#don't fridge her!!

[color-gang-and-co]

Loading [Alan's PC]...

Hello there! Welcome to Alan's PC, a home for quite a few stick figures! Say hello to everyone, sticks!

Hey there! I'm The Second Coming, but most people call me TSC or Orange. I have a close group of friends!

Hey hey hey!! I'm Red, though I think it's pretty obvious who I am. I'm a farm boy! Huge fan of animals, I am. You could call me an advocate!

Hello. My name is Yellow. The redstone guy. I'm pretty lenient on what requests come through, as I'm willing to try just about anything. Unfortunately, Tumblr doesn't have any yellow font, so pink was my closest bet.

What up! I'm Green. I know, I know, I'm THE Green Stick Figure. Popular Youtuber on the block. My friends are pretty cool I'd say. I mean, just look at what we built together.

Heya! Name's Blue. You could say I'm a professional chef. I'm pretty good at what I do, y'know?

Hiya!! I'm Purple! I'm so glad to have friends here!! I just wish I got to know my adopted dad's son...

Hey there, bucko. I'm King Orange. You can just call me Mango, though. I'm Purple's adopted father. Unfortunately, my son Gold isn't here. He'd like it here, I think.

Hey. Uh. I'm the Chosen One... I'm sure you've seen my face on wanted posters. Just... Just call me TCO.

What's up. I'm the Dark Lord. Technically, I'm dead. But, by unpopular demand, I'm back.

And at last, I introduce myself. Hello, my name is Vic, short for Victim. Don't call me Victim, though. I just wish Mitsi was here...

× CAST & PRONOUNS ×

The Second Coming/TSC - It/He

Red - He/They

Yellow - He/Him

Green - They/He

Blue - He/She

Purple - He/Him

King Orange/Mango - He/Him

The Chosen One/TCO - They/It/He

The Dark Lord/TDL - He/Him

Vic/Victim - He/She

× TAGS ×

#orange basketball hoop - The Second Coming's posts.

#nature's best stick friend - Red's posts.

#kind of a redstone genius - Yellow's posts.

#THE green stick figure - Green's posts.

#nether wart addict - Blue's posts.

#purple fly boy - Purple's posts.

#minecraft's no.1 hater - King Orange/Mango's posts.

#flamey hands - The Chosen One's posts.

#the virus maker - The Dark Lord's posts.

#the og hollowhead - Victim's posts.

#chilling on the couch - Fluff posts.

#don't fridge her!! - Angst posts.

#colorful emails - The color gang and co. got an ask!

#animator vs animation rp - General rp tag.

× RULES & REGULATION ×

NSFW is not allowed! No heavily sexualized actions or super gorey stuff that the characters (or I, the owner) tell you is uncomfortable.

Failiure to comply results in being blocked, sorry.

No racist, transphobic, homophobic, or ableist shit here. I'm not gonna deal with your asses, and neither will any of the characters.

I suppose you can be rude to the members here, but why would you do that?

I don't do shipping around here. If you ask the group about any ship in a romantic or otherwise sense, don't expect a sweet reply. I'm aromantic, and these sticks are going to be the exact same way. Hell, I even read Vitsi/Vicsi (what's the ship called-) as a QPR, so take that as you will.

Have fun!

[mollysunder]

Sky and Viktor's relationship is such a horror movie to me. You've got a man who was frustrated by the limitations placed on his life that were out of his control, like his class, mobility, and general health. Despite everything, he manages to rise beyond his station and avoid being an assistant for the rest of his life.

Then you've got a woman from the same background who admires him and all that he's accomplished in spite of the similar class based prejudices they faced all the while she's his assistant. She works up the courage to take leap of faith and reach out to him with her own research to show what's possible if they worked together as equals. And then he gets her killed!

Sky's death isn't the end of it because while it affects Viktor it is in no way meaningful to Sky's life or value as a person whatsoever. Even the pendant he wears in her memory is based on the design of her notebook, but that was just her notebook's cover, she probably bought it from a store and the design itself is probably mass produced. Why not use Sky's signature that was in her letter and in the notebook, the thing part if the notebook with real value?

