#deemphasize

[wrexwas]

SOMBRA in LE SSERAFIM (르세라핌) 'Perfect Night' OFFICIAL M/V with OVERWATCH 2 for @cuberry 💜

Bonus!

[welcometogrouchland]

I miss them so bad (Dick and Damian)

[pattymelterqp]

HDG and mech handling stuff have an intersection to me (I guess shared with forcemasc if you really want to lean into some kind of Unified Theory of Online Kinks) wherein there are unavoidably politically questionable aspects of the kink and/or communities, and you can glean a lot about someone's perspectives on power, politic, and kink in general by how they approach those aspects

[meadowlarkx]

Maemag and 19 for the kiss prompts!

19. ...for luck

The cavalry of the Union of Maedhros was a haphazard affair, to Maglor's eye. Cold steep Himring had few mounts, and the other riders had been cobbled together from the few remnants of the Gap's forces, alongside Caranthir's Elves and Bór's horsemen. Maglor had poured the past years into Maedhros' Union, and he had accomplished much. He had sung his most stirring songs and spoken his sweetest speeches to win his brother Bór's men as allies. He had coaxed his few friends that escaped burning in the Bragollach into facing the Enemy's fires again boldly and bravely. He had trained Elves and men and horses, month after month after month. He looked out upon them now, from the entrance to the command tent, and still found them wanting. Truth be told, Maglor was nervous, though he did not show it on his face. The pride he felt beholding the bristling array of banners and riders was dampened by the knowledge, too-intimate, of fracture lines in the ranks and the taste of choking ash.

He would hold fast on the morrow. He had vowed in his heart that he always would, for Maedhros.

Turning inwards, he let the tent's flap close behind him as it slipped from his shoulder. Maedhros stood at the hastily-erected table, beside the pallet they would share that night. The summer sun carried rich color down through the tent's cloth and arrayed it upon his hair and skin.

For the first time since the fateful moment he rode out to meet Morgoth's embassy, Maedhros had taken to wearing his thick red braid twined intricately in many strands, and today he had set into it a glimmer of silver wire that set off the vermillion. He bore himself proudly and seemed even taller for it. He had begun to speak in private moments of what they would do afterwards—when the Enemy was gone. 

Even in stillness, looking over the maps laid out on the table, he was a blaze of energy: a taut harpstring or a bolt of lightning. Maglor's spirit was stirred, as ever, seeing him. It sought him out—his answering spirit.

Maedhros raised his glance from the parchment and found Maglor’s. He should have looked worn: a scar stood out near one eye, and in the past few months he had all but ceased sleeping. Instead, lit by hope, he was more beautiful than Maglor had ever known him.

No song or tale of heroism encompassed his brother's courage. Maedhros had not wished Maglor to try his hand at crafting one himself. The protagonists of Tirion's theater had been cut out of paper, but Maedhros had remade himself from deepest darkness, from the tangled skein of the world, and created this strategist, this soldier. Despite his forebodings, Maglor felt a rush of confidence. They would win the day tomorrow.

"Káno, come here." Maedhros gestured with the stump of his right wrist. Maglor flew to him like a falcon to a falconer's glove.

"The cavalry are ready; Bór's men have been—"

He was cut off: Maedhros wound his gauntleted left hand into his hair and kissed the breath from him. Maglor made a needy sound as the metal tugged at his curls and could not help it. Heat flooded his body despite the exhaustion of the march and scouts and surveys. He felt the seam of his trousers chafe the place between his legs and wished Maedhros would touch him there. Belatedly his own arms wound about strong shoulders, petting and holding. But by then Maedhros soon released him. Maglor stood stunned and dizzied. Maedhros grinned at him.

"For luck," he said.

Maglor laughed and barely recognized the sound, so light it was, like his old laugh. Maedhros had not drawn him near in weeks, and in the years before that, rarely with such open passion.

I am your luck, then? 

There was an irony in the sentiment, but for once, Maglor was content to leave that stone unturned. 

"To the day that dawns, glorious!" he said smiling, as though Maedhros had raised a glass in a toast instead of kissing him senseless. With the way Maedhros was looking at him, he hoped he would be tempted into more of the same.

