#charlestonshoethieves

[waveridden]

also for the other way do you have any thoughts on majoume/chazz and/or johan/jesse

so in the past month i've been thinking about this and i would like to propose a general idea that is the gx players as shadows for various teams. i think it fits well with the "next generation" thing as well as the whole idea of them trying to become pro duelists. anyways with that in mind,

chazz is one of those "high stars but super borked fk" shadows players where it's like, he would be okay but a single shinfuse would make him great

it's just that that's constantly the fifth most important thing going on at any given moment

he is really mad about this. why won't they let him play. don't they see he's a four star batter.

meanwhile jesse wins one of those blessings that's like "bedazzle a player in your shadows" and like nobody knows what the fuck bedazzled means but they all vote for it

jesse definitely is also, like, a semi-beloved late-discipline replacement player who got foreshadowed in early expansion because he's just not that good. but people still love him.

[killerforthepies]

the shoe thieves were my og team, feeling drawn back to them..

simultaneously becoming more of a dale hahn fox fan every day

[glassgob]

[ID: Digital Illustration of Rigby Peacelily from the video game Blaseball. Rigby is a Black woman who wears ‘70s disco fashion. She is facing forward, holding a spear with a metal tip shaped like a peace lily. Behind her are more peace lilies. The illustration is a warm peach-tone. End ID.] 

rigby peacelily for @charlestonshoethieves 💖

[leonstamatis]

Hope you don't mind an ask but I would love to hear your Hurley Pacheco and/or other dead flowers thoughts

oh i don’t mind this at all kieren thank you for asking!! <3 i love the flowers very much and the dead ones especially hold a place in my heart.

so early team dynamics for me rely on the idea that beck was not entirely a pro at managing everything from the get-go? like she gets there, she will Become the all-poowerful captain/coach/mom friend extraordinaire, but she doesn’t start there. first she’s a stellar batter and a good first baseman, and then she learns everything else as she goes. this is the context by which i build out the team in my head.

(this got VERY LONG. here, have far too much niche flowers content,)

assuming beck is frantically trying to figure out how to do blaseball taxes and invoices and what have you. i think hurley and matheo kind of fill the gap of being leaders in some respects for the batters, and zeb and king manage the pitching rotation.

neither hurley nor matheo were like, hotshot star players or anything, but they were there if you needed someone to help you practice for a while and they could wrangle everyone into gear before games and so on. hurley was mostly there for the Garden itself - they like working with the earth, getting their hands dirty and all that. (honestly i think she and zeb probably got along really well, and i think zeb still misses hurley quite a bit.)

matheo was there because he did like the game, he enjoyed playing and all of that, but it was kind of more a hobby he did alongside his day job. so neither one of them was particularly driven or competitive; they weren’t there to win, or to make a name for themselves, they were just there to do something they genuinely enjoy with people they liked, and they were great people to go to if you got too in your head about your performance in a game or something because of that perspective.

also, they were soulmates. i think. i haven’t hammered it out yet, but i think hurley and matheo like. not even romantic, but just in that sort of drift-compatible, you and i have similar understandings of how the world works and what’s important, we can rib one another and finish each other’s sentences sometimes and it feels like we’ve known each other for years. so matheo, grumpy old man, and hurley, the gentle giant, are very close, and this is important to me. maybe they’re in Love, love, i haven’t decided. but like. they were close. and even if matheo didn’t show it at all, he was beyond devastated when hurley died.

hurley is close with everyone. hurley dies, and beck has to find a way to fill this hole of a friendly, beloved person who took care of everyone, because that’s what hurley was and without it the team will fall apart. this is the first of many things that will change beck from a slightly overwhelmed captain to carrying the entire team on her shoulders. matheo is close with king, and with margo to some extent in a kind of Dad Friend way, and offers advice to jacob on how to not lose his mind when supernatural shit happens, because “that’s just the game, sometimes, bud.” but mostly, matheo is friends with ace chambers. they are grumpy and tell a lot of “back in my day”-isms that everyone else grows tired of VERY quickly. ace is perhaps the saddest when matheo dies, not that that’s anyone’s business.

my thoughts on brya, jorge and isaac are fairly minimal in comparison to those two, whom i have spent. just so much time thinking about. but i think it was charlestonshoethieves who said brya should be a weaver from friends at the table? and i kind of adore that interpretation of the lore honestly. but anyway.

bryanayah chang and glabe moon would have gotten on like a house on fire if they were on the team at the same time. i think brya has the perspective of someone who is always changing, who can pick up one form and drop it when she gets bored, and sometimes it’s fun to scare the other players with it a little bit but there are those - hurley and isaac, namely - who never actually get scared.

i think brya can change other people, if she wants to. if they ask. i think hurley got hurt during practice and brya asked her if she might like some additional protection, and hurley couldn’t understand why brya would offer that kind of thing, but brya has seen the way that hurley takes care of the earth and the plants in the garden and has seen hurley leaving wilting saplings in the locker room for brya to take into herself, and these small things are enough to merit a gift if hurley wants it. so brya teaches hurley to grow a second set of ribs, stronger ones made of roots and stone, and it sits on top of his skin like an exoskeleton and is as much a part of hurley as any of brya’s limbs is a part of her.

