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leam1983 · 4 months ago

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2024 in Gaming

Helldivers 2: it's become a running joke with the polycule, and approval with Progressive opinions or talking points now gets at least one of the three of us to jokingly pull out their smartphone to "call their Democracy Officer to report a case of treasonous activity"...

Walt isn't any better, but he's unlocked a few rocket-propelled weapons and now feels better sitting behind myself and Sarah while pelting the enemies ahead with weaponized Freedom.

Balatro: Walt and I's new favourite casual game, wherein appearance of it being a cutesy little variant on Poker suites turns into virtual crack. I've woken up in the wee hours to Walt's face bathed in his phone's OLED screen. When I ask him what's wrong, he typically replies something to the tune of "I need four thousand Chips, babe."

Marvel Rivals: it does what Overwatch 2 don't. As in, it's fun. Me, Walt, Sarah and a few of the boys on an all-Rocket Raccon match? You betcha! Also, there's Jeff the Land Shark, and Jeff the Land Shark deserves the world. Nay, the universe.

Astro Bot: didn't finish it, but I loved what Team Asobi cooked up. It's the most genuine, heartfelt, cutesy and engaging piece of corporate PR and Engineering porn to ever exist. Every button pressed during an Astro Bot session twiddles Mark Cerny's fun bits remotely.

Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree: bought it because I approve of the design ethos behind this DLC's existence, never played it because I suuck at FromSoft games. I made sure to watch some related content so I could point and laugh awkwardly if friends of mine greet me with a random cry of "BAYYYYLE!"

Worshippers of Chtulhu: Anno with a Lovecraftian twist. It's very broken, still very much in Early Access, but the promise is definitely there.

Park Beyond: Meh. Got it for cheap, I guess we're still not getting a decent heirloom to Roller Coaster Tycoon, after the Micromanagement nightmare that Planet Coaster turned out to be for me.

1000xResist: basically a Yoko Taro game not written or directed by Yoko Taro, and it's one of the deeper game-based experiences I've had in a long while. Strongly recommended.

The Cabin Factory: Spot the Difference for easily-frightened streamers who haven't played Exit 8 yet. It has an interesting narrative format and is one of the more surprising implementations of Unity Engine I've seen to date. I could've sworn this was a UE5 project! Beyond that, it's nothing special, but it's priced accordingly.

Clickolding: if Cookie Clicker had an uncanny sense of atmosphere and managed to creep you out with nothing except a sparsely-animated antagonist and a rising click counter, you'd have a sense of what this feels like. It does a very effective job at making you want to be as compliant and possible.

Daemonologie: The Salem Witch Trials in game form, or Ace Attorney if Phoenix wore a Quaker hat and had a fixation on nakey women doing odd shit in the forest. Very tense and minimalist, and very, very worthwhile.

Cryptmaster: it's basically a spruced-up oldschool MUD, with 3D black-and-white graphics and four zombified D&D character archetypes you control simultaneously, by either using your Arrow keys to move the entire party at once, or typing in the words that correspond to abilities or attacks. Very, very, very British humour is on offer, along with a script-writer that managed to predict most stupidly filthy prompts you're likely to try at any given point. It's hilarious and kludgey in just the right way, especially if you remember the nineties' MindMaze on Encarta '95.

Liar's Bar: Russian Roulette for Furries with a decent voIP chat integration. It's shallow and stupid fun, and the subject matter makes people behave in increasingly crude ways as the session goes on. If you're like me, you'll swear you played a round or two against a guy who was actually stone-dead-drunk and who actually had nothing to lose...

Silent Hill 2 Remake: finally, Silent Hill's fog doesn't feel like a performance-saving measure and actually creeps me the fuck out. It makes me feel terrible and has me contemplate not playing it, but it does make sense. Kudos to Bloober Team for finally manage to ground this one heck of a weirdo title.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: take Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny, burn all copies, consign the masters to Disney's oubliette, thank Harrison Ford for his decades of diligent service and pass the fedora and bullwhip to Troy Baker, 'cause Machine Games and Bethesda have managed to find themselves yet another prime title to fuck Fascists up using fisticuffs or blunt weaponry. It's a great callback to Machine Games' own contribution to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, seeing as every single level in the game has the granular detail of their version of Prague. Slap some John Williams on, add the authentic audio samples for whip cracks and punches, lifted straight out of the movies. I haven't had as much fun raiding tombs or poking through lovingly-reconstructed real places since Nolan North last lent his voice pipes to Nathan Drake.

Imagine my surprise, when the Sistine Chapel turned out to be about the size of our condo building's parking lot! That's tiny! The more you know, I guess!

Star Wars Outlaws: this is what happens when a studio really, really, really wants to give the IP due diligence, but its decades of re-iterated design docs ruin the experience. Kay Vess isn't a galactic scoundrel; she's basically every Far Cry protagonist ever, except in third-person!

The Forever Winter: all crunch, no fun. An incredibly engaging premise, but the mistaken notion that the average gamer has several three-to-four-blocks to devote to this each and every single day. Worth at least a YouTube ride-along, to see the incredible work the Art Design team's pulled together.

Disney's Epic Mickey - Rebrushed: Warren Spector's poorly-received baby and love letter to classic animation gets its just desserts on PC. It's not super complex with only two basic mechanics based off of two buttons on a controller, but it managed to use an extremely limited toolset to great effect, even throwing in what feels like a younger relative's first potential exposure to the Immersive Sim concept of looking for unmarked routes through a level. The in-between side-scrolling levels are oozing charm, and essentially feel like some part of Spector wanted to play in the same ballpark as American McGee's Alice.

If anything, it cements the idea that non-verbal instances of Mickey Mouse should never be left in the same room as a magical implement or toolset. Ever. Verbal Mickeys can push past their childlike glee and reason accordingly, but the oldschool button-eyed and non-verbal originator is not to be trusted.

STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl: Have fun losing half your health because the ARMA-esque mechanics decide that grazing damage means holy shit, you almost died! Especially, have fun getting knocked flat out on your ass by mutants - over and over and over...

To be played in subtitled Ukranian out of implicit support, and to have fun with the Slavic definition of an acting range. It's like watching the second season of Squid Game, except you get the sense that their scale goes from Nonchalant to Pants-Pissingly Terrified with very little grading in-between.

And now, for Games I didn't really get into until 2024...

Valfaris and Valfaris II: Mecha Therion: side-scrollers that do their damndest to look like they stepped straight out of the pages of Heavy Metal as of the mid-eighties. Gorgeously grotesque pixel art meets with a banging soundtrack made up of certified shredders. The lead headbangs and throws the horns when he finishes a stage!

Brütal Legend: an oldie but a goodie, previously constrained to the PS3 but now quite cozy on my Steam Deck. It's got a semi-cohesive grab-bag of mechanics, sure, but it's got even more heart, along with a pre-stroke Tim Curry voicing the villain with the gooiest of all countenances. Imagine Shere Khan, but Metal as fuck.

Katamari Damacy: Re-Roll: I barely touched the original when it came out. Having managed to grab the PC port for cheap and knowing how well it plays with a Steam Deck, the Prince of All Cosmos' ball-rolling sojourn across the surface of our planet has turned into a nightly staple for me.

Baldur's Gate 3: Yes, I know, I'm late, you've all banged Astarion sixteen times by now, but I've got time for a long-form WRPG right now. I might not have this much free time once January 10th rolls around.

The Night Cage: not a vidya, but a really nerve-wracking tabletop game that's made for quite a few fun Friday nights at La Casa de Gremlin.

On My Backlog, You'll Find...

Metaphor: Re-Fantazio: I know it's beloved by all, but it feels so "so far, so ATLUS" to me, and I still haven't gotten over P4, P3 and P5's excellent PC ports. I also have Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne to go through, so I really don't know if I have it in me to tackle something in that same vein quite so soon.

Arizona Sunshine 1 & 2: I just can't be bothered to set up my Oculus Rift 2's Link Cable. I have the games, I just don't know if and when I'll play them.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster: I'm waiting until my old cheese strats fade into the back of my mind before I tackle this one. Plus, I'm torn about Frank West not being voiced by TJ Rotolo. He doesn't just... feels like he's covered wars, y'know?

Frostpunk 2: bought it to support the devs, am just not jazzed about having to sort of network my way across several simultaneous points of origin until the depressing version of a Dieselpunk sprawl covers the map.

The Yakuza series on Amazon Prime: SEGA's trying to become the Disney of gaming, but something about Kazuma Kiryu's story (or stories) have always felt distinctly and uniquely Japanese to me. As in, it requires a specific mindset and might not be for everyone. I'm waiting for a sign, basically - maybe one to pop my collar and rent a karaoke machine so I can belt out maudlin soliloquies to lost childhood innocence while smoking half a pack of cigs between every third or fourth stanza...

The Sonic Movies: yeah, sure, I'm in my forties, but Jim Carrey's going through a career renaissance by acting out Albert Einstein on crack. Yeah, sure, it's not either of my Robotniks (the Jim Cummings or Long John Baldry versions - for the memes) - but it seems like it might still be a trilogy of adaptations worth pursuing.

Plus, hey, I gotta start catching up on that Stobotnik shit, huh?

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joyce-stick · 1 year ago

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An Essay About Slash Review of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, A Video Game Which is Very Good

(and also: has prompted many quite wrong rather bad takes)

An essay by Audrey of the joystick system

The very bad discourse and drama around The Coffin of Andy and Leyley has served to obscure the simple fact that it is quite a very good video game and this video essay is here to tell you about that.

Video version:

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Previous video essay: Lost Judgment's Lost Plot

If you enjoy this essay, please consider following us here or on any other platforms, and/or donating to support future works via our Patreon or Ko-fi.

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Transcript:

Hi everyone. So. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is really, really fucking good.

If you’ve heard of this game, you’ve probably heard of it in the context of memes, screenshots divorced from context, and/or capricious moral outrage. If you’ve not heard of this game, well, you’re hearing of it now! And good thing, too, because much of the coverage and discussion around this game that already exists has… been, let’s just say, not particularly earnest. I hope to remedy that at least somewhat with this video.

