#emulated it a while back and i had to use the fast forward feature a lot

[skeletalheartattack]

re: your recent tags about the gameboy sp! that boy's got headphone adapters i POMISE!!!

the magic of modern science. wow...

[allsonicgames]

Sonic the Hedgehog (iPod)

Original Platform: iPod Classic (5th Gen), iPod Nano (3rd Gen)

Original release: 18th December 2007

Available to buy: No

Not played: No way to play other than getting hold of original device with it installed.

Sonic the Hedgehog got a port to the old click wheel iPod. While the rom has been backed up, it has not been cracked so even if you get hold of a compatible device, there’s no way to install it. The only way I could play is was to somehow get a device with the game already installed, which would be very difficult to track down.

The main “feature” of this port is the use of the clicky wheel. However, instead of using it in a fun and unique way (having to spin around to move would be an interesting novelty), it just acts like a really bad D-pad. There are two options. Option A had the middle button as the jump button, pressing the fast forward/rewind to move. Option B has you touching the fast forward/rewind to move and clicking down to jump. Looking at reviews, both were horrible.

This version also adds an auto save at the start of each zone, infinite continues and an in-game tutorial for the control schemes. It also keeps the time and battery in the corner. The port itself (which isn’t emulation) seems to be really well done and accurate, it’s just the terrible controls that supposedly lets it down.

[sg2tiger]

Finally, this is my 2022 gaming wrap up! Usual ramblings under the cut.

Pokemon Throwback

With my 6-year old nephew living with us, it's my job to get him on and off the school bus. Last year, when he was in preschool, he had the afternoon class, so we had all morning to do whatever before we had to get ready. It ended up becoming a regular part of the routine to play Pokemon for an hour or so before get dressed time...and the game he chose specifically was LeafGreen. What we actually ended up playing was a FRLG romhack I found with a grab bag of pick-your-own QoL changes called Pokemon Throwback. In essence, we were playing LeafGreen, but things like cut trees staying cut, ability to obtain all pokemon in one cart, phys/special split, consecutive-use repels and other things just made life a bit easier, especially when coupled with the emulator's fast forward feature (GREAT for grinding).

Ultimately, over the course of the school year, we made it through the entire main game, Elite Four, and all of the Sevii Islands (I was pretty burned out by then, and he actually wanted to move on and play Gold, but he also didn't want to stop until we got his Dragonair to evolve...and it had about 5-6 more levels to go after we beat the Elite Four...). Then we went back, caught all the legendary birds, and Mewtwo. We didn't catch 'em all, but we DID catch every single Unown of the alphabet, which took about 3 weeks (again, we only played for about an hour every weekday) and probably made me go more insane than catching 'em all would have. In the end what matters is that he had fun and was excited to learn more pokemon than just the handful of popular ones on his pajamas and stuffed toys. And he really did learn them, and retain what he learned - kids are smart! Even if his sense of nicknaming was essentially 'the animal it's based on + y' (he had a real crisis when we caught Horsea).

We played the game on my phone, with my bluetooth controller. I really liked this controller and was pretty bummed when I upgraded to a slightly bigger phone and the mobile clip just simply did not fit anymore (we still use them as Switch controllers for multiplayer, but still). I ended up getting a different type of mobile controller that attaches horizontally for my new phone, which will hopefully accommodate at least one more phone in the future before they start making them TRULY gargantuan.

Minecraft: Arid Adventures

One night...at a time where I actually hadn't played Minecraft for several months...I had a weird dream. It started out with a friend gifting me some kind of VR survival horror game about exploring desert tombs and recovering artifacts while being pursued by the angry undead guardians. At some point, the dream called for sand physics, and my brain reached into the video game sand physics databanks and pulled 'minecraft sand blocks falling all at once'. The dream then shifted from a more realistic style to that familiar blocky aesthetic (though the non-aesthetic elements were still very survival horror and NOT minecraft). When I awoke and recounted the dream, the minecraft image ended up being what stuck with me, and I wanted to see if anyone had made any kind of desert-themed modpacks. I found...one, which I didn't really like, so I took it upon myself to spend a month and a half working on my own.

The result is a sort of desert-flavored kitchen sink pack, filled with tons of places to explore, loot to discover, challenging enemies, and some light survival with thirst/temperature mechanics (offset by lots of food items to hydrate and keep you cool because I didn't want hardcore survival to be the focus of the pack). I spent a lot of time creating a huge arid ecosystem of modded desert, badlands and savanna biomes filled with tons of desert ruins, bandit camps and other structures across the landscape. But despite how much time I spent fine-tuning and playtesting it, when we actually got it on our friend server we ran into more than a few problems...like the massive overspawning of deadly, deadly scorpions. Still, regardless of some oversights, I'd like to think the pack was a success, and we had some fun playing it together between April/May (I spent half of February and all of March putting it together).

