#but also how *fundamentally different* they are

[cuntyji]

nanami prides himself on many things—his discipline, his work ethic, his impeccable taste in ties. but above all, he prides himself on his ability to communicate clearly and concisely, whether in speech or in writing. his text messages are a testament to this:

nanami: I will arrive at 7:30 p.m. Let me know if you need anything.

capitalized. punctuated. grammatically flawless.

then there is you. his lovely girlfriend. his chaotic girlfriend.

you: oks eeu thns

nanami blinks. once. twice. he tilts his phone screen away, then back, as if a different angle might help decipher whatever cryptic language this is. "oks eeu thns" is not english. nor is it japanese. it is… something else. something eldritch.

"what." he mutters to himself.

this is not the first time. nor will it be the last. your texts are a battlefield, a warzone of typos, autocorrect fails, and complete disregard for sentence structure. you do not "text." you unleash a tornado of half-formed thoughts at an alarming rate, as though your thumbs operate on a separate plane of existence.

exhibit a:

you: r u cmg home latr i wan ice cre nanami: Are you asking if I will be home late, and if so, whether you want ice cream? you: ye nanami: …What flavor? you: gimme mint sumn u kno the blue green w the chunks idk idc nanami: You want mint chocolate chip. you: ye

he has, over time, become somewhat of a linguist. an interpreter. a man who now instinctively knows that when you say "bcum," you mean "become" and not whatever horrifying alternative that initially flashes through his mind. but nothing—nothing—prepared him for exhibit b:

you: bby whn u cming hom i wan hug n u also i los a sock idk where she go nanami: I will be home at 6 p.m. I assume you meant to say you lost a sock. you: y au did nanami: What does that mean. you: *ya i did nanami: Understood.

he did not understand. he once tried to gently correct your typos. you responded by sending him "ok grammarly" and proceeding to text even faster with worse errors out of sheer spite. now, nanami has simply adapted.

you: i made pasta bt i dropd some :( rip lil guy nanami: Rest in peace to the fallen. you: he wud hv wantd us to eat his brothr in his honr nanami: Then we shall.

sometimes, he marvels at how two people so fundamentally different could love each other so much. and then he remembers the first time you sleepily texted him "gn ily mwuah" at 1:43 a.m. with no capitalization, no punctuation, just raw, unfiltered affection—

and suddenly, he doesn’t mind deciphering your nonsense at all.

[strangesmallbard]

i do think it’s interesting that severance fans often default to discussing the outties and innies as two separate people—like yes, functionally, they are right now. lumon does its best in-universe to separate outties and innies. for example: banning contact between outties and their innies’ coworkers, banning contact between outties and innies themselves. they create that distance and the fantastic acting also helps create that distance. it’s fundamentally important to the show that we acknowledge that difference.

and like. yes it’s a philosophy question: at what point do outties and innies become truly different people? is a person stored in their memories, their upbringing, or their instincts? etc. as we’ve seen so far, this separation creates some of the most fucked up consent issues you’ve ever seen. but also, and this is so easy to forget, there is also no separation. mark scout is mark s, helena eagan is helly r, and visa-versa. one is just missing necessary history and context to be the other person, but the vestiges remain. essentially: i don’t think they can truly become two different people and therein lies some tension.

for example: mark s has mark scout’s frankly impressive ability to repress any and all grief-related emotions. (i was wondering yesterday, actually, whether an innie who experiences some of the same life events as their outtie will eventually morph into them. like a manual reintegration.) another example someone else brought up: helly r has helena eagan’s entitlement and strong belief in her own personhood.

the outtie vs innie conception is particularly interesting when it comes to how fans discuss helly r/helena eagan. many people love helly and hate helena and it has me going “huh!�� because, like. that could be the same gal! in different fonts. they both want to believe they’re completely different and want everyone else to believe that too. but we’ve been shown differently.

i’ve also seen some cognitive dissonance in discussing helly r/helena’s actions, which is also very interesting. there’s a very human urge to paint one as evil, the other good. but that’s never how it goes. yeah irving says “helly was never cruel” but he’s biased! (which is a good thing! i love when characters are biased). helly tried to kill helena last season (i know i just said they’re not separate people, but helly doesn’t agree with me). in season 2, helena stole her body and assaulted mark s. again, absolutely insane consent issues inherent in the severance process. (maybe it doesn’t come down to the good/evil dichotomy at all but rather: power. who has the power and when are they justified to wield or fight it)

anyway! no tl;dr. just food for thought. please try to enjoy each sentence equally etc

[ooooo-mcyt]

I know Joel being mostly alone in Third Life is largely attributed to him being a loner and not having solid loyalties that season, and yeah, he did spend a lot of time alone willingly, and he was uncertain about his loyalties for most of the season. But I think it's really fascinating to look at the other side of why Joel was so isolated in Third Life;

That being that all the alliances he did form were fundamentally either coercive or conditional, either mutually or from the other end of things.