Then Sky's brought back in s2 and she really only exists to be Viktor's assistant again, who he kills, again! But this time it's different because this time Viktor's making a conscious decision to look Sky in the eye and kill her... to prove he's changed.

In the middle of all this, in no way has Sky's death been mourned by her family or anyone else who could have known her. Jayce wasn't affected by the reveal, he didn't think it was important to tell Heimerdinger, or anyone who knew her. Nothing about her life, death, or disappearance has spurred any emotional reaction or even curiosity about what happened to her.

Sky's new life was also extremely isolated because she became further tied to him (in some ways you could say she was defined by him). Viktor never mentioned Sky to anyone in the material plane during his commune arc, so she only exists to him and she has no way to communicate with others, she's just there for Viktor's sake.

Then in the finale we learn this all a part of a big time loop where Viktor actively set the wheels in motion to have him and Jayce create hextech together, but if everything follows as is, that means Sky is violently killed in those timelines too. That means Viktor weighed the costs and decided over and over and over again that Sky was expendable enough to let her die for his plan to work eventually. How is that not murder at this point?

What's worse is that post-finale Sky's humanity is a point of dispute amongst the fandom, the VAs, and the writers themselves. Sky's the hexcore manipulating Viktor. No, Sky's a manifestion of Viktor's guilt. No, she's actually supposed to represent his humanity/conscious made physical. And in none of these arguments do they discuss Sky as a person, she's just an object meant to serve Viktor both in the narrative sense and literal sense as his assistant.

The most absolutely maddening part is that with Viktor's new bio on the League site, not only have most traces of Viktor had been scrubbed by Piltover's archive, but Sky's life has been completely wiped. Her death was implied to have been swept under the rug, and only described as the "loss of life" consequence from his Hexcore experiment.

Viktor was afraid of dying a senseless death (created by the conditions Piltover condemned his birth to) in obscurity and then he turned it into Sky's destiny.

[muzsmocsing]

I cannot fucking believe mxtx literally fridged a woman. Lan Yi is just in there. Chilling in an ice cave. Slowly withering away for the plot.

[shapelytimber]

The new zelda is great but alas I’m kinda art blocked rn so all I can do is silly doodles, hope you’ll enjoy anyway <3

Nintendo you cowards let me befriend the Yigas I swear they would like me if I had chocolate to offer nintendo please

PS : please don’t spoil me :) I did not finish the main quest nor the yigas quest nor the crop circle tears memory thing- (and I never looked at any trailers)

[sodafrog13]

*announcer voice* IN COMES MYSTERY SKULLS ANIMATED WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!!

missed these guys. take some doodles + a silly hlm au that i'm not gonna do anything with <3

[inksandpensblog]

Still fascinated by how much hate Mitsi gets for the whole "dead fem-coded loved one backstory" thing and all the hangups surrounding that when Purple's mom is arguably a much more egregious instance of the thing everyone is upset about Mitsi for but she ultimately got a pass because...idk, she was The First?

[dwemer-osha]

A lot of my problems with totk arise from how obvious the hand of the creators is. A lot of the things in this game feel very contrived; we start off strong with the game forcing you to get a heart container. Which. Yeah, sure, alright. I can handwave that, it's fine. Then we get to the skyview towers, which are... very similar to the Sheikah towers (which were still functioning just fine when we found them in botw). The challenges from the Sheikah towers came from how old they were. They were still functioning fine; the world around them changed. With the skyview towers, they're glitched, they're broken... something that by all means just feels like a reason not to give you the map. The Sheikah towers are tricky because after all that time, they should be. The skyview towers are tricky because the game needs them to be.

And there's so many things like that in the game; things that can be dismissed as flawed on their own, but stack up and become extremely irritating. I can't remember who exactly pointed this out, but since you don't technically even need the master sword to beat Ganondorf, Zelda turning into a dragon is completely and utterly pointless. She could have just put the sword in some other holy place, this is just an excuse to metaphorically put her in a crystal again. For a process that is supposedly irreversable and forbidden, it's stupid that she went and did so anyway. Again, it serves the needs of the game, without really justifying itself.