Arid Adventures was ultimately my less-polished-than-I'd-hoped first foray into learning how to make Minecraft modpacks, and I've applied a lot of what I learned about things like NBT structures and datapacks to other packs I've made since. Still, I've got a soft spot for this one, and I'd like to recreate it on 1.18 or 1.19 if possible...and I think it should be, I'm just waiting on one mod in particular to update (Team Abnormals' Atmospheric, for its additional desert biomes as well as resources like aloe and yucca which my bespoke desert food mod incorporated as ingredients for lots of recipes). Maybe when the time comes that I'm able to remake and polish it up a bit I'll even post it publicly on CurseForge. I'm pretty shy and have a massive lack of confidence in my work, though, so I tend to just keep my packs private for our friend group server 😔

(we’re actually currently playing a winter-themed modpack called “Arctic Adventures” which is “Arid Adventures but Cold”. Except not really, because I just took a light vanilla+ modpack I’d made and threw a couple winter-themed mods on top of it. But I thought the name was funny, so maybe there will be more [x] Adventures packs in the future)

Vigil: The Longest Night

You can really tell that 2021-2022 was me trying to work up the nerve to play the actual Dark Souls by warming up with various Soulslikes first. I don't even remember how I discovered Vigil, but probably I figured that if I liked Hollow Knight and Salt and Sanctuary I'd have fun with Vigil too. And I did, actually. Unlike the aforementioned, I even finished Vigil with 100% completion, grabbing all achievements over the course of two playthroughs.

Combat and healing felt a lot more forgiving than the others Soulslikes I'd played, at least if you picked the right perks. I ended up running axes, focusing entirely on that tree and the general survival one, and generally it always felt like there were very few enemies and even bosses that gave me a truly difficult time by the latter half of the game (several of the early bosses did kill me many times). At least, as far as the 'main' content goes - once I hit the bonus bosses like Bluemagpie and Redsparrow I really felt like I had to memorize every possible move the boss could take and counter appropriately. Frankly, if not for the fact that I misunderstood one achievement as having to collect EVERY weapon/armor set in the game, I probably would have given up on fighting Redsparrow after my first 10+ deaths...but I persevered and killed every optional boss in the game too.

I think what I spent the most time on in Vigil was just my obsessive determination to discover every nook and cranny on the map, because games like this where your map is fogged until you traverse it always compel me to reveal it all (I'll never forget the hell Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey put me through because of this urge of mine). The game is absolutely chock full of little secret rooms that you can just barely see a hint of on the map...usually there will be a small passage you have to slide through or something, sometimes hidden behind breakable objects or just otherwise in places you wouldn't think to look. I'd call it the 2D equivalent of Dark Souls' love of invisible walls. Between hunting down places that I sensed held secret passages and trying to platform my way through the trees in the forest areas, I got really into unfogging the map. But hey, in doing so, I was also working my way through all the various loot required for achievements, so one gameplay loop always fed into another in a satisfying way.

I feel like Vigil is the kind of game that's easy to overlook in the sea of 2D soulslike metroidvanias out there, but I had a good time with it. By the end I even really wanted to know more about the story and the lore, unfortunately somewhat marred by a translation of questionable quality. And with the way some of the endings played out, I'm really hoping that there might someday be a sequel, because it definitely feels like the devs left an open door for there to be. I'd say if you're into this kind of game, though, Vigil's worth checking out.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

I was pretty torn between rating this "Pretty Good" vs. "Decent", because I feel like my expectations for this game were unfairly high, but I also feel like every time I play I find something that I feel like the game COULD have done better, but for some bizarre reason chose not to. Kakarot was a game I was looking forward to a lot when it first got announced, because conceptually it seemed like something pretty different that had a lot of potential to be interesting. And while I think Mistake #1 was choosing NOT to start the story off with kid Goku in the original Dragonball (which would have suited the survival and exploration mechanics so so SO much better if we started off with him before meeting Bulma) I understand that we must bow to the whims of the marketing gods at the end of the day, and 90% of the target audience doesn't care about the original DB at all. Still, despite the name being 'Kakarot', it was obvious that a lot of the game would be spent playing as characters who are NOT Goku...and in particular, Gohan, and the idea of playing through his training with Piccolo with these game mechanics sounded like a lot of fun.

That comes to my first issue with the game...speed/pacing. And I get it, because the game spans the entirety of DBZ from Raditz to Buu, but even so it always feels like we're skipping way too fast through the parts of the story that would service the gameplay the most. I thought what would make this DIFFERENT than the usual DBZ fighter is that we would NOT be skipping over the 'less interesting' parts quite as much, because the gameplay involves more than JUST fighting this time around, but more often than not I still found that it skips massively through major story beats when it should slow down and try to be more immersive. I've been playing intermittedly over the course of a few months so I don't have a lot of specifics off the top of my head, but the most recent part I finished was the whole entire Ginyu Force segment...in the space of about 45 minutes.

I remember being irritated that the game barely conveyed what an actual THREAT the Ginyus were to Gohan/Kuririn/Vegeta before Goku shows up, because of the way you still 'win' even the losing battles of this game. And while I know we're kind of in an era of de-bloodening the Dragonball franchise as a whole, the lack of violence also really lessened the impact of the absolute beat down Rikum gives everyone, and thus also diminishes just HOW powerful Goku - who shows up and stomps him in 10 seconds - has become. Then the whole Ginyu body change bit is just kind of raced through with little ceremony at all despite being one of the more iconic aspects of the whole Namek arc IMO...I don't know. I felt like Goku went from space ship to healing tank in even less time than usual, and in a game that's literally named after the guy it's EXTRA noticeable just how little time is spent focusing on him (admittedly if you go over all of Z in your head you'll realize Goku is actually out of the spotlight for a whole lot more than you'd think, but the game's fast pace doesn't help matters either).