"To us," Maedhros answered, lowly, as though he had not meant Maglor to hear.

[skrunksthatwunk]

yakuza: dead souls - american vibes, bigass guns, and why zombies are super weird to have in ryu ga gotoku thematically/ideologically speaking

so i've been playing dead souls recently (hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah) and although i'm having the time of my life with it, there was something about it that kinda felt off to me, and i think i've figured out what it was, but i'm gonna have to walk you through a bit of my thought process to get there.

my first instinct was that it felt... american? and upon further examination i think that boils down to a couple of things:

everyone suddenly has lots of guns and also way way bigger guns

high emphasis on individual heroism (this itself is quite typical for rgg, but it manifests differently here; more on that in a bit)

military/government incompetence, which must be solved by the right individuals having the biggest and bestest guns

[for the sake of transparency i will note that my experience with zombie media is pretty limited and skews american (and i myself am american), so that may create bias. however, the 'this feels american to me' instinct is a rare one for me even in genres where i have seen little/no non-american media, so i think the fact that it did occur to me is notable. what about dead souls triggered that response when little else has? that's why i examined it and, truthfully, i think there's merit in the idea itself.]

the first point is pretty self-explanatory. america's got more guns than it does people, and its gun worship is infamous. japan's ban on guns (aided by its being an island state) means there's far fewer guns in the country, as well as far fewer people with guns (and likely far fewer guns per gun owner, excepting arms dealers/smugglers) than somewhere without such a ban. obviously, there are guns anyway. due to their illegality they are clustered within the criminal population, which explains their presence within organized crime within the series. very few guns will be sitting around in the homes of otherwise law-abiding citizens.

and yet, when the zombie outbreak hits kamurocho, plenty of civilians suddenly have access to quite an arsenal. everyone has the knowledge they need to aim, fire, and reload smoothly and quickly; ammo is infinite for certain guns. characters we've never seen using firearms before suddenly have shotguns under their couches (looking at you, majima). it's not only very different from reality, it's very different from guns' place within the series up until this point, when they were limited weapons used primarily by the enemy.

and they're making a zombie shooter, so of course they would have to do this. it has to be unrealistic to be simultaneously in this setting and in this genre, in the same way that yakuza solving their problems with bareback fistfights instead of guns is itself both unrealistic and necessary to being the kinds of games rgg are.

my point is that this is a kind of focus on and valorization of gun ownership and competency unusual for the series and setting. further, it serves as an argument for why an armed, competent populace is crucial typical in american media.

which brings us to the third point (we'll get to 2 in a minute). guns are often marketed as self-defense weapons. the implication is that the government's defense of the individual (via law enforcement or the military, but particularly the former), are insufficient. this is objectively true. if someone pulls a gun on you at the gas station, will a cop manifest out of thin air to intercede? no. that's impossible. but if you have a gun, or if some bystander has a gun, you or they may be able to do something with that gun to stop the armed person. thus, there is an undeniable gap in the effective immediacy of such responses.

many gun advocates also point to the incompetence or insufficiency of law enforcement, even when they are present to stop an armed aggressor. the fact that law enforcement do not have a 100% success rate in protecting the citizenry is also objectively true.

so, when you are in danger, arming yourself increases your chances of being able to put down (or at least take armed action against) a present or potential threat. whether it is viewed it as a supplement to or a replacement for law enforcement, it is meant to make up for the shortcomings of the government's ability to completely protect all its citizens. it's a safety net for state failure.

back to dead souls. rgg has always centered political corruption in its stories, including politicians, the police, and sometimes even the military, though usually the former two. sometimes this is treated sympathetically (i.e. tanimura, a dirty cop, whose dirty-cop-ness allows him to work outside/against the law to help disadvantaged people, not unlike how kiryu views being a yakuza), and other times it's simply a matter of greed or lust for power (i.e. jingu).

however, something that's almost never touched on so clearly is government incompetence. when the government fails to help people or hurts them or does corrupt things, it's usually due to a competent, malicious bad apple who is removed from power by the end of the game. this implies holes in the system because it keeps happening all the time, but that's on a series-wide scale, a pattern ignored by the series in favor of the individual game solution of "this guy's gone now :) yay".