If you’ve heard about this game because of discourse, and come here expecting drama and hot takes, then, this may not be your video. Or your YouTube channel, even. Or maybe it is, if you’d like the delicious comments section. If you’re that sort of clicker, though— welcome! I’m Audrey of the joystick system, and this is the place where I (and my headmates) talk honestly about things we care about, and I hope you’ll hear me out a little and maybe consider staying and improving our viewer retention. Thanks, if you do.

So, to writ: My purpose today is to gush. I will be gushing here. For most of it. And as for what I will be gushing about, some of it will be gushing BLOOD, GUTS, AND DELICIOUS DEATH. I am entirely serious. The subject of today’s presentation contains mature content, including copious foul language and themes slash depictions of death, cannibalism, cultism, demon summoning rituals, parricide, dystopian social decay, and heterosexuality. Oh, and also a little bit of incest as a treat, I guess, but the incest is heterosexual, and that’s worse.

[long pause]

Excellent. You’re still here. So. This morbidly beautiful video game may not be for everyone, but that’s good, because it is instead for exactly me! A short plot synopsis of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley might go as follows:

if you're not watching the video listen to this for extra effect

Siblings Andrew and Ashley Graves are forcibly quarantined inside their apartment by the local authorities, with no food and even less hope for rescue. Their parents have abandoned them. Absolutely no one is coming to save them. In order to survive and escape this awful situation, they butcher and consume the fresh flesh of some guy who got himself soul vored by a demon that he summoned without a plan.

This conspicuously carnivorous crime, and their effort to cover their tracks, puts them in a fair bit of a deeper shithole than they are already in. So naturally they keep digging themselves deeper by committing even more crimes, AND in the process, also dig themselves deeper into their toxic codependent sibling relationship, which is going just great, thank you. Sure, Andrew almost killed his sister, but he didn’t, and that’s what matters! And she still loves him, so it’s all good!

This is of course a joke.

First thing I absolutely love about this game is the writing. It’s witty, intelligent, uncompromising, and just generally delicious. It holds nothing back in depicting the toxicity of the two leads and their relationship, resulting in two compelling characters whose flaws and few virtues perfectly complement slash exacerbate one another, resulting in a beautiful train wreck of a relationship dynamic that proves equal parts disturbing, mesmerizing, and hilarious.

The charming darkly comedic bite of the writing style also lends a lot of great character to the setting. This sardonically presented dystopian world is both richly detailed and fleetingly elaborated on, a commendable balance to have achieved, in my opinion. The first chapter of this game is hilarious not just because of the banter between Ashley and Andrew (which is terrific), but because it presents such a sharp satire of current year bullshit.

As just an example, I give you, one of my favorite jokes in the game:

I probably don’t need to explain the thing this is making fun of to you, but I will anyway.

The situation presented in The Coffin of Andy and Leyley’s first episode is very easily readable as an allegory for how disasters that are a direct result of ongoing 2020s late capitalist decay continuously fuck people over. In particular, this scenario feels like a direct commentary on both the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the Flint, Michigan water crisis. The former obviously has affected way more people but what both have in common is that they are crises created and exacerbated by malfeasance and/or negligence committed in the name of for-profit interests, and that the “response,” to them, such as there was one, has amounted to dehumanizing and marginalizing the victims while minimizing the issue, forcing the victims out of society’s wider view, and being reticent to punish the individuals responsible.

Just as the authorities responded to the water crisis and the worst excesses of the pandemic in real life, the authorities in The Coffin of Andy and Leyley impose half-measures designed to further restrict the freedom of the dirty undesirables who bear the worst damages, while merely shielding the upper echelons of society from the disaster rather than actually addressing or attempting to solve the issue. Most of you who lived through 2020 in the United States probably have experienced the frustration of being on the receiving end of this kind of policy.

During the pandemic, the quarantine was supposed to protect us, but for a lot of people it ended up doing quite the opposite. A lot of folks didn’t have any savings, and couldn’t get any since the employment market wasn’t exactly on fire, and our representatives had to be bothered way too much just to put out a pithy economic stimulus just to save face. Not to say that this all has stopped, exactly, as all that’s changed now is that we’re just, living with this situation, but.

It wasn’t literally a cop outside everyone’s door preventing them from going outside to not die, but for a lot of people, it might as well have been that! Never mind those who, y’know, had no inside to retreat to. Or were imprisoned during the pandemic and left even more unprotected! Or thrown out by their landlords! And so on. And, y’know, the big chain grocery stores keep throwing out all the perfectly good unsold food, so they’re already sending this message in all but, well… these exact words.

So, that’s why I think this joke lands. It’s exaggerated, but familiarly rooted, and that’s just good satire! It’s a joke which feels lifted right out of Invader Zim, which, I would put The Coffin of Andy and Leyley right about on the level of as far as both the tone it’s going for and the quality of its execution. Which of course, brings us to the extremes that these circumstances push its characters, and its plot, to.

Okay, so, also like Invader Zim, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is hardly a polemic, nor is it a morality tale. Sure, there’s social commentary in it, but that’s just a nice side thing. It’s not a story about the otherwise innocent victims of an unjust society who are pushed to do terrible things by circumstances outside their control— it is, rather a story of terrible people, who, both because of their character failings, and the desperate situations they find themselves in, find themselves doing even worse things.

Andrew and Ashley commit the cannibalism the first time in large part because they kind of have to do it. No food! Cop outside their door actively deterring them from getting food! Out of options! So they do it. They could probably be excused, if only they were given a fair trial. Which they realize they’re not going to get. So yeah. It’s understandable that they do it. And that they kill this one cop, who very much has it coming.

But they do not have to keep doing it! And gosh grief, do they keep fucking doing it— so many its. They really do not stop digging that hole that they are in. Even the first time that they do the cannibalism, when they kind of really have to do the cannibalism, Ashley is just a little bit more excited about doing the cannibalism than she probably should be.

I love this kind of delicious edgy dark humor. I love stories that go for it, imagine the worst possible people they can, and also try to make that funny. I love this about Invader Zim, that it presents a character who is unquestionably a monster, but also has relatable human desires like wanting to fit in and being concerned about looking weird or abnormal, but has those feelings for very different reasons and acts on them by committing some very despicable crimes. It really gets at a deep-seated darkness that I and a lot of other fucked up traumatized queer people who were little kids when this show aired have, the catharsis of visualizing some of our worst intrusive thoughts while evoking the emotions that pushed us to imagine this kind of fucked up shit.

I’ve loved this kind of thing since we saw Heathers when we were 14. Heathers is an absolutely incredible film that you should check out, by the way, and about which we failed to properly or interestingly articulate our thoughts a few years back. Its lead protagonists, Jason “J.D.” Dean and Veronica Sawyer, are similarly relatable characters who have familiar feeling flaws and emotionally resonant trauma hangups, and also function as very toxic enablers of each other’s worst traits, leading them to work through those feelings by, y’know, murdering their classmates!

Heathers made us realize just how exactly mentally ill of a 14 year old we really were when we were 14, and I love it for that. So. So fucking much.

That was ten years and change ago.

We are still a mentally ill 24 year old.

And Andrew and Ashley Graves, if I had to sum them up, are basically J.D. and Veronica, if they were in their twenties, siblings, and also way, way, way worse.

And I love them.

So, obviously. Ashley and Andrew are hilarious. At least, I find them to be such. They’re terrible, and awful, and amazing, and Ashley is such a girlboss. She is one of the most God Forbid Women Do Anything characters ever.

Anyway! I’ve talked about the cannibalism, and the dystopia, and the characters, and why all of that’s good. I’ve also forgotten to talk about the part where they evade an assassin, and, also a host of other things.

I love that this game has so many fun little optional interactions with NPCs, objects, and items, that you can totally miss. I love how the narration hints at the solutions to puzzles by snarkily referring to things you can interact with as what their purpose is to the characters rather than what they are, this quip about the mop that you clean up a murder scene with, the interactions that Andrew has with these cultists who suck at demon summoning, the excellent in-game art and the brilliant visual duality of Andrew and Ashley’s character designs, this line where Andrew is upset that life is so hard for them as fugitives from the law because they can only find this one shitty motel that takes cash and doesn’t ask them for their ID, and also the music, which is royalty free music made by people unassociated with the developer but is nonetheless perfectly suited for the game.

So much about this game is stuff I find so completely brilliant, and I have so little to criticize, that I think we’d probably be here all day if I kept going. So.

Let’s spend a thousand ish more words talking about the parents.

When The Coffin of Andy and Leyley begins, the protagonists’ parents are absent. You can optionally find two early references to them early on— one, if you interact with the bed in their bedroom, and encounter the shocking revelation that “Your parents have FUCKED on this bed.”

The second, is if you interact with the phone, the game dutifully informs you that,

You’re probably less than five minutes into the game at this point, barely begun solving the first puzzle, which prompted you to “find nutrients to not die.” And of course, this says about all you need to know. These children have been abandoned. But if it needed to be any clearer, the game later delivers unto you a flashback to prior in the story, when Ashley desperately calls Mrs. Graves for help after they leave and go move to a hotel, and later a new house, to which the kids are of course not invited. And this specific scene, specific line, here, fucking hit me:

“And I don’t want to hear these lies about starving anymore.”

Emphasis mine.

Even as Ashley and Andrew escalate the severity of their crimes which gradually come to have less and less to do with their need to survive as the story goes on, I find it very hard to not be on their side at least a little bit, and this is easily the biggest reason why.

I have had this phone call.

Not this exact specific phone call, of course. Obviously, I’ve never been locked up in an apartment with an armed patrol outside my door whose job it was to gaslight me while ensuring that I starved to death. Obviously, my mom has never said those exact words.

But gosh grief and fuck me if it’s never felt like she has. She may as well have fucking told me that, with all the things she told me I was lying about. And who fucking knows, maybe she did say those exact words to us, and we repressed them. I don’t know. I am very not done working through all the bullshit that she gaslit us over.