Again, I'm sure a lot of this is just my own expectations being unreasonably high for a Dragonball game, but it bums me out when the general presentation - the extremely faithful cutscenes, the soundtrack, etc - is really immersive, but then they'll just go and race through a whole story segment to get to the next fight. Oh, I remember another one that annoyed me. Imagine if the game wasn't afraid to actually let you control BULMA for the brief interlude where Popo takes her to Kami's spaceship! Imagine actually having to explore around as Bulma (you could even give her Popo's magic carpet so she could still use the game's flight mechanics) and scavenge for mechanical parts (which is already a thing you CAN DO in the game mind you!!) to try and do some repairs to the ship. Or just having to search around the area, maybe in the middle of a blizzard (it was a snowy place iirc), to find the ship at all. Instead the game just kind of went from 'Vegeta got away' to 'but they found a spaceship to go to Namek' almost IMMEDIATELY. Being that I'm playing the game alongside my nephew, who started to get curious about Dragonball (I think he saw some kind of Goku vtuber playing Minecraft on youtube or something, and got excited when he found out that I knew all about Goku), there's lots of bits like this where I end up having to summarize some of the stuff the game glosses over, because watching the story unfold via this game IS his first exposure to Dragonball (which I guess in a way makes it a good thing that the violence is generally pretty toned down compared to the original).

Anyway, yeah, idk. I feel like even when the game does let you explore it's all very barebones and watered down. The fact that only the story cutscenes are voiced and all the original sidequests are just grunts and noises also irritates me because it feels so lazy (Xenoverse does the same thing but idk, it didn't bother me there, I guess because all the battle dialogue was still voiced and it was just overworld stuff that wasn't). I also don't feel like I ever really have to use mechanics like fishing or cooking or any of that stuff because the battles are pretty easy? At least on normal difficulty, because the combat system is so simplified compared to a proper DBZ fighter. It's more about like, Touhou-style attack dodging than anything, which is fine, but I find that it's rarely challenging enough that I feel like "damn I should have spent more time scavenging ingredients to cook food before the battle!". It just feels like they tried to make a game with these survival RPG mechanics but didn't know HOW to, so they're very tacked on...and they just made a bog standard 'let's rehash the same DBZ story once again' Dragonball game when it COULD have been something better. Especially if they dared to start with Kid Goku's life. Sadly I know that a AAA game focusing on OG DB is basically a pipe dream.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights

After I finished Vigil I was feeling hungry for more 2D metroidvania soulslikes, and Ender Lilies just happened to go on sale like, a few days later. It had really good reviews so I picked it up and spent the next few days playing it obsessively. In fact, based on the dates of my achievements from start to end, I finished the game in less than a week (31 hours total), 100% completion with all achievements. And after I did I just kept feeling like...it wasn't enough and I wanted more. I really got sucked into the world and its atmosphere, particularly through the amazing soundtrack. And once you start digging and trying to understand the lore, it's extremely compelling as well.

While I'd really like to see the devs make another game like this, maybe even set in the same overall world, I'm not really sure if I want a sequel per se. In a way, Lily's story has just begun, but I also don't feel like I want to PLAY whatever lies in her future. Probably because if I did it would mean what awaits her is more monsters and more sadness. But I really would like to explore more of the Ender Lilies world, perhaps beyond the boundaries of the kingdom, or maybe even delving into the past of the Ancients before the events that lead to the game's story.

I can't really talk about the game too much without spoiling too many things that I think are just better discovered for yourself. The game is tough, but not unforgivingly so (especially if you're not going for all the achievements), and it's pretty short if you can hit 100% in just 31 hours. I'd absolutely recommend checking this one out, especially if other similar 2D soulslike metroidvanias seem too challenging. Or at least watch someone else play it (ideally without commentary). Ender Lilies is a whole experience, between the art and the music and the story and the lore and the way the gameplay itself just clicks, and it's one of those things that I'm sad I'll never be able to play for the first time again.

PS - I want more games to take a hint from its map system, particularly in highlighting a room when I've collected everything in it to let me know I really didn't miss anything, because that shit is SO fucking clutch when you're achievement hunting, or just if you're the kind of person who hates the idea of overlooking anything.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

As I mentioned in the addendum of my 2021 post about Three Houses, it took me so long to finish that game that I actually saw the release date of Three Hopes (mid to end of June iirc) as my deadline. And that wasn't because I had any intention of GETTING Three Hopes (especially on release day, because I just don't buy games like that), but because I knew my Three Houses-loving friends WOULD, and I'd be right back in No Spoiler territory with them after just finally breaking into the inner circle of 3H spoilers. Thankfully I did manage to finish my final route (Crimson Flower) just a week or so before Three Hopes came out, and I even played the Three Hopes demo afterwards to see what it'd even be like (I've never played a Warriors game before). When I saw that the story was actually pretty engaging I was like, oh, this is less brainless than I thought, maybe I'll buy it (eventually)...and ended up getting a gift copy from a friend instead. Nice!

Except...while my Three Houses friends all expected to get obsessively sucked into it (after also enjoying the demo), and I was excited to actually be there with them this time, they unexpectedly became engulfed by a DIFFERENT fandom...progress sort of halted on the Three Hopes front...and then I became the one who was afraid to spoil THEM by pulling too far ahead, so I slowed down...and eventually that just sort of killed my momentum entirely and...yeah. I've stopped playing for now.