but in dead souls, the SDF's barracades fall, their men are killed, they are unable to help protect the people outside or inside the quarantine zone. they are weak in a way the government usually isn't in these games. and who is stronger than them? our individual good guys with guns. so we need to be armed because the government is weak and can't protect us. boom. america.

returning to point 2, i'd like to say that dead souls is not particularly more individualistic than any of the other games in the series (other than, perhaps, y7). rgg is an incredibly individualistic series, actually. its protagonists are usually men who defy, oppose, and skirt around the law as a way of helping others and doing what is truly right (with a few exceptions, like shinada and haruka). the romanticized view of the yakuza as a force for helping the community in the face of government incompetence is a real one, and one that tends to manifest itself most in kiryu and how the series treats him. it shows us yakuza who aren't willing to kill, yakuza who cry about honor and justice and humanity and brotherhood, yakuza who never dip their hands into less palatable crimes, or only do with intense regret (and only ever as part of their backstory). the beat-em-up style emphasizes this as well. i mean, what's more individualistic than a one-man army?

put more clearly, this series is about men defying legal and social laws and expectations to live in a way that feels right to them, and about making themselves strong enough to combat those who would get in their way. the individual is placed before the society in importance, (though generally in a way that benefits the community, because they are good guys who want to use that agency and power for good).

all of this is true in dead souls as well, technically. those who live on the outskirts of society are the ones who actually save the day, and the ones who go in there and save people rather than just walling them off and pretending like they don't exist. they have the guns, which are illegal and mark them as criminals, but this broken law is what gives them the power to save themselves when the government will not, and to save their community if they so choose.

where dead souls differs is in the nature of that strength.

rgg places a lot of emphasis on self-improvement, both of one's body and of one's character. do both of these, and you will be strong enough to back up your ambitions. what allows someone to carve their own path in life is the ability to put down ideological and physical resistance by having resolve and the ability to tiger drop whoever won't be swayed by your impassioned speeches. you make yourself a weapon. you make yourself strong. in dead souls, that strength comes from an external, material possession. strength is something you buy (or that you take from someone else). who is able to survive the apocalypse comes not from the heart, nor from rigorous training, but from who has the most, the biggest, and the most bestest guns. it's an intersection of capitalism, militarization, and individualism. simply, deeply american.

[when i was talking myself through this a few days ago, i spent a lot more time on the capitalism + individualism stuff, but i think i'll keep this moving. consider this aside the intermission]

dead souls also differs for a few other interlocking reasons. it can be described with this equation:

zombification of enemies + lethality of guns = loss of emphasis on redemption

if your best friend turned into a zombie, could you shoot them? or your child? or your lover? it's a common trope, but it's a damn good one. watching your family, your neighbors, your town, everyone turn into a husk of themselves, something that looks like them but cannot be reached, is deeply tragic. it's even more tragic when these husks are trying to kill you. unable to be reasoned with and unable to be cured, you must incapacitate them before someone innocent is hurt--or hurt, then themselves made dangerous; each loss adds to the number of threats surrounding you. your life is seen as more valuable than that of your zombified friend, not only because the zombie is attacking you and it's self defense, but because they are no longer a person to you. to be a zombie is to no longer be human; zombification is dehumanization.

and so in a series so focused on connection with one's community, on saving innocent civilians, often on saving kamurocho specifically, one would expect similar tropes to occur. even if one's friends aren't turned, perhaps the cashier at poppo you chat with sometimes is. it's the destruction of that community and of the members one has tertiary relationships with that i expect would occur most within a kamurocho zombie story, since they are likely unwilling to axe anyone more important than that, even if dead souls isn't canon. i'd especially expect to see that in the beginning, before the need to kill zombies rather than contain or redeem them becomes apparent.

this does not happen.

i cannot speak for the entire game, but i can speak of gameplay choices that affect this, and ones i think will not be subverted throughout, even if they are somewhat contradicted by plot events i am presently unaware of.