Joel and Scar were "friends", but their "friendship" was formed with Scar doing what he did best in Third Life- throwing his weight around and asking for something from Joel as a Scary Red Name. It was an alliance based on Joel not wanting to get on the bad side of a red name who was implicitly threatening him (as scar did with most players).

Joel joined Dogwarts briefly, but at the point where Joel joined, Dogwarts had started majorly employing intimidation tactics on the rest of the server, which left Joel in a position where he, again, didn't really have any choice but to just hang the banner and hope for the best.

People talk about his "flighty loyalties" with how he switched between sides, but I'd argue this had less to do with Joel's sense of loyalty and more to do with the coercive tactics that both Scar and Dogwarts liked to use at different points.

Joel had other allies at points. He bonded with Etho a bit. I think Scott and Jimmy both liked him. Cleo and Bdubs were friendly with him after he left Dogwarts. But these were largely very loose bonds, and many of them were conditional on the fact that they happened to be on the "same side".

Yes, Joel's decision to play relatively solo and not commit harder to a side was a lot of the reason he was a "lone wolf" in Third Life, but there was also a massive aspect of isolation from the other end where Joel was used as an easy intimidation target or convenient temporary ally by other players who (intentionally or not), would capitalize on the fact that he was alone to get something out of him, and that would just drive him further into isolation.

Which is something I always thought was fascinating regarding Third Life. Especially considering that, while Joel didn't seem too upset by the isolation in Third Life specifically, I think the fact that it wasn't entirely self imposed is good context for his continued isolation in Last Life, which he took significantly harder.

[ceaselesswatchersspecialboy]

I love the Clone Wars, it’s a show I grew up on and it was a fundamental part of my childhood, but one of the things I can’t forgive it for characterisation-wise is Anakin. I have a complicated relationship with TCW Anakin where I either love him and think ‘yeah, that’s Anakin’ or I just grimace, because he feels so jarringly different from the Anakin established in the movies.

I know it stems from the backlash that portrayal of Anakin received, but I generally dislike the decision to make Anakin a more ��acceptable’ masculine figure to speak. It’s in the little things too. He is not a rogue, charming hero when it comes to flirting with Padme. I can see him being that way when trying to flirt his way out of a situation, but Padme? He sucks at flirting with his wife in AOTC and ROTS and I find that endearing about him. He’s so overwhelmed by love and never properly learned how to convey that romantically. He’s also very prone to crying or almost crying when overwhelmed by his emotions, particularly anger — see him admitting his massacre to Padme in AOTC — but I don’t think we ever see him cry intensely in TCW, even in moments where movie!Anakin would. It’s like they’re afraid to make him vulnerable in that way, because so many perceived it as a flaw in his previous characterisation. But Anakin is a vulnerable character. He wears his heart on his sleeve even when he tries to hide it. He’s even afraid of his own emotional outbursts.

He’s angry, yes, but that anger doesn’t just manifest in yelling or violence. Anakin notoriously feels every emotion too deeply, and regularly flips between seeing Obi-wan as a perfect mentor and father/brother, to absolutely resenting him. He also sees Padme this way, which is shown in TCW, but it feels different than how we see it in the movies — again, Anakin in TCW has to be the pinnacle of masculinity, even when he’s being toxic and lashing out, he has to remain that rogue hero stereotype, which just doesn’t work for Anakin. I’d probably enjoy the Clovis Arcs a lot more if it delved into Anakin’s vulnerable, emotional state and Padme’s rationalisation of how Anakin is acting, internally defending him, rather than witnessing it on a surface level.

Again, I love the Clone Wars, for all its flaws and questionable choices, but there’s something to be said about how the character who is a very good portrayal of C-PTSD and BPD, alongside a stilted upbringing, has to be altered to be more acceptable to the general audience. He’s a mentally ill nineteen-year-old, leading an army and looking after a fourteen-year-old on a battlefield at the beginning of TCW, I think he deserves to be even more insufferable at the start.

[slow-drowned-angels]

[image id: A screenshot of a tweet from the New York Post. It reads:

“Carl’s Jr. Super Bowl ad brings back bikini-clad burger models after yearslong clampdown.”

Attached to the tweet are two images of said ad. They both show the same scantily-clad, blonde, white woman posing with a burger and cars. She is wearing a bra that is made up of two star shapes and a jean miniskirt.

End image ID./]

Some notable parts of the Vox article:

It harks back to the idea that was dominant in the Bush era, a moment when our culture was capable of prizing Girls Gone Wild and purity balls in equal measure, when pop stars like Britney Spears were expected to serve their audiences sex on a platter while avowing their virginity at the same time. It’s the ideology that unites Republican raunch and purity culture, that makes them two sides of the same coin: one based on the idea that women’s sexuality should exist in the service of men. The right once again championing this brand of bawdiness while working relentlessly to restrict women’s autonomy and denigrating the women they don’t like isn’t a departure. It’s a return to form.