*sighs, preparing to vent*

I have called our mother and had to beg her to pay for food. I have called her and had to beg to pay for our rent, while our parents were supposed to be supporting us studying abroad. I have called her and begged her to forgive me for daring to use just a few of the thirty dollars our parents used to send us to live with every month back then, to buy a drink or a movie ticket or something. I have had to concede to our parents financially holding us hostage, had to go the last week of the month on a shoestring diet while waiting for them to graciously deposit another thirty dollars into our bank account... so that we could continue eating. I used to relish February, the shortest month, for being the one part of the year in which I had to stretch out that thirty dollars the least. And once, I pleaded with our mother to pay for us to move to another apartment when the landlord suddenly kicked us out of the current one, abruptly and obligatorily switching gears from arguing with her to kissing her ass through our gritted teeth, under threat of our parents cutting off their financial support of us completely, abandoning us in a foreign country where we had no money, no job, and barely spoke the language.

And one day, after I stopped dancing to their tune, they just stopped listening, stopped even pretending to want to help. After nineteen years of escalating emotional and physical abuse and neglect, they abandoned us. And one day, after I spent months working 10 hour days every week Ubering food around for tips, sending my resume, filling applications, making calls, stopping into places to ask for work, all to no avail, for months, and desperately plugging the Patreon page of this very YouTube channel praying that some generous soul with money to burn would solve all our problems. All of this still wasn’t enough, and wasn’t going anywhere, and I’d run out of money and was short on rent on the one sublet room we could get that cost exactly three hundred dollars…

And I called her, and I asked her for help. I really didn’t want to. I wanted to hear nothing of her again. And she said to stop lying. To stop bullshitting her that I couldn’t get enough money, or find a job.

Not too long after, I swore off all contact with her, and eventually also with our father. And every time I have spoken to either of them since, I have made no secret of how I feel. Because if I get nothing out of kissing their ass, why fucking pretend.

My family is not poor. They own their house. They own, and leased out, a second house. Their house is full of fancy IKEA furniture and various other niceties, they’ve renovated the place at least twice, they live in a nice, safe neighborhood, they have an attic and a basement, they at one point paid for multiple plane tickets for us per year while still refusing to let us eat on any more than thirty five dollars, an extra five dollars we also had to beg them for. Our dad has a lucrative tech job. All of this, and they insisted, while refusing to answer questions about their finances in any detail, that they couldn’t afford to help us go to where we wanted to go for college, that they had no place for us in their house, that they couldn’t afford three hundred dollars of rent to help us have a roof over our head for one more month.

So when I read this delightful jaunt of a chapter of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, where Andrew and Ashley break into their parents’ new huge house to steal all their shit, and Ashley says “This is some rich people stuff!” about their fireplace,

And when their mom says, “there’s no room to keep housing you here indefinitely,” and the internal monologue says, “even though it’s way bigger than the old house.” It’s both an entertaining mockery of the attitude of the typical American family, how first you’re your parents’ property for eighteen years and then you’re turned out on your own to face the world without their support, and how the fuck are you supposed to live like that, to figure out how to live your life in the face of that, to meaningfully be a fulfilled person in that situation, especially in a time, when, no, mom, I can’t pay a college tuition on a waitress salary like you did back in the fucking nineties, you c--t,

Even though they have an extra bed in their basement and a perfectly good couch and plenty of space for another bed besides, and a vegetable garden, and a kitchen, and all these other middle-class petty bougie niceties, the Graves mom says, “sorry, we can’t keep helping you,” and. And. I read all this, and I think,

“I understand why Ashley wants to fucking flay these people. I understand why she wants to K1!L them.”

I cannot tell you how much catharsis the ending of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley episode 2 gave me. I cannot convey the weight of my gratitude that someone out there validated my anger and my specific fucked up power fantasy with their art. I didn’t even ask them to. I probably would’ve eventually done it on my own. But I’m so glad that someone did it for me.

If I ever hypothetically meet Nemlei, somehow, and have some cash, I will happily buy them a drink. Hopefully, by paying this excellent game’s ten dollar cover price, I already have!

I know you’re not watching this, but on the off chance this reaches your ears, I just wanna say thanks. For giving me a safe, legal, regret-free, socially acceptable, non-violent outlet for the rage I feel towards my parents.

Well.

Mostly socially acceptable.

Meow.

This game is not finished, as you may have noticed if you’ve gone to check it out on Steam. It ends on an ambiguous and open note, but in my opinion, a perfectly satisfying one. Nemlei could disappear absolutely, never release the proper ending of this game, and never make another game again, and I would not be mad. I've already got more than my money’s worth and then some. So. Yeah. I’m happy. Count me as happy!

I kinda wanna start talking a bit more about the branches of the second episode. I wanna say how it’s a brilliant idea to have two separate story arcs for the two variations of this episode’s ending, and how I hope that that’s executed on as beautifully as the rest of the game already is. I wanna talk about the ways in which Andrew and Ashley’s mom is ambiguously humanized despite being so obviously terrible. I wanna talk about the dialogue Andrew does when his parents offer him a chance to make amends, and he has doubts, if you choose to let him have them, and how I would probably also have doubts in his position, and not be able to follow through without my lovely evil cannibal sister pushing me towards… the thing. I wanna talk about this line, where Ashley talks about why she likes eating people, and how it’s so equal parts poetic and macabre and edgy bullshit and that that’s such a beautifully balanced cocktail of emotion to nail and Nemlei totally fucking nails it

I WANT TO GUSH FOREVER. ABOUT THIS GAME. AND I WANT NO ONE TO STOP ME.

Alas, I will stop myself.

And move on to the elephant in the room!

THE FUCKING.

Mom: “But that-.... That doesn’t make any sense.” Mom: “Why would you not-......” Mom: “Ah, I get it.” Andrew: “..........??” Mom: “You fuck her.” Andrew: “Wha— HUUUUH?!?!!?” Mom: “Oh that is disgusting! Andrew, she’s your sister for god’s sake!” Andrew: “I haven’t done anything!? What the hell, mom!?” Mom: “Then what does she give you that makes it worth all this?” Andrew: “W-well that’s none of your business, is it??” Mom: “I knew something was off… How did I fuck up so bad? I’m the worst mother ever..!” Andrew: “No! I mean yes you are, but I have never—!” Ashley: “I’m baaaa-ack!!!” Andrew: “Now of all times!?” Ashley: “I got the money! Did you miss me, handsome?? Did you? Did you??” Mom: “...........................” Andrew: “(I WANT TO DIE!!!!!!)”

Okay. So. I said I didn’t want to talk about this. But I’m talking about this game. I can’t not talk about it.

Yep, it’s hot takes and drama time!

So, not too long ago, Nemlei deleted their Twitter, their Itch.io, their everything, their entire online presence. The Steam page for The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, which used to list Nemlei as the developer and publisher, now lists “Kit9 Studio.” It is the only game to their name on the platform. A community forum post from said entity known as Kit9 announces that “the developer” (no name given) “has decided to permanently and completely terminate their activities online from here on.”

I don’t know exactly what happened, or why they did this. There’s a lot of people around who sure think they know. But in brief, as neutrally as possible: Nemlei, or someone close to them, was doxxed, or at least sought out as a doxxing target, by one or multiple users of an online forum. Their supposed crime? Making a video game “for degenerates.”

I don’t know who did the doxxing. I don’t know what their motive was, and for my own sanity, I am not going to look. I am choosing not to care. The most important and most obvious fact at hand here is that Nemlei’s creation has been met with controversy amongst social media users, and about one or two hack video game outrage journalists, who seem to have nothing better to do or say. And it seems clear that the doxxing wouldn’t have happened had they not been met with this negative attention. And all because of this.

Not the cannibalism, not the parricide, not the demon sacrifices. No, um, the one implied sex scene.

And it doesn’t even actually happen! It’s just a premonition of a possible future event that Ashley and Andrew supernaturally receive. It’s not particularly graphic, it doesn’t yet go anywhere, and it’s a short scene on an optional route that the game actively forewarns you about. You have to be trying to see it on purpose.

Well, that’s all true. It is indeed a minor and avoidable scene, and the discourse about it has absolutely poisoned the well when it comes to the conversation about the game. But also, “uhh, it’s optional and not a big thing,” is inadequate as a defense. This is still content in the game that Nemlei actively chose to put in the game, and even discounting this, the themes of incest are all over the game. Ashley speaks flirtatiously to Andrew at basically every turn. Even if you avoid this specific scene, the incest themes are not something you’re going to just not notice, if you’re paying attention to the text.

All that being said, it’s not like this content comes as a surprise. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley’s Steam store page accurately represents the product! A brother and sister. Codependency and cannibalism. It’s not as if you don’t know what you’re paying for and choosing to play. You came here for this! Most of the people playing this are here for this! You have to figure that if they are fine with killing and eating people, they’re probably fine with fucking each other, or, eventually possibly eventually going to be, at least.

So you’d think, except that many people seem to unironically believe that the cannibalism is more moral than the incest.

Oh, god, I’m doing this right now, aren’t I.

So, I get it. While I’m pretty skeptical of the notion that cannibalism is not as bad as incest, I do realize that incest is, at the very least, the more taboo of these things, and that a lot of people are more uncomfortable with it than they are with the cannibalism and the murder. To quote the one positive and in-depth review available in any media outlet at the time of this writing, from Destructoid:

“This aspect is undoubtedly the most controversial element about The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, and I understand why. While cannibalism is a taboo subject, it’s present in mainstream games like Fallout as an option for players. Having incestuous themes crosses over into Drakengard territory, and even then, no option allows Caim to reciprocate Furiae’s feelings for him.”

"The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is horrifying and I can’t get enough of it" Andrea Gonzalez, Destructoid, November 12 2023

So, yeah, I. y’know. Get it. I know why. However.

I can point to a lot of things that Andrew and Ashley do wrong in this game. They are, as per the game’s premise, very not okay, not as individuals, and not together. Andrew is way too attached to Ashley, and Ashley is generally an awful person who is way too attached herself, and also, all too quick on the draw to take advantage of Andrew’s attachment to her to make him do what she wants. This is not a healthy relationship. And we’re here for it! It’s compelling!

