#dialogue is ambiguous for a reason btw

[benjineedssleep]

ass trio blunt rotation but it's who gets traumatized from The Bullshit™️ (this time it's sam)

suggestive post but not inherently nsfw. mdni anyway or else... *pointing angrily*

so my commute to college is damn near two hours. and instead of doing homework, i spend most of my time listening to music and daydreaming, right? normal people things. well today i had to stop myself because i was almost in TEARS in public with this idea. me and @bitterpoison both tbh XD

a lot of fan art i see of sam has him wearing some kind of bracelet or hair tie and i presume it's referencing that one line of dialogue (y'know, about needing to remember things). but i swear everyone gets creative about the colors and i cannot for the life of me stop seeing them as those stupid jelly bracelets that pop up again every ten years. the thin ones. y'know, the squishy ones that look like hair ties.

anyways, i imagine sam wears a bunch of them and one day while ass trio are hanging out, one snaps. and he's sad as fuck like "man. that was my favorite one!" and abby and sebastian are all ??? and there's just a weird aura in the room and sam is lost.

now if you're also lost, those stupid bracelets are often referred to as "sex bracelets" and at least when i was growing up, color didn't matter, you just had to go do somethin' about it if one broke. it was like a stupid little lose-your-virginity game no one played because we were like 13 and most of us found the bracelets ugly anyway LMAO

these things also tended to be big with alt kids for some reason (especially the emo aligned ones) so sebastian definitely gets it and abby just knows things, so she does too. and so one of them is like, "so... are you gonna do something about that? you know the deal, right?" and sam is just staring and abby's like "it broke. you gotta go have sex with someone now." and sam is like "WHAT???" and sebastian's like "they're called sex bracelets. it's kinda in the name, dude."

and then they have to sit sam down and explain the whole thing. all the different lore and how it varies depending where you're from or how unhinged your friends at the time were. and sam's just sitting there, hands clasped and pale, because he's been wearing them for a long time and not a single soul has told him anything about it.

there's a prolonged silence before he stares his friends down and goes, "that's not happening." and there's a back and forth something along the lines of "it's the rules," "FUCK YOUR RULES," "exactly! you get it! fucking!" "i'm going home," "can i go with you?" whoever says this is totally batting their eyes just to bother him and sam finally shuts it down with an "OH FUCK OFF".

the convo ends there and sam keeps wearing the bracelets. mostly because he likes them but also out of spite because he doesn't give a single fuck about stupid middle school urban lore. some time later (probably like a week) another one snaps while he's hanging out with sebastian. the motherfucker doesn't even look up from what he's doing, just keeps typing and goes "karma". sam throws all of them out immediately. both abby and sebastian bring up the two deeds he "owes yoba" for the next month and a half.

it's great, amazing even. and overall just really fuckin' stupid XD i like to think sebastian's minding his business way too much to be antagonistic like abby and sam but sometimes he feels problematic and, if the cards are properly dealt, he'll join in. otherwise, in almost every other circumstance, it's sam and abby saying some shit that makes him want to pray to yoba in abby's house.

[epersonae]

Director's cut of "For The Benefit of All the Broken Hearts", please! (p.s. - is it annoying if I send more than one of these? I have Curiosity)

I saw that it was for the whole fic and I just [stares into space] - because not only is it 62,158 words, which is a lot of words, for me anyway, but it also is one of those stories that occupied my entire brain for months on end, and is still kind of a core part of my personality. I could probably do a whole Taika-commentary-track-of-Boy thing with it, and be equally weird and revealing. 😅

But in trying to pick out a single aspect to write commentary, I realized I've never written the post I've been threatening to write for a year (WHAT), which is what I learned about writing an unnamed protagonist. (Or at least I can't find anything in the #carlita coded content tag.) It's now been a year, so it's likely I will miss something important, but it was such a striking learning experience that I think I can do pretty well with it.

This got long, so more under the cut:

Because aside from being obsessed by the subject matter and vibes and all that, writing for the benefit of all the broken hearts was an incredible boost in my writing craft. (the other big boost was around dramatic pacing and narrative tension and foreshadowing, btw.)

She didn't have a name in the original, and deliberately so, and I was committed to that in my work. See also: Rebecca; this post's tags has some thoughts about Rebecca as a narrative influence in addition to the technical aspects. And unlike Rebecca, I was writing in close third person. (One of the reasons that when I'm feeling particularly cocky I will say SUCK IT DAPHNE DU MAURIER.)

And that's not that hard to do when there's only two characters in a scene and they use different pronouns, but so much of the story is her and Mary. (this post made me laugh A LOT) Which means I can't use pronouns to do the lifting, instead I had to think about other ways to handle it structurally.

Using Mary's name probably more than I would normally, to be quite honest. Her name is in many more dialogue tags and starting actions than I think it would be otherwise, because if Mary's doing one action, she's doing the other action; if Mary is saying one bit of dialogue, she's saying the other.

Using line breaks strategically, clearly separating character actions; and I think over time this actually made a difference in distinguishing how they act (and speak) differently from one another, that carried over to her interactions with Ed and Stede as well. And that carries over to how Mary also becomes a more distinct character.

In some cases, this went as far as actually rearranging the physical action. I don't remember the precise details, but there's something about when they first go into the kitchen in Ch 15, when Stede is making drinks, where you have all four characters directly interacting: I reworked who was doing what where to disambiguate which "she" I'm talking about.

There's also a lot of very fiddly sentence rewording, rethinking every individual sentence, and does every clause need to be there, and what is every single sentence doing. Because there's a lot of ways of writing that are "natural" (aka I have been writing fiction off and on since I was probably nine years old, and even with a wholeass English degree and a lot of supplemental reading about craft, I'm still kind of intuitive about my writing) that lead to structures where clearly her name would go here, but I can't do that, so: is the sentence working? Should it get flipped the other direction? Do I need a paragraph break? Is it okay if it's a little ambiguous -- there's a line in one of the coffeeshop scenes where it's kind of unclear which one of them does some gesture or another, and I decided that the ambiguity worked, actually.

And then probably my favorite craft becomes theme trick, particularly where there's sort of a repetition of sentence structure, or where Mary has been doing something and her actions are in reaction to that: sometimes it makes it work to just remove the subject of the sentence. Walks across the room. Picks up her coffee. It both somehow makes things clearer despite offering less detail AND reinforces this thematic thing of her being both absent and present.

Bonus difficulty level, btw: even if epithets had made sense for the tone (which they did occasionally, iirc), I deliberately chose to have very limited physical description of both her and Mary, on account of them both being amalgams not of actor and character (like Ed, Stede, Jim, Roach, etc), but of either two real people and real person and character played by a different real person respectively. They are both entirely secret third thing, and giving them things like hair color/style (beyond a vague reference to length) or eye color takes that away. (Instead they have some details of their overall physicality - age, respective heights - and clothing, both of which also tie into the themes of the thing.)

Honestly, overall it was an interesting creative puzzle, and I learned a ton -- Through the Storm, which is a very very very different story, owes a lot to it, and I've managed to commit to the bit through all the missing scenes fic (altho since a lot of that is alternate POV, there's a lot of "Ed's wife" construction, which is not my favorite) and the alternate bad endings fic.

tagging the beta team in case anybody has anything to add; this was very much a group project, esp in identifying places where it was clear to me but not to other people: @emi--rose @veeagainsttheday @gaypiratebrainrot

also, going to leave this here - when I went to ECCC in 2023 the original artist of this meme was selling versions with a blank word balloon and you could have her write in something, and I got it left blank with the idea that I would write other things on the plastic or if ever get a glass frame, but uh, it's been Carlita? since March of 2023.

there's so many other things I could have written about at this length about this story (both specific details and the thematic stuff), I'm serious.

and to answer your ps: NOT ANNOYING AT ALL. clearly I enjoy talking about my writing. :D

[director's commentary asks]

[unimatrix-581]

We can draw parallels to the dynamic between House and Wilson versus House and Cameron. Wilson and Cameron are both massive people-pleasers, and self-sacrificial, as demonstrated by Wilson very early on, where he defies Vogler by voting no on firing House. Vogler gives him the option to resign, and Wilson takes it, even though 3-4 other members on the board have backed him up. Wilson is visibly upset as House waltzes in to ask for a file (about an experimental drug). Their friendship is being tested for the second time (first one being House in withdrawal), but Wilson reserves judgment, knowing what he has signed himself up to from the day they became friends, just that, ‘my marriage sucks, but hey, at least I have you by my side… it’s pathetic… is it?’ and House responds by saying (looking exactly like a kicked puppy), ‘no, you matter, always have, end of story… even though I’ll do it all over again…’ Those aren’t the exact quotes btw, but, that’s the basic gist of the unspoken love they have demonstrated for one another, time and time again. Very affectionate.

Cameron, on the other hand, resigns from her post to save everyone else on the team (from getting fired), but the motive revolves around House’s wellbeing, his feeling of the matter. He doesn’t show it, but he adores the ducklings. Sticking it to the man backfires on him, spectacularly, and now he has to face the consequences of his action. It’s his pathology, he can’t help it. He’s torn over who he has to let go, even though he does toy around with the idea (coping mechanism perhaps?) to weed out the whistleblower, to try to deal with the situation by being rational about it. As expected, the decision on the ‘who’ drags on. We know Cameron crushes on House, hard, signalling a potential love match between the two but the idea is never fully realised. She goes, and we spend two episodes max without her.

At this point, Vogler is no longer in the picture, or in House’s words, ‘Vogler (the concept) is dead.’, but Cameron is reluctant to return to her post, rather, she has one condition… for House to take her out on a date (reverse power harassment?? hello???)