Being that I had done the two Eagles routes back to back as my last two routes in Three Houses, AND that being the favorite house of said friends (and the one they were also gonna pick first), that's where I'm at. I have no idea how far into it I am because the game seems surprisingly on par with a normal FE game in terms of story pacing...maybe halfway, or not quite halfway through? I wanna say I got to chapter 8 or 9 before I burned out. I do want to go back to it at some point, ideally when (if?) my friends become re-interested, but either way after how long it took me to push through Three Houses I suppose it was a good time for a Fire Emblem break regardless. I've still got a bunch of other Switch games (notably Shin Megami Tensei V) waiting on my shelf, and I had intended to jump on that when I finally finished Three Houses before Three Hopes came along and threw me that curveball. I've just kind of had the cartridge in my Switch ever since, deluding myself into thinking I'm 'still playing it' because I know the minute I take it out that won't be true anymore.

I suppose I should actually give a review, huh? Well, despite how not far at all I actually am in the game (considering the other routes), I feel like I've played enough that I've seen pretty much every type of gameplay mechanic. I gotta say, despite it not being a turn-based strategy, it feels a lot more Fire Emblem than I thought it would. Just about every downtime activity from Three Houses reappears here in some form, and there's a lot more to do at your base and on side missions than I expected. Trying to get all S ranks can also be really addictive and I spent a lot of my playtime retrying the same missions over and over because I felt like just one small change could improve my time and get me that S (and so far, with maybe one or two exceptions, I've managed to S rank every mission by retrying it a few times). The missions are also still very much what I would call strategic, just in a different way, and the main missions especially give you lots of options for how to tackle your objectives so long as you've been thorough about clearing the map and picking up resources and intel along the way.

I find the gameplay pretty overwhelming with the realtime combat when so much is going on, so the way I adapted to that personally is that I spend a loooot of time pausing and opening the map screen to issue orders to the other characters. Then I usually pick one and try to carry out my own goal while they autonomously work through theirs, periodically swapping to someone else to see how they're doing and just for the variety of playing as someone else here and there. But I'm basically ALWAYS checking my map every 30 seconds to get a feel for where my units are and what they're doing, and what needs to be done...which I found helped me keep track of things a bit better amid the stream of endless enemies, special attacks flying around, and being constantly bombarded with dialogue while I'm trying to fight. It took a bit of getting used to but I think it's pretty fun once you get the hang of it.

What surprised me the most when I played the demo (and made me consider getting the full game at all) was that the story does play a big part in the game. I guess I just sort of expected an excuse plot that sent a bunch of familiar faces out to use anime moves against an army of bad guys. I have no idea how the plot kicks off for the other houses, but what really drew me in with the Eagles was how the decision to reveal and act on one thing at a much earlier point in the plot lead to a completely different outcome, spinning the usual Three Houses story off into an AU that still felt internally consistent with the original characters and events. When it came up, I was like, "no way, that's going to basically change EVERYTHING!" and got really sucked into the plot even before the demo wrapped up - so kudos also to the demo for providing enough content to actually suck the player in. That said, this game is very much only for people who finished Three Houses...at least, I sure can't imagine being able to keep track of the story, or even being interested in it, if not for knowing what ORIGINALLY happened and how differently a few factors of Three Hopes influenced them to change course. So while I'm sure there ARE Warriors fans out there whose interest in the game is mostly that aspect, I think for most people you're not gonna want to just pick this up without having played the original first...IMO, anyway, this game is NOT Standalone, despite being an alternate universe version of Three Houses' plot.

But yeah, I do wanna go back to this someday, because I was enjoying myself. I think just the combination of my friends falling off (not having anyone to talk about it with anymore after liveblogging ALL of Three Houses to them felt weird) and just generally needing a break from these characters after 8 straight months of them warranted a break. It's time for me to accept that, pop out that cartridge, and move on...I'll come back eventually. Probably...

DARK SOULS: Prepare to Die Edition

So, after all those soulslikes paving the way, we finally arrive at this point. All of it, training me for the mindset to go into a game known for its frustrating level of difficulty. I'd actually had Dark Souls in my Steam library for YEARS (that's why it's the old Prepare to Die Edition and not the Remaster), but only now did I finally feel like I was ready to take it on. And so, after applying the DSFix patch/mod (and one other mod that makes crates/barrels occasionally drop things like arrows and throwing knives because I was gonna smash them all anyway (currently really missing this in DS3)), I began my journey in June 2022...and only just wrapped it up in November.

I talked about this a bit in my Undertale review back in 2020, but what you know/expect/feel about a game before going into it can very much affect the experience you have when you finally play it. In the case of Dark Souls, I was strongly influenced by fear of how difficult it would be, due to its reputation. That fear lead me to watch lots of videos before playing, as a way to kind of prepare myself for what was to come (because going in blind was too scary). Most of these were challenge runs, so the focus was on the boss fights, but it all gave me enough of a taste of the general progression and various hurdles I'd be facing along the way. As such, I often knew exactly how to prepare, and how cautious to be making my way through areas, which trivialized a LOT of that expected difficulty.

To give perhaps the best example, I was very aware of Blighttown's reputation because it's practically a meme. People hate this Blighttown place. It's full of aggressive enemies and a deadly poison swamp that's become a staple of all future FromSoft games. It's the worst area of the game. Etc. Granted I later found out a good deal of the hate was due to the terrible framerate the game had on consoles (wasn't an issue for me on PC, at least with DSFix), but I imagine a lot of the hate also comes from people recklessly rushing their way through the upper level and getting caught by the constant ambushes, especially from the toxic dart guys. But because I KNEW ABOUT THIS REPUTATION, I went through Blighttown very slowly and cautiously. I had my bow ready at all times and a solid supply of arrows, which I used to tag enemies from a distance so they'd come attack me one at a time instead of ambushing me in large groups. I came prepared with blooming purple moss from Darkroot Garden to counteract the toxic from the blowdart guys, and since I knew they wouldn't respawn when killed I wasn't really afraid of them in the first place - after all, once they shot me, I'd pretty much know their position and be able to kill them, heal the toxic, and be on my way.