But, I think it’s worth asking why it’s such a toxic dynamic. Is it because they’re siblings? Well, not really. It’s a dynamic that’s specifically possible with them being siblings, but it’s not because of their sibling connection.

The actual reason why Andrew and Ashley’s relationship turns abusive isn’t because their relationship is abusive by necessity or nature, but because Ashley abuses their relationship. And she is doing this for basically the whole game. Like, it is abusive the whole time. It doesn’t become abusive when their relationship takes its romantic turn. Does it become more abusive? I mean. Maybe. Maybe the romance exacerbates the abuse. I dunno, we’ll have to wait and see what the next episode says.

So, then, why is the notion of them possibly in the future having sex the elephant in the room here, when before that, they do so many objectively worse things that cause much more harm both to themselves and others? Is that really so much more of a bigger deal than the murder and the people eating?

Or. To phrase it Ashley’s way. You played a game about mutilating and eating your parents’ corpses, and getting laid is what you’re freaking out about?

Is the incest really that much more extreme, or are you just more disgusted with it?

And even if you are more disgusted with it. Even if we grant that it is, actually, somehow, more harmful for siblings to have sex with each other, than to do murder and cannibalism. Is this the hill you’re dying on? What you’ve decided is of such utmost importance and injustice that you decide to go harass some random indie dev who just wants to make a silly video game about a couple of siblings eating people?

Does it truly make sense to let your kneejerk moral disgust guide you to the conclusion that the creator of this game deserves to be persecuted for merely writing about and drawing a thing you don’t like?

Well, to answer that, we have to get into the question of whether or not “immoral fiction” is harmful, or “normalizing” things that are wrong. Does fictionally depicting an immoral action actually cause harm?

I could dance around in circles for a little while about the edge cases, and certain writers who are publishing bad or hateful material in bad faith, or fascist propaganda, which is of course always bad, or whatever other example I could use to qualify my point or list out an exception to appease the people who disagree with me, but, I’ll just cut right to the chase, and tell you the answer

No!

The answer is NO!

The thing about taboos is that they don’t make us more safe. They don’t protect us from bad things. All they do is protect people’s comfort by silencing people they don’t want to understand, and enable bad actors by keeping their victims in the dark, and denying them the ability to talk about it.

The only thing we end up doing by censoring stories about these uncomfortable topics, and making it socially unacceptable to talk about them, is make it harder to know. We deny ourselves knowledge. We deny ourselves a conversation about these subjects, we deny ourselves the ability to meaningfully understand them. We deny ourselves power, what little we have, as readers, to understand, and to critique, to reason.

There’s a tumblr post I really like. Well, a number of them, I really like, on this topic, but I’m picking this one, because it’s got a quote I really like. It talks about Lolita. That Lolita. And, now, I’ve never read Lolita, at least not yet. Lolita is a novel about child sexual abuse, told from the perspective of an abuser. It’s an uncomfortable book with an uncomfortable topic, and it’s not wrong to be uncomfortable with it. The author of this post acknowledges that.

But they talk about it. They talk about how it shines a light on its subject matter. The why and the how of abusers and their actions. The ways in which their victims suffer. How it shows all of this in a way that it only could from the perspective it takes. And, I’m just going to quote them. I can’t do anything else. They said it better than I could, right now.

“Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.” - tumblr user legsdemandias

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley has been ridiculed, joked about, hot taked on, made a target, drama-ed over, and so on, but it’s hardly been criticized. No one I’ve seen admitting to not liking it talks critically about why it’s disgusting to them, or tries to understand why it exists, or what it’s for. And this is most people’s reaction to most media that deals seriously with anything taboo. “I don’t get it. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t exist. Get it away from me.”

I’m annoyed that the medium, the art form, of video games, is valued so little by so many that this is the wide reaction when something like this gets popular. That the mainstream games journalism media ridicules it, and the creator gets threatened by an internet mob, and it falls on the weirdos and the freaks and the no-name YouTube uwu girls, to give it the serious consideration and recognition it deserves.

To summarize, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is, in my opinion, a very good video game, and on its behalf, I am mad at video games.

Now, go on. You made it through this video. I told you the plot! You can probably stomach the plot! So go, go. Shoo. Go buy Nemlei a drink. If you want to.

Or, buy us, the joystick system, a drink! You can do that at patreon dot com slash joycestick, or, ko-fi dot com slash joycestick. You can buy us drinks in both of those places.

I’ve been Audrey. Thank you for listening.

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#joystick system posts #audrey (of the joystick system) posts #joyce-stick #the coffin of andy and leyley #video essay #video going up public proper tomorrow morning for youtube optimization #I think

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bluefuecoco · 9 months ago

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i saw that pokeclicker has a desktop client version so i downloaded it to try, but a) it's kinda laggy on my computer and b) they disable autoclicker capability?!

i KNOW it's cheating, but i'm not TRYING to get carpal tunnel from clicker games!!!!

#so i'm back on the browser version #i had to go into the discord today to get help because i got hit with a bug #that was making my save not load #and i was goign to cry because i'm nearing the end of alola again and if I LOST ALL MY PROGRESS HERE AGAIN--#luckily it was a known bug with a quick fix so.... yay :)#my sanity is being held up by clicker games #i just have to beat hau and i'm soooo close i'm like 1 second off from being able to do it in time #maybe if i had a time flute i'd be able to do it? let me see

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spleenmuncher · 4 days ago

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I just finished the last of us season 2 episode 1, spoilers for season 2 episode 1 and part two follow.

I wrote down my train of thought while watching the episode.

-ˋˏ✄--------------------------------------------------

- Tweaking out already

- "Okay"

- WISHEJJDJDJDNDHDBDB

- HOLY SHIT, GIRAFFES???

- ARE WE GONNA GET ABBY?

- Abby!!!! :33

- FIREFLIES!!!!!

- ISSAC MENTION??

- Abby revenge arc

- "They say he's handsome"

- He is a lot taller than her

- Kaitlyn Dever, my wife

- I like how we get her motives earlier.

- "Slowly" ...good God.

- CALEB???

- ELLIE, HUH???

- I'm assuming this is a misdirect and she's just training.

- YEAH, GET HIS ASS!

- Knew it

- JESSE!!!!! :333!!!!

- Bella Ramsey, my husband.

- Ellie's so fucking hot

- Is that fungus in the pipe?

- DINA!!!

- JOEL!!

- Dina and Joel scene!!!

- Father in law and his soon to be daughter in law

- "I lick them?"

- I forgot Joel was a carpenter

- I don't want Joel to die

- "What I am"

- Joel says he's Ellie's parent confirmed!!

- interesting that he's a lot more open about Sarah now.

- "What did I do?" FUCKING GENOCIDE????

- I love you, Dina

- "Don't tell anyone I'm in therapy" he's so real for that tbh

- CLICKER

- TOMMY AND ELLIE!

- HE'S TEACHING HER TO SHOOT!

- "Compensate for the bullet drop"

- "It's standing on a fucking fence" I love you, Ellie

- I low-key forgot she was an adult.

- Tommy's my favorite character, he's so cool.

- She's yapping about it too loud.

- SHE'S YAPPING ABOUT IT TOO LOUD.

- Puppies!!

- BENJAMIN!

- MARIA!!!! SHE'S ONE OF MY FAVORITES!

- "Caulk" I'm so fucking mature, I swear.

- Joel is so cool, I hope nothing bad happens to him.

- I love how we can see how Joel and Maria's viewpoints contradict each other.

- I really hope nothing bad happens to Benjamin.

- The tonal change for "monsters" is killing me

- I'm going to cry.

- Liar

- I LOVE BENJAMIN

- I LOVE JOEL, I HOPE NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO HIM

- Is that weed

- that's weed

- Ellie being called Joel's daughter makes me so happy.

- I love you, Gail.

- HUH?????

- JOEL KILLED EUGENE??

- WHAT THE FUCK?

- I'm assuming he was infected

- ☹️

- ☹️☹️☹️

- Poor Joel ☹️

- "I saved her" I mean, technically.

- I'm sad.

- THE GUITAR!

- I love that Ellie's working on her gun.

- DINA!!!

- "You're wearing canvas sneakers in the snow"

- Just kiss already

- CURTIS AND VIPER REFERENCE???

- THE KNIFE IN THE SIDE TABLE, JUST LIKE IN THE GAME!

- Shimmer ☹️

- JESSE!!!

- I love all of them.

- CURTIS AND VIPER REFERENCE AGAIN??

- Jesse's 23?

- KAT!

- "for some fucking reason" LMAOOOO

- Kat is so fucking hot

- OHHHHH

- This is the night before the dance

- "She's the other one" THE OTHER LESBIAN????

- KAT IS SO HOT

- Ooooooo, bloody tracks!!

- Dina and Ellie, you fucking idiots.

- JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, LISTEN TO KAT

- Clicker corpse!

- Bear corpse!

- Jesus Christ, that's a lot of corpses.

- "How many infected does it take to bring down a moose?"

- ELLIE'S FACE LOOKING AT THE DISMEMBERED BEAR 😭🙏🏻

- "Bear-b-que" THEY MATCH EACHOTHER'S FREAK!

- I love Kat already.

- I love how the other guy is just letting it happen.

- DIVAAAAAAS

- Why the clicker kinda....

- BOTTLE!!!!!!

- I love the charades game they're playing

- EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH BOARD LIKE IN THE GAME!

- PUPPY ON THE EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH BOARD!

- The way at Ellie's killing the clicker reminds me of her knife kill animations in the game when she was 14.

- "did you get bite? Do I have to shoot you in the face?"

- ELLIE FALLING THROUGH THE FLOOR HAS ME DEAD

- This is just like the game, I'm in love

- QUIET THE FUCK DOWN, YOU DINGUS

- She's gonna to get jumped right now

- You know she's not gonna to stay put, Dina

- THE SET IS SO SIMILAR TO THE GAME

- Ellie, I am clocking your lesbian ass so hard.