Okay, so, the parallels aren’t really, paralleling, because Wilson’s motive for protecting House is ambiguous. It could be his pathological need to seek out House’s approval by standing up to Vogler, but his reasoning has never been set in stone. Just, ‘people-pleaser, i.e. protect friend.’ I know that Wilson and Cameron are often compared with one another due to their shared traits, that being: 1. Kind. In epic proportions. To a worrying amount.

2. “They have so much love to give.” but they end up hurting them (or themselves) in return.

They treat House as a ‘charity case’, with varying degrees of dignity to the recipient. As an unwavering aroace heterosexual, I can’t help but think that House/Cameron is inevitable, or organic, because my assumption is grounded in the sociological expectation of ‘boy meets girl…’, and the fact that House is somewhat reciprocating. However, we see a similar progression with House and Wilson, except, the furthest they’ve gone to admitting their feelings for one another is either:

Wilson’s ‘why not DATE you?’ moment in S4.

The S8 car scene. (Ow, my heart.)

Wilson: I need you to tell me… that you love me. (uhhh)

They don’t fit into the mould of the stereotypical dudebros of the time, allowing for implicit affection to seep into the dialogue. It gives us room to assume that, hey, maybe what they have is not exactly platonic… because, as stated earlier, Wilson goes far and beyond to prevent House from getting fired. Wilson’s unrelenting pursuit to play protectorate for his goofy boy best friend over the years is always a topic of discussion.

IN CONCLUSION!!... House/Wilson? Keep it coming.

[kjxlll]

20 questions for fic writers

tagged by @seasidesandstarscapes days ago lol thank you!!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

18!

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

93,514

3. What fandoms do you write for?

tbitb, lab rats, and IT

4. Top five fics by kudos?

Take care of Will. - 339

the less i know the better - 320

If this is a rom-com, kill the director! - 310

“going slow” - 286

Truth or Dare - 253

the first two are stranger things and aside from just not liking the show anymore my they are also definitely the ones i am least proud of. but alas.

5. Do you respond to comments?

yes! i sometimes get behind but i try my best :)

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

i have only posted happy endings. oops!!!! i do have a very small ~ambiguous ending~ x men thing in the works right now, not sure if it will see the light of day though.

7. What is the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

i am very aware that most of my fics end in the exact same way but i will say Let The Sea Roll because it’s the only time i’ve done an epilogue!

8. Do you get hate on fics?

thankfully no! i think all the hate i’ve gotten has been on tik tok lmfao

9. Do you write smut?

i have! have not been feeling it lately though, idk. there’s a joke to be made about seasonality here i’m afraid.

10. Craziest crossover?

the one crossover i started is the only fic i’ve deleted lmaooo. so none ❤️

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

nope!!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

also no

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

so. technically yes. wattpad bandom crackfic that was started in 2016 and brought back in post ironic 2020. but in my ao3 career i have not lmfao.

14. All time favorite ship?

this isn’t a singular ship but the progression of chase/sebastian -> chase/reese (-> chase/kaz) is something so personal and crazy to me what do you mean that’s from disney channel. also possibly reddie. they’re insane.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

very angsty lab rats EF rewrite. i started it two years ago and it got pretty dark given the source lol

16. What are your writing strengths?

hmm i hope tasteful humor, i love when people comment that a joke landed!!

17. Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

i can’t remember any specific fic i’ve read that’s done this. i’m always interested by how comic book writers deal with dialogue in another language but i do think it’s heavily medium dependent. “**translated from [language]” probably wouldn’t work as well in a fic lol.

18. First fandom you wrote in?

lab rats!!

19. Favorite fic you've written?

i like different ones for different reasons, tbitb-wise i’ll say How to Use the Kodak Retina (colloquially known as photo) since it’s most recent. i am also fond of If this is a rom-com because i think it reads Very bad disney channel sitcom-ish. weird thing to be proud of LOL but i like that it feels true to the source :)

20. If you were forced to write only one genre for the rest of your life (like James Patterson lol) what would you want it to be?

i gotta go fantasy/sci-fi. that counts as one right. love this question btw!!! very fun :)

open tag if anyone is reading this and hasn’t been tagged!!

[wizzycore]

helo fellow spider enjoyer :]] a tuppence for any spider headcanons ? or any thoughts u had abt him lol

thank u for the interactions on the internet btw it gives me serotonin <3 happy to have someone to cobpost with

HIIII!!! my fic is totally my dump for spider related headcanons but here are a couple off the top of my head!

- spider saw mellori as a child not knowing she was the daughter of raven. one way or another thru prophecy or vision or just showing up thru somebody else (#posession)...i have a sillier differenter fic abt this interpretation of his mirage battle dialogue but its very sweet to think about hahahaha.

- ive always had underdeveloped thoughts abt how spider sees spiral peoples, especially as some of them (such as aztecans) descend directly from first world peoples rather than having been created theoretically after the titan war. but somehow spider's attitude (if he is to be believed) toward the yw i think indicates smth abt how he sees mortals in the spiral. he talks a lot of shop about how he doesn't care for any of the spiral or its peoples because his ex made it, that they're all weak or fodder but he is still grateful for what the yw had done for him even if it were prophesized. even if it were essentially "fate" at that point - spider recognizes that even if the yws actions to help him were done under coercion (from himself or others) they were still kind actions to him - they made him say that the yw was "one of their favorite things the spiral made" bc of that act. you wouldn't necessarily tell that to somebody you regard as a puppet that was bound to do those things anyway. (ofc he could've been sweet talking us but i choose the belief that theres part truth in it-) TLDR: spider ascribes a very interesting free will to certain spiral beings despite manipulating their fates massively over the years -- and i think that indicates more of a kind opinion toward the spiral than he lets on.

- my funniest spider hc is that he loves knitting and like fabric-related arts because he's good at it and better than raven. you just know the motherfucker is making sweaters in the husk

- his blood contains the purest form of shadow magic. a reason among other things that the chaos heart is one of the most powerful shadow artefacts in the spiral. theoretically other body parts of his are up there as well in terms of power. but luckily for him they arent removable.... as far as we know

- another reason why spider is fond of the yw is because spider himself was essentially the first wizard/first teacher of wizards - bartleby doesn't betray either witchiness or wizardry honestly i think "druid" is a legitimate camp to be in and bartleby is there -- raven is overtly witchy -- i think spider is in his own way incredibly wizard-y and mage-like. i always like to think he gave nuggets of his knowledge to the spider mages and guided their studies for a time...and the reason why people dont speak abt wizardrys root in spider is bc of raven's casting of him as ultimate evil in spiral mythologies. the role of guide to wizards is given rather ambiguously to bartleby instead...

- this hc is silly but. the divinities eat azoth. spider subsisted on that shit even in the black hole. idc that immortals don't need to eat i think it'd be funny if they ate azoth. consume ancient magics my boy

- tho raven and apider settled down in the husk, they still watch the yw but dont say nothin. spider COULD step in and narrate but why would he. all of arc 4 is so literally not his business at all ur on ur own wizard. however spider gossips about the yws goings on in lieu of being helpful literally at all.

- spiders favorite non-shadow schools of magic r storm and myth bc they're the most chaotic ::::)

- spider isn't taking to divorce therapy very well at all. 💋

[qippabtch]

I’m on episode 19 of the Animorphs TV show which is available on youtube btw and I’m gonna be honest,,, I don’t hate it

I don’t know if I’m just getting used to it being bad or if the quality of the show has actually gone up, but I’m really into it

And yeah it’s slowly deviated further and further from canon, but for some reason I’m not even mad. It still feels like Animorphs yknow? It’s all clunky dialogue, 90s pop culture references, moral ambiguity, and war crimes just as KAA intended

And they didn’t whitewash the cast??? Which is really nice??????? Cassie and Marco are both played by POC actors??? And Marco is definitely gay for Ax

Anyway I highly recommend giving it a go, it’s not quality tv by any means but it’s thoroughly entertaining

[dragonsandphoenix]

To answer the question of how explicit audio dramas work, look no further than to Asian audio dramas. I didn't think I had much to add to this, until I listened to the currently ongoing Till Death Do Us Part audio drama, an adaptation of the danmei novel of the same name (danmei meaning Chinese m/m romance btw). It's interesting that it takes the opposite approach to English audio dramas which rely heavily on narration and dialogue to convey its storytelling. Chinese audio dramas increasingly aren't doing that, for a simple reason and that is censorship. So extra elements such as voice acting (including breathing), sound design and the BGM (or soundtrack) are used to convey what cannot be fully depicted in explicit detail. And because the visual element is not present, there's ambiguity but if you understand the context you can work out what's happening.

Been thinking recently about queer theory in audio, specifically in regards to intimacy and how different identities have different needs and how this interacts with the medium. 

The big examples, and the one I see most frequently talked about, are kissing noises, usually in regards to some of the Big Podcasts, TMA and Penumbra (It doesn’t really seem to come up in a lot of the other big podcasts - TAZ is a TTRPG, not an audio drama, W359 has no romance, there’s kissing in The Bright Sessions but it doesn’t seem to be that big anymore)

Here you’ve got to examine both what purpose the kissing serves, and what it actually sounds like, and to do that you have to take in to account the context of the show, the soundscape at large + the directing style, etc etc. Penumbra is easiest because it has what I would consider to be not a realistic audio style, but not an unrealistic one either. It doesn’t care about how you’re hearing this, there’s no framing device, so spatial awareness isn’t really done with rigidity - You can hear people talking, you can hear the THEIA talking to Juno, you can hear Rita over whatever she uses to communicate with Juno etc. I think S1 is best to examine here because S2 doesn’t really focus on romance, but S1 is primarily a noir romance, with all the heaviness and passion that that entails. When Juno and Peter are kissing you can hear it, and there’s a reason for that outside of genre convention too. Sophie Takagi Kaner specifically wanted the kissing to be very in-your-face (or. ear.) because they wanted the queerness, and specifically in this case the sexuality aspect, to be something unavoidable. The first arc ends with two queer people making out and you can’t avoid it, and that’s the intent! The genius of it though is that it’s also made to be plot relevant - This is Peter using his sexuality as a distraction, he’s sexy and he knows it and he’s about to escape into the night like the thief on a mission he is. And it doesn’t sound wrong in the soundscape, the whole show up to that point as been quite over the top, so this doesn’t sound out of place. The combination of dialogue, sounds, and Juno’s noir detective monologuing over the scene make it work.