Aside from one or two deaths by fall damage (one particularly funny one was when I saw an item on a ledge that I could practically sense was schmuck bait...but I jumped down to get it anyway, and sure enough the floor collapsed under me and I fell to my death) I didn't have any trouble from Blighttown AT ALL, and definitely not one bit of frustration. It was TENSE, because of how dark the place is and because I was in constant fear of being ambushed, but it just didn't really happen because I could always spot the ambush from afar and tag the enemies individually with my bow. In a few areas with particularly dangerous drops of walkways I just decided that I didn't need the items that badly and ignored them. I got to the middle level bonfire without issue, and then made my way to the bottom of the swamp from there rather easily. And despite the poison swamp at the bottom itself being an obstacle, I had already gone back to the asylum to pick up the Rusted Iron Ring (though originally that was so I could get through the pool in Darkroot Garden), and the enemies at the bottom are much weaker than the ones in the top half of Blighttown so you're really only using your estus to heal off the poison anyway. I spent a lot of time farming the slugs down there for titanite shards and it felt like the poison, while it lasts for a million years, REALLY doesn't even do all that much damage, so as long as you don't panic and keep an eye on your health bar it was really easy to just periodically heal through.

The point is...one of the most hated areas of the game was a piece of cake to me because of the way I approached it. And I approached it that way to begin with because I went into the game knowing about its difficulty, preparing myself accordingly, and taking it slow and steady instead of rushing through and getting caught in a dozen ambushes. Of course this experience is built on the back of the millions of players who played this game when it WASN'T a decade old, and I'm not trying to trivialize the experiences of people who DID struggle with Blighttown by saying 'just like go slower lol'. But I do think it's fascinating how much easier this game is when you approach it the right way. I think, if I didn't know about all this stuff in advance, I too might end up trying to play it like Skyrim or something, just recklessly running into ambushes and traps and swinging my weapon wildly with no regard for enemy attack patterns. But by 2022 I think almost everyone knows that you can't play Dark Souls that way, and they probably wouldn't even try. And if you're not trying to play it that way...it's really NOT that hard of a game at all. It's a challenging game, and it will punish you for playing carelessly, but it's a far cry from the reputation the game has for being hard for the sake of hard. In fact, having recently played Megaman 1-3 with a friend via Switch Online, I feel like THAT is much more of a hard-just-for-the-sake-of-laughing-at-your-failure kind of game, where it just feels insurmountably difficult for no reason half the time, in a very un-fun kind of way. And the whole time we were playing it (and making heavy use of Switch Online save states along the way) I kept thinking about Dark Souls, and how much more forgiving it is than fucking NES Megaman (or NES Mario, or lots of NES games tbh).

Anyway. While this preparedness probably is the entire reason I was able to push through the game and finish it with 100% completion (even if it took me 6 months of playing cautiously), I did also end up feeling like it trivialized my experience in a sad way too, because I didn't really get to learn what the game wanted to teach me by punishing me, since I always knew what was around each corner. That's why I'm currently playing Dark Souls 3 blind (though I'll go back over a walkthrough once I finish an area to pick up items I missed, I'm NOT looking into things ahead of time). I think I probably would have been too scared to play Dark Souls blind, which is why I used those videos as a crutch in the first place, but I'm stronger now and I want to have that experience.

So, would I recommend Dark Souls? Yes, unless you absolutely hate third-person action RPGs in general. I think even if you're afraid of Dark Souls for its difficulty, you should give it a chance. Don't feel ashamed for looking up a walkthrough to prepare you ahead of time - you're still the one who has to beat the area by yourself, after all. While it did make me a little sad after the fact that I didn't get to experience the game blind, honestly, if I hadn't played like this I might never have had the courage to experience it AT ALL, so I'm glad that I did. I still felt pride when I conquered a tough area or boss on my own, even if I knew what to expect before going in. I guess it's like, if you were going to climb a mountain or explore the woods, wouldn't you feel a bit more peace of mind if you had a map of the area? But the map isn't going to climb the mountain for you...at the end of the day that's still something you've gotta do with your own power, and you can still be as proud of that as the guy who didn't buy a map. Or something like that, anyway. And also, don't believe everything you hear about on the internet, because I feel like the game's difficulty has been memed and exaggerated far beyond the actual truth anyway. Just take it slow and steady, prepare as much as you feel comfortable beforehand, and whatever you do, don't you dare go hollow.

Skyrim Together

Oh boy. So as we know, every year I find some way to play Skyrim again (except last year where I played Oblivion instead), and this year that took the form of trying to get Skyrim Together Reborn - the multiplayer Skyrim mod - set up and working with some friends. Except the idea of playing vanilla Skyrim (even with friends) sounded too boring to me. No, instead, I waited until someone else released a stable Skyrim Together modlist and then tried THAT out...and then proceeded to cannibalize it, removing mods I didn't like and adding new ones in that we wanted instead. You know. Just normal Skyrim PC player behavior.