…

The joke was that it was funny when girls were sexy and it was sexy when girls were degraded — especially when they played along.

…

“The more attractive women around us are, whether in real life or fiction, the less one is able to maintain two important leftist delusions,” Hanania writes. “That the sexes are or can be made interchangeable, and that sexual selection either is or can be made to be an unimportant part of human affairs. If Sydney Sweeney’s boobs walk into a room, even Chris Hayes is going to experience a physiological transformation.”

Hanania’s take, if I’m deciphering it correctly, is that it is fundamental to human nature for men to publicly ogle women’s bodies and value women accordingly, and that when feminists object to the ogling, they are attempting to put some sort of vise around human nature. Sweeney’s star power, combined with her willingness to show off her curves, he argues, is proof that this vise has vanished and men can go back to the way things should be: sexualizing women pretty much whenever they feel like it.

All of this is a willful misreading of contemporary feminism. There’s a clear difference between Sweeney being proudly boob-forward — while still getting taken seriously as an award-winning actor with major star power — and other people getting rich by exploiting the breasts of beautiful underpaid women, as was the case with Girls Gone Wild, The Man Show, and, heck, even today’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders

The radical idea of pop feminism in the 2010s was that you should be accorded basic human dignity regardless of what your body looks like and how you choose to display it, even if you are an entertainer in a visual medium. Raunch culture looks at this request and declares it regressive, prudish, delusional. Raunch must be compulsory or it is nothing.

…

This basic fact is why raunch culture and purity culture co-exist so closely. It’s why the online right can think of themselves as being pro-sex and also be in favor of outlawing abortion and making it harder to access contraception. All of it is about men controlling women’s bodies: controlling how they look, how they have sex, and how they have children. The point is always that it’s not the woman who chooses.

…

“If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable, makes it easier to explain and to market,” Levy writes. “If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff — big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs — then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.”

…

The claim that sex belongs to Republicans should not be understood simply as a bizarre and self-deluding brag. It’s a threat.

while being depressing, this is also sort of fascinating to me bc there’s something so…inauthentic here. what i mean is that if you saw something like this back in say 2001 (which you probably wouldn’t, at least for carl’s jr. but i digress) it would seem tacky but in a “sex sells” sort of way.

seeing this in 2025, it’s clearly purely a political statement and you can tell partially bc the image itself is so oddly sexless. it’s like there’s more titillation in the prospect of “owning the libs” than in the image of the scantily clad blonde white woman itself.

[talenlee]

The Boundaries Of Love (In Worldbuilding)

Hey, does love exist?

This is one of those frustrating kinds of philosophical questions because there’s a host of stuff in the real world that exists, fictionally, but that doesn’t mean the material of it actually exists. In the real world, countries definitely exist, but there’s nothing about the country existing that’s true outside of the people in the space enforcing that identity. Numbers and math exist, in that you and I can both execute on their systems and get the same results suggesting some kind of central uniformity, but there’s nowhere you can go to get a cup of four.

In the real world, love is not an object unless you want to get into truly ontological spaces of what an ‘object’ is. It isn’t stuff, it isn’t material, it’s a fiction, in that it is also a term that is used to reference a signifier that humans can relate to based on its meaning. And those meanings are… weird. Those meanings are manifold and complicated, and this is, I must make clear, not a thing that’s true of all cultures everywhere.

Love is very ambiguous in English, because it’s a word that’s meant to cover a host of topics from the social to the theological to the preference to the experiential, and in no situation in English is love the wrong word or overstating anything but contrasting those uses with one another creates some strange discrepancies. In a vow, love is the term we use to describe a lifelong commitment’s motivation and then in the dinner after that wedding it’s a term used to describe how we feel about the nice fingerling potatoes.

I bring up English because it’s very important to remember this is localised to English. Not that other cultures are clearer in how they communicate about love, but about how that other cultures just aren’t doing the exact same thing because it’s always valuable to remember the boundaries and parameters of what your constraints are. You can use this as an angle to address, by thinking about these big, broad concepts and then trying to consider ways the concepts might be approached in different ways.

The United States and England, two major media producing cultures that share a language and use ‘love’ in similar ways still express that idea in a lot of different ways. As an example – god help us all – Love, Actually is a movie that is ostensibly about depicting love in a host of ways, and those ways include some incredibly British things that then, non-British people are able to interpret and map onto their own experiences. A Christmas novelty Single isn’t really a thing in most countries, but it didn’t stop Love Actually from selling perfectly well in America. This is because Love in this case is not a universal, uniform thing, but is a collection of floating, related signifiers. You don’t find love as a thing that exists and testing a goopy liquid in a tube, but instead, love is a thing you find by people talking about it.