kamurocho is not a community to protect, nor is it filled with your fellows. it is a playground filled with infinitely respawning, infinitely mow-downable, infinitely disposable zombies. you are meant and encouraged to kill them by the thousands, and never to hesitate or consider whether they may be cured or who may be mourning them. who may be unable to identify their loved one because you were trying to reach a headshot goal from hasegawa. you are not meant to consider them as human, nor beings that were once human, nor beings that could be human again, in the eyes of the zombie shooter. they are merely bodies, targets, and obstacles.

the zombies are contrasted with the true humans, those barricading themselves within the quarantine zone or those living in ignorance outside it. humans are meant to be saved, zombies are meant to be killed. the player character is the only one who can truly help with either of these goals, because the other humans are cowardly, ignorant, or unarmed/helpless. you must be their savior. to be a savior is to eliminate zombies, who are less than human.

the black and white nature of this is also emphasized by another gameplay characteristic: the lack of street encounters. when you traverse the peaceful parts of kamurocho, you are never attacked. you are also never directly attacked by the humans within the quarantine zone. kamurocho feels very different without its muggers and hooligans, but it's because this is a zombie shooter, not a beat-em-up. in a normal rgg title, you'd subdue threats by punching, kicking, and throwing them. you'd use your body in (supposedly) nonlethal ways. dead souls does not have a combat system meant for civilians. you have your guns. you subdue threats by shooting them, preferably lethally. the game doesn't want you to do that to humans, so you never fight humans. this furthers the black and white divide between the salvation-worthy, noble humans and the death-worthy, worthless zombies. combat is only lethal, and only used against the inherent other.

this leads me to the part of dead souls i find most conflicting with the ethos of rgg broadly, and perhaps its greatest ideological/thematic failing.

because the enemy are incurable, dangerous, and inhuman, you must kill them to protect yourself and others, others who are still human. humanity is something that is lost or preserved, but never regained. once someone's gone, they're gone, and you not only must kill them, it is your duty and your right to kill them. you should kill them.

in dead souls, there is no redeeming the enemy.

and that's a big problem.

rgg is about a lot of things, but a key one is the ability of people to change for the better. its most memorable, beloved villains are those who see the light by the end and change their wicked ways (usually through some form of redemptive suicide, though that's another essay in itself). its pantheon of characters is full of those who come from questionable backgrounds struggling to be the best people they can be, to live as themselves authentically and compassionately. it's about the good and the love you can find in the moral and legal gray zones of life/society, and the potential/capacity for good all of us have, no matter how far we may have fallen. it is a hopeful series. it is a merciful series.

this is something bolstered by its gameplay. countless substories are resolved by punching a lesson into someone until they improve their behavior, either out of fear or genuine remorse/development. the games don't just discourage killing your enemies, they don't allow you to (yes, we've all seen the "kiryu hasn't killed anybody? umm. look at this heat action" stuff before, and while they've got a point, i believe it's the narrative's intent that none of this is actually lethal, based on how laxly it treats certain plot injuries (cough cough. y7 bartender) and the actual concept of taking a life, the gravity it is given by the text, particularly when it comes to characters crossing that threshold into someone who has killed. explicit killing is not an option open to you, even when you're being attacked by dozens and dozens of armed men. conflicts are resolved by simply beating up enough guys in this nonlethal manner.

but dead souls is a shooter. to avoid conflict with the series' moral qualms about letting its characters kill, the enemies cannot be human. furthermore, the zombie shooter genre can only fit within the series if its zombies are completely inhuman. this means their pasts as humans cannot be acknowledged, nor the possibility of a cure, nor the characters' own potential conflicts about killing them; or, at least, not in a way that impedes their or the player's ability to gun them down afterwards.

if you can't kill humans in your series, then it cannot be possible to save (in this case, rehumanize) zombies. this is especially true in a game where you are unable to fight humans, and thus human lives are universally more valuable than zombie lives. because if you kill a zombie that can be cured, you are, in a way, killing a human.

and so, in a series where you should always assume your enemies (and everyone, for that matter) are capable of reason, compassion, change, and redemption, and where they are always worth that effort, even if they reject it in the end, dead souls' enemies are irredeemable and only worth swift, stylish slaughter. there are only good guys and bad guys. good guys must be protected, lest they be turned irreversibly into bad guys. good guys are only protected by killing bad guys, and the only way to save good guys is to kill every last one of the bad guys. do not spare them, and do not ask whether or not it's right. only kill.