Anyway, after about two weeks of working basically nonstop on my list, patching it and everything, making it as stable as absolutely possible on singleplayer...we took it online. And I learned that just because I've got Intermediate+ Skyrim modding knowledge, I don't know SHIT about what's going on under the hood in Skyrim Together's arcane black magic system. Long story short, we had uh. Problems. Lots of them. Most of them actually very funny, like, being attacked by a wolf (on my screen) and being told I'm actually crazy because it's a fucking skeever (on their screens). 

Or looting the dead wolf/skeever and finding 148 bones, 296 dog meat, 539 skeever tails and 148 wolf pelts on it. 

Or having...whatever this is, happen whenever your friends move around, except on THEIR screen YOU’RE the one doing it

Or getting launched into the sky for having the audacity to shield bash... 

OR the respawn system sending you to the back half of a dungeon you just started, potentially behind locked doors that only open from the front side, leaving you essentially trapped. 

Or

You know. Normal Skyrim behavior.

Suffice to say, after many days of saying "okay let's try it again but do [x] this time", we just couldn't get past a lot of these issues. And funny as they were, they were kind of impeding our ability to play Skyrim...together. Eventually we all just kind of got so tired of trying that we quietly abandoned the project. Even me, with the fierce determination I had to make the modlist work for that two week period, just couldn't understand why things were so hilariously broken once we got online, and lost all my zeal for trying (the only thing I could possibly think to do was to ask for help on a support Discord, and given the choice between troubleshooting with a stranger and just giving up, I chose giving up).

Honestly, even if things WERE working as intended, the whole process quickly became tiring. Every time I made changes to the list I'd have to reupload it for my friends to then redownload and overwrite their files with. And we had to get VPNs to connect to a private server session with (the need for extra tools like this is why I listed this as "PC" and not just "Steam"), and depending on which one of us was hosting we'd often experience slightly different flavors of bugs. And it didn't even matter how hot we made our orcs, because certain RaceMenu features just don't sync properly to the server, so all the time we spent perfecting our Himbo body morphs was for naught. It just kind of kept chipping away at our patience a little at a time until the cons started outweighing the pros of playing Skyrim together, and we all just lost the desire to keep trying.

But hey, this was all happening in September, just a month or so after Skyrim Together Reborn's official launch. And it was only DAYS after I saw someone else post a modlist that I then used as the basis for mine. It was probably too early to be as ambitious as we were. My hope is that development on Skyrim Together, and its Nemesis fork, make enough progress that by the time ky desire to play Skyrim again rolls around I might be willing to take another crack at it, and maybe things will work better by then. The day may yet come that our hot orcs will finally be unleashed on Skyrim...together.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2

I've mentioned a few times how me and a friend of mine like to co-op play ostensibly singplayer games with Switch Online, but they do have some multiplayer-friendly games on there too, and sometimes we do also play those. One time we got very into playing Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on Genesis. And then shortly after that my friend discovered an alarmingly similar game on the SNES called Kirby's Avalanche. We started to suspect this might be a case of some Japan-only game that they didn't expect to take off in the west without more familiar marketing, so we looked into it and it turned out to be the case - for a series of puzzle games called Puyo Puyo. After finding out there was a modern Puyo Puyo x Tetris crossover for Switch (that might be easier to play together than doing it via Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine) we both grabbed a copy...and I even grabbed a second copy on Steam when there happened to be a Sega sale about a week later and I spotted it there too.

Anyway, I may have briefly fallen into a week-long period of Puyo Puyo Fever where I couldn't stop playing, and all my dreams were haunted by falling puyos and tetris blocks. I got over it, but I still think it's a really fun and addictive game, and the multiplayer aspect of dumping garbage on your opponent's field to screw them over is a really fun way of turning what I tend to think of as a singleplayer genre into something competitive. And there's tons of different modes and ways to play, too, whether you wanna play Just Tetris or Just Puyo Puyo or a combination of both, time attack, all kinds of weird variations...and there's a weird over-the-top anime singleplayer story mode as well, where you can launch special attacks at your opponent as well. I actually got stuck on one of the bosses in this mode because I suck at utilizing the special attacks and you REALLY have to in order to beat her, but I'll get her...one day...

My nephew also got addicted to it and even got his own copy of the game for his birthday, so we can play together too (or by himself instead of him borrowing my switch all the time). He particularly likes that you can reskin your puyos to look like Sonic characters. But yeah, honestly it's a pretty fun game, especially if you just want something to pick up and play on the bus, or while you're in a hospital waiting room because you've had an ear infection for 3 weeks, or something. It's pretty pricey on Switch at least, though, so I'd either grab it on Steam (where it's $10 cheaper even when it's not on sale) or wait for some kind of Sega sale to get it cheaper. I think it's a lot of fun, just like, not $40 fun. There's also a Puyo Puyo Tetris 1 that's cheaper, which I imagine can't be all THAT different unless you care about the online scene or something.

Super Mario 3D World

My Switch co-op friend got me this because he thought we would have a fun and friendly time doing co-op together. Oh how wrong he was.

First of all. It’s a fun enough little game, though I prefer the gameplay style of Mario Odyssey myself. I feel like this game’s levels are definitely designed more for quick play sessions, with the star and stamp hunts kind of working like bite-sized versions of tracking down moons in Odyssey. I played through the first world or two by myself before we headed online together for jolly cooperation. Or more like (I’m Mario)...

