought Celedon and Theo had insane levels of chemistry in both agasv AND acafl???

and Celedon and Lethe are already super cute and canon by the end of agasv too??

I'd honestly love it if Lethe and Theo end up being into each other too like the dynamic sounds super fun.

anyway that's the prediction Celedon x Theo x Lethe is canon next book (i'm gonna look like such an idiot if i'm wrong)

2. dragon Theo???

now i'm not too sure about this one but maybe (just maybe) Theo's a dragon?

i remember i made this prediction all the way back when adahs was released and there was that random paragraph in the beginning on how people can be dragons without realizing it. i was like 'okay, so one of the characters we care about has to be a dragon right??'

by process of elimination i reached the conclusion that Theo was the dragon out of all of them.

i remember when we found out that his grand aunt is a dragon i freaked out like i was so proud of myself for reaching that conclusion cause there's a high chance that he inherited those traits.

buuuuuuuuuuuut i'm not too sure whether that's actually going to be explored or bought up or even be true in the next book so this is a very tentative theory.

3. if Riadne dies, then who's killing her?

okay so i'm not too confident about this because i don't actually know if Riadne will die in book 4, at least in the traditional sense. but if it does happen the potential candidates are;

Theo: NO LISTEN I'M NOT BEING BIASED ACTUALLY FR HEAR ME OUT; Theo wants to rule over seelie summer, and if i'm not mistaken you need to defeat the existing head in order to do that so... maybe? admittedly its not very likely though cause there aren't enough emotional stakes. unless Riadne just murders his parents or smth in the first half lmao. i'll say 5% chance

Arlo: since we're talking about murdering parental figures... yeah. i'd say there's like a 10% chance that it's Arlo who kills Riadne maybe?

Celadon: 25% chance it'll be Celadon simply for the emotional stakes... and murdering parental figures. but actually if we're talking about someone who needs to stab their mom in order to get over their mommy issues...

Vehan: him having some kind of arc in which he's vaguely unhinged would go so hard. sadly, however, it probably won't happen. he's still most likely to kill Riadne at 50% chance, because the angst would be so good.

others: this is just me covering up my tracks in case my top guesses are wrong so that i don't look like a total idiot. Lethe, Nausicaa and Aurelian take up the remaining 10%. although i seriously doubt it'll be any of them. if it is though, Lethe's most likely to and Aurelian's least likely to.

honestly the more i think about it Riadne probably won't be killed by someone else. either she'll manage to get herself killed in her quest for power or she won't die at all. it doesn't feel like all the loose ends would be tied up if she did (watch as she dies at the hands of someone i didn't mention on this list.)

5. Vehan does some insane shit

this actually isn't me pushing my let Vehan go batshit crazy agenda. i mean insane as in he's going to have a major battle or show off some huge feat of power.

extra points if it happens in front of Riadne.

i think the best case scenario is a Riadne vs Vehan fight scene.

6. Who's the big bad?

see this is more of a discussion than a prediction cause i know Riadne's our main antagonist but i feel like there might be an overarching one as well.

easiest answer to this is Cosmin, and honestly, yeah it probably is him. however, Luck seems like they have a good head on them and that they might stop him from doing anything that would harm Arlo, so i actually think that maybe, just maybe it's someone else.

Fate, maybe? i'm not sure, but it seems we don't like them.

it could be another one of the titans but i'm not too sure they'd introduce a completely new major antagonist by the fourth book.

7. Theo has a bigger role.

there's no evidence no nothing i'm just manifesting stfu

[neproxrezi]

Are you participating in the proposed dbd boycott to get them to do a game health update?

yeah, i wasn't sure at first caus "dont play the video game for a brief period" isn't going to work but "this company has put all its eggs in one basket and they are frankly quite neglectful of said basket, everyone stop buying anything ingame for 3 months" has me interested

more than 'fix the bugs' or anything else like that what i want to see out of the game is them being less god damn stingy with cosmetics (you should not have to pay $10 for ONE FUCKING COSMETIC) and addressing the grind. holy shit the grind in this game is so rough and it could be fixed fairly simply (i'm in favour of removing perk tiers, to cut a long post short)

hold on im gonna complain about dbd under a cut caus itll get long, i love this game so much but oh boy it has issues

it's been said a million times already but dbd's grind made more sense when there were like 4 or 5 characters per side, there are now over 20 and each new one introduces 3 perks to each side

I want to write about the grind in this game for a moment. There are 95 survivor perks in DBD. Every perk has three tiers. Some of them are great, and many are kind of pointless. Realistically, I'd bet you're only going to see about 15 of those perks in action in most of your games. However, if you unlock a perk to be taught to other survivors (which I tend to do even if I don't particularly want it, out of a mix of completionism and a 'may as well get it out of the way' kind of thing), you can't get rid of it. It's in your bloodwebs forever. 95 perks. 285 perk tiers. Let's talk about how long that takes to claim.