- INFECTED IN THE BACK!!

- I love how you can see how Ellie's grown since season 1.

- STALKER!

- "run at me fucker!"

- I love the infected sounds

- ELLIE TURN THE FUCK AROUND

- TURN THE FUCK AROUND

- ELLIE TURN AROUND

- Infected makeup goes hard

- The tendrils 🤌🏻🤌🏻

- OH SHIT OH FUCK OH FUCK SHIT SHIT SHIT FUCK OH SHIT

- Ellie is getting bit left and right, Jesus Christ

- Are they discovering stalkers for the first time??

- I love Maria

- I love Jackson, it's my favorite faction

- MARIA IS SO HOT.

- It's interesting to see how The people react to the infected in the show, since we only really get the perspective of Joel, Ellie, and Abby in the game.

- Owie ☹️

- Don't leave the fucking water running Ellie, that's wasteful.

- I could never give myself stitches, I'm terrified of needles.

- HOW HIGH IS ELLIE'S PAIN TOLERANCE, JESUS!

- I love seeing Ellie's journal, she's so silly.

- "Don't fuck it up don't fuck it up" Ellie's serving such lesbian realness rn

- OUR FIRST JOEL AND ELLIE SCENE!

- ELLIE IS SO HOT

- THANK YOU ELLIE, FOR SERVING BUTCH LESBIAN REALNESS

- FLANNEL ELLIE COME SAVE ME

- SAVE ME FLANNEL ELLIE

- Bad string reference, that reminds me of the patrol chapter.

- I love how Joel got out of there so quickly 💀💀

- SAVE ME GREEN FLANNEL ELLIE!!!

- THEY'RE PLAYING THE CLICKER GAME! LIKE IN THE LOST LEVEL!

- Puppies!!

- THIS WAS THE SONG IN THE GAME, I THINK!

- THIS IS EXACTLY LIKE THE GAME!!!!!

- SAVE ME DINA, SAVE ME

- THEY'RE ALL SO HOT!!!!!!

- I love Dina

- I remember I couldn't play the game whenever she was in it because I was too busy staring at her because she was so stunning.

- JESSE!!! MY SECOND FAVORITE!!

- ELLIE ☹️, YOU ARE NOT THE LEGAL DRINKING AGE.

- HOLY SHIT IT'S GUSTAVO, IT'S FUCKING GUSTAVO!!!!!!!!!!

- I LOVE YOU DINA

- Oh my God, just kiss already

- "How bad do I smell?"

- I FUCKING GOT IT

- Sapphics are so cool, I hope someone named Seth doesn't come up to them.

- KISS, KISS, KISS

- JUST KISS ALREADY

- That scene with Dina when she says "Oh Ellie" looks exactly like her in the game.

- "Oh Ellie, I think they should be terrified of you" That's literally just the synopsis of the entire fucking game 😭🙏🏻

- SAPHHICS!!!!

- FUCK YOU, SETH

- JOEL SHOULD HAVE KILLED HIM.

- DINA'S FACE IS KILLING ME

- I love you, Maria

- All of these characters are so cool. Except for Seth, fuck Seth.

- ☹️😭😭😭😭😭

- SISNDJDKDJDJHXDJNDJSJAJDN

- I'm going to fucking cry.

- WAIT, ARE WE GETTING THE SCENE EARLIER!?

- WE'RE GETTING THE SCENE EARLIER!!!!!!!

- We are not getting the scene earlier.

- Oh my god, the people of Jackson are fucking stupid

- THEY'RE GOING TO BURN DOWN FUCKING JACKSON

- Dina fucking Chekov's gunned us with the roots.

- WAIT, IT IS FUNGUS, I WAS RIGHT!

- HIVE MIND!!! HIVE MIND!! HIVE MIND! HIVE MIND!!

- Abby's group?

- ABBY'S GROUP!!

- Kaitlyn Dever, my wife.

#the last of us

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fishnoodles · 2 months ago

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Might of the Meek Devlog #1 - Better Late Than Never

I've been meaning to do small updates and devlogs for my game for like, forever. So I'm biting the bullet now.

What is Might of the Meek?

Might of the Meek is an incremental game me and Brynn (@brynnticus) been working on for the past few months. It's a game where you play as a God of the meek, using creatures to gather power, while shaping how you intend to grow as the game progresses.

Progression comes in the form of your Skill Tree, and at the start of the game you'll get different minions, each with their own strengths to play into on the Skill Tree, if you so choose.

Prototype for a barebones clicker is actually done! It clicks, you can buy minions, and the whole thing Works. Very very few passive nodes on the tree are also added and is functional (Basically the system is done, I just have to code in all the passives)

Other features have also been added, such as the rarity and tier system for minions. There's plans for more systems, such as abilities and trinkets, that will come later in the timeline.

So here's the priority list for code:

-Getting all the minions done

RNG for a minion's rarity and tier has been made. Right now all that's left is the passive minions have when they're Epic or Legendary rarity.

-Skill Tree

Part of the core loop of this clicker. So pretty important

-Prestiege & Trinket system

Core progression to finish the main game loop

-On Fire System & Crits

Stuff to spice up clicking, and to call on for passives

-Ability System

Planned to be a card-based system, this one is the final touch to finish what I'd call a 1.0 release.

Currently all artwork is done by Brynn while all code is done by me in Godot. I might post more of Brynn's art soon as the current UI is temp UI. It's inspired by Minecraft, since it's a style we found hard to replicate with AI in a horrendously AI asset saturated market (mobile)

In other code-related logging. Save and Load is a constant spectre on this game and I've been continuously doing and redoing my approach with it. It's horrendous and I hate it, but for now it works. We'll see if it still does every devlog onward.

That's the end of this one. The others moving forward will be more what I've done today oriented rather than introductory. ok bai

#devlog #game dev #game developer #hexblast studios #might of the meek #kish soup #ill think abt getting a dedicated blog but if i do ill rb my old posts like this there

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orteil42 · 1 year ago

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as part of porting Cookie Clicker content to the mobile app, i wrote myself a tool a few months back that automatically converts the desktop game's upgrades and achievements for use in the mobile version's codebase. there's a bunch of details i have to add manually afterwards, ie. upgrade effects and unlock requirements etc, but it's really helped streamline the process! there's also built-in special cases that let me get stuff like generic building upgrades or cps/bank achievements working immediately too, which is going to save me a lot of pain for future updates. thought it was neat

#cookie clicker

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unseededtoast · 1 year ago

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Turtle Doves | Joel Miller

Part Eight

Chapter Directory

Series Summary: In which two broken souls connect so deeply, that if one should perish, the other would surely die of a broken heart. (slow burn, timeline changes. After TLOU1, before TLOU2, assumed knowledge of infected, uses elements from both show and game)

Series Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, death, and sexual content.

Also cross-posted on Wattpad and AO3. Link to my masterlist for everything else I’ve posted!

Though he is a man of few words, his actions speak for his character.

Heading west, I keep walking through the night, though it's less than ideal. I take my time, wanting to stay quiet and undetected by both infected and people. The silence of the night allows my mind to mull over what I found today and how everything is supposed to fit together.

My mind can't seem to figure anything out that makes sense. The map is the only thing that makes the most sense to me. The notes, the game tallies, they all seem so odd but there has to be some connection. There has to be some reason these people were tasked with killing a specific age range of children in QZ's across the country. There has to be some reason they're connected to the Fireflies. I'm seeing bits and pieces of the picture, but not the full painting.

But what if this is all a bit bigger than I can take on? Am I walking myself right towards a death sentence? Maybe. Could I be making the wrong decision to go to Nebraska? Possibly.

The other alternatives are either to retreat back to the QZ and be stuck wondering for the rest of my life, or try to track down which QZ the others went to, and I could miss them and have wasted time. But if I guess which QZ they're going to next, I could possibly save more lives. I've never been good at gambling, and yet I find myself playing at the highest stakes.

Each step seems to take ten times the effort as normal as I consider my options, trying to see which is the most logical, which would give me the best odds of finding these people. As soon as I think I've made a decision, I second guess myself. It feels like there's no right decision to be made.

I stop walking in the middle of a street and stare straight up at the dark sky, the stars shining brightly down. If only they could give me the answer. The sound of a clicker in a nearby skyscraper gets me moving again, towards the interstate. It seems I've made up my mind, and only time will tell if this was the right decision.

Readjusting my backpack and yawning, I take in my surroundings so that I'm not ambushed by infected. Sometimes it seems like they come out of nowhere. My thoughts seem to run in circles until it starts to drive me mad. I have to think of something else or I'm going to go insane. And after searching for something, the green sign above the road distracts my mind and reminds me of the stranger I met only yesterday.

I wonder how Joel is doing, how his journey is going so far. He seemed seasoned to life outside a QZ, his time away from Boston likely forced him to adapt. Whatever job it was that he took to get out of Boston must have caused him to not want to return. But no matter the reason, I hope that he has a safe journey, I'm sure whoever is waiting for him is worried sick.

My path leads me to a roadblock where an old FEDRA checkpoint used to be, just before the entrance ramp of the highway. Cars are parked bumper to bumper and there's sandbags stacked on top of each other supporting a thick line of barbed wire. Knowing I can't climb overtop of it, I take a right and decide to go around. Sure, this is going to delay my trip slightly, but it's better than trying to go overtop of barbed wire. I don't really feel like nursing open wounds on my way to Nebraska.

As I go to turn left to get back on track I immediately stop moving. Standing in the street are three runners, all hunched over with quiet sobs. A clicker cries out somewhere close, its screeches ricochet off the buildings and echoes into the open air. My heart hammers in my chest and I take careful steps backwards so that I can keep my eyes on them. Thankfully, they don't see me and I'm able to get back to the front of the barricade.

I take a left instead, and hope for a better outcome. Bracing myself, I turn the corner and am in disbelief with what I see. There are four runners standing in the road. My eyes trail down the street and I see that they're all trapped here. The FEDRA barricade extends down the streets so that the infected in the Boston area can't use this ramp to get onto the highway. On one of the barricade sections I see the telltale sign of a door, there's a giant FEDRA sign hanging above it. That door would be a direct path to the road if it weren't for the infected. It seems that there's no unobstructed way for me to get to the highway. I'm up against seven runners and a clicker, at least. Even during the day I don't know if I could take this on.