This is where you can wind up with some interesting tripping points in your world. Because it’s not uncommon in worldbuilding, fantasy especially, to try and turn ‘love’ into something like a material force, or a fundamental underpinning of a magic system or something that drives psychics, and that creates a new problem. Because love is powerful. I mean, love doesn’t even ‘exist’ in our society and we still treat it as if it’s fantastically powerful, because people will do things in the name of love. Love is one of many motivators for people but it’s a really, really strong one, it’s so strong it overrides our common sense and can even lead to displays of strength or resolve that transcend all forms of survival instinct. We are really good at loving and loving is really good at being a motivator, and if that’s the case…

Like…

We already have in our real world, systems that try to weaponise love. Patriotism, for example, tries to engender a love of your country, one of those other fictions, and we do a lot to try and instill patriotism like a kind of psychic virus. That’s the real world where you can’t turn love into fluid goop and transport it, for example. When you start involving psychic powers or magical energies that can recognise and respond to the Power of Love, when there are government-impacting artifacts that care about Love, you run the risk of making it so that these are things that governments start to render programs to react to.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

After all, imagine if there was a magical power of love sword in your country. Imagine if there was something that, like, cared about a wielder who was pure of heart and knew true love, and this was capable of turning the tide of armies in battles. In that environment, a government program to ensure that people could be pure of heart and could know true love would be worth doing. This is assuming there’s no ‘line of descent’ malarkey there though because then the government program to promote the use of this weapon is uh, eugenics, but if it’s just anyone pure of heart and smoochy of lips could use this weapon? Then you might wind up in a country where there’s a whole bunch of infrastructure that seems kinda weird and fanciful to people at first, where there’s a deliberate attempt to make sure people can communicate openly and honestly about love and relationships, and maybe even a more refined language for doing so, to make damn sure that people who have ‘true love’ know really well what that means and how they can use it, for when the government needs to access it.

When you look at a world, as a world builder, there’s always a chance you give away that whether or not the world is meant to have one language, it was definitely thought about in one language only.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[sha-brytols]

like for me i think it's interesting that rook and the inquisitor get two very different versions of solas and i dont think its really fair to blame it all on bad writing. we already know solas is callous and cold towards people he considers his enemies but i don't think people really appreciate how you only really get a taste of that part of him in inquisition. for one solas is COMICALLY easy to befriend in inquisition like part of me feels like we forgot how quickly you can get him to high approval. you literally have to go out of your to make solas dislike you because he literally just approves of you simply talking to him so i mean regardless of your character i think the underlying fact remains that the solas you meet in inquisition is far warmer and polite and friendly, and i think it's because it's so difficult to make him dislike you that people kind of forget that this particular aspect of him is still mostly a mask

so i actually kind of enjoyed getting to see more of his calculated and manipulative side. i mean not just because it's a brand new perspective of his but also i actually think this is another mask. to the inquisitor he was the wise old hermit who was completely uninvolved with the events happening and only guided you out of pure altruism. to rook he is The Dread Wolf. the sneaky trickster god who tempts and manipulates you and whos motivated purely by selfish pride. yeah he gets really fucking hammy with it dont get me wrong LOL and i do believe a lot of it can be attributed to a fundamentally poor interpretation of the character but at the same time i do genuinely think that a large portion of it is specifically because solas has made the active decision to present himself this way to rook. i mean varric all but outright says it's another persona made so solas can reconcile his actions in the present. like i think really the biggest sin of this whole thing is just how little we get of solas himself in the grand scheme of things so the way he's written comes across as weirdly shallow

[crystallinecardinal]

So I was thinking about Starlo and Chujin

Hi. I love overanalysis. It’s in my blog title as “lore enthusiast.” Most of this probably means nothing and was unintentional, but I’m like an English teacher when it comes to media I like and am scrounging for canon content— I will see something that might have capital I Implications if you think about it hard enough, and I will shake you by the shoulders and go “WHAT DOES IT MEAAAN”

Which brings me to Starlo and Chujin and a thing I noticed while looking through the Spriter’s Resource for Starlo references. Long rant and UTY spoilers below the cut.

I should start off by saying that Starlo and Chujin are similar, in a way. Both of them are nerds, although for different things. Both are said to be caring. Both dedicated their lives to their work. Both wanted to help monsterkind. Both loved Ceroba. Both had secrets.

These similarities have not gone unnoticed, I’ve found— both by the fandom and the devs of UTY.

(Transcript:

Sword: “It does make sense that, like, Chujin and Starlo are kinda similar, and Ceroba, yknow…. She has a type, I guess.”)

So it’s not a secret these two are similar, and it’s probably intentional to make them parallel each other.

But from there, we get to the meat of this post:

These sprites.

This is where I dive into a lot of overanalysis— I’m giving that as a warning before I start. My point here though, is that these two sprites feel incredibly similar in a way where I speculate if it was intentional or not.

I’ll play devil’s advocate first, though. I’m an artist. I draw things, mostly characters and creatures. Sometimes you just have two pieces looking similar— not because you intended it that way, but because the blocking and composition was best that way.