Now take something like TMA. TMA also features a queer couple, but the big difference is that you do not hear anything intimate going on beyond a hug. And yes, part of this has been said on the director’s behalf to be because they just couldn’t get the kissing to sound good on audio, but whether it was the intention or not, another key difference is the fact that one of the two characters is ace. And it adds this really nice layer of like, schrodinger’s kissing to the character. Because we’re told in regards to sex that he “Doesn’t. Like, at all.” but we’re never given any indication on his opinions on kissing and that’s fine! It isn’t that kind of story. Penumbra S1 I would argue is a romance, but TMA, even when it has the main character in a romantic relationship in S5, is not a romance because the horror and tragedy take far more priority. So I think one could argue that his aceness is shown through the fact that he’s never shown kissing his boyfriend, and that he can absolutely be read as kiss-averse, or maybe just kiss-sometimes, or maybe he’s fine with kissing and it’s just all off-audio, that’s the interpretable part of it. I’ve seen some bizarre takes in the past year saying that the creators of TMA are homophobic, even, for making this directing choice (Because ah, yes, let’s tell the bi man writing a m/m relationship that he’s doing it wrong) when I just don’t think people take the time to consider that A) Audio is hard to work with tone-wise and if they couldn’t get it to sound good, then they couldn’t get it to sound good B) not every queer person needs to be represented in the same way. Penumbra’s overt sexuality is it’s way of doing that, and intentional or not TMA’s protagonist’s lack-of is shown in a lack of those moments. 

If people are looking for audio dramas on the spicier side though, apparently there is a market for explicit audio drama? I’m not quite sure how it works but props to those people for finding out how to do that. I know Dreamboy uses third person narrating but I think there is some genuine audio drama with sex stuff out there, and Good For Them. But also, when a relationship is shown without those aspects, that can be just as revolutionary and queer too, as much as we live in a heteronormative world, part of heteronormativity is amatonormativity, so different media can be important in their stances for different reasons, they can co-exist and one does not automatically become bad by juxtaposing the other. 

[astralartefact]

Placeholder Name for Atarase's Media Diary

Entry 007 - Starfield: Shattered Space <<Prev: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Synopsis

Maybe on the planet of culturally-ambiguous lizard cultists (i'm sweating in white, their words not mine) we'll find someone who should be asked the Gretchenfrage.

...i just think it's funny to bring up the word gretchenfrage whenever i get the chance

How much did I know before playing?

Listen, I contemplated writing a post about this at all - what will it do to my already tangible lack of credibility etc etc - but I think it's only right and fair and truthful to take accountability even and especially for my bad sides...

The truth is I just love playing self-insert character creation open world rpgs. I love them, the weird first-, second- to third-person escapism of it all, I feel like I connect to games like these and how they work at a primal level - my "perfect game" would absolutely be a very specific kind of this sort of game - all that to say I know

Did I like it more than I expected?

We all knew Starfield was going to be bad, they had multiple seperate events where they used Microsoft big bucks to demand the whole world's attention only to sit there for an hour plus while talking about "Immersion" or some other meaningless marketing buzzword while showing nothing but concept art and maybe a pre-rendered cinematic and nothing else, it couldn't possibly have ended up as worthwhile - but that's not what I'm playing these games for, I just like pretending to be not!Me who's hot in the exactly right way

Did I think the DLC would change anything? no absolutely not

Since [absolute meh], here's what I liked about it

I think it looks nice. I actually do like the aesthetic of Starfield, I know not a lot of people are particularly fond of it. btw stay with me here while i'm speaking of the dead but I do think Concord and Starfield went for the exact same aesthetic it's just really really REALLY easy to slide into absolute meh territory

I do prefer the way they handled the DLC planet as one big open world zone instead of putting everything on three different planets. It's still not worth exploring anything, but at the very least it's more cohesive and you don't run into the same things twice in a row (at least not right away)

What did this game make me think about?

Nothing. And not in the nihilist way. It's that thing that happens when you go on a walk and you notice that the remnant thoughts from whatever you did before are still bouncing through your head because there's simply nothing else going on that could lead to any other thought. For a DLC that's fully about religion, I had 0 thoughts about religion while playing this.

actually, fun fact: i would consider myself somewhat of a "positive nihilist", i do think there's no inherent worth/value/reason for life/existence but that is good actually bc that just means you can make your own! if nothing is worth anything everything is worth the same amount <3 could you imagine if starfield was about that

Specific Impressions that will stick with me

I'm actually not sure how "good"(tm) I think they are but the way Starfield does Final Quest Gauntlets/Big Dungeon Deep Dives is fascinating to me, they feel very energetic even though there's nothing really happening that's actively pushing you forward. I don't think they're particularly well designed from a 'game design' perspective or anything, I'm sure someone could blast them to shreds in a "gameplay analysis" video essay, but to me the structures you're fighting through actually feel very big and grande in a somewhat sensical way.

Also I actually kind of liked the Religious Initiation Ceremony, it's just wild to me that instead of making it optional they make you do it and then for the rest of the quest line they waste one of your two to three dialogue options on a mandated "You religious people are weird!!!" option; also that weird merchant follower dude will loudly judge you, the player, for every single choice that's anywhere leaning into the roleplay of it all, fuck that guy, he sucks ass (also why is he there, i didn't pay attention to what he was saying, wasn't i supposed to be the only outsider here)

Outstanding Audio

There was a boss theme I liked, I think. All in all the Audio is fine I guess, at least when it doesn't creation engine-ly blare over a npc discussion expositing lore at you, but that just reminds me of skyrim <3

Favorite Character

The receptionist guy in the hall of healing with his robot was kind of hot. Something about him did it for me. Doesn't even have a name :(

Favorite Arc/Story Line

ahahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

Favorite Set Piece

If there's one thing they have gotten down with Starfield compared to say Skyrim it's Set Pieces and I will defend those, like I absolutely hate the way the Crimson Fleet Quest Line and every single character in it is written but damn, I have actually replayed it more than once just to do the Lock, the Vault and the final assault again...

In this DLC that set piece is the final dungeon - the "final boss" and then rushing outside felt really cool (even though it ends with the lamest culmination cutscene ever lol)

Best Performance

I actually really liked the voice acting? They used a lot of (differing) accents but it all worked, I didn't really notice a lot of weird line reads or anything.

btw, as a german with english as a second language I noticed I have this very weird thing with heavy accents in english voice acting where I tend to think they sound weirdly fake when they're recorded "too well" (I know, really weird, feel free to judge, but I cannot listen to a single second of xenoblade 2 i cringe into my shell, i do not have this problem with those accents in rl or "normal" tv shows but i guess in any abstract art styles like anime? prison) (for me not for them)

German Localization Notes

So, in it's current "official" state german doesn't really have they/them pronouns. While it's possible to rephrase a lot of sentences to get around it, there isn't really an official, grammatical way to directly refer to someone without the mention of their gender on the level of the singular they/them pronoun in english - and because there's certain ways around all of that, it wasn't really a pressing problem until the last few years.

You see, the only people that really need that sort of thing are Non-Binary People, and as we all know those only exist since the 2010s (/s) - and while Germany as a whole was actually somewhat quick to at the very least acknowledge that the additional gender category "Divers" is a thing ("Divers" = various, do not translate as diverse in this context) - changing the way your entire language works around it is a little bit harder especially since we can't just copy the way english does it because our they (=sie) is coincidentally the exact same word as our singular she (=sie) - so that doesn't work unless we decide to embrace the generic femininum (btw underrated i think we should try it)

So we kind of have to figure out a way to introduce a neo-pronoun into our language (which makes it necessary to debate "which one" on top of the regular "if any at all") to accomodate even just those Non-Binary-People that would get away fine with they/them in english which is an interesting linguistic problem to have.

Anyways; Starfield has actually translated the non-binary they/them as a german neo-pronoun (i think it's dey? not sure and gaming journalism has taught me i don't have to look that up before posting this) and I was really fckin confused because I thought it was a really weird spelling error.

Then again - as someone who didn't really have a clue how this specific one works, as was now demonstrated to me it's pretty easy to just go "Oh! That's what that was! Neat!" when encountering something like that. I still won't be able to use it without looking it up, but sometimes only communicating in pre-written answers comes in handy, I guess.

--- ENTERING THE PRETENTIOUS SECTION OF THIS ENTRY ---

What about this game gives me Hope for the future of gaming?

ahahahah AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA

What about this game makes me scared for the future of gaming?

Hey there gamers in the hate mob, stay hydrated! Have fun out there campaining against capitalist practices but don't forget! Any agitated group of people that considers themselves exploited by some sort of superior standing class is ripe to be co-opted for things like *Populism*! Make sure the force of your emotions is used for reasonable purposes and isn't taken advantage of by fraudsters who try to make you lose focus on what truly matters by riling you up against problems that don't actually exist! Remember to point your fervent rage at the people with too much money to ever care about anything at all! Do you actually think annoying ""woke"" people on the site formerly known as twitter are the problem of your woes or is it the rich white man exploiting 50000 people in a single breath whose budgeting decisions make your work life hell?