Ducking back behind the building I try to formulate some sort of plan. How can I get through this barricade without the infected noticing me? I know the door is to the left, but there's no way I can get past all of those infected and open it. Even if I do sneak to the door, I know it's going to make sound when I open it, and that's like ringing the dinner bell for them.

Sound would be like ringing a dinner bell. An idea comes to my mind and I spot an abundance of bricks laying beside one of the cars. If I can get those bricks to all fall at the same time across the street, it should draw them away long enough for me to get to the door. It's still risky, but I think it's my best shot. But how do I get them to fall at the same time?

I don't see a way that I can pull that plan off without considerable time, and I don't have time to be stopped up here, not with all the infected. I stare at the pile of bricks and another idea crosses my mind. What if I use them to get over the barricade? I could lay the bricks in a way that I could get over the barbed wire. It might not be the most sophisticated plan, but it's going to have to work.

Quietly, I walk over to the pile and begin picking them up slowly. The barricade is at least six feet high, so I'm going to have to bring bricks up to the top of the sandbags and lay them there before I can construct something over the wire. I slide my backpack off my shoulders so that it's easier to get the bricks to the top of the barricade. Clutching three bricks under one arm, I climb the sandbags and drop them on top. Thankfully, the sand masks the sound of the bricks landing.

I take another trip up with three more bricks without incident, and feel more confident in my plan. On my last trip up with bricks, I drop them on the sandbags, but one of them hits the corner and falls down to the road with a loud crash. The infected hear it and I can tell they're rushing to investigate. I drop down to the road to pick up my backpack and see them coming towards me on both sides. Shit.

With the speed of lighting, I put my backpack on and start climbing the sandbags. I hear them getting closer as I reach the top, their carnal breaths loud in the night. I'm about two inches away from pulling myself to the top when I feel one of them grab my foot and it yanks me down.

My fingers slip on the sandbags and I fall a few inches before I'm able to grab ahold of something. Wildly, I kick my feet in an attempt to get them off of me, but there are too many. In a last ditch effort, I grab my gun from my thigh holster and shoot the ones who drag me down. The shots ring out in the night and I know it's only going to attract more.

The few runners I've shot collapse to the ground, which gives the clicker more space to reach for me. Clickers are infinitely more terrifying than runners, and they're about ten times stronger too. Runners take one bullet to kill, clickers can take at least two or three. I aim my gun towards the clicker and pull the trigger, but it just clicks. It's empty. Quickly, I shove the gun back in the holster and use both hands to grab onto the sandbags.

Adrenaline pumps in my veins and I fight harder to pull myself away from the feral infected. My pant leg rips at the bottom from their clawing and I feel my fingers beginning to slip. Clenching my eyes shut, I grit my teeth and pull with all my might to get away.

Just as I'm about to accept my fate, a shot rings out and one of the infected crumples to the ground. Four more shots hit the clicker, and it falls as well, body twitching on top of the others. Without thinking I pull myself on top of the barricade and whip my head from side to side to see who shot them. I grab my curved knife from my belt and hold it in front of me.

My chest heaves with each breath I take as the adrenaline begins wearing off and the panic sets in. Whoever shot them could be coming for me next. What if it's the T group?

From the shadows I see a figure approaching, slinging a gun behind them as they quickly jog towards me. Once they get close enough, I recognize who it is immediately. It's Joel.

He runs to the barricade and holds out a hand. I put my knife away and offer him my help up the sandbags. We both start using the bricks to construct a makeshift bridge across the barbed wire, the screeches of a dozen approaching infected rushing our movements. Joel takes bricks from my shaking hands and practically stands me up on his own and pushes me across the bridge, my other pant leg ripping from the barbs.

My feet hit the ground with a hard thud, quickly followed by Joel. His hands push on the back of my backpack and one word is clear over the coming stampede.

"Run." We take off sprinting down the highway's entrance ramp. He's slightly faster than me but I keep up well. Joel points to an abandoned car that crashed into a guard rail and I nod, showing him I understand the plan.

We yank open the doors and climb in. If the infected make it over the barricade, they shouldn't see us here and eventually will disperse. The two of us are out of breath and we sit in silence, trying to regain our bearings.

After a few minutes of steadying my breath, I take my backpack off and sit it in my lap. I rest my head on it and lean forward, closing my eyes in an attempt to calm myself down.

"Thank you." I say, slightly breathless. Raising my head from my backpack, I look over to Joel, who's glancing in the mirrors to see what's behind us. His eyes flicker to mine and he gives me a stern nod, opting to stay quiet.

If it weren't for him I'd be some infected's dinner. That fact sinks in and I feel an immense amount of gratitude. He didn't have to save me. He could've left me for dead. Most people wouldn't stick their neck out for someone they barely know, but he did. Though he is a man of few words, his actions speak for his character.

My gaze turns to the mirrors as well, the two of us anxiously wait to see if the infected are going to make it over. The runners would have no issue scaling the wall given the proper motivation to do so, but they're less likely to if they can't immediately see something that grabs their attention.

After hours of us hunkering down silently in the car, Joel opens his door and gets out. He slings his bag and rifle on his back, looking behind him one more time. I get out and gear up as well. And just like the first time I met him, the silence is almost overwhelming. The morning sunlight begins rising, and I realize we spent almost the entire night in the car.

I chew on the inside of my cheek as I debate whether or not I should say anything. Seeing as how he just saved my life, I decide it's the least I can do. I clear my throat and scratch the back of my neck, looking down at the ground to avoid awkward eye contact.

"I just want to thank you again for saving me back there. You really didn't have to put yourself at risk, but I appreciate it." I find the courage to look up, only to see him staring at me already with a fierce intensity.

"I thought you were headed towards that camp?" He asks, totally disregarding my appreciation.

"I was. I mean, I did. One guy was left but he was infected. I found clues though, about where they might be going." I tell him, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. He nods,

"So where're you headed?" He asks again, and it throws me off. This is the most talkative he's ever been.

"Omaha, Nebraska." I say, recalling the city where the large 'T' was located. Joel's eyebrows raise.

"That's quite a ways from here." He points out and I sigh, knowing I'm severely underprepared for the long road ahead.

"Yeah, I know. But I have to do this. I won't be able to live with myself if I don't." I confess to him. I'm well aware my choices defy logic, but, the alternative of letting the guilt eat me alive is worse.

Joel rests his hand on the top of the car and looks down the highway. He shifts his weight around like he's deep in thought for a few minutes. He's probably trying to think of a way to ditch me. Feeling like I'm intruding on his venture home, I speak up again.

"Listen, I appreciate what you did for me back there, all of it. But I know you're trying to get home so I'll get out of your hair, for real this time." I say and extend a hand out to him again, probably for the last time. Like before, he stares at my hand.

"I'm headed west and go right by Omaha." He says, squinting in the sunlight. I drop my hand once I realize he isn't going to take it, meaning we aren't splitting quite yet. My eyebrows draw tightly together in confusion as I try to understand what he's trying to get at. I think I understand, but I need to hear him clarify.

"Meaning what? We tag along 'til Omaha?" I hear the insecurity in my own voice and I hate it. Joel takes his hand back from the top of the car and nods.

"Safer that way, for the both of us." He confirms my thoughts and starts walking down the highway. I follow him, accepting his offer.

We walk side by side down the road, the only sounds being the birds in the sky and our gear rattling around. My mind is buzzing with questions I want to ask him, but I respect that he's a quiet, reserved man.

Every few minutes I check behind us, feeling paranoid that we're being followed. There's never anything there, but I'd rather check and see nothing than not check and be surprised. Joel is less paranoid I think, he walks with a silent confidence that tells me he's no stranger to the outside world. He understands it far better than I do.

The two of us walk for miles without saying a word until we come to an exit ramp. I recognize it as a suburb outside of Boston, but I've never been there before. Joel veers off the highway to the exit and I follow without question.

Off the ramp, there's a small town to the left and a bunch of housing complexes to the right. Seems like the perfect place for infected to be lurking about. But for some reason, I put my blind faith in the man leading me and trail him into the town.

He looks over his shoulder at me and points at a small brick building. I nod and approach it with him, preparing my knife for use. He stands on the opposite side of the entrance doors with his knife in hand, looking to me for confirmation that I'm ready. Silently, I nod and watch as he swings the door open. I wait for the sound of infected, but am pleasantly surprised with silence.

Joel seems to know where he's going though, he heads straight for the back room. I take my time to look around at the front room, seeing if there's anything of use. Most likely there isn't, but every once in a while I get lucky. The sound of whatever Joel is moving is enough to catch my attention, and I stand in the doorway. He's moving a large piece of plywood that's on the floor. There's a hole in the ground, and he drops down into it.

Curiosity gets the best of me and I go over to peek in the hole, seeing a small stash of supplies. Joel rummages around and picks up ammunition, a few cans, and another knife. He turns around and sees me staring above him, and he hands me items he can't carry himself; some cans of food and ammunition, before he pulls himself back out of the hole.

"You stashed that?" I ask quietly. He huffs as he puts away the extra supplies.

"A while ago." He answers and the two of us quickly shove the items in our bags. My bag feels like it gained fifteen extra pounds, but I can't complain. The extra weight means we have better survival odds.

Wordlessly, Joel moves out of the store and heads towards the suburban side of town, only a few miles walk away. The cookie-cutter houses remind me of the neighborhood I used to live in. A small, idyllic place at one point in time, turned to nothing but a ghost town now. Joel approaches the porch of one and opens the door. Luckily, it's empty and I follow him inside.

He blocks the main entrances to the home without a word, and I move to help him. I shove a strong chair underneath the handle of the back door and try to turn the handle to test its durability. After that, I make my rounds on the curtains and close them all. It seems like we're making this our base for the night. Once we've taken all the safety measures that we possibly can, Joel finds his way to the living room and unloads his stuff on the old, worn-down couch.