For Starlo’s sprite, the answer feels simple. All of Starlo’s talk portraits are front facing, so this one doesn’t have a need to be any different. If it was, it may feel out of place amongst all the other sprites, especially because there isn’t a reason for him to have this sprite in particular face a different direction. He isn’t looking around, and isn’t averting his gaze. He’s being direct. The best way to convey that is with eye contact (or at least, implied eye contact) via a front facing sprite. Additionally, even if Starlo was averting his gaze, with how UT’s talk sprites work, there are better ways to convey that than changing the way his talk sprite faces.

Starlo’s character as himself also contributes to the way this sprite looks. It’s a direct contrast to the loud, boisterous North Star. This is the monster behind the persona— one who’s a lot less confident, one who thinks himself a ghost to the people around him. A “nobody farmer,” in his words. When trying to get this across, art-wise, the way Starlo’s talk sprites look as opposed to North Star’s talk sprites are a perfect fit! It’s in the subtle expressions versus animated expressions. This is even down to how Starlo’s glasses are drawn, not showing his eyes behind them, giving him a much more distant look.

As for Chujin’s sprite, the answer also feels fairly simple. The sprite pictured earlier was for his tapes, where it would make sense for most of his sprites to be front facing. He’s talking to the camera, it’s a video log. Being silhouetted also works here— it makes him more mysterious in a way.

That’s what I have to say if you look at it JUST from an art point. However, we like to be a little silly in this house (my blog), so I’m going to overanalyze the hell out of this.

So. The pose.

I’m probably going insane at this point. I’ve already explained the most likely reason for the poses being similar, and don’t get me wrong, that’s probably the main reason why. But also— note the eyes.

According to the Spriter’s Resource, Chujin’s sprites usually have his eyes visible from behind his goggles.

But.

There are exceptions.

I think the reason for this lies in the same reason we never see Starlo’s eyes behind his glasses after he takes the hat off. I explained this earlier when discussing the artistic reasoning behind these sprites— not seeing Starlo’s eyes makes him appear more distant, which highlights the part of his character that’s much less confident in himself. We go from seeing his eyes (or at least, the shape of them behind his glasses, this is a consistency with UTY sprites I can talk about later) to not at all.

This is what makes Chujin’s sprites so important to me.

We’re meant to like Chujin. At least, before we know the truth. We’re meant to think he was always a kindhearted man, a loving father and husband, and a good mentor. All the good things. It’s only as the game continues that you see the imperfections. By talking to Dina, you see he didn’t like the Wild East due to what it stood for, and you learn of the time he came into the saloon all disheveled, uncharacteristically asking for a drink, only mentioning he thought he “saw a ghost”. You learn in the Steamworks of his research, and how he wasn’t as good at robotics as he was made out to be.

That’s what makes Chujin flawed, though. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, none of these things will make a player dislike him. As said— we’re supposed to like Chujin. An opinion and a mysterious saloon visit isn’t the end of the world. We also grow to learn more and more about him, and he seems just like a kind man with a love for robotics (even if he struggled).

And then we learn of Ceroba’s plan. And we learn of something hidden in the abandoned Ketsukane Estate.

This is the first time in the Pacifist route that we actually SEE Chujin, first in a photo.

Note the eyes.

We see Chujin’s eyes behind his goggles here! Once again— this is likely for the reason mentioned before. We’ve only been told mostly good things about Chujin so far! Here’s a photo of him and his family— how could this kind man be wrapped in anything suspicious?

Which then makes the sudden change in the tapes crucial.

We can no longer see his eyes— he’s grown distant, mysterious. This is the part of Chujin that he kept secret from even Ceroba, up until he was on his deathbed. It’s the part of him that isn’t necessarily the loving husband and father we know him as, but rather, this is the part of him that was a determined researcher on a mission. And therefore, Chujin goes from lively to cold.

I’m sure that last bit doesn’t ring any alarm bells at all.

Hey! Remember how I said Starlo and Chujin are similar in ways? This is where I get into that. I’m applauding you from behind my screen if you’re still reading.

I’m now going to talk about Starlo and Chujin as characters, as well as the parallels between the two sprites that started this analysis. For simplicity, I’ll break these into sections. Funky names for a funky reading experience, so I’m not just word dumping at you.

1) Got a secret, can you keep it?

Soooo. Chujin and Starlo’s secrets.

One of the first things that rings alarm bells for me is the situation in which both of the sprites I’m analyzing pop up in. Context is key. Specifically, both of the sprites are used when we’re learning the truth about each character.

For Starlo, we’re learning about who he really is, the monster behind the persona. He takes his hat off, reveals the monster underneath, and we get his new talk sprite. He’s finally stopping, for a second— taking a moment to break the act he’s been playing for YEARS. And he does it all to show Ceroba he’s still there underneath it all, as well as reveal to Clover who he really is. He’s at his most vulnerable state, revealing how he sees himself as a nobody, and a fraud.