Anyways, love you all, go vote people who aren't weird af <3

The Ramble Section where I get to actually talk about what I thought about

Okay, there's one specific reason I've decided to type out all of this and it's to eject that one sentence that has scoured the corner of my brain that vocalizes my inner thoughts for far too long. So. Here it goes:

"It's almost awe-inspiring how resistant to learning Bethesda Softworks proves itself to be." - Me

That's the thought. That's the singular thought that bounced through my brain while playing all of this. I can't believe this is the 5th (probably more, didn't count) time you made this game in a slightly different theme of the year and apparently you guys have just not learned a singular thing while doing all that.

The entire game feels as if it was made without a single thought. Nobody in a position of power over this thought. At all. It feels like the people deciding what to write, what to produce, which pieces to build to then put together, have never played a Game of this type, a Bethesda Game, ever. Nobody has asked "Would I as a player actually do or care about this" ever, not a single time at any option whatsoever, be it narrative choice or gameplay function. The only people that thought were the low-level workers actually making the stuff that they're told to implement, like the assets, I guess, at the very least those look pretty good.

Like, who decided on these Open World Mechanics. You have made this game 5+ times, you should know that even just economically speaking there are far better ways to populate a world than how you did it here. Why would you not also make dungeons much more PCG-heavy when you already make all the planets PCG anyways? Why is there not a single "Hey, you used this pre-built location the last time, don't use it again right away" rule in your PCG generator? You know you can just do that right? Store a reference and then go "this was the last one generated, if it's this one again try again!" That's like three lines of code or something! Did you not think running into the exact same place twice in a row would be weird as fuck? Did you not realize that this would almost immediately happen when the total amount of your randomized items is like, 5, which is a problem in and of itself.

Food feels absolutely useless, most of the stuff that accidentally ends up in my inventory heals an entire amount of 2 entire HP - and yet with this little use why is there so much fucking food (and why does it look so good?).

The Writing is atrocious. Just. Not even just bad, it's baffling. How can you go through years of people pointing at New Vegas, you have to have seen those tweets, that's one of those games everyone agrees is good which means bullying in its name is acceptable; Hbomberguy, the one Video Essayist really everybody knows, made 2 entire video on it! It's impossible you haven't heard criticisms of your style of writing because people will have parroted whatever he said to you on your socials to hell and back - but regardless of how annoying those twitter weirdos are, how do you still go through years of being beaten to death with it and take absolutely nothing, 0, nihil nihil nihil from it, not even a little bit? honestly crazy to me. how???

And once again, it doesn't even make sense from a economical perspective because the way they did it now results in more work than if they just sat down, thought about what they were doing and wrote fewer, meaningful, concise but efficiently written storylines that actually differ from each other instead of what they did, which is giving the same side quest four different, equally as boring endings that are at most minor alterations of each other, three of which nobody will ever care about because why would I not just choose the obvious good ending, the easy everyone is happy choice instead of a miniscule extra reward I do not need in the slightest because money has no value - but then all of those endings still result in a distinct, hand-crafted, voice-acted 3 minute dialogue each that you will only happen to stumble across on accident when you pass that particular house four hours later and have already completely forgotten about that quest. Same amount of work for far less use - but hey, thank god, at least we have Immersive Storytelling!!! How delightful that the environment remembers your actions!! How Real Life of them! Surely I will care about the other result when on my Next Immersive New Game Plus I try the other, fundamentally worse option!

I have to assume that having good writing would make them liable for damages to Obsidian in some way, because how do you write any of this and even just feel. anything??? This can't possibly be what you wanted to write? And if it is... o-okay? *silent judgement*

also who on the team thought it was fine to make the religious fanatics lizard people come on

[bao3bei4]

girlbosses, male wives, and other lesbian genders

a post about jing wei qing shang. but also mostly about another unrelated movie. spoiler-free.

for a lot of people, mulan 1998 is their definitive “ohhh i’m a chinese woman dressing as a man for contrived reasons and i get absolutely nooo erotic pleasure from this” movie. 

however, because i am very special and unique, for me it’s the love eterne 1963. it’s the shaw brothers adaptation of butterfly lovers, the classic chinese folktale. here’s how i’d summarize the movie: 

zhu yingtai, an aspiring scholar, convinces her parents to let her dress as a man to attend school. on the way there, she meets liang shanbo, another prospective student, and they become sworn brothers. they study together for three years, growing closer, until zhu yingtai returns home. liang shangbo accompanies her for the eighteen-li journey home while she hints she’s a woman, but he remains oblivious. by the time he learns her gender, her parents have engaged her to another man. he dies of grief, and while she mourns at his grave, it splits open, and she buries herself inside with him. two scraps of her torn outfit turn into butterflies and fly away.

it’s worth noting here that like. this movie is made in the huangmei opera style. so both zhu yingtai and liang shanbo are played by women (betty loh ti and ivy ling po respectively). because of this, basically every level of the film is preoccupied with gender: if we take zhu yingtai’s male performance as credible (as the characters in the movie do) the leads bond through male homoeroticism; the text is ultimately about a heterosexual romance; it is acted out by two women, in a performance that is difficult to mistake as heterosexual or even feminine; and the dialogue of the movie can’t help but remark on this.

basically it asks: what if lesbians could be gay both ways? wouldn’t that be based? 

like opera was traditionally made by single gender casts, so roles tended to be genderless, in that the gender of the actor doesn’t determine the gender of the role they play. roles are instead typed into four categories: dan (fem), sheng (masc), chou (clown), and jing (painted face). it’s a sick gender quadinary. each of these roles has further subtypes that are represented through stylized patterns of singing, makeup, costuming, movement etc.

so in butterfly lovers, betty loh ti plays a dan, and ivy ling po plays a sheng. but because of the textual cross-gender play, you end up with a woman playing a woman playing a man who falls in love with a woman playing a man.

i’m going to make a brief digression here into talking about like.. acting theory. in the european tradition, you see it evolving out of early concerns (from stanislavski, brecht) about the fourth wall, and its permeability or lack thereof. in chinese opera tradition, the fourth wall didn’t ever really exist. and mei lanfang, the legendary fanchuan performer, claimed that his success wasn’t just due to his appearance, but rather, his mastery of some nonliteral feminine subjectivity. 

If I kept my male feelings, even just a trace, it will betray my true self; then how can I compete for the audience’s affection for feminine beauty and guile?

i’m not going to argue that there’s like, an essence to being a woman because i’m not a fucking idiot. but there’s something to be said for the idea that the gendered interplay between the audience’s perception of the actor, the actor’s perception of themself, and the character they play is a massive part of the appeal of fanchuan performance.

this is echoed by david hwang’s m. butterfly, in which gallimard memorably says, “i’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. everything else—simply falls short.” btw sorry for having the type of brain disease where i constantly reference chinese crossdressing related media. you already know why i have it. 

anyway. parallel to that (but far less morally detestably), jin jiang argues “young male impersonators in yue opera embody women’s ideal men—elegant, graceful, capable, caring, gentle, and loyal.” so, trivially, 1) the eroticism embodied by fanchuan performers is distinctly different from their “straight” counterparts, and perhaps less trivially 2) it’s way better. 

back to the love eterne for a bit. one of the many reasons it’s lodged itself into my psyche is because there’s something more interesting at play than just all that. normally in opera, to compensate for any perceived residual femininity in the sheng, the dan camps it up even further. so this is how zhu yingtai first appears, this bratty femme pastiche of womanhood. yet within a couple minutes she’s dressed as a man, which she’ll stay as for the bulk of the movie. they do however make compromises with the makeup--more gently lifted eyebrows than the steep angles of the sheng opera beat, and an improbably masculine smoky eye. 

that’s right. they performed girlbossification on her. 

i don’t want to suggest that she’s straightforwardly feminine. i could write an entire other thing on her relationship to masculinity. instead i want to highlight the erotic interplay not just between the “girl” and the “boss” but also between her and her counterpart: the male wife. 

liang shanbo is ostensibly straightforwardly male, but his relationship with zhu yingtai isn’t gay in the ahaha what if i was into my bro way-- it’s a what if i was into my bro and i was his wife way.

that’s right. they performed force fem on a cis woman-man. like when zhu yingtai tells him he can’t watch over her as she recovers from an illness because “boys and girls can’t sleep together,” liang shanbo asks “are you implying that I’m a girl?”

there’s a lot of shit like this that builds up over the course of the movie. it all culminates in that final 18 mile journey. along the way, zhu yingtai compares them to a pair of mandarin ducks, one male & one female. liang shanbo sputters “i am a man inside out-- you shouldn’t--” before graciously conceding, “you may compare me to a woman.” 

this is like. a simple punchline. but it’s incredible. it’s true! liang shanbo isn’t a man inside out in that he’s a man and only a man, but rather that he’s a man seen inside first, built for desiring, by a woman & for a woman. as a perpetual object, he becomes a more believable woman than zhu yingtai. and at least in his view, it seems more likely that he could be a woman than her. but beyond that, his permissive tone reads as a kind of wanting in itself--recast, if she wants, “for you, i’ll be a woman.” 

obviously this is a classic lesbian mood. who among us has not seen “no gender only lesbian” posts. and speaking of classic lesbians, you might ask. did you just tiresomely reinvent butches and femmes but with a more annoying name? yes. no. okay. well. 

first, like butch/femme dynamics have both historical specificity and a classed character such that it’s not rlly that appropriate to impose them on the love eterne. and i guess more importantly, i wanna talk about stuff that isn’t real.

we fight all day about people who confuse performance with performativity, (i use we lightly here. for instance, i go outside every day so i don’t care about discourse) but what if we actually wanted to talk about the former for once? something specifically, whether we choose or are forced into it, that we pretend to be? 