(other gifts brya has given the flowers: a second row of teeth for jorge, then, later, a row of bone spikes on his tail; a third arm to improve efficiency, offered to and rejected by matheo; once, in a misunderstanding, skeletal bat wings for beck.)

jorge is great. jorge is a lizard, and he is brya’s absolute bud. they’re both a little unsettling to people unfamiliar with them, and so early on they decided they would not be unsettled by each other. brya helps clean out jorge’s scales after a muddy day at work in the garden, and jorge eats the remnants of brya’s shedded parts, and it’s a mutual and effective friendship that relies less on verbal communication than on looking at someone and saying. you and i have been othered, and so we will be others together.

i think isaac is the one i have the most trouble developing, honestly. the closest i’ve come for nem is that ne is really close to dunn and owen? the original dunn, of course, given the timeline. so these three are kind of in a not-quite-human-but-close-enough bubble in my brain, where maybe they can relate on occasion to the regular old guys on the team, but they can also have some level of understanding of what it’s like for brya and jorge. they inhabit this in-between space, and they don’t all communicate or have the same perspective in every way, but it’s kind of fun to try and parse that out!

in my head, isaac vibrates at specific frequencies to speak? and owen and dunn can both mimic that in their respective ways to communicate with nem. it’s a little bit clunky and weird, but once they get it, they get it, and the three of them are nigh-inseparable. just some really good early-twenties mischief makers vibes here honestly. they don’t pull pranks but they DO skip out on practices and gardening duty to go get coffee or throw things in the harbor and pester seagulls. love these dweebs so much.

and then isaac dies. and dunn gets alted, and now owen is trying to figure out where owen fits in the lineup and who owen’s friends are. and that’s very sad, and something that new dunn tries to help owen with, which is nice of her. she asks owen for stories about isaac and the version of her that owen knew before, and they mourn isaac’s death together and celebrate nir birthday every year.

and the last one is cali! cali exists in a separate space in my mind honestly she wasn’t really part of the OG flowers she was part of flowers 2.0 with inez and hotbox and vito, so like, it’s a little bit different. mostly i think of cali as part of cali and beck, because that came to be a pretty defining part of who she is. mostly i think she is athletic and capable, and she is quiet, and she kept to herself not because she didn’t love her team but more because she preferred to be an observer, and it took beck to get her to start actively participating and letting everyone get to know her.

and those, i think, are most of my feelings about the dead flowers. maybe. possibly. god i love them so much thank you for asking about them kieren!!! <3<3<3

[orthgodlove]

okay but do i go for shoethieves or charlestonshoethieves

[waveridden]

for yugioh. val hitherto

@leonstamatis asked: val hitherto

first of all you know how every series is about a different type of summoning. like gx has all the fusions and 5ds has the synchros and whatever. i think val for sure has versions of his deck set up for every type of summoning and he tries to pick ones that his opponent can't necessarily counter

anyways this is on the nose so in the spirit of yugioh i'm running with it, this bitch DEFINITELY runs a time-thief deck. like especially with these cards being well suited to spamming the field, a move that feels very val to me. in terms of support he favors machine-types bc those work well with the deck and also you can go with all types of aesthetic. cyber shit. ancient gear shit. all of the above

[waveridden]

Oh!! Can i ask abt the spears & richardson rivalry scene in downswing? Or the ending where dickson goes back to planning out their bloodsucking

MAN THE DOWNSWING. this is going to be so long

so a lot of the time when i write something with blaseball, i have a specific narrative in mind, and also certain events. with the downswing, i had just been thinking a lot about siphons, and i went "you know what would be fun? writing about siphons." i didn't know who to write about but i knew from early on that i wanted it to be something nasty, both in terms of bloodiness and characterization, so i was ready to take some characters and make them into just... real motherfuckers. (sorry, yeong-ho benitez likers.)

the incredible @charlestonshoethieves had a list of all siphon blooddrains, something that reblase didn't track for some reason, so i immediately went to that and started looking for patterns that i thought were interesting. i had a couple criteria in mind - ideally i wanted a siphon who had previously been blooddrained, but i don't think there was one - and eventually narrowed it down to cory ross on the steaks, or dickson games.

all this to say, the spears/dix sequence is actually part of the reason i picked dix! i was looking through all the drains and saw that there was a lot of back-and-forth with the fridays, and i was immediately interested in that. there's something really compelling to me about these two people caught up on their own power trips at basically all costs. people got hurt, but it's easy to view that as temporary, especially when you are inflicting that hurt.

the ending was something i came up with pretty early on, and actually something i wrote pretty early on. i wanted those last couple paragraphs of dix's hit list to be dense. i wanted it to be hard to read and parse out everyone on the list, because they are at a point where anything and everything is cause enough to get on the drain list. and the total lack of self awareness re: "blaseball is a mess" came to me so easily, because... how can it be messy when they're so satisfied with what they're doing?

in closing after i wrote this @leonstamatis said to me that between s11 and the grand siesta dix probably had some withdrawal but corn syrup is a good blood substitute, so siphons probably just straight drink corn syrup now. i bequeath this mental image unto you. use it well.