There's just a ton of things like that. I'm very tired and frustrated writing this so it might not make a lot of sense, but it's just. Aughh I wanted to like this game SO BAD

[thoughtfulchaos773]

He vividly remembers when Syd said Hi. Hello. and that was close to a year ago. He remembers her headband and the smile on her face. Usually, he only vividly remembers bad things- family dinners, yelling, glass breaking, slaps, and his favorite song going backward.

But the good thing he remembers is when he first met Sydney. He remembers the expression on her face when she said yes to his business proposal. He remembers all the good things she said about him.

This is 'the first moment I saw her, I knew' quote a million times over.

Tell me it's love without telling me it's love.

[laurelwen]

Misogyny in Like Minds

[Like Minds Masterpost]

[dxppercxdxver]

i can hardly stand it i wonder where your head is but i don't think i wanna know so i leave it alone

[surprise surprise it's more sharpelesbians. might need to make a tag for this au because i don't think it'll be releasing its stranglehold on me any time soon.]

[color-gang-and-co]

yeah....

Death au cara

I need to... I need to think about this.

[haveyouthoughtaboutcomicstoday]

Sometimes grief hits the hardest when things are going well.

Arisia pauses mid sentence while playfully arguing with Iolande about which of them was at fault for messing up their last mission—causing it to extend an extra 4 days and making them miss John’s birthday party.

The other lantern lays a gentle hand on her wrist when the silence extends too long, head tilted to the side in concern, “is something wrong?”

Arisia blinks awkwardly at her. It’s hard to explain why her chest has gone tight and her eyes feel hot. Why she’s suddenly forgotten how to measure her breaths. She forces a smile but knows based off Iolande’s expression that it doesn’t come across as comforting as she had hoped.

Pulling her hand away, she makes an excuse of needing a refill, lifting her mostly empty glass from the table as evidence. Nearly running directly into another lantern who was sitting nearby, she cringed uncomfortably before making her way through the thrum of people populating Warriors. It’s the dinner rush and, as is always the case when everyone isn’t busy being stretched across the galaxy, it’s a packed house.

The heat of tightly pressed bodies, the overwhelming sound of dozens of larger-than-life personalities holding court over a relatively small space, a poker game in the corner that erupts into a wall of sound every once in a while. It was too much.

She feels her skin prickle as Vath’s arm brushes hers while walking in the opposite direction on his way back to Isamot. He might have stopped to say something but all she can hear is her blood rushing in her ears, the erratic thump of her heart trapped in the too small space of her chest. Finally making it to the bar, she follows it, ducking and diving around chairs and bodies until she makes it to the door leading out back. Throwing it open, she takes a deep breath of the slightly cool air of Oa that greets her. She steps through and lets the door fall close with a heavy thud.

She waits a beat in the new found silence before crumpling where she stands on the small steps. Her forehead presses to the knobby bones of her knees, shoulders hunched forward to enclose herself against the world. Arms wrap tightly around her legs.

Everyone was alive.

A single door stands between her and their laughter.

It’s been years since she’d gotten her ring back, since she was given a chance to hug Kilowog again, and Salaak fell back into bossing everyone around in the neurotic, overbearing, mothering way of his. It wasn’t even the anniversary of anything, so why did she feel a yawning pit open itself inside of her? She hates how helpless and small she feels in that moment. Especially over something so insignificant in the grand scheme of it all.

There was nothing left to grieve. Breathe. Get up. Go back inside. She knows she needs to apologize to Iolande and Soranik (who’d also been sitting at the table with them, now that Arisia was thinking about it), and enjoy the time off like a normal, well adjusted adult. She counts down from three to help spur herself into action, yet finds herself immobilized.

Her eyes drift to the soft green hum of her ring and there is a flash of anger, hot and vitriolic before it dissipates just as quickly, leaving her feeling exhausted. What use is willpower if you can’t force your brain and body to cooperate with you?