You buy a new character in the next chapter. You have every teachable perk unlocked. The new chapter really excited you, and you want to claim every perk on the new character (who I am going to name... Doug), so you saved a lot of bloodpoints in advance. In fact, you played for days and days and saved the cap, which is a million bloodpoints. You buy Doug, after much excited testing him out in the PTB. You spend all million points on Doug. Doug is now about level 35 to 40, out of 50. Hm. Well, time to keep playing. The bloodwebs kind of gave you a bunch of crap stuff on Doug, and you don't feel like running Power Struggle, Ace in the Hole, Babysitter and Breakdown, so you can't play Doug yet. You go play someone else.

Solo queuing as survivor is a mixed bag, and your games range from getting 10,000 bloodpoints (pretty rough game where everyone got wiped) to 27,000 (a great match, maybe with a bloodpoint offering). You save enough to get Doug to level 50. In the later levels, you start being able to get two perks a level instead of one. Let's say from level 1 to 50, you collect a total of 65 perks, because I don't remember exactly when it starts offering 2 per level. Okay, there are 220 perk levels left. Because of the game's propensity for giving you the same perk over and over to get you lots of perks at level 2 out of 3, of those 65 perk tiers you've probably got something like 20 to 25 actual perks. You're missing like, 70. Best case scenario, the ones you picked up include a lot of what you want. Most likely, you've got like half a good build and some gimmicky crap to slot in alongside it. Worst case scenario, which has happened to me plenty of times, you have like maybe one good perk and a pile of gimmicky crap. So. How long is it going to take you to get what you want?

There are 220 perk levels to go. After level 50, the webs are all the same size. It costs about 50,000 points to level up, and you get two perk levels per bloodweb. That's going to be 110 webs to get everything for Doug. Which is 5.5 million bloodpoints. Oh no. How many points were you earning per game again?

If you play with friends, you're probably going to do better. I find this to be true even if me and my friends are playing without voice comms or anything, because I just sort of know these people a bit better. I know my friend who mains Lisa Garland is a hook-diving bastard, so I don't need to go rescue anyone. Ace, god bless him, makes batshit altruistic plays, so I certainly don't need to go protect my teammates when he's out there doing things like this. I think I'm just going to sit on generators in the distance, think about our final gen spread, and try get us out of here. I'd say if I'm playing well, and accounting for offerings and WGLF stacks, with friends I average 30,000 a match and by myself I average 20,000. Playing killer I average more like 60,000, but playing killer is a bit stressful sometimes and I'm very indecisive about actually queuing up for it, so I probably actually get bp faster as survivor. I'm going to call the average per match across everything 25,000, because for every good game there are plenty where you underperform, or things just go drastically wrong. To earn 5.5 million points like that, you're going to have to play 220 matches. A game, including queue times and whatnot, can take ten to twenty minutes. That's... that's going to take a while. And that's ONE CHARACTER.

Now, on the survivor side you only really need to do this once. They're all just reskins of the same gameplay loop. On the killer side, you need to re-earn those perks for every new character you want to try out, because they're all different. Miiiiillions and millions of points. Hundreds of games. I have no problem with the game having a grind, but at this point it's absolute insanity.

In my opinion, removing perk tiers would cut the grind down to a reasonable level. There'd still be a grind, which I'm completely comfortable with existing, but it wouldn't be excruciatingly long, and you wouldn't have to spend as long dealing with bad perks.