For Chujin, we’re learning part of the truth of who he was, when he’s at his most morally dubious. We learn of his experiments, the ones he worked on and hid from his family until he was about to die— only then did he tell Ceroba. We also learn of his views and opinions, the reasoning behind them, and how he lied about his job at the Steamworks. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Ceroba he was fired, because he didn’t want her to think less of him.

So, the main points of this:

Starlo and Chujin both had their own secrets

Both of their secrets are revealed when these sprites are used

Both secrets reveal more about the characters’ identities

Both want to be seen in a good light

The main difference, I think, other than what the secrets entail themselves, are what they mean for each character.

2) Light and dark symbolism?? In MY overanalysis??? It’s more likely than you think

Chujin and Starlo’s secrets both weigh on them. Starlo doesn’t want to break character— he enjoys being North Star and wants to bring a smile to the faces of monsterkind. Chujin doesn’t want Ceroba to think any lesser of him for his mistakes.

Additionally, the reveal of their secrets marks two different things for their characters. For Starlo, it’s a step forward. For Chujin, it’s spiraling down.

This gets really fun considering these two sprites, and light and dark symbolism (not in the traditional good versus evil way).

Starlo’s in the light. He’s showing himself, he’s maturing. He’s being incredibly vulnerable for probably the first time in a LONG time, and finally breaking the persona. He’s working towards a better goal, accepting both North Star and Starlo as facets of himself, but it starts with taking off the hat. It starts with coming into the light, and letting the shadows fade away.

Chujin is silhouetted in darkness. As said previously, we only ever hear mostly good things about Chujin from those who were around him (barring Starlo, although that’s secondhand information, and by some extent, Dina). Martlet and Ceroba saw the best in him, a mentor and loving husband respectively. But as he rambles off to his tapes, shrouded in shadow and secrecy, we learn of what was happening behind the scenes: he reveals part of who he really was, and how much he hid away from those he loved, all away from the rose colored glasses.

3) “Your opinion is wrong” -Chujin, probably

To just point out more ways Chujin and Starlo parallel yet also contrast one another (which I will mention for the section after this as well): I think it goes without saying that Starlo and Chujin have opposite worldviews when it comes to humans.

Chujin believes the worst in humans, primarily due to the Snowdin Attack. He hates them— The War was when the blade was plunged into monsterkind’s flesh, and the Snowdin Attack was only a twist of the knife.

Starlo admires humans, maybe a bit too much for some monsters. He loves their stories, loves the idea of cowboys and Westerns, so much so he creates the Wild East with his posse.

This is what makes these two different, only strengthening the light/dark contrast. The ideas of hate and admiration fit well into that theme, don’t they?

Stick with me here. I promise this is going somewhere.

4) “Monsterkind’s Hero is a title soaked in blood.”

So, the aforementioned views of humans? This gets really fun when you apply it to the crux of Starlo and Chujin’s missions: to help monsterkind during their time underground.

Both want to be heroes, in a way. They both want to help. Of course, this is in different ways— but the main intention behind it is the same.

Chujin, as said, hates humans. He wants monsters to be brought to justice. After the Snowdin Attack, he decides that if he can’t help through Axis, then he’ll help another way. Thus starts Chujin’s dedication to his experiments, which he makes his work and eventually the rest of his life. All of it for a chance to help monsterkind when the time comes.

Starlo’s dedication to the Wild East is similar, in a way, yet directly contrasts Chujin. His admiration for humans and Westerns goes to the point he wants to provide monsterkind with their own “slice of the Surface.” He wants to see those around him smile— his own way of helping monsterkind when they’re still stuck underground.

My point here is that while they find different ways to accomplish their missions (and you can drag more light/dark symbolism out of this— Chujin hidden away in the shadows of the basement in the Ketsukane Estate versus Starlo out in the spotlight), both have so much dedication to it that it becomes their lives.

Chujin, although having a family he loved and cared for, let his experiments drive him onwards to the point it cost him his life. Starlo willingly gave up who he was to be North Star, letting the Wild East become his life.

5) Yes, and?

I could go on and on about more similarities and differences between Starlo and Chujin, but I feel like I’ve brought up what I need to for now.

Why bring all of this up in the first place, though? What’s the point of going on about these characters’ missions, or their secrets, or all the light and dark symbolism you could hypothetically draw from it?

Let me talk about those sprites again.

I’ve spent ages going on about Starlo and Chujin, and how they parallel, yet contrast each other. They’re foils, in a way. These similarities and differences are what make these two little sprites so interesting to me.

You could say it’s all because that’s what the scene needed at the time, and that statement likely has truth to it. I already talked about how. But the knowledge of the context of the scenes and these two characters is what makes me wonder if it all was done on purpose.

Chujin, shrouded in shadow, revealing a part of him kept secret from even those he loved most. His reasoning for his hatred for humans comes on full display, and he begins to formulate a mission, the same one his life would eventually fall to. If the royals won’t see how much he cares for monsterkind, he’ll show it himself.