anyway. what the hell does all that have to do with jing wei qing shang. i’m going to start by first making the argument that there’s no such thing as a naturally occurring girlboss. i think, honestly, she’s a product of capitalism (“boss” should be the tipoff here) but because both of these stories are set in ambiguously historical china, i’m going to say, instead that she’s a product of uhhh primitive accumulation.

semantics so that i can be canon compliant with marxism aside, if girlbosses are made not born, can you choose to be a girlboss? sheryl sandberg says yes. i don’t disagree, i guess, but i will say: stop glamorizing it! humans only become girlbosses when they’re greatly distressed. 

you become a girlboss when you have no other choice not to be one. when your wants are too great to be a woman, when the things you want are not things that women should want-- whether that’s something that really no one should want, like being a ceo, or whether that’s just something like loving a woman (or, as it is quite often, both) -- you have to become something else. 

another important part of being a girlboss is that other people are not. your excesses mean that not only do you lose something in the process, but your bosshood comes at the expense of others. the girlboss necessitates a girlworker, or so to speak. 

now we’re getting to jwqs. i’m assuming that you haven’t read jwqs, because most people haven’t. that was me until like four days ago. in broad strokes, the novel is about a woman, qiyan agula, who was raised as a prince, and her quest for revenge against the kingdom who slaughtered her people. of course, this involves marrying one of the princesses of that kingdom. it’s all very exciting (lesbian). 

what’s striking about jwqs is that both of them seem to fit the girlboss paradigm, in vaguely similar ways. qi yan (agula’s assumed name) seems to follow the lineage of zhu yingtai, who pretends to be a man to achieve her goals. she’s forced to give up much in the process, and also sacrifices a, uh, lot of innocent people. similarly, nangong jingnu, the princess, is inherently a girlboss because royalty sucks. but also, qi yan girlbossifies her over the course of their relationship. 

but i wouldn’t say jwqs is girlboss4girlboss. there’s something a little more complicated happening. qi yan isn’t zhu yingtai in that she’s a dan pretending to be a sheng. it seems more like that she was a sheng all along. it’s something that the women of the novel return to often: qi yan seems to be better than a man.

for instance, nangong sunu, jingnu’s older sister, reflects on this. 

Nangong Sunu had seen many foolishly loving women who sacrificed everything for the sake of their husbands, but there were rarely any men who would do the same for them. 

(...) 

Thinking it through, Nangong Sunu felt that Qi Yan was truly becoming more interesting. She intended to observe discreetly for a while, to verify if such a man truly existed in this world. (ch 221) 

and i forgot to write down the citation for this, but nangong jingnu also seems to argue that not only is qi yan prettier than a man, but she also seems to be prettier than a woman. (it’s the bit where she’s watching qi yan sleep. help me out here.)

moreover, the way qi yan relates to nangong jingnu is suggestive. jingnu brings out the elements of wanting to be a woman in her. it’s jingnu’s body that makes her wonder what she would look like if she was more feminine. it’s jingnu’s happiness that she resents, wishing that her people could have that as well. it’s her desire for jingnu that makes her a woman. 

(another important distinction i suppose--while one person can’t be both a butch and a femme, because the girlboss and the male wife are things we pretend to be until we embody them / them us -- there’s greater slippage between the two.)

anyway, the girlboss/male wife dynamic is reversed wrt who’s actually dressing as a different gender. that suggests an inversion in the implications we see from the love eterne, if we are to take the love eterne as the paradigmatic girlboss text. which i do, for no reason in particular. 

so then, is qi yan pretending to be a man? under the opera framework, we’re forced to say no. she’s not pretending to be a man any more so than liang shanbo (as acted by ivy ling po) was. but that, of course, feels incorrect, just looking at the text. is she, then, pretending to be a sheng? i’d strongly say no. the things that others see in her, they authentically see; and she does authentically feel the same things as liang shanbo wrt femininity.

so it has to be the opera framework that jwqs is subverting then. if qi yan kept some trace of her once-womanhood, if qi yan reveals her true self, and yet she still can compete for the audience’s affection-- jwqs’s inversion of the opera framework seems to argue instead that it’s that true self that allows you to compete. it’s being masc that lets you be a desirable woman; it’s being feminine that lets you be a desirable man.

there’s an increased gender ambivalence to jwqs, which make sense, i guess, seeing as it’s not meant to be a het story the way that the love eterne was. for instance, nangong jingnu crossdresses to go out in public, and qi yan remarks that jingnu’s disguise fooled her on their first meeting. when qi yan and jingnu go out in public, both disguised as men, they’re repeatedly perceived as a gay male couple. there’s freedom in that: they could be gay women only privately, they could be straight officially, but they could be anonymously gay publicly. 

so it’s through the gay male pretense that they can be gay women; it’s through the qi yan pretense that agula can love women; it’s the qi yan caring husband persona that coaxes jingnu in caring for qi yan in return-- jwqs, more precisely, argues that you can’t be a woman if you’re going to love them, and even less so if you’re going to be loved by one. 

this is perhaps well-trodden ground for anyone who has read wittig & certainly many people who haven’t. but it’s the layer of pretense that for me complicates these two narratives. 

i think it’s a relatable feeling: wanting something anticipating getting something, or wanting something for yourself anticipating knowing that you already had it. that is, desire in itself being constitutive of that reality. 

or less abstractly, knowing that you’d want to be a lesbian if you could, knowing that you’d want not to be a woman if you could-- anticipating any realization of either. 

the dramatic excesses & wants of the girlboss, i think, are a decent literary stand in for being a lesbian. 

i wanna note here that this is rlly just based on my experience being a transmisogyny exempt nonbinary diaspora lesbian lol. it’s fun & cathartic to overread this history & place myself in the accidental implications.

i don’t think most of the things i say are literally true. and i don’t want to overstep & say any of this can be generalized. please lmk if something here doesn’t read right! ok kisses bye

[jorisjurgen]

undertale for the ask meme!

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most): FLOWEY/ASRIEL. All the way, absolutely. I think about him a normal amount of time. My current @ (f-f-c) is a reference to him. I’ve talked at length about it in the past, but he has depression and ptsd, canonically. He deserves better than the way the fanbase treats him. Also he’s literary 10, and the way some people talk about him is just... Beyond disturbing or victim-blame.

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped): Frisk, absolutely. They’re so cute, but cowardly, and a bit mischievous. And it’s fun to analyze their dialogue choices and actions.

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave): Flowey/Asriel, lol.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week): Honestly I’d love to say that it’s like any other character, but despite being the main antagonist of the game, I’m pretty sure that Asriel/Flowey still legally applies here. If not, it’s napstablook.

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave): Still Asriel/Flowey. Girl help!!!??!? Also his dad too. He’s an epic pathetic divorceman and I love his mental illness. Being a morally ambiguous depressed murderer has got to be a family trait.

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason): IT’S STILL ASRIEL/FLOWEY  😭

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell): Chara. I also love their “dying” and “staying dead in the good ending of the game canonically” swag. A net win and net gain of everything for everyone btw.

[junisfics]

ooh are we talking about POVs?? no one asked but here’s my lil analysis bc this is literally so interesting to me:

btw idk if it was to you or some other blog but regardless, someone was talking ab this a while back and if it was u then i might’ve sent u a less in-depth version of this? but enjoy the movie<3 let’s gooo!!!!

2nd person is the standard for fics, she’s cute, she’s reliable. not much to say, but i really do like her. although, the one con here is that it lowkey maybe sounds sliiiightly confusing if/when the narrator is omniscient. like narration for the character is fully 3rd person and when we go back to the reader’s thoughts being told by the narrator it could be a tiny bit confusing. although you’re a good enough writer and it’s not really a problem in your fics, imo.

1st person sounds bad 9 times out of 10. in published novels, 1st person really only works bc it’s to express the protagonists unique voice. it’s a largely artistic choice to let us get to know the mc in a more intimate way. which is why it often doesn’t work in reader-insert content, in which the mc is meant to be ambiguous. it’s contradictory. or at the very least it’s extremely hard to make it work.

3rd person is beautiful. sexy. everything of the sort. it sounds like i’m reading high brow literature when really i’m just reading about myself pegging the shit out of armin in a dress. works seamlessly with both an omniscient or limited narrator. however it takes a little bit of maneuvering to make it work for reader-insert fanfiction. “y/n,” “______,” “(name),” etc. have always been a bit jarring to me. it’s not that i mind it, but it sort of takes me out of the moment and out of the world that the writer has worked so hard to build. it suddenly comes crashing down and feels fake again. like oh i’m not blowing admin’s back out? i’m just reading on tumblr dot com, tuff. the reason i mention it here is bc it’s the biggest problem in 3rd person. in 1st and 2nd, the reader’s name is only written when another character says it in dialogue. in 3rd person, it could potentially be everywhere. it’s really hot, cool, sexy, and beautiful when reader is basically an oc who’s name is never written in the text. “he called out her name” type beat. no need to write out “y/n” (or any of the aforementioned variations). but yeah hjnnngghh 3rd person, my beloved!! there’s something a little bit romantic about it somehow. patiently waiting for ur 3rd person platonic eren fic bc i just know ur gonna deliver.

- 🍙

yes literally povs are so difficultttttttt

cuz i want a mix of all three but i hate when people switch povs all the time 😞😞😞😞

but yes my platonic eren fic is in third person omni and it's super different from what i usually do but i'm rly liking it so far !!!!!