i love dead souls. it's a silly game. i like seeing daigo in decoy-drag and majima gleefully cartwheeling his way through zombies and ryuji with his giant gun arm prosthetic. it's fun. but when i was trying to figure out what felt off about it to me, one of the words that came to mind (besides american) was indulgent. that, too, felt odd, because i love indulgent media. i am not one to scorn decadent, hedonistic, beautiful high-calorie slop type media. if dead souls was just fan servicey, that wouldn't really bother me. i am a fan and boy do i feel serviced. it rocks. but i think my problem is in what dead souls is indulging.

i think dead souls indulges in the desire to cut loose, and to see these characters cut loose. thing is, they're cutting loose all over kamurocho, and all over the bodies of people they used to (at least in concept) care for. with lethal weapons. it is catharsis via bloodbath, not by pushing your body and mind to the limit in man to man combat, but by pulling a trigger before the other guy can hurt you, or even think about hurting you, for the crime of existing as the wrong kind of thing.

and i just don't think that's in line with rgg's beliefs.

yes, it's probably fair for dead souls' characters to kill zombies. i'm not against that. i'm also not against games letting you do purposeless violence. i spent a good amount of my elementary school years killing oblivion npcs for shits, like. that's not what bothers me about dead souls.

rgg as a series has always taken a hard stance in both its game design and narrative choices against killing and for the potential for redemption in its enemies. and i think the lengths to which it goes to promote that despite the probably-lethal moves you do and the improbability of a harmless do-gooder yakuza is one of the most endearing things about the games. so for this one entry to disregard that key theme for the sake of a genre shift that flopped super hard, well? i dunno. it feels weird i guess. it's out of place not just because it's a dramatic shift in gameplay and style and also zombies are only a thing here (and the supernatural/fantastical are thus only prominent here), but because of what those shifts imply.

so, uh. yeah. my pre-dead-souls thoughts that dead souls wasn't that out of pocket bc rgg's just kinda weird? turns out it was actually super weird to have a zombie shooter in there, but for way way deeper reasons than anyone gives it credit for.

(footnotes in tags)

[blessedislandofgoodboots]

shout out to tobias for frequently visiting his girlfriend for a nighttime chat and being so innocently matter-of-fact about it. jake and marco and even cassie would absolutely have a moment of internal processing (as in "oh my gosh. okay. i'm actually here") if they were to enter a romantic partner's private space alone at night but tobias's attitude is just "i went to rachel's room because she's there and it's nice being with her"

[moon-yeongjun]

"I think too much weight is put on the word 'love', because people like to separate it a lot. 'This is like, and this is love'. The feeling of liking something is also loving something. A lot of people think the dream of love is dating, but looking at a pet and its so cute, then it's love. Ah, you're drinking coffee and its so delicious, that's love. Don't think about it too hard, love isn't a heavy topic. And historically, there wasn't a time where it didn't exist either."

-Min Yoongi

[kunosoura]

I’ll figure out someday how to take pictures with color settings that both flatter my skin tone and don’t make my hair look like a scraggly mess insteady of the proud wavy mane it is because the contrast is too low. Idk

[rexaleph]

finally finished Titane after seeing a bit like half a year ago. i'd heard people talk abt it as transsexual and i was like, hmm idk abt all that. but then the middle-aged man was nudely injecting his steroids in the bathroom, and i must apologize for my misgivings, this really aint disney's mulan.

Anyway, another feeling i got from the first 40ish minutes - before the daddy/boy angle got really introduced, is that it's like Cronenberg's Crash (weird violent car sex movie), but just not at all fun or sexy, and i gotta turn around on that as well. the eroticism is different, truly painful and compelling, i dont hate it. Sth i hadnt really considered abt my favorite movie Crash was that i am not a 1996 straight person so a good portion of the transgressiveness is truly lost on me. I don't think i'm particularly media-illiterate, but because it is an erotic thriller it's meant to be on the line of hot and repulsive and i cant quite tell e.g. on which side of the line gay anal sex or a person with a leg brace is supposed to be. like Vaughn still comes off as sexually menacing to me, but only in a like dark romance novel archetype way. so idk that Titane is that much more tryhard edgy. I think im coming to the conclusion that it's basically exactly like Crash, the good and the bad, so i really can't dislike it.