I place my backpack on the floor next to the couch and lean against the doorframe that connects the living room and kitchen, watching as Joel straightens his back out on the floor. His arms reach above his head to elongate his spine, and I hear the bones pop and crack. Wincing slightly, I turn my attention elsewhere in the house.

My eyes catch the fading family portrait on the wall and I go to look at it. The black frame houses an old photo. There's a man, woman, two kids, and a dog. They're all smiling, even the dog looks happy. My heart tugs at the sight of the happy family, and I can only assume what happened to them, just like so many other families. Sighing, I look at the other photos on the wall, seeing the slow growth of the children through still images. They look like they were probably high school age. My fingers find their way to the necklace that adorns my neck and I squeeze it tight.

A sound from behind me snaps me out of my thoughts and I turn back to see Joel staring at me. I offer him a polite smile and go to take a seat across from him on the floor, resting my back against the old couch. I fiddle with the torn edges of my pants, and can no longer restrain myself from asking questions. There are too many things I want answers to.

"How did you find me at that barricade?" My voice is soft. Joel clears his throat and shrugs.

"I took the long way 'round so I wouldn't interfere with whatever you were doin'. I was plannin' on taking this highway back home anyways. Guess it was just a coincidence." He plainly answers and I nod, accepting his answer.

"What a lucky coincidence." I smile, trying to break through the tension that always seems to hang over us. It's going to be a long trip west if he keeps things this short. He just shrugs in response,

"So what did you find 'bout those people?" He asks. I'm surprised he even cares, but I reach for my bag to show him what I've found. I spread the documents out in front of me and let him look. I explain to him what I know and what my theories are.

"Whoever they are, they need to be eradicated. Those kids, they were-" The tightness in my throat constricts my ability to talk and I take a shaky breath, remembering what it felt like to cradle the dying girl's head. Joel just nods, not needing further elaboration. He holds up the scraps of paper I found in the fire and reads the simple words.

"I'm not sure what those have to do with anything, and I'm not sure there's any sort of connection." I speak up, truthfully not knowing if they're of any value.

He puts the scraps down and picks up another piece of paper, the one with the Firefly insignia on it. As he reads the paper it's like the blood is drained from his face. My eyebrows knit together,

"What is it?" I ask and his startled eyes look deep into mine with fear that he tries to mask. An uneasy feeling settles in me. He looks back down to the paper and re-reads the note before he says anything.

"These bastards aren't going to live much longer." Is all he says before handing everything back over to me. The look on his face is unsettling, so I don't push anything further.

There has to be something he knows about this.

Part Nine

#joel miller #joel tlou #the last of us joel #joel miller fanfic #joel miller the last of us #joel miller fic #joel miller fluff #pedro pascal #joel miller fanfiction #tlou #tlou hbo #tlou fanfiction #tlou fanfic

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panakinthedisco · 10 months ago

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As the world lay in shambles by the sudden outbreak of a disease called cordyceps brain infection, society is broken, the government is on the rubble where a world became lawless and violent. But even chaos is prevalent, some are persistent to find a vaccine, though it is deemed impossible and hopeless due to the overwhelming mutation.

Kannika Suriya-Neuman, the only child of two known Medical professors took part with the cause - becoming the first pioneers who tried to find the vaccine, ten years after the outbreak. With her parents, Phillip Neuman and Anna Suriya, the tumultuous journey to find a cure becomes, metaphorically speaking, the search for a holy grail that can end the virus once and for all. Their team that consisted of surviving doctors and medicine majors from different prestigious universities across America took part in a seemingly impossible cause.

Even though there is progress, a group of syndicates that are formed has other things in mind. For years living in a world without law or governance, the idea to take power in a lawless country will be gone if a vaccine is created. The Citadel whose ideology is protecting the society they created is now in a threat to the vaccine so they did the unthinkable, pulverize the whole operation.

By the massacre of Kannika's colleagues along with her mother who sacrificed her life by saving people, the search for the cure becomes thin up until a revolutionary group by the name The Fireflies steps in to protect the remaining survivors.

But the quest of the cure becomes hopeless for another ten years. Kannika, now thirty eight years old, is beginning to believe that the world she's living in is going to rot along with the decaying corpses of the clickers and runners. Until, Marlene, one of The Fireflies, tells her about a young girl who might be the answer to the prolonged cure.

Hope begins to shine in the horizon as Kannika sets the journey to find the young girl who is said to be immune from the virus. In between crossroads and that small hope that she hid in her heart, a man with a cold heart comes to her with tenderness and begs to be indulged by that love that he couldn't even remember. Kannika finds herself with Joel Miller, a man whose life is enveloped in regrets and sadness. But Kannika is in thin ice as Joel would take a bullet for the young girl that he grows to love as his own child.

A child over the future of many generations.

While for Kannika with a gun in her hand pointing to her lover, she silently hopes from the darkest corner of her mind that Joel should've pulled the trigger.

pairings: joel miller x original character / original characters x canon characters

warnings: major character deaths (oop!), smut, violence, brief mentions of SA (will state in the chapter) and gore.

author's notes: this is a slowburn romance for kannika and joel. also, as much i want to make this as a reader x joel, kannika neuman has a special in my heart soooooo sorry y'all! this fic will stick to some parts of the canon (series and video game) but act one and act two is full canon divergence. basically making my own lore.

other notes: most of the graphics of this fic are made by me unless its stated.

translated version/s: i've got a spanish translation for this fic in wattpad. you can check it out in here [CLICK HERE]

collateral damage gif banner: made by @alderaandors <3

AVAILABLE ON WATTPAD & AO3

ACT ONE | INFERNO (sets in ten years after outbreak)

001 . . . . fungi

002 . . . . sense of normalcy

003 . . . . happy anniversary!

004 . . . . breaking dawn

005 . . . . the holy grail

006 . . . . alternate universe

007 . . . . i am, i am, i am

008 . . . . all things must pass

009 . . . . sense of kindness

010 . . . . whiskey and fate

011 . . . . machiavellian

012 . . . . a little light

013 . . . . tortured soul

014 . . . . the punisher

015 . . . . not now, not ever

ACT TWO | PURGATORIO (sets in eleven years after outbreak)

016 . . . . a path ahead

017 . . .. happiness is a warm gun

ACT THREE | PARADISO (sets in twenty years after outbreak)

SEE BELOW THE SPOTIFY PLAYLISTS OR YOU CAN VISIT MY ACCOUNT.

☆ MASTERLIST | NAVIGATION | SOCIALS | SIGN OFF BANNER MADE BY. @ALDERAANDORS ☆

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spookywinz · 17 days ago

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a ✧MASSIVE✧ analysis thread on all the released teasers/trailers from TLOU season 2

Wanted to start this with a disclaimer that this is just MY OPINION as someone who’s been following everything really closely and has a very harsh hyper fixation on the TLOU universe as a whole. All of this is purely hypothetical and a mix of what I think and/or want to happen. Don’t take anything in here as a hard truth, and do not come at me if it turns out to be completely wrong in the end lol.

P.S: this contains massive spoilers of the game.

FIRST LOOK

Going chronologically in the order of release, the first teaser was posted on August 4th, 2024. It starts with this shot of Ellie at the Jackson dance, which already shows us they’re moving the flashbacks around as we only see this scene in the game almost at the very end.

We can hear who we now know to be Gail asking Joel “Did you hurt her?” and he replies with no, then she asks him “Then what? What did you do?”

The next scene is a small shot of Ellie’s tattoo (that looks really good with the acid scar, may I add) followed by a scene of Gail ending her question (What did you do?) and a shot of Joel looking up at her. We have this shot of Ellie screaming that is still genuinely baffling to me as I really do not have any idea of what might be happening here besides Ellie waking up after Joel dies, as the person next to her seems to be Maria.

We are then followed by a shot of the horde running towards the wall of Jackson and Tommy shooting at them with his rifle. The next scene is our first look at the Seraphites who seem to be running to? from? something, which is then followed by a very short shot of Dina holding a lamp while she cries, she seems to be using the clothes from day 1 (if they follow the structure of when things happen in the game), my guess is this shot is in the underground tunnels of the subway.

The very next shot is of Ellie running and shooting at something. My guess is this is either at the hospital as we get this scene again in another trailer and I’ll delve into why then. The very next shot is of what I assume is Abby standing alone in the snow, probably on her way to look for Joel.

Then we have our first look at Isaac, pointing his gun at someone (probably a scar as this is a scene that comes up a lot in later trailers if its the same one). We then have the iconic scene of Abby trying to escape the horde of infected, climbing under the falling fence while the infected pile up on top of her. We have a split second shot of what it looks like to be Maria and two other people riding away on their horses, I’d assume this is during the horde’s attack on Jackson. The next scene is clearly at the subway tunnels, Ellie is screaming while a clicker is trying to get inside the train. This teaser ends with Joel shedding a tear and saying “I saved her.”

Will continue this in another post that I'll link here!

#tlou hbo #the last of us #tlou part 2 #bella ramsey #pedro pascal #tlou spoilers #tlou #ellie tlou #joel tlou #abby tlou #joel and ellie #the last of us hbo #ellie williams #tlou2 #tlou season 2 #tlou analysis #i wrote 4.4k words of this #it's just not fitting in one post im afraid

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bigfan-fanfic · 7 months ago

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Writing Game 1.9: Enthralled

Prompt: Enthralled Pairing: Joel Miller/Jason Grace

Joel sits back, glaring at the younger man. The campfire they lit crackles, the stone semicircle they stacked around it keeping it from smoking.

"Are we gonna talk about it?" The last thing Joel wants is to talk, but he needs answers.

"No." The man growls.

Joel lets out a sigh of irritation. "You brought down a goddamn bolt of lightning like you're goddamn Jesus and we're not gonna talk about it?"

"That's about the size of it."

"Boy..."

"I'm thirty-six, don't call me 'boy.'"

"Then tell me what the hell is going on, damn you!" Joel's nostrils flared, his eyes wide. "If you're some kind of lightningrod, I can't bring you back to Jackson."