[kawaii-chronicles]

Current state of Genshin Impact and some personal thoughts

First things first major spoilers, leaks etc of the new story of Inazuma and possible upcoming stuff that was leaked. It could be false so don't take it to seriously. All right so....besides the disaster that is the anniversary. Currently on Twitter the genshin fandom has been heavily divided and only seams to get worse at every update. And i wanna share some of my own thoughts and hopefully not get canceled because of it XD 1. Inazuma was like game of thrones...it had a amazing start only to get worse till the end (insert drawing horse meme). Usually i can excuse when stuff is rushed. But when is PLAIN in your face, how rushed and how things went form A to B...then there is a problem...And i believe those who have seen reviews, analysis videos and such know what I'm talking about. I don't wanna write an entire novel so ill keep going to the next thing. 2. Baal only got popular and got more money than any character, BECAUSE OF A MEME !! People did not liked Baal IN TILL BOOBA SWORD CAME TO BE ! I still remember when her design was leaked ! People called her bland and boring, that they will skip her banner and shits but lord and behold the trailer dropped and ,,YO BOOBA SWORD HELL YEAH !! BAAL WHEN ?! WE NEED BAAL !!''. *face palm*.....I like Baal don't get me wrong...her fight animation is awesome and i did enjoyed her backstory. But using her and how her banner managed to top everyone as a excuse on why Mihoyo prefers to to make more female characters and such.....was nothing more than a desire to get a meme, it was not for the gameplay it was not for the story or personality at least in my opinion....and same might be for Scaramouche...If he did not do the fandango in that event I'm very much certain that most people might have not been desperate to have him playable. And btw. 3. How the hell can Mihoyo make a evil , psycho character like Scara playable....Childe is a special exception. But Scara not only has the motives to be like this but also many times now in both the event and the story that he is evil, and it might get worse if the leaks are true. Unless Mihoyo dose a FGO move and just makes a evil character playable no need to details or even a redeeming quality. Once again Scara only became popular because of the meme. Yeah his design is cool but we already saw a few example of amazing character designs and they are dead ! My only theory that might work for Scara is that we get to somehow reprogram him ? Since he is a puppet like the shogun. Personally it will be a bad move in terms of story telling to have Scara redeem himself in any way but if the devs managed to properly make him playable then i have nothing against it. 4. Racisms , misogyny , misandry, shipping etc. People are at each others necks when these subjects and genshin come together and hell that i will explain this here because i already lost to many braincells reading trough comments and threads but this time the most recent drama this is on the translations team's fault. Pretty much...we now have to travel to Sumeru to find the dendro archon. It all started whit Yae mentioning about a god of flowers named lesser lord Kusanali a female deity that right now is in charged of Sumeru. People already jumped the bandwagon and speculated that the dendro archon is in fact a female. I might do a separated post theory about that but in shorts...the translation team messed up big time because in previous dialogues when the dendro archon was mentioned, it was gendered as he but now and only now they change it to she....while in the Chinese version the dendro archon's gender was left ambiguous but that did not stopped the players to complain once again of the ratio between female and male characters and is far worse now that the Archon ratio is 2:5 now aka only Venti and Zhonlgi are the only male archons while the Cryo, pyro and Hydro are confirmed to be females. And people really hoped for the dendro archon to be male so that we can have the balance of 3:4. Seams reasonable and logical right ? But again i will not go any longer intro this. Case

in point...devs did a opsi and now people are at war. 5. The aniversary.....my dude FGO has the worse gacha rate up and a non existent pity system and yet they make better anniversary gifts than you. Phew this rant could have been much worse people i was yelling whit a friend about my frustration whit the genshin fandom and the stupid decision the devs are making so this was the most watered down version i was able to do. Again don't take my rant to serious. Things can still change either for the better or for the worse. If you still enjoy the game good on you. Everyone has the right to enjoy whatever they want as long as it not bothering those around them :3

[helldivers2]

Hi! Just curious but why do you hate apex? (Hope you're doing well btw! 👋)

HONESTLY ITS MORE LIKE... PERSONAL AND JUST GETTING REALLY FED UP but theres also like. a lot of problems with the game and its fanbase too that really just add up

like to start i really do hate a lot of the fanbase a lot because there's a lot of whitewashing and obvious colorism issues... i got frustrated with how people ignored gibraltar, a canon indigenous gay man whos fat too, because people would rather kiss up to caustic and say how hes a gay man when that would be an awful thing and theres loads of reasons for me to hate him especially the fact that he used to have a racist line of dialogue (against crypto i think) and is a eugenicist.. wraith/wattson is uncomfortable too because there's like a pretty big age gap and i like mirage but it irritates me how people talk about him since there's a lot of fetishism going on and plus he's really like a. mystery meat character or just someone with ambiguous race or just brown without a lot of culture behind it and thats always irritated me too when everyone nearly else has clear cultural influences and ethnicities

i also have my problems with the apex team as well especially with the writer tom lastname (i forget it a lot but it starts with a c) whos especially infamous for interacting with apex twitter fans a lot and having some weird parasocial stuff with them plus i think hes just irritating in general... apex also has a really bad rep of giving non-black characters dreadlocs and having them appropriate from cultures they're not apart of... the biggest example is especially wraith who has had various skins with dreads and is relatively infamous for just having so many skins that are so obviously influenced from other cultures when shes white/white-passing. it bothers me too that the last i saw of the game dev team they boast so highly about their diversity but they only had like 3 people of color amongst a sea of white people and it just ticks me off

anyways. theres a lot of little things as well and they really do tend to add up to where its really hard for me to enjoy whether its as a fan or someone who plays the game.. it makes me sad too because i remembered when apex first came out and i saw the roster of mostly characters of color i was so enamored but it really did just get worse over time because it just started to become obvious when it was still a game made by mostly white people... but yeah sorry this is super long its just a lot of things :P

[jcogginsawriter]

Hand to Hand: Mark Waid’s Flash

I have been a fan of comic book characters for a long time. I started with the cartoons, and as I got older, I began doing deep dives into wikis, reading fanfiction, and participating in that shallowest of internet past times, the vs debate. I dabbled in writing fanfic for myself, but I spent far more time thinking about writing fanfic instead. I would come up with all these ideas about what I would take from the various different versions of the characters, and don’t get me started on the idea of Crossovers.     The point is, I knew a lot of what happened in the comics, but I never read many comics. I didn’t know where my local comic shop was, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have had the money to spend on them. The comics that I did read were usually fan translations of manga. I did read a few comics, big name stories like Death of Superman or Crisis on Infinite Earths, but they were few and far between.

Recently, I’ve begun to change that. I now follow several comics as they come out, most notably the current X-line. This change sprang in part because I began reading a lot more comics criticism. In particular, I followed the blog of a certain Superman fan, and began to eagerly digest his various takes. I wanted to be able to ask him questions about new comics without looking like an idiot (This is how 90 percent of my interactions on comics twitter go, BTW) and that was a kick in the pants for me.

After getting into a steady habit, I decided to look into reading some of the classic runs I’d read so much about throughout life. To go from knowing them second hand, to knowing them first hand. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I’ve settled on Mark Waid’s legendary run of Flash Comics to start off with.

(Spoiler Warning for some 30 year old comics, by the way)

As of this writing, I have read up to the final issue of his story arc Dead Heat, wherein Wally does battle with the speed cultist Savitar. Before we get into things like plot and characters, I want to discuss the art, because no discussion of comic books is really complete without talking about the art. Unfortunately, the art in this run hasn’t done much for me, but that’s not really it’s fault. I read this comics in manner that they were not created to be read, digitally and zoomed in. These comics were drawn with physical issues in mind, and I don’t doubt that they’re good in that format. It also doesn’t help that I’ve read far more manga than I have American comics. American comics have never clicked with me the way manga does. Even now, I still find the layout of manga more legible than the layout of an American comic. That’s not a value judgment, it’s just my personal experience.

I do distinctly recall thinking that the art was better up to issue #79 (The conclusion to the Return of Barry Allen storyline), than it was after. I prefer the less exaggerated character designs, and lighter inks, though it could very well be a case of me having gotten used to the initial style and not liking the change. One thing that thing I can say about the art is that it helped me grasp how Wally’s costume differed from Barry’s. Before this, I was incapable of separating them in my mind, but seeing them side by side made it clear to me how different Wally’s Costume was colored and shaded.

Now, onto the writing of the run, we’ll start with the lead, Wally West. My previous touchstone for Wally was the Justice League series from the DCAU, which I watched a lot as a kid. The Wally in these comics comes off as more serious that his DCAU incarnation. Not too serious, he still cracks jokes, but he’s more on the ball. He takes his adventures as seriously as any hero would, rather than the more carefree attitude I recall his DCAU version having. This is not unsurprising, Wally here is the lead whereas there he was part of an ensemble cast, and here we get his internal monologue which gives us a much more thorough sense of his headspace. Not to mention, the DCAU version was voiced, so we know with no ambiguity what tone his dialogue’s in. In text, tone is more up to interpretation.

Perhaps the biggest thing that set Comic Wally apart from DCAU Wally is that the Wally in the comic was more consistently angry and frustrated. While his DCAU incarnation had hidden depths, I can’t recall a time when he got seriously angry. This Wally is frequently irritated, usually by things which are enitrely understandable. On occasion, his irritability causes him to be rougher with the bad guys than he could be, and that feels uncomfortable sometimes, though thus far he hasn’t gone too far.

Going into this, I knew that one of the issues that Wally had to overcome was his mental block about surpassing Barry, and to my surprise, it wasn’t as much of a through-line as I expected. I was expecting it to be a reoccurring issue that was solved by the Return of Barry Allen storyline, but in reality there are only one or two times something like it comes up, usually in the context of him not being able to do the vibrating through walls trick. In the Return of Barry Allen, it feels more like an issue introduced in that story than a long running plot line. Granted, it may only feel this way because I’m solely reading Mark Waid’s Flash. I didn’t read the issues prior to his take over, so that storyline could have been more apparent there for all I know.

