#but yeah ive been thinking a lot abt like. the potential relationship between between mother goose and pinocchio

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thinking about mother figures in neverafter.

(no colour version under read more)

[argisthebulwark]

hiii 👋 this is my main blog but my tesblr is @reachfolk (im the one who made that ask game lol)

ANYWAY so my main oc is alexandria silver-blood. yeah those silver-bloods ajsksks, her dad is the older brother of thonar and thongvor and her mom is a reachwoman who married into the family because she knew it was her best bet to avoid her or her children from being persecuted like so many in the markarth incident. it.. mostly worked, but between the awful genetics from her mother (panic disorder and insomnia gang 🤪), the numerous attempts her uncles made to get rid of that whole side of the family, the general day-to-day racism in markarth, and the pressure to keep both herself and her family together, alexi eventually snapped and decided to run off on her own until she can sort her shit out without being pulled in every which direction. she spent most of that time running around the reach, studying old reach magic and alchemy from the different tribes and reconnecting with her culture and religion, and then started running around the rest of skyrim because she's a giant nerd with a love of adventure.

ANYWAY with that out of the way, personality wise alexi is literally the sweetest most agreeable person ever. it's funny cause she always wears forsworn armor so people assume she's some evil savage but she literally sees everyone as a potential friend (assuming they aren't trying to kill her). if they're grumpy and distant, she just sees it as a challenge to make them laugh. it can.. be pretty irritating if you really don't like her vibe, but she won't like completely disregard boundaries yk? she's also a prankster who loves goofing off and messing with people too, usually involving stealing something or messing with their food or drink using some alchemy ingredient. she literally has a billion stories of dumb shit she and her siblings did growing up and she'd often share them to make people laugh.

beyond just being a little rascal, she's also pretty smart, being very well rounded in magic and well read on all sorts of subjects thanks to her great tutors as a kid. but she most excelled in alchemy and literally lights up like a kid on christmas when she finds a rare ingredient (even if it's gross af—that's where the namira worship thing really helps lol).

i have soo much to say abt her but ive already rambled enough so i'll spare u the time lol, but i'd love to hear how your oc would feel abt her!

HI omg sorry i sawthis a few days ago but work has been a lot. here we go! 

Saryn is bad with people so she just kinda observes. She likes to watch people before she interacts with them but she would 100% think pranking people is hilarious. She would absolutely be willing to distract someone so alexi could mess with their food. 

She’s a big fan of listening to stories so she’d love to hear all of them. Saryn’s also atrocious at alchemy so she’s fascinated by anyone who is skilled at it. she steals and hoards pretty much everything that isn’t nailed down so raiding an alchemy shop for rare materials is up her alley. 

After dealing with Windhelm’s racism, Saryn is not a big fan of Markarth but she’s very interested in the reachfolk so she’d love to learn!! She’s never spent time with her family so she would be more than willing to listen to alexi bitch about the silver-bloods. they may not have a long term relationship but for like a few weeks working on similar jobs they’d be besties. 

[nbapprentice]

You said a while back that while Supergiant games (Bastion, Transistor, Hades) was mostly okay, you had some words about them. I was curious as to what those words were, since Hades' full release is soon.

okay. alright. ive been playing hades lately so i definitely want to give my two cents (or dollars by the size this is gonna get). but let’s go Step by Step

the good: i want to throw a whole Endorsement over supergiant games with the art direction and its characters, which is what keeps me coming back again and again, and what i can assume is that most people are attracted to. 

gameplaywise, they have a Format they stick to which has become their staple, not to their detriment but to their advantage, like... gameplay tropes, so to speak, that they stick to (such as the addition of special conditions that give a disadvantage in exchange for more long-term rewards)

i fucking adore that they take one concept per game, go for it, and when they’re done they are Done; they don’t bother with sequels, they don’t want to run things to the ground and i fucking respect that. They have their themes, and they stick to them (to various degrees of success).

that said, like every piece of media, they are not perfect and this has to be analysed and spoken about

CONTENT WARNINGS: genocide and ethnic cleansing, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, suicide, and mentions of incest, and a general Spoilers warning

bastion: touches on ethnic cleansing, and not in a way i’d say is satisfactory. our narrator and one of our Sympathetic characters is one of the men who worked on a world-ending weapon meant to use against the Ura (a group of people coded as East Asian) which after a bit of googling is literally called “the final solution” if there was ever a war between the Ura and the Cael (who feel like rly tan white people to me). jesus fucking CHRIST.

we also meet more Ura other than our two named characters and we have to kill most of them. so that fucking blows.

the game tries for “being a genocidal monster will get you fucked up and blown up” which duh, but i feel we shouldn’t have had a person responsible for war crimes be one of our friends no matter how bad he feels about the whole thing, or the people victim of war crimes become villains in the latter half of the game. zia’s father could’ve taken ruck’s role ez pz.