Jason laughs without mirth. "I can control it. It's... inherited. From my father. My sister could do it too."

"Lightning... powers?"

"Yeah." Jason runs a hand through his shaggy hair. "I didn't mean to use it, but... the clickers would have killed you. I was out of bullets."

"Thanks."

"Yeah. You fished me out of that river. Saved me. So... you're all I've got. You and Ellie."

"Anybody else... like you?

Jason looks up into the thickly clouded sky. "There used to be. Before. Hopefully they're hidden away, in fortresses and strongholds. But I'm not."

Joel hands him his glasses. "You've been through hell before. Haven't you?" It's not a question.

"Yeah. A lot of hells. Way, way Before. My dad needed a lot of... help."

The clouds suddenly flash and release a peal of thunder. Jason hardly reacts. They fall silent for a moment until the rain begins. Jason blinks as he stares straight up, enthralled by the droplets on his skin. He starts to cry, startling Joel a little.

"I'm alone, Joel. I've lost everyone, and it wasn't even to anything I thought I'd die to - it was to some fucking plague!"

Joel growls, trying to ignore the downpour. "You have us. You saved my life with that... lightning bolt. You've saved my girl's life plenty of times. I'm not gonna forget that."

Jason looks at him. There was something vulnerable in his gaze, and Joel gives a deep growl. He had always valued action over words. So he reaches out and draws Jason into a fierce hug. "Don't make me regret this, boy."

He holds him tight as the rain soaks them through to the skin, and just maybe washes away some of the pain of the last twenty years.

"I ain't leavin. Me and my girl, we're your family now. Okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah..." Jason trembles, finally melting into the embrace.

"Let's get back to Jackson, okay? Can you move?"

They make their way away through the rain, finally realizing that they were heading home...

#joel miller #jason grace #writing game #tlou headcanons #pjo headcanons #headcanons

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marianne-dash-wood · 3 months ago

Note

LARP OCS YOU SAY

you are the best i love u

i'm gonna put this under a readmore because a) it will be LONG and b) it will have photos which, while I have cropped/redacted for privacy reasons, still are of me/the backs of other people's heads. For the same privacy reasons I am not linking back to the photographers but some of their watermarks are still there, if cropped a bit.

So first up i wanna talk about my faviroute unethical scientist This is Duck! They live in a post-cordyceps world and have been passing themselves off as a doctor for the last twenty years in order to get shelter/accomadation at whatever survivors base they end up at. They have a best friend, Pigeon, but have lost track of him since their last job, uh. exploded. They have a bit of a skewed moral compass and definetely won't try and take your kidneys. you know. for science.

They are currently aligned with a group called the Ghost Moths (definetely not the fireflies, please don't sue us) and are working on a cure. there are a couple of immune people in the group and duck is currently planning an "organ donation" program in the event of anyone in the community's deaths, in order to further research the effects of cordyceps on the human body. Each of their patches represents people they've known that have died, and want to remember them. Their last job had a group known as the Nightengales (or alleged Nightengales) delibretely infecting people with forms of cordyceps to test strains of the virus. While Duck was soley on "retrieval duty" (aka, picking up new test subjects) and ultimately helped to destroy the place, they are still incredibly guilty, and terrified their new friends will find out. They are also really struggling, going into the next event, with the loss of a friend who they were not able to prevent from getting infected, and another friend who was literally torn to pieces by a supercharged clicker. (his name is boy george. he's a clicker that can see. it's the scariest shit ever) also they might be on the run from the secret elite group that still controls all the food supply in the country called the consortium for their cure research. (100% duck would have cut into ellie's brain, for SURE. they have a pact with another "we-have-no-ethics-and-have-odd-moral-lines" scientist that if one of the gets infected, the other will vivisect them)

I have written so much of this characters stupid in-character diary, it's ridiulous. I've started leaving it around the game's medbay, hoping someone will pick it up and read all of duck's juicy secrets (like their old job, the fact they have no medical training, and that they've been secretly working on the cure anyway despite being told not to for security reasons)

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Second, my hunger games champion, Ashe! From Province 12, they are the youngest of four brothers. Their eldest brother, Smoke, is dying of blacklung, Cinder is disabled after a mine "accident" and Hemlock is working himself to the bone. Five years before the games, their youngest brother, Cinesra, won a bet and moved to the province's merchant district, not speaking to his family since. What a wild coincidence that it is that they both got drawn to represent Province 12!

Ashe went into that arena with one goal - save their brother. With the support that a Champion gets, their brother will be rich enough to save their family from death or poverty. Due to the technology of the ruling classes, you don't get to die just once during your games - And Ashe died three times. The last time, they were woken up, their brother beside them, and told to try and persuade the scientists why the other should die and they should live. When Ashe woke again in the arena, they were convinced that they had been brough back and their brother was dead, with only an hour to go until the end of the games. They found each other, miraculously alive, and then found out: the rules had been changed. If two tributes from the same province were alive, then they would both win. They could both go home. The two of them waited until the last possible moment, as the forcefields were closing in, to rush into the cornocpia. Standing above their only kill of the game, the career, Ashe realised they had won. They both had won.

but that was only the start of the horror. Their victory tour was exhausting; at their interview, they had sung with their brother, and now they were forced to perform as the newest stars. Just when they thought the tour was over, that they could finally go back home... they woke up in a dark cell, with other champions of previous games, and supposedly, trapped in a lab experiment, with the resurrected tributes of former years to haunt them. The scientists were gone, and all their experiments were loose.

And there, in the middle of the second night of this new and terrible hell, the doors were opened and as their brother was going, they got up from their brief sleep and went with him, to make sure everything was okay.

and that's where Ashe Bastion took their final breath. bleeding out, they were dropped by a monster in the dark as the rest of the group ran for cover. they managed to crawl to their feet, and staggered towards where they had made their base.... but bled out of the stairs. their body was picked up and paraded to their brother through the glass wall of an observation booth, before being unceremoniously dumped. and that's how their story would have ended.

But.... perhaps.......... it is not the end............

(fun facts - their kit is obviously quite bare cus of the fact we were wearing the t-shirts provided by the game. to differentiate ashe, i used the space buns, and even slept in them! i also, in the second picture, had Ashe's in-character diary in my pocket, which contains songs of rebellion and the admission that they looked the other way when Cinder stole their explosives (they are the explosives expert in the mines) to try and revolt against the metropole. they have tremendous guilt as that attempt led to dozens of deaths of their fellow miners and the permenent disfiguration and disability of Cinder. They only ever got one kill in the entire arena, and even then never killed any monster while at the labs. they are haunted by the single death they brought about.)

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Next is Kestrel! They are a human fighter from a game set post-ragnarok, where humans, alfar (elves) and gods fled midgard when ragnarok occured, and settled instead in some of the other nine realms. Kestrel is from Vanahiem, a place that values nature, equality, and the cycle of the world above all else. All are equal, even gods, and everyone has a voice. They are fiery, passionate, and always ready to defend their fellow Vana. For this reason, they have been named the Champion of the Reaping (Autumn), to represent change, action and passion. They are also a member of the Hunters, who are focused on balance in nature, exterminating threats that might work against that balance, and follow the will of the ancestors. Kestrel is working a little on learning how to bend to that authority, which they have always struggled with, having been a mercenary for many years. They are an impulsive fighter, but they are now also second in command of Vanahiem's forces, learning the trade alongside their fellow Hunter and master of war, Halvdan, who they now count as close as a brother.

Critically, before they joined their fellows on the newly opened Midgard, they only cared about one person - Jackdaw, a Hearthkeeper (storyteller held in high regard), with whom they've travelled. the Birds, as others call them, are also Fatesworn - their souls tied together, for good or ill. If one feels pain, the other does too. (Luna can u tell double life came out just before i played this characteR CAN YOU TELL). When on midgard, mortals are blessed with an extension of life. They can die twice, before it is permenent again. Unfortunetely, Kestrel was very stupid, and a jaunt to the woods to gether resources left them down a life. (CAN YOU SEE WHY I WAS THINKING ABOUT DOUBLE LIFE CAN YOU sEE)

However, Jackdaw has been wandering midgard (i.e. their player has not been able to attend events) and they haven't seen each other since before Kestrel's first death. Kestrel has no doubt he would have felt it, but they have no idea what this has done to their bond.

Kestrel's past is also rearing its head - before they found jackdaw, they may have..... been a minor terrorist troublemaker with a cult that worshipped Hel and promised ruin. Having now seen the truth about Hel (she's nice we promise), in seach for more knowledge, kestrel has reached out to the leader of the cult that they very dramatically left for information. oh, and it's also their ex.

I am SO looking forward to playing kestrel again. they have so much going on - they have been given responsibility as a Champion of the Seasons (meant to advise the council) and as a future war leader (meant to plan the battles and strategies against our enemies). They are also, critically, dealing with the fact that a) they died, and they have no idea if jackdaw is okay and b) they are actually caring about other people that are not jackdaw, which has not been the case since they met.

also they beat up a ghost once and it was AWESOME

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A quick shout out to Aleyn, a character who is now retired, but was a bit of a rebel - worhsipping outlawed gods, straddling the line between two nations at all times and their individual and sometimes contridicting laws. After the loss of yet another member of their family (at this point, this was the fifth person they had lost in a year), they have left the Warhost of the allied nations, to try and hunt down and kill an enemy of their clan. I'm just showing off this fit because it fucking slapped and that embroidery on the front took forever

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And finally.... MY NEWEST CHARACTER

I don't have any good photos of them yet, but they live in a swamp with their family and are very excited to see the world outside of the forests of their homeland. Their name is Cragan, they like fighting and i think these photos sum them up pretty well

before and after the monster called strength lmao.

They're technically a healer too, but mostly just so they can slap a bandage on their family and get them out of the way of monsters, not fully getting them up lol.

#larp #my writing #anyway please talk to me about any of these i love them so much #luna thank uuuuu for letting me gush look at them look at my idiot children #god can't it be april already that's when duck comes out to play again

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