HOWEVER, on top of that is the fact that they just. Holy shit the game updates slowly. I don't want to blame them for that in a way of like "these developers are incompetent and lazy", I really do love DBD to bits and I'm sure they do work very hard on it. That said, its update cycle is really slow. Reeaally slow. I wish they either had a bigger team, made balance updates faster (a handful of perk adjustments once every six weeks is... very very slow) or something to just try make the changes faster. Even when things do change it always feels so anxious and tentative, I wish they'd experiment more often. The time they disabled bloodlust to see what happened was really cool!

Yeah in short I just hope the grind gets addressed more than anything else, caus that's the part I actually think there's a relatively straightforward solution to. Also, I never got to play the older events where you could do shit like earn cosmetics, but they sounded way fucking cooler than the new ones. The halloween one last year was absolute shit, it's weird that their special events would get worse over time rather than better.

Buuut I agree with Scott Jund that the Resident Evil chapter was bad news for DBD's long term health because the one thing that would really give BHVR a kick up the ass is competition, and every time they land an amazing licensed chapter they become harder to compete with. They have an absolute monopoly on asymmetrical horror, and I honestly think the game would be in a better state right now if they had some competition >:[

[margridarnauds]

shuffle the ma cast/roles with a randomizer and talk about how you imagine it!

Thanks!

So, I’m going to randomize it with ONE caveat, and that’s that, in cases where I land on someone who would require the roll to be genderbent, I pull another name instead. This is for the sake of protecting my sanity after rolling Kai and Mitsuo Yoshihara for Margrid. 

Also, while I was initially going to go down basically the ENTIRE cast list, I realized, frankly, that was batshit insane, so I’m focusing on the five most prominent roles: Marie, Fersen, Margrid, Orléans, and Louis. (Note: Before I made this executive decision, I’d gotten results such as “Hanafusa Mari playing Rose Bertin” and “Natsumi Kon playing Lamballe”. Also, for the sake of upping the choices, I’m adding a few ladies who aren’t in the top five, because otherwise, under my own rules, because both the Antoinettes and the Margrids stayed static, I would just be switching the Margrids and Antoinettes around, and that wouldn’t REALLY be as fun. 

Marie Antoinette (A) - Kanami Ayano

Marie Antoinette (M) - Mao Ayabuki

Margrid Arnaud (A) - Rena Sasamoto

Margrid Arnaud (M) - Hanafusa Mari

Fersen (A) - Ryonosuke Onada

Fersen (M) - Mitsuo Yoshihara

Louis (A)- Mario Tashiro

Louis (M)- Furukawa Yuta

Orléans (A)- Kai

Orléans (M)- Yuichi Harada

Personally, I think Kanami Ayano would be a WONDERFUL Antoinette - She has a very nice, graceful presence on stage and, while it can be difficult for me, personally, to see the quiet, sweet Lamballe taking center stage, I know that she very much did during her time with Takarazuka. I feel like she’d play her very charmingly, very elegantly, more similar in tone to Rena Sasamoto’s, though perhaps more subdued from the beginning, which would downplay the changes in Act 2 but also make for some very effective scenes in prison. 

I have a hard time seeing her clashing against Rena Sasamoto’s Margrid, though - I’m not sure how they would do with that conflict, because, for it to work, both Marie AND Margrid have to have a certain amount of fire and, frankly, neither one of them are known for playing fiery roles. The fiereriest Rena Sasamoto’s gotten, to my immediate recollection, was when she played Eponine. Even when she played the role in 2006, she was...rather miserable in it, which, to be fair, I do blame partially on the directing as much as anything else, as well as the fact she was quite young at the time. But, still, even back then, Rena had this very elegant way of carrying herself that was at odds with Margrid - MAYBE, if she played it now, she could play it in a way to emphasize Margrid’s fall, but that’s a BIG maybe. 

Ryonosuke Onada, I actually think, would make a better Fersen than an Orléans - He has a very...”heroic” stage presence, he’s charming, with a nice tenor voice. Fersen doesn’t need to have the power that Orléans has behind his voice, because Fersen is quieter, subtler. I think that he would play a very warm Fersen, though, perhaps, given that he did seemingly work to humanize his Orléans despite....everything, we would see a few different shades to him. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but I do think that, while he wouldn’t totally REINVENT the character like Furukawa did, we would get to see some different angles to Fersen, a certain softness and vulnerability that goes beyond his Romantic Hero image. Not as splashy as Mario Tashiro’s, not as aloof as Furukawa’s, not as.....Kaisen as Kai’s. 