Moving on, starting with Waid’s run had another knock on effect, that being that the character introductions aren’t introductions. I came into this expecting to see when Wally met Linda, when he met Jay Garrick, when Pied Piper redeemed himself, but all of that happened before Waid took over the book, so they’re already part of the cast from the start. Again, not a flaw of the work, it’s just a result of my personal experiences. Now, let’s take a look at some of these characters.

I’ve heard a lot about Linda and Wally’s romance, and so far it’s not bad. I wouldn’t rate it as one of the best of all time, but I haven’t gotten to most of the major moments yet, so that’s not a huge surprise. One thing that’s very apparent is the Lois Lane DNA in her character. Some of that is to be expected, which the love interest to your superhero is a reporter, but I see a lot of similarities in their personality as well. There’s a lot of the same fire in her. Fortunately, the fact that Wally’s identity is public lends a very different arc to their relationship than what you see with Lois and Clark, so Linda doesn’t come off as a Lois rip-off. Linda’s concerns that there’s no place for her in Wally’s wild superhero life is the kind of relationship hurdle that isn’t present in Lois and Clark’s Relationship.

Next, let’s take a look at the first Flash, Jay Garrick. Within this series, Jay is perfectly pleasant, and by no means unlikable, but he also comes across as...kind of superfluous? There are three elderly male speedsters in this comic, and of all of them Jay is by far the least defined and has the least role. Max Mercury is the Wally’s mentor in the ways of speed, the one with the most knowledge of the Speed Force. He’s basically what I expected Jay Garrick to be going into this. The third of the group is Johnny Quick, a speedster who is the father of another speedster, Jesse Quick. Jesse is also very skeptical of Max Mercury’s teachings, which veer from the scientific into the mystical.

Because Johnny takes the role of skeptic, Jay is left without a role in the narrative because being the nicest of Wally’s friend group. Veering over to Hollywood for a second, whenever a book gets adapted into a movie or TV Show, minor characters get lost in the transition. Either they get composited with other characters, or they get cut entirely. Game of Thrones is the most prominent example in recent memory. I bring this up because, if Waid’s Flash were to go through that process, it’s hard to argue that Jay wouldn’t get the ax. Despite being the most important of them in the context of the universe at large, Jay is the least important Speedster in this narrative. Of course, Jay’s importance in the context of the larger universe means that in this hypothetical adaptation, he probably be composited into either max or Johnny. More likely Max, since mentor is the logical position for the first Flash to take in the Third Flash’s narrative.

I mentioned Jess Quick there, so let’s talk about her. Thus far, her most prominent role in the narrative has been to call Wally out and be his critic, though she does have very good reasons to be angry. In the Terminal Velocity storyline, Wally believes he’ll die soon, and tells the Flash Family that Jesse will be his successor, but it turns out to be a lie in order to motivate Bart Allen to take things more seriously. Jesse has remained angry with Wally since then, though it hasn’t seriously impacted her hero work. That’s good, because her continued competence lends legitimacy to her anger within the narrative. She’s not being punished for being mad at Wally for mistreating her. Hopefully it stays that way going forward.

Now let’s take a look at the character Wally chose over Jesse, Bart Allen AKA Impulse. I’ll say up front that I’m not reading Bart’s solo series during this read through, as I didn’t want the hassle of going back and forth between books. As such, the only issues of it that I’ve looked at are the ones that tie into the Dead Heat arc. I feel it’s important for me to say this, because I’m basing my opinions of Bart primarily on his showings in Wally’s book, not his own. In Wally’s book, Bart’s character flaws are more on display.

Bart is a character deliberately designed to be obnoxious, and such characters are a hard tightrope to walk in fiction. Gotta be annyoing enough to get the point across, but not annoying enough to turn people off from the work. Bart in Wally’s book isn’t perfectly balanced, and tends toward the too much pile. Not to an egregious extent, but a little bit. I found myself echoing Wally’s frustration with Bart more than a few times. In Bart’s defense, Wally does share some of the blame here. He doesn’t do a very good job as a mentor, and handing those duties off to Max is probably for the best.

I find it interesting, that a character like Wally who is so defined by inheriting a legacy is a poor mentor, to both Bart and Jesse. He makes different mistakes with both of them, but he still fails both of them. I’m eager to see how that plays out in the future issues.

Now that we’ve discussed the supporting cast, let’s discuss some of the book’s villains. We’ll start with the one who is most infamous, Eobard Thawne. Thawne’s spends the majority of his time in this book thinking he’s Barry Allen, and if I’m being honest, he’s more effective under that guise that he is as Eobard. The scenes where what appears to be Barry Allen turns evil out of jealousy of his successor are powerful, more so than the more traditional villain Eobard displays after the reveal. Not that it would have been a good idea for it to actually be Barry, of course. Much as I prefer Wally to Barry, having Barry go full supervillain would have been very out of character. In any case, this run had a profound impact on Eobard’s character going forward, solidifying him as an agent of toxic fanboyism, making him a dark mirror of Wally West.

The next major villain of the run is the cult slash terrorist organization Kobra. That might bring thoughts of GI Joe to your mind, and you honestly aren’t far off. So far as this run goes, the biggest differences between DC’s Kobra and Hasbro’s is A) DC’s version prefer green over blue, and B) Hasbro’s version has more in the way of distinct characters. Kobra thus far is more of a plot device than  anything else. They’re generic terrorists with little to make them distictive. Their storyline, Terminal Velocity, is more notable for it’s introduction of the Speed Force, Wally preparing for his upcoming ‘death’, and Linda going on a revenge quest after said ‘death’. All things that Kobra is incidental to, any villainous organization would have sufficed.

The final, as of my current point in the run, major villain is Savitar. Savitar was formerly a soviet test pilot who gained a connection to a the speedforce, gave himself the name of Hindu god, and started a speed worshipping cult. It says a lot about my mind that my immediate thoughts upon reading Savitar’s origin were. “Huh, an AU where Hal Jordan became a Speedster the same way would be neat.”. Savitar is in some ways an improvement on the Kobra Cult from Terminal Velocity. This time the Cult has a more direct connection to the Flash and his mythos. Dead Heat is by no means a retread of Terminal Velocity, but if you wanted to mesh them into one story, it wouldn’t be hard. And it’d improve on both, in some ways.

One of the things I like to do in my fanfic ideas is connect the other speedsters to Thawne’s theme of Toxic Fandom, and it wouldn’t be hard to do that with Savitar. His entire motivation is to deprive those he considers unworthy of their speed, and that can easily by played as a metaphor for gatekeeping.

Over all, while the run is far from perfect, I must say I’m enjoying these comics a good deal, and if you’re like me and have read a lot about comics without actually reading them, I don’t think you’d regret jumping into them.

[dreamangel-ren]

Headcanons n’ Ships. Bullies? OH MY!

Heya gang, how ya doing today! I feel like I should discuss about a situation that happened to me on Twitter early this week. I hope you’ve got plenty of free time to read because this is a long one.. So, I was on Twitter looking at some delicious G’raha Tia content until I came across a tweet that caught my eye. Someone made a statement saying that people need to ‘tone down’ the G’raha x WoL stuff because it’s giving them brain damage (in other words, your headcanon ISN’T CANON so you need to stop). Originally I was going to ignore it because it’s their opinion, and it doesn’t matter, but for some odd reason, I had to respond because of the fact who are they to tell people how to handle their stuff; so guess what, I responded.. I told them that XIV was meant for open interpretation so people have the freedom to ship G’raha with the WoL if they want to and if it bothers them that much, they can just ignore it. They then replied saying the issue is that some people tend to get pushy with their headcanons/ships and would attack those who don’t agree with them. I replied saying that’s an easy solution: you tell them to back off, block them, then move on; all in all, it’s just headcanon, just let people have their fun. Someone else came onto the thread basically saying the same thing about what the OP just said, and I repeated my response. They then got snarky and said, “You’re too dense to get the point, show yourself the door”. Yeah, I got mad because I don’t accept that kind of talk, so we ended up blocking each other. It did sort of got out of hand because I was being petty at one point and left a petty tweet and a couple of people responded LOL (which btw I deleted the tweet afterwards because that was stupid on my part for posting a tweet while angry). Next thing I know, the OP’s friend came to me saying that I was wrong for telling people to chill regarding to the headcanons/ships and how my comment invalidates the fact that people are getting harassed/bullied for this topic on both sides. They also mentioned, “herd mentality” where one person sends their followers after someone that doesn’t agree with them. I will tell you right now that I ain’t no punk; if someone doesn’t agree to the content that I make, that’s totally fine just if they be RESPECTFUL about it; if they don’t, that’s for ME to take care of, not my followers which I don’t have that many XD I was at my peak and I told her that the issue that they keep repeating to me isn’t new; that stuff happens in ANY fandom and people outta learn to tolerate the nonsense. Someone replied to me saying, “some can’t and never will be assertive (confident) and it’s annoying when someone behaves that way.” I just gave up and left the whole conversation while blocking folks in the process because apparently, we weren’t getting on the same boat.

As of today, I still believe that I didn’t say or do anything wrong; I didn’t call anybody names, I didn’t cuss them out, NOTHING. I just voiced my opinion and for some odd reason, people took offense on what I said which that doesn’t make sense to me. If there’s something you don’t like, yes you can express your opinion about it, BUT be aware that someone isn’t going to agree with you. When it comes to XIV characters and how they feel towards the WoL, like someone had mentioned from a post that I read a long time ago, “no one isn’t wrong” which they’re right. How can I put this..the XIV writers do their very best not to write the NPCs feelings in stone because they know how we feel about these characters. What they do is they write ambiguous dialogues for us to interpretate their feelings however we like because after all, WE are the main hero, this is OUR story. So, whatever your headcanon is for that character, it is indeed canon, FOR YOUR STORY. If someone else has a different interpretation, you shouldn’t be bothered on what they say because it doesn’t affect your character’s story or game at all. HOWEVER, openly telling folks to tone down or stop with their headcanons because it doesn’t synchronize with yours is kinda silly because because 1) You don’t have to look at it 2) It ain’t gonna stop others from doing what they love and 3) this is all for pure entertainment sooo why make a fuss about it. If someone else is getting harassed/bullied for that kind of thing, the only things you can do is either, back them up or let them handle it. If YOU are getting harassed/bullied for that nonsense, you got the keyboard and the hands, you can tell those lunatics to back off. If they refuse to and they send their so-called ‘army’, you block or report them; plain and simple. If you can’t do that, then I don’t know what else to say.