[insanekirby]

I do hate that WotC turned artificer into just an engineer class.

[ylajali]

i wish advice on how pear shaped women should dress focused on how to look even more pear shaped

[witchblade]

i think the hidden power of OOO is that you pretty much never have to hear them rap

[angryteapott]

LOL SHIQI GAVE SPOTS AND SKINNY ABSOLUTELY 0 CREDIT

[claud1as]

[id: two slightly different versions of the same picrew, watermarked @ nakdraws. the person shown is a white girl with straight red hair that just reaches the middle of his neck, right at the level of her adams apple, with messy bangs and a tiny bit of facial hair. hes wearing dark eyeshadow and red lip tint with a denim jacket over a black shirt, black earrings, and a short black necklace. the only difference between the two pictures is that in the first she only has a bit of chin hair and in the second she also has a bit of a mustache. end id.]

i was making a more accurate version of this picrew and decided i should make a kin euphoria version too. i rlly cant decide which version i like more but theyre both pretty good overall imo i just wish i couldve put streaks in the hair

[holdharmonysacred]

Also just saw a post having a giggle about Pearl and Vriska discourse and I think that like. If you want to try to seriously figure out why the hell that particular genre of discourse gets so bad - and hell, I’ll throw The Egg Guard in as the same genre of disk horse - then the big thing to look at is that all these characters tend to be Creator’s Pets. “Character did bad things” is almost never the actual problem, if the arguing goes in that direction it’ll be because the people making the arguments don’t know how to articulate things from a Doylist angle, the actual problem is pretty much always that Character is blatantly the creator’s favorite and the creator(s) cannot stop themselves from being self-indulgent. And that constant self-indulgence means they can’t bring themselves to Kill Their Darlings or approach the Shenanigans that Character is doing appropriately.

So you get this weird genre of character who constantly does really horrible shit to the rest of the work’s cast - horrible shit that frequently crosses the “this is too real and hits too close to home” boundary - and basically gets away with it and excused for their actions literally all the time and always hogs the spotlight and is just plain annoying if you don’t like that character. And a big part of this genre of creator favoritism is that the creators just can’t bring themselves to actually treat the more villainous characters in this genre like campy villains, so you don’t even get the fun kind of evil girlbossing. And it sucks, if you’re a writer, don’t do this shit. This is the exact kind of thing that the classic “kill your darlings” advice is meant to warn against, nothing good comes from writing like this.

[artbyblastweave]

A few years ago I read a horror fic set in the version of Earth that’s getting sapped for energy, raw materials and the like for use on Earth Bet.

So I had a thought. Tattletale verified that powers work with interdimensional fuckery so that she could make that portal to Earth Gimel, and she did it by asking Scrub to shoot at a bit of road. This resulted in a little circle of Slightly Different Road, proving that Scrub's power works by replacing stuff from Bet with stuff from a different dimension but in that same spot, yadda yadda, combine with Labyrinth and make a stable interdimensional portal, who cares.

The interesting bit is that during the Scrub experiment, it was revealed that the world he replaces stuff from had an asphalt road there, which MEANS that that dimension has, or had, modern human civilization on it, including a city at the same location as Brockton Bay. Now, let's go back to the Merchants' whole brawl for the Cauldron vials, where Scrub triggered and promptly killed like 5 people by "erasing" various parts of their bodies. Due to the fact that those body parts were replaced by air and nothing else, we can infer that those body bits just started popping up suddenly in a city on the american east coast.

So, assuming that dimension actually had active human civilization on it and didnt just get all life erased by the Entities, How do you think the people in that mall felt when one day, without warning, cleanly and freshly disconnected human body parts just fucking appeared in the middle of a crowd, and then day later the only other sign of paranormal activity was a tiny bit of road looking a bit different?