transistor: the weakest of their games, imo; the lore and writing are fairly flimsy and i did not come out feeling Satisfied, especially because it had this rly good build-up that did not pay off. not to mention... their villains? 3/4 were gay people. lol. two married guys (not even explicit, you only realize by their shared last names) and the ps*cho lesbian trope (iirc she wanted to kill the protagonist’s lover or something). the female protagonist also ends up killing herself to live forever in a digital paradise with her dead lover. it’s. god. 

very Aesthetic, GORGEOUS music, interesting gameplay; had potential, i do not feel like it lived up to it at least as far as the story goes.

pyre: now this one. this one’s BEEFY. where transistor felt flimsy, pyre is rich; lots to sink your teeth into, rich in lore and loveable characters, again w the beautiful music, themes of cooperation and togetherness. my favorite of the cast is volfred sandalwood, the only Black (or, well, Black-coded) revolutionary i’ve ever seen portrayed with this amount of sympathy.

onto the bad: they literally have a Class of character named “Savage”; there’s the “mystical mentally ill person” trope; there is an overwhelming amount of explicit m/f pairs (one of them being. a romance that formed in a single day and then both of the characters were somehow willing to risk it all for each other? PLEASE) while the only hints of gayness are... hints. especially when Jodariel (another of my favs) is teased to have feelings for the player regardless of gender then only gets an ending with a male character with whom she has nothing in common 🙃

hades: and now. this one. music: gorgeous. character designs: spectacular (aphrodite is straight up naked but it’s so... natural and casual, it doesn’t feel sexualized at all). voice acting amazing. character interactions charming and endearing. as a greek mythology nerd, it was nice to see them go for the obscure shit like Zagreus at all, NOT portray Persephone and Hades as a loving couple, AND portrayed the gods as the bunch of petty assholes (some more benevolent than others) that they are. imo they’re too generous with their portrayal of achilles but i’ll allow it.

and finally... it seems all those criticisms about having all the gay characters hidden in the shadows paid off, cuz we got (aside of patroclus and achilles) a bisexual polyamorous protag. Holy Shit! and it’s not even playersexual, romance whomever you want shit without the routes recognizing each other: he explicitly talks about how he’s thinking abt them both (though it’s like “yeah usually mortals take one lover but gods love many huh” polyamory is a human thing too bro!!!!!)

and this is where it all goes, well, at least vaguely downhill lol. ok so the incest warning i gave up there? well. it’s not... outright incestuous. but it has some ugly implications. i want to emphasize: the characters never refer to each other as siblings, nor do they treat each other as such (thanatos, in fact, only recognizes hypnos as his brother, and megaera only sees the other furies as her sisters), but they were all raised by the same woman, Nyx... zagreus and thanatos even grew up together (im assuming megaera didnt meet zagreus until he was fully grown).

this is complicated even worse by the fact that they tried to trick zagreus into believing Nyx was his mother. he realized pretty early on this was not true but like... adoptive mothers, anyone? granted i can believe that bc of the attempt at deception that probably ruptured any attempt at actual familial closeness, and it’s not like hypnos and thanatos saw zagreus as their brother at any point, so they were p much aware of the truth too. with the fact that thanatos even looks like goth miles edgeworth (im not kidding you can google him up right now its literally edgeworth in a cowl) i rly feel they were aiming for Childhood Friend Anime Rival Man than the “surprise kiss bc ur not actually related <3″ shit. zagreus never once refers to nyx as his mother in-game, and also refers to thanatos and hypnos as her sons, never his brothers.

so yeah, like. if one’s feeling generous, zagreus and thanatos are more of a “my father is emotionally closed off and neglects me so my best friend’s mother basically raised me” kind of situation... just pulled off in, perhaps, the worst way possible (why didnt they just say Zagreus was told Hekate was his mom, that’s such an easy fix? or that he was born of nobody other than Hades??? [gestures at athena])

but then, the gods. aaaaaaaahhhhahahahh the gods. demeter shows up! and she calls zeus, hades and poseidon... her foster-brothers. which somehow would make the persephone thing less fucking awful, apparently. they really. really really did not need to do that. she could’ve just said “my fellow gods” or whatever. or my “god-brothers” or something, to pretend it was just a weird god alliance thing??? i dont know but implying that foster family isn’t family is just... bro, the dynamics still exist.

Don’t Like That.

i even contacted supergiant games over this. they reassured me they were even trying to avoid the incest of the original myths bc they didn’t want to mess with such a heavy theme. i believe them... but i really think they didn’t think this through. compared to something like fire emblem fates this is nearly benign, but the implications don’t look good :/

tl;dr of the tl;drs: i admire their artistic philosophy and the heavy emphasis on fresh gameplay, characters and their relationships; i appreciate that it seems that they listen to criticism?; i don’t appreciate that they didn’t think to at LEAST talk to adoptees when making a game about family.