The door opens behind her. There is a yell about beer, a crash of laughter. She thinks she might be able to pick out Kyle’s voice. His meeting with the guardians ended on time for once then. That’s good.

The door shuts.

“Hey, Kid.”

Her eyes squeeze shut to force tears away. “I just need a minute, Guy. Did you need anything?” Her voice sounds mostly steady, she thinks. She might pass as stable so long as he doesn’t look at her face, which was surely blotchy and flushed, or her hands, which were trembling. She imagines, briefly, forming a large, green sign overhead announcing “nothing to see here.” Will that get him to go back inside? Will anything? Did she want him to?

“Nope,” Guy said as he lumbered forward. She can hear his left knee creak and pop as he settles himself down next to her. Normally she’d take the time to bully him for getting so old. She lets the silence sit instead.

There were a few inches between them, which Arisia knew he did consciously because Guy did not have much of an understanding of personal space otherwise. Even still, she could feel the heat radiating off of his body, but it didn’t prickle at her overstimulated senses the way everyone else’s did just a few minutes before.

Slowly, she unfurls herself, allows her elbows to rest on her knees, lifts her head to settle her chin more comfortably on one hand. She brings her gaze to the left where Guy has situated himself, and finds him already looking back at her. His eyes are soft and sad, his mouth turned ever so slightly downward.

She knows that he is the only person capable of understanding exactly how she feels in this moment. He had held Kilowog’s skull in his hands, had built a shrine to everyone in a different Warriors bar once upon a time. She wonders, suddenly, if it’s ever the image of her body, ensconced in a casket, that haunts him. She hasn’t been dead in actuality but he didn’t know that at the time.

She knows about her funeral. Had gotten filled in by Zinda when she finally brought herself back to Earth for a visit. Had seen a picture of the sign, written in Guy’s blocky writing, “Closed Due to Death in Family.”

She typically tries not to think about it at all. The feeling of large hands around her throat. The panic. How she insitinctively reached out for a ring that was not there. Struggling against the hands of a man who didn’t even know who she was, on a planet she wasn’t even from. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong life.

“I’m sorry,” she finally says.

“Me too.”

Arisia remembers a different night, in a different bar. Everyone else had gone to bed and Guy was ceremoniously presenting her a single chocolate cupcake with a candle shoved into the top. He was trying to make a joke of it, the way he does when he feels emotional and unsure of himself.

He was fighting with an uncooperative lighter. The flame flicking in and out of existence faster than he could get it to the wick. It had taken both of them, laughing and clumsy, to get the candle to light at all. The flame itself was so small and pitiful she had to blow it out quickly for fear it would extinguish itself first.

She remembers in that moment thinking of her friends and her home and the freedom of not being tied to one place like she had been for long at that point. Aching tremendously from the loss of it all. They both pretended she didn’t cry into the cupcake while eating it in little pieces. Her rolling stomach wouldn’t allow for more than that even if the cupcake had been good. Guy was a decent baker when he bothered to be.

In the now, she closes the space between them. Draws Guy into a hug and feels him return it instantly. She thinks she ought to thank him for taking her in the way he did, or for being here with her now.

She knows she doesn’t have to.

She allows herself the moment to grieve the things she’d lost, even if they had been found again.

“Hey do you remember that time you were turned into a girl?”

“Oh shut the fuck up.”

[calciumcryptid]

Watching Perfect 10 Liners is just me trying not to beam all my divorce kid trauma onto Faifa.

[the-blossica-fan]

Mesmer: Can we go to a haunted house? It'll be enriching for you and for me.

Vertin: What’s wrong with the one we live in?

Mesmer: ...Wh... What?