Starlo, left in the Swealterstone’s light, revealing a part of him the Wild East knows nothing of. His mission starts to redefine itself, and it’s original intent becomes more clear. He only ever wanted to be someone. He only ever wanted to help. Maybe now, with the hat off, he can learn to make others happy, but not forget himself in the process.

A conclusion:

So. Do I think that these two sprites for Starlo and Chujin were intentionally made to parallel yet also contrast each other?

My answer is a big fat Maybe. I can’t be entirely sure.

Truth is, I’m not a UTY dev. I literally only discovered and got into this game a little over a month ago. I don’t know the true intent behind the spritework, I don’t know the conversations that happened behind the scenes. I am literally just A Guy ranting on the internet about a silly little fangame that I have brainrot over.

But! I do have a finalized game and commentary I can analyze, and knowing that some spritework details were intentional (the way that Chujin’s talk sprites face are made to match Ceroba and Kanako’s), I could see something like this being either intentional or a really fun coincidence. The type of thing the devs can look back on and realize “oh! That’s funny how I accidentally made that parallel. I didn’t mean to do that, but it works.”

I can only hope it was intentional. Chujin and Starlo are both incredibly interesting characters to me, especially in how they can be seen as foils. Something as minor as this I think just shows the love put into this game and these characters. UTY is just a great game overall, in my opinion.

But yeah! That’s my ramble, all because I was doing sprite studies and looking for references in the Spriter’s Resource for art. Hopefully I made at least some sense :)

[emptymanuscript]

Counterpoint: It could simply be that the author is wrong about the meaning of their own book.

Remember, Ray Bradbury firmly believed that his Fahrenheit 451 was fundamentally and primarily about the danger of the Television to society and how its enabling of passive enjoyment would destroy us through alienation. He used to get booed off stages by people who loved the book because that may have been what he meant but it isn't remotely what the extreme majority of readers got out of it.

Bradbury wasn't misleading the audience. He wanted them to hate and turn away from TV. That was his intent. But the problem wasn't the lack of reading comprehension skills on the part of his audience. It was that he had made a quite different argument than he intended and he had constructed it so that TV was merely a side aspect of that point instead of taking center stage.

This is not an issue unique to Fahrenheit 451. In the end, meaning is necessarily a shared duty of Author and Audience. It is made out of what the Author puts in but it can only say what the Audience can read out of that. So if an Author's story constructs a meaning for the Audience different from the Author's intent, that's not the Audience's fault. That's the Author's failure to communicate their message in contrast with the accidental success of another communication that is also possible to derive from the text. An author gets authority over the text but is powerless to dictate what others think about it beyond that text. It's the same reason an author's demand that their story is good holds no water if nobody particularly likes it. It is the natural right of the Audience, as a mass, to determine the reaction to and interpretation of the text the Author has given them.

It can actually only be called "misleading" if it was the author's deliberate intention to mislead the audience. If the author had no intention to lead you to the wrong conclusion, and you simply arrived at one all by yourself, it's just sparkling Your Lack Of Reading Comprehension.

[cryptidmickle]

hough save me gay yaoi

[gildedpomegranates]

imo, Jinx and Vi's bio parents didn't need more screen time (the importance of their characters was their deaths at the hands of enforcers), but if they were so intent on exploring Felicia as a character in s2, it should've been through Vi and added onto her character/arc in some way. Not her memory brought up in that half-assed sisterly heart-to-heart in s2ep6, not her retconned connection to Silco and Vander. And, in my ideal world, it serves as a point of conflict between Vi and Jinx.

Imagine a similar scene as in s2ep6. Vi, grief-stricken and perpetually stuck in the past, demanding, "Do you even remember them?" and Jinx doesn't say anything, so Vi breaks. A torrent of memories shoots out of her. A flood of every detail she locked away, growing more and more frantic the longer Jinx doesn't react, possibly culminating with that comment about their mom's smell, if the writers felt that inclined to it.

Imagine they go the route of Sokka and Katara.

Vi is visibly devastated. The 'sit down on the ground, shut down' kind of devastated. Part of Jinx is still that same child wrapping her arms around Vi's waist on the bridge, part of her is always that little girl wanting to fix things, so she sits down next to her, but not too close. Not touching. And she admits that she remembers their mom, a little. But whenever she tries to picture her, Vi's is the only face she can see.

s2 suffers from the writers overestimating the importance of Powder's other caregivers. Her parents, Vander—they're all secondary. Vi has always been her number one.

[drenched-in-sunlight]

saying this as respectfully as possible but. Do not put fandom content creators on a pedestal. We are also just fans contributing to a community just as you are. We have boundary on our own work and that’s it. What I say is not and should not be considered sth the whole fandom should listen to. I’m just a normal ass person ranting about things on my blog. If it does not have a fandom tag for others to engage in, do not make it out to be me trying to start fights or addressing the whole community. Because it’s not.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, my art, my lore talk, is biased. I’ve never tried to hide that I view Marika a certain way and will always develop my theory following that base assumption.