I have dealt with that craziness before except I was the victim; people were messing with me and my art because they didn’t like my Canon x OC content (for a different fandom). I’ve seen how Emet Selch fans get bullied by folks who don’t like the character and/or hate hcs in general which that’s dumb. People shouldn’t be harassing folks for this kind of thing period because it’s pointless, but unfortunately, it’s never gonna stop no matter how much we want it to. So overall gang, do what you want with your headcanons and forget what others have to say just BE RESPECTFUL to one another PLEASE. Thank you for taking your time to read my ramblings :D

[dalekofchaos]

The Fireflies’ vaccine wouldn’t have worked or why Joel did the right thing

In the last part of The Last of Us, Joel kills all the fireflies and saves Ellie but by doing so he may have doomed humanity by ending the possibility of a cure being made, making the ending bittersweet and morally ambiguous. The thing is, Joel didn't really do anything wrong, and saving Ellie was the right choice, here are my reasons:

The doctors would remove Ellie's brain to try to create a vaccine, but that's not how vaccines works, a vaccine is a tamed version of a pathogen that "teaches" your body to defend against it, to do a vaccine you need to use the pathogen in small quantities or a modified version of it, Ellie is immune to it, you don't create vaccines from the immune system, that's called a serum, and it works differently, a serum is used when someone comes in contact with a disease and it contains a series of antibodies that fight the infection, but it doesn't make anyone immune. So what they were trying to do was pointless;

Even if the doctors know what they were doing, it was a wild shot a with no guarantee that it would work;

Even if a vaccine was successfully made they wouldn't save the world, the world was destroyed 20 years ago, society collapsed and was rebuilt again on a new way, and everyone already new how to deal with it, also the greatest threat were not even the cordyceps fungus anymore, it was the infected (that the vaccine couldn't do nothing about) and the crooked humans that walked the earth. Besides that, the fireflies had no way to distribute the vaccine worldwide, not even in a national level.

If you listen to the tapes in the Colorado segment, it pretty much confirms that Ellie is not unique and they wouldn’t be able to make a vaccine anyway. The doctor has practically lost his mind and Ellie is just his white whale. Ellie was not the first subject and she most likely wouldn’t have been the last. 

The doctor pretty much went against the common ethical code of all medical practitioners just for a CHANCE at a vaccine/cure.  

And wouldn't it take a lot of time to study her? A day to do all the tests is outright impossible. Just look at the corona vaccine. With all the tech the world has the biotechnologists are going to take more than a year to make a vac.

Vaccines for Fungal infections are nearly impossible and are a logistical nightmare.Even in today’s world,they can only be treated with antibiotics and anti-fungal medicine. They didn’t even bother with thoroughly researching Ellie’s blood and trying to extract the fungal specimen without killing her. The tests were blood samples and samples from the area where she was bit and then only cutting her brain open as THE LAST POSSIBLE USE for her, then when their step 1 was "lol just kill this incredibly rare specimen" I was shocked.

BTW, PS4 version actually removed a piece of paper that's available in all the other forms of the game. What is this piece of paper? Just the one that describes how they've tried this process dozens of times before and how they've NEVER gotten any useful info.

The Fireflies are terrorists. The Fireflies are terrorists, and not even competent ones. Here we go. We first hear of the Fireflies in credits, where they are taking credit for attacking the Federal Disaster Response Agency. Not a good start.The next time we start to see hints of them is through graffiti in the quarantine zone. What does this graffiti say? Fireflies will take it all back. That sounds great! Burn it all down. ...oh. That’s, uh, a little less great. Fucking die, pig. Um… Uh, that’s uh, not a great look here guys.And that goes on and on. The graffiti does not exactly inspire. All it does is get angry.Next time we see them, it’s when they literally bomb a checkpoint and supply truck, then begin firing wildly all over the place. This is straight terrorism. They don’t care if there is collateral damage, in fact, Joel gets injured in this scene.Then we meet Marlene, the so-called Queen Firefly. Injured and on the run, the military is slowly wiping them out. This leads to a line of dialogue that is absolutely hilarious. Marlene starts to preach about “We’ve been quiet. Been planning on leaving the city, but they need a scapegoat. They’ve been trying to rile us up. We’re trying to defend ourselves”Those are big words from someone who just bombed a checkpoint.This clearly shows us that Marlene cannot be trusted as a narrator. She has an agenda and is lying to Joel and possibly herself. And that despite how effective guerrilla tactics usually are, her group is still managing to get absolutely devastated. They are failing so badly that they have to recruit smugglers just to try to get Ellie out of the city.So begins the trek showing dead Fireflies at every turn. Downtown subway station? Dead Fireflies. The Capitol building? Dead Fireflies. Pittsburgh? Oh, let’s talk about Pittsburgh.Pittsburgh is a monument to Firefly failure. Pittsburgh was originally another Quarantine zone held together by FEDRA. So what happened here? Well, times got hard, and the Fireflies instigated a civil war or insurrection. This fighting lasted for months, with Fireflies lynching soldiers that they caught alone, burning soldiers alive after dousing them in gasoline, and FEDRA retaliating by executing Fireflies. FEDRA finally gave up and retreated from Pittsburgh, putting the Fireflies in control- and then it all fell apart. The people of Pittsburgh discover that the Fireflies had planned to move right into the space FEDRA had previously occupied. And so, after this was discovered, the Fireflies were driven out just like FEDRA had been. Only much faster, and with less fight. And now Pittsburgh is nothing but anarchy. People gunned down in the streets for nothing. Rooms full of bodies, clothes and shoes. Almost looks like after images of Dachau. Bravo, Fireflies. Excellent revolution.Next up, we meet Tommy, Joel’s brother, and disenfranchised Firefly. He worked for them for years, going all the way to Colorado for them. Somewhere along the way, he lost faith in them and left their cause. He doesn’t specify exactly why, but it seems he might have lost faith in their methods.Then we come to the University. This is where we really discover how incompetent the Fireflies actually are. One of the first notes you see at University is about a guy who is angry he got yelled at for falling asleep on guard duty. Real professionals. This same note indicates that while they’re still getting some supplies, it’s not enough for what’s needed, with gasoline being particularly short. The next note comes from a recording, telling us that they’re losing more guards, with the doctor clearly concerned about how much equipment and data will be lost if they have to move. The doctor even calls the Fireflies incompetent in this note. And then we have this genius.. That’s right. Bitten by his own lab monkey. Because he just had to set it free, rather than putting it down humanely. Brilliant work sir. Brilliant. He kills himself before turning though, but not before informing us that they hadn’t accomplished anything for over five years. And even that small breakthrough was ultimately a failure. And now the entire lab is compromised, and abandoned.And then there’s a long break from Fireflies until Salt Lake. Ellie, having just gone underwater, isn’t breathing. Joel attempts to perform CPR on her when our hero Firefly shows up, and knocks Joel unconscious. Ah, violence. The first solution. Willing to forgive it, since it strongly mirrors the scene with Sarah, only the Firefly is in the soldier’s shoes this time. But still. Military was gentler.And now for the hospital. The final failure of the Fireflies. This is where so many people are convinced that Joel screws the world by preventing a vaccine. But somehow, I just don’t think so. This is one last desperate bid by the Fireflies for control. How do they intend to do this? Comprehensive bloodwork? No. Vigorous testing with laboratory animals, like, oh, maybe monkeys? No, someone let all their monkeys go. Crack open her head and hope for the best? Hell yeah! Does the fact that they’ve lost their biologist concern them? Nah, it’ll be fine! Does the fact that this is the only time they’ve seen immunity to this degree even give them pause? Pfft, crack her open! Does the fact that there has never been a successful vaccine against fungus give them pause? PASS THAT SCALPEL! No need to think this over, let’s blow our whole load on this once in a lifetime lucky strike as fast as possible. No, I’ve never heard the story about the goose who laid the golden eggs, tell it to me after I finish butchering surgery. Even if we make this vaccine, how will we deploy it? You're thinking too hard, hand me the saw!This is just bad science. Done by bad scientists. Cheered on by fools. Fools who wanted to murder Joel after he made that long trip.And for people who insist on government and democracy, it’s funny how they didn’t risk telling Ellie their “plan” and just sedated her and rushed her to the table.

Even by SOME MIRACLE they managed to make a vaccine, the world ain't gonna automatically return to what it was. It's a dog eat dog world and that is the new normal. Infected, cannibals, more psychos like David and raiders are still there and it ain't going away soon or maybe ever. On top of that, mass production and distribution of a vaccine is an absolute logistical nightmare in a post apocalyptic world- they simply don't have enough resources for that. And who's to say The Fireflies wouldn't use it to as a bargaining tool to put everyone, willing or not, under their new rule? And even given all that, they debated killing Joel after he delivered Ellie. He did the job and the payment he received was getting knocked out and being marched outside of the safe zone AT GUNPOINT WITHOUT HIS WEAPONS AND SUPPLIES! The Fireflies broke their deal and fucked Joel over. Joel had ever right to kill them and save Ellie.

So I believe what Joel did in the end was the right thing, the fireflies was an extremist group that was willing to do anything not to save the world, but to prove their point, even kill an innocent girl under a delusional precept.