You see, the game feels nice and friendly and colorful and there’s even a lot of cases where co-op is encouraged. But you can’t show me a results screen at the end of the level where one player can do better than the other, even to the point of being awarded a crown to wear into the next level, without awakening the blood fury inside me. Every time he performed better than me (due to my overwhelming tendency to hurl myself off cliffs) it would ever so slightly raise the rage meter inside my heart. I would become obsessed with doing better in the next level. And at first this was sensible...get more coins than him. Collect the stars before he can. Get the checkpoint and exit flags to show my M instead of his dumb L. All things that would give ME more points. But sometimes you’re just not as good at Mario games as the other person and it’s easier said than done to just BE better than the competition.

But what if there was no competition in the first place? The solution was in front of me all along. Eliminate him. Pick him up and throw him off a cliff, or into an enemy, then use the resulting precious seconds to race ahead and get all the goodies before he can catch up. Of course, this became less and less successful as time went by and he caught onto the fact that I’d try to throw him at virtually any opportunity. Sometimes he’d flip the script and throw ME off before I could get a chance, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth warfare. But more often than not it goes like this

Turns out I’m REALLY good at playing myself. In fact, while looking for a video clip for that first gif of me throwing him off the cliff, I found about 6 like this where I try to pick him up but end up being the one who dies instead.

Honestly though, my favorite was this time, where I spent a while playing nice and not doing anything overtly evil, until we got to a toad house...

The toad house gets marked as cleared as soon as you exit, and he didn’t have any powerups on hand while I was running around with my raccoon suit, so he was pretty pissed about this one. Perhaps my finest moment of video game dickery of all time, and it’s not like it was premeditated (I’m not that smart). I just thought it up on the spot and thought it would be funny. And it was (to me). And that’s what it’s like playing Super Mario 3D World with me.

[soleilsuhh]

— soon the cold night falls.

plot. when you went to doyoung’s place to study, you didn’t expect to end up staying the night and sleeping on the same bed.

pairing. doyoung x gender neutral! reader.

genre. college!au. fluff. suggestive. pining. good ol’ sharing-a-bed trope.

word count. 1.8k words.

you had been falling behind in maths, which was why you asked doyoung to help you study. although you didn’t have the same major, you knew he was more than proficient in the subject. he had eventually agreed to help but not without calling you an idiot first. this was how you found yourself in his rented studio apartment where he lived off-campus, about fifteen minutes from the university.

suddenly, you felt a hard but painless tap on your hand.

"are you listening?" he demanded, the look on his face is evident that he already knew the answer. he sighed, "pay attention, y/n, this topic is important."

"it seems like even you can't make maths interesting,"

he shot you a look at which you responded immediately by raising your palms up slightly in surrender, topped by a cheeky grin. you tried your best to focus as he continued with the explanation but by the time he reached to the next page, your thoughts began to drift away from the formulas and to the fact that the two of you were alone.

it wasn't as if this was the first time you had been alone with him in a room; you weren't sure why you were feeling jittery and why your foot was bouncing of its own accord under the table.

"—will you stop zoning out!"

his raised voice and the sound of frustrated slam of pen on the table startled you, effectively pulling you away from your thoughts.

surprisingly, the rest of the tutoring session went by smoothly. but it seemed like at some point while studying for what felt like forever, you fell asleep. when you woke up, you were pleasantly surprised to feel a jacket wrapped securely around you, and that its owner was also asleep in front of you, using his own arm as a pillow. his face was serene, the soft breathing making the world outside seem to stand still.

you grabbed your phone, trying to ignore the odd feeling in your heart. looking at the screen, you jumped, nearly causing the jacket to fall off your shoulders. it was already midnight, and you were still at his apartment. you reached over to shake doyoung awake, and as he rubbed his eyes, you showed him the lit-up screen.

he momentarily froze in his movements. "huh." he looked at you, "sorry, i didn't mean to fall asleep; i was planning to wake you up before your dorm curfew," he paused and after a moment, he said: “do you want to stay here tonight?”

your heart involuntarily beat faster at that and you brushed it off. it was probably a good idea; you were already an hour past the curfew. you said ‘okay,’ before calling your roommate to inform them. they sounded sleepy but nonetheless, relieved to hear from you. as you talked on the phone, doyoung walked over to his dresser and your gaze lingered after him.

“catch,” he said, throwing a simple tee and sweatpants at your direction just as you hung up.

you caught them clumsily.

“thought they might be more comfortable than your jeans, but you don’t have to change if you don’t want to,”

you smiled at him, “thank you,” you brought the clothes closer to get the whiff of fresh scent, “they smell really nice,”

he scoffed but not unkindly.

as you shuffled towards the bathroom to change, he began to put away the books on the table. when you came out, the table was cleared, everything neatly stacked and an extra bedding was spread out on the floor along with a pillow.

"you take the bed," he said, gesturing towards it.

you blinked at him for a moment then delcared, "hell no, this is your place anyway; i can sleep on the floor,"

"exactly, this is my place, so i make the rules," he said, "take the bed,"

you refused to move, not giving in but also uncertain about what to say. this was such a conflicting situation you were in; why did you care that much if he slept on the floor? why were your eyes so fixated on the fact that there was no extra blanket for him? what was this clenching feeling in your stomach?

"the bed is big enough for two people..." you awkwardly suggested. "i mean it's not like we've never shared a bed before,"

it's true; you had taken so many naps together - that was back in primary and middle school, yes, and things might not be the same anymore.

you could have sworn that you saw doyoung's movements stop after hearing your suggestion but he continued whatever he was doing on his phone. his lack of response was a clear enough answer for you.