Aside from translation stuffs and pointing out in-game items, everything else I say you can look at it, agree or disagree, and move on to form your own opinions. Just because I draw stuffs doesn’t mean you get to saddle me with responsibilities about managing fandom expectations. What the hell? I’m a fan artist, I’m the last person who you should look at for “leaderism” (?) WHAT?

I can and will be a hater in my own space, like I know sometimes other artists will just post their stuffs and not engage too heavily with fandom, and for a while I did try to do that here (because I’m already a dramatic ass on twitter), that’s just not me though.

You will get art and you will get my opinions as well.

[beif0ngs]

Law truly is at his most sassy self around Kid lmao

like never forget the time Law flipped Kid off during their very first meeting

[bigskydreaming]

Imagine looking at a character whose entire premise is that in every stage of his life, he's made every version of himself into someone that inspires people to such a degree that EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF HIM has people wanting to literally follow in his footsteps in some way or another.....

And coming to the conclusion that like.....the most important things about him are the sum of all his trappings. His entirely homemade developed from scratch could not exist if not for what he already was and brought with him BEFORE crafting this newest version of himself trappings, with his greatest trait throughout all of it being his adaptability; his ability and willingness to roll with the punches and not try to simply weather any opposition or changes to his life but instead reshape himself as needed to better fit INTO whatever new shape his life and the world around him takes. All while managing to carry the most innate, fundamental and necessary aspects of himself from one version to the next. Thus every single version of himself is different but simultaneously every single version of himself is also undeniably the same person.

The strength of this character, to me, will always be that he can be so many versions of himself, he can become so many things, all without ever actually losing or discarding any of the aspects of himself he considers most essential, the things he's not willing to lose or give up just to keep going. Finding that road not taken by most, usually because most never even think to look for it as an option. But one that he's always able to find because the one trick he's mastered in his tumultuous life is threading that needle of not just digging in his heels in an unproductive way but rather being selective about when and where he makes a stand and decides "this is not a thing I'm willing to compromise about" but here are places and ways I can and will change and evolve and adapt in order to make it possible for me to hold onto these parts and keep them as they are.

And that's why its always so mind-boggling to me that so many writers can't seem to think of anything else to do with Dick Grayson other than invent some new reason for him to just....not be that person, or to like just take the character whose most basic fundamental trait he's NOT about to compromise on is willingly giving up his spot in the driver's seat of his own life.....and make him just a passenger in his own life and stories.

Dick Grayson at age nine....at age nineteen...at age twenty nine....the one core thread running through all versions of him is the only way he's standing back and letting you call the shots for him or putting him on the sidelines in some way is over his dead body.

HOW he goes about that, what that looks like, who he becomes and what aspects of himself he plays up at some times and what traits he lets fall by the wayside at other times when they offer less in service to his primary goal here....that changes constantly. He changes constantly.

But those changes are almost always (or at least they used to be/should be IN MY OPINION) made with the intention of keeping certain things about him or his life as consistent as possible.

That's the duality of Dick Grayson that I'm here for. The inherent contradiction of him that COULD allow for endless conflict and breaking new narrative ground in all sorts of ways if mined properly:

His eternal willingness to compromise....but only ever in pursuit of doubling down on the ways he's not willing to compromise.

Forever walking that tightrope in ways that only a kid born and raised in a circus could ever hope to.

[chaosbabee]

I'm so curious about the flesh hat cinematic universe

Like, what is the underlying structure? Is the brim made of cartilage or bone? Are there differences in organs and muscles? Can you break your flesh hat like you break your nose or your skull? Why no hair? Why do only some people have flesh hats and others have regular heads? Is it a birth defect? Or is it not because the parents react so nonchalantly? Is it genetic? Does that mean some genres are recessive?

Also in this world the people who don't have flesh hats STILL wear hats? That are the same shape as the flesh hats? Does this mean the flesh hats came first and were then crafted for people without them? Why??

And according to the logic of this world you're apparently sometimes born to only enjoy one genre of content without variation or else you're betraying some fundamental part of yourself (like the flesh wizards)? And they can tell that by your flesh hat?? How would the entertainment industry work in this world? What are the cultural implications?

WHAT IF INSTEAD OF GENDER REVEAL PARTIES THEY HAD GENRE REVEAL PARTIES???

Do people get plastic surgery on their flesh hats? Do regular people ever get surgically implanted flesh hats? Is it seen as attractive to have a flesh hat or is it somehow obscene or shameful? ARE THERE FLESH HAT BEAUTY STANDARDS????? When you get older do flesh hats wrinkle? Or get age spots? Or droop? Are they like ears and noses where they just keep growing? Are people with flesh hats more likely to get skin cancer? I NEED TO KNOW

A story about a boy who was crazy for westerns since birth.

[bonesandthebees]

sigh feeling nostalgic for my old fics/the old community these days. I miss it man.