Or I could be totally wrong, who knows? 

It would seem, from behind the scene photos, that he gets on very well with Kanami Ayano (or, at least, they both do a very good job appearing to get on well) - That could lead to a very natural dynamic between his Fersen and her Antoinette. 

Mario Tashiro...I think would actually make a WONDERFUL Louis. He did a fantastic Franz Josef in Elisabeth and, with his distinctive voice, he could really, really sell Louis’ solo, and I feel like he and Kanami Ayano’s Antoinette could round one another out nicely. 

.....I’m sure that Kai would bring the same amount of talent and nuance to his Orléans that he brought to his Fersen and Light Yagami. Not much more to really add there. He and Rena could bring the unique level of chemistry that their Fersen and Antoinette had to the stage once again with Margrid and Orléans. 

Now. M cast. Mao Ayabuki actually wouldn’t be TOO unlikely an option for Antoinette, given that she DOES have star power as a former Takarazuka star. I haven’t really looked into anything she’d done, but she’s a good enough actress/singer at what she does, the only issue I can see is that it seems like her voice has a much lower range than Marie’s written for - Which makes sense, given she was an otokoyaku in her Zuka days. Given that her Takawiki article says that she loves crying, I suspect that her trial scene wouldn’t have the stoic brokenness mixed with dignity that Sasamoto displayed. Since I only have Bertin to judge her acting/singing off of, I’ll note that she infuses her Bertin with a definite sense of pride and glamour that I could see her adding to her Antoinette as well. 

Hanafusa Mari as Margrid... 

Look. Allow me to be blunt. 

That is the single worst nightmare scenario this could have created. This isn’t even because I personally dislike Hanafusa Mari, rather because there has never, in the entire existence of musical theatre, been a role that is more polarly opposite from The Empress of The Imperial Theatre’s specialty. Hanafusa Mari, in general (no, I am NOT counting Carmen) tends to focus on queens who had sad lives. And you will KNOW that they had sad lives by the end of it, given that all it takes to set her lip aquiver is for someone to drop their tea in her immediate vicinity. I don’t feel like she would know HOW to deal with a character as impoverished as Margrid, because there’s no GLAMOUR to her, not really. Not much to romanticize. And Hanafusa also tends to go for innocent characters, characters who, even at their worst, are misled (and if they aren’t misled, she’ll MAKE them misled). Margrid Arnaud, on the other hand, is an anti-heroine who leans into being a villain antagonist at times. There is an EDGE to her. Can anyone really tell me that Hanafusa could convincingly shout out “KILL THE CUNT” at the top of her lungs? Could anyone tell me that, with her classically trained voice, she could do any of Margrid’s belts in “Enough is Enough?” Or really be able to give Margrid any of her fire and fury? She’d do well for “Blinded by the Light of a Thousand Candles”, probably break into tears at the end of it, but her Margrid would be so saintly, so simpering, I would honestly probably leave the room. It would be worse than The 2006 run. What we would get, with her being played against Mao Ayabuki’s Antoinette, would be a proud, haughty Antoinette bullying poor, sweet Margrid and, tbh, if I wanted that, I would just go back to the German production. 

Mitsuo Yoshihara’s Fersen........God it would be interesting, wouldn’t it? For one, Yoshihara does NOT have the general look you’d expect from a love interest, having a rather stocky build and an overwhelming voice. It would be INTERESTING seeing him trying to play the love interest and singing the quieter love songs, but I do know from his work in Side Show and Violet that he CAN. His Fersen would be VERY warm, very friendly, in some ways the exact opposite of Furukawa Yuta’s, but with the same degree of thought put into the role. Yoshihara is an A Class actor, I can guarantee that he would be putting thought behind every single LOOK that Fersen has. 

Furukawa Yuta would probably play Louis off more as someone who WANTS to be a good father and husband, but who is still a little distant despite his own best intentions. While his Louis wouldn’t be in love with Marie, they could have a mutual respect, though I sense that Furukawa.....might play the relationship as being a little bit more broken? I DO know that his take on Louis’ song, no matter what approach he took, would be devastating, as we see him breaking down that proud facade he’s built up the entire time. He and Mitsuo Yoshihara would probably find SOME way to goof off during the curtain calls. 

Yuichi Harada - .......2006 Orléans. That’s all I’m going to say.