Voyager, from behind her: Goodnight, Mesmer. ^-^

Even better if you consider that Tuesday and Jessica could join forces for a prank 😈

[tethys-the-aquatic-sea-godness]

BG 3: So, Helena and 0r1n are Sarevok's d-

Listen up fuckers, Sarevok didn't carry the remains of his dead lover back to her homeland on the other damn side of Toril so you could write shit like that

[tritoch]

the damsel and the hero: some thoughts on minfilia and elidibus

I get why many people have (understandable, justified, legitimate) gripes to this day about how Minfilia was handled, but I think you don't have to change anything about how she's presented in game to arrive at a reading that lets her feel like more than a sacrificial victim. Within the game as it exists, Minfilia is already a rich and layered heroic character. She is not a damsel or a tragic hero but a victorious figure whose very exit from the narrative affirmed her own ideals, and she controlled her own destiny to the end. All you have to do to see this more clearly is read her against one of her underexamined foils: Elidibus.

Spoilers through the end of Pandemonium (6.4) below.

After 5.3 dropped, the devs mentioned that because they basically had to develop and pay off Elidibus in the space of a patch or two, they drew conscious parallels between him and other characters. The game highlights the G'raha parallels in the scene just before Seat of Sacrifice. There's also the parallels to Alphinaud that people have noticed in both the broad strokes of their characterization (idealistic short kings who believe in the power of rhetoric and diplomacy to achieve true and lasting understanding between people, whose mission to save the world is forever held in balance with their duty to save those they love) and in specific lines of dialogue.

But a far more direct narrative parallel than either character is Minfilia. Like Elidibus and Zodiark, Minfilia offered herself to Hydaelyn, serving as the Word of the Mother, only to be called forth once more when an intractable conflict between her allies threatened the stability of the world. Both were messianic young figures who nonetheless lead their older allies by both example and command. Both, seeing an opportunity to save not just their close friends but everyone, offered themselves up to a higher power in an act not of desperation but of deliberate will. You can even poetically gloss both Antecedent and Emissary as "The One That Goes Before."

The difference between the two of them is that at every turn, where Elidibus failed, Minfilia succeeded.

Elidibus returned to broker peace between the Hydaelyn faction and the Convocation. He failed, and the result was the Sundering. Minfilia, entreated by Urianger, came back to resolve the conflict between the Warriors of Darkness (Hydaelyn's champions and Warriors of Light themselves) and the Scions, and succeeded in saving two worlds by her actions.

But more than that, Elidibus provided us a picture of what it actually looks like to lose your identity to a primal like Zodiark. He'd lived a thousand thousand lifetimes as himself and he was so broken he could scarcely remember anything more than his name and his duty. He is one of the most explicitly tragic figures in all of FFXIV, and his final sendoff in 5.3 was an image of him plagued by unanswerable grief, which for him was a consequence of his failure: "The rains have ceased, and we have been graced with another beautiful day. But you are not here to see it."

Meanwhile, in the preceding expansion, you actually had the chance to spend multiple scenes with Minfilia and they're all extremely clear: unlike Ardbert or Elidibus, after 100 years this was still Minfilia, she remained resolute in her mission to see the First saved, but she had not forgotten the woman she was or the people she loved. In both 3.4 and 5.0, she went out as herself, head held high.

Speaking to the Warrior of Light before she departs for the First: "So many times have I watched you depart, my heart filled with worry, and ever did you return to me in triumph. Someday, when I have found a way to free this star from Her sorrow, I promise you I shall repay the favor."

Her final words to Ryne: "No one, however powerful, is immune to the whisperings of doubt and despair. Do not give in to them, but do not deny them either. Look instead to the light within, that you may continue to serve as a beacon to others."

In both instances, we were given a Minfilia who had not merely accepted her fate, but who had chosen it of her own volition and rose confidently to meet it, even imparting to her successor some final hard-won words of wisdom. And unlike Elidibus, she met her friends again at duty's end; they live, and they are happy, and she is content. She's already heroic, but the contrast to Elidibus (and Ardbert, and Emet) underlines the extent to which we should see her as extraordinarily driven, self-possessed and ultimately victorious on her own terms.

And in making the connection between Elidibus and Minfilia, we can begin to let Elidibus's characterization inform hers in retrospect.

Elidibus as we see him in 5.3 and earlier more specifically paralleled Minfilia as the Word of the Mother. Prior to that point in her arc, Minfilia's parallel was Themis, the pre-Zodiark Elidibus we glimpse briefly in the 5.3 Echo flashbacks and would only meet properly an expansion later in Pandemonium. The important thing about Themis for our purposes is that he was not some naive or too-young figurehead tricked into serving as Zodiark's Emissary. This was not a Crystal Braves situation for him. In Pandemonium, you can see how the kind of man Themis was very clearly lead to him choosing to be offered up to Zodiark. He took seriously the principles and duties of the Convocation. He valued dearly the lives of all people generally and his friends and comrades in particular, but held those truths in balance rather than prizing one. He was rational, clear-sighted, and decisive.

All of these, obviously, were true of Minfilia. And unlike Elidibus, whose ascension into Zodiark was forever somewhat obscured by the narrative, we were quite close to Minfilia before she became the Word of the Mother. We were quite familiar with her grief and guilt over surviving where Louisoix did not, her fear that she could neither fill his shoes as a leader nor serve in action as others did. She confided in us about the difficulty of her task in serving as the pillar of strength and guiding light for the rest of the Scions. She despaired alongside the player character at both the death of Moenbryda and the disastrous events of the Banquet. We know what she believed, what she valued, what she feared, what frustrated her. When she chose to depart for the First, it paid off very directly everything else the game has said about her through 3.4. Her arc was one of trepidation and doubt, and it ended in her ultimate victory and an astonishingly clean win that compromises none of her values.

Both Urianger and some fans raised the question of whether it was wrong for Urianger to ever offer her the choice of sacrificing herself for the First at all. Minfilia, for her part, got a chance to speak to this directly: "Have we not walked together in the light of the Crystal, and at Her bidding borne witness to the joys and sorrows of this land? Each and every one of you knows my heart. If this be the price I must pay, I pay it gladly." It did not matter whether she was given this particular decision or not. You could have offered her this dilemma in a thousand different permutations in a thousand thousand different scenarios. This was the choice she made. This was her choice, forever and always: to save everyone she can, in honor of those she loves.

Candidly, I understand critiques of Minfilia's writing far better than any praise it could ever receive. Nothing I've written above answers the clear and obvious truths that she is underwritten, that she does not get much to do or much screentime for a putatively important character, that it is very easy and common to read her death as a fridging, that she is unfairly dismissed by many due to her role in the narrative and the way she leaves it. Her sacrifice plays into specific gendered tropes that are disappointingly common to see. Those things all remain true.

But I think as we remember those things we should also keep in mind that she does still get a complete arc that is interesting and thematically rich in itself, and which puts her in some senses on the same level in the narrative as characters like Elidibus, Emet-Selch, and Ardbert.

Her sacrifice continues to inform the game. Her literal ghost returns to affirm the truth and value of her beliefs and the choices she made. Her guiding words ("For those we have lost, for those we can yet save") remain a mantra not just for the Scions but specifically for the player character. They are not an empty slogan. The phrase succinctly conveys an ideal of all-encompassing humanism and compassion arising from grief. The ideal those words represent is one of many organizing principles and responses to grief that the game examines (because a lot of FFXIV is about grief and how we respond to tragedy and change), it is Minfilia who develops and articulates it, and it is the one the heroes continue to align themselves with. It is the same principle that leads her to the First, and G'raha, and us too. It is Minfilia's ideals--Minfilia's heroism--which continue to serve as the model to which the Warrior of Light aspires, in the game's text.

Truthfully, my gripe is this. I think it is very easy to imagine a male Minfilia--same lines, same screentime, same blocking, same ass cut-out--appearing in place of the Minfilia we have. And I feel quite sincerely, and quite frustratedly, that if we had Malefilia, both the fans and detractors of that character would ascribe to him more thoughtfulness and more thematic depth than the Minfilia we already have, even though their lines would be exactly the same. We are so ready to see the damsel we expect in Minfilia that we are unwilling to see her as the hero she is in the text, and my hope is that by holding her up to her mirror, Elidibus, we may see her as a rich character in her own right all the more clearly.