"um, fine then," you said with a hint of despondency.

"i guess we can keep a pillow between us," his voice came. "i don't have an extra blanket too, anyway and it gets cold at night," he paused a brief second and lifted his head to look at you, "are you sure you're okay with sharing a bed?"

you nodded, a little too eagerly, a little too fast, "yeah, i'm okay with it! sounds good!"

the two of you remained motionless on the bed. it was awkward. you couldn't tell if he felt the same or if he was already asleep. he was lying still on his back, eyes closed and face relaxed.

you tried not to move too much, but you couldn't help yourself from restlessly tossing and turning, pulling the cover that you were sharing slightly closer to your body. he was right; the night was really cold.

suddenly, you felt a hand on yours, not grabbing it, just resting there and applying enough pressure to get your attention. you noticed how warm his hand was and you cherished it.

"y/n," his voice was soothing in the quietness of the night, "stop moving so much,"

you stopped and his touch, warm and gentle, lingered before he completely retreated his hand.

after a moment, you lifted your head slightly, "doyoung?"

"hmm?"

"i'm cold,"

he eventually opened his eyes and got out of bed with a sigh; he headed towards his dresser, the path dimly lit by the moon and then he came back with a hoodie which he tossed at you. "here,"

you mumbled a 'thank-you' as you put it on, feeling both thankful yet also...disappointed. you weren't sure why though. what exactly were you expecting anyway?

once again, both of you lied down on your backs, neither moving; his eyes closed, and yours wide open. minutes passed before you began to feel restless again. somehow, your mind wouldn't stop thinking about how warm his hand was and how yours was itching to be held again.

you turned your body to completely face him as you edged closer to the pillow barrier between you two. "doyoung?" you tried.

you waited a few seconds.

"what?"

"i'm still cold,"

you waited a few seconds. a few more. and a few more.

you were certain you wouldn’t get a response anymore. he was probably tired and dying to get some sleep. and he already gave you a hoodie; what more could he do for you?

sleepless, you found yourself distracted by how pretty he looked in the pale moonlight that came through the window. you noticed an eyelash on his cheek and tentatively, you reached over to gently brush it away. you were tempted to wake him so that he can make a wish but that probably wasn't a good idea. despite how warm his hand was, his face was cool under your touch, his skin so soft that you found yourself lightly trailing a finger along his features; first his cheekbone, then his nose, and when your finger reached his lip, his breath deepened and his eyelids moved albeit still closed. you stopped dead.

you weren't sure whether knowing that he was awake made you feel more nervous or more delighted. perhaps both.

your fingertips lingered on his skin, waiting for him to stop you but he didn't. you felt compelled to continue and that’s what you did; your fingers began moving again, trailing over the shape of his lips. with each passing second, your movements gained more sense of ease and certainty as your feathery touch brushed along his jawline, creeping down his neck, and then his collarbone.

you watched, marvelled as his breath hitched softly.

your fingers edged up his neck again.

and his hand grabbed your wrist. there it was. that warm touch of his.

he opened his eyes and your gazes locked.

the look on his face was unreadable and it made you all the more nervous and excited. the eye-contact broke only when you gulped, trying to shove the nerves down, and his eyes followed the movement on your neck.

“you said you’re cold?”

you nodded.

letting go of your wrist, his eyes met yours again. “turn around.”

you looked at him uncertainly, suddenly feeling a tingling sensation in your fingertips and toes. “why?”

he gave you a small, reassuring smile, and his hand reached out to trace along your jaw and down your neck, the maneuver emulating yours earlier.

“you’ll see,”

you shifted your position and turned until you were facing the other way. behind you, you felt the pillow between you two being lifted and placed on the other side of the bed. soon after, doyoung wrapped his arms around yours, pulling the covers over your bodies and holding you close. back pressed against his chest, you entwined your arm with his and laced your fingers together.

the two of you stayed like that for a while, still and quiet.

it was him who broke the silence, “how about now?” he said, “are you still cold?”

you smiled, “no, this is really nice,”

“good.”

it was a little awkward and stiff at first. but after a while, it became peaceful as you both slowly relaxed and allowed yourselves to melt into the warm embrace. your breathing slowed down and your heart stopped racing. the steady rise and fall of his chest was so comforting and you found yourself snuggling closer against his chest and into his arms.

“honestly,” you began, voice quiet but light-hearted, “i was kind of thinking about something else when you told me to turn around,”

he hummed amusedly and let out a chuckle. then he leaned forward to hover his lips over your ear, “i know what you were thinking,” his voice was barely above a whisper and held a tone of refrained laughter.

you shivered but eventually bursted out laughing, and he promptly joined, unable to contain it in him any longer. the laughter in the stillness of the night was heavenly. doyoung muffled himself by burying his face in your neck to stop himself from laughing too loud for the sake of the neighbors, but that only caused you to laugh louder and harder because of the tickling sensation. in spite of himself, he managed to whisper soft ‘shh’s and gently covered your mouth with his hand from behind.

even as you both tried to calm yourselves down, you broke into fits of soft giggles every now and then. doyoung tried to sound annoyed as he told you to go to sleep but he couldn’t stop smiling.

you sighed, happy and content but also sad because you knew this moment would eventually pass, “i don’t want this to end,”

“don’t be silly,”

silence filled the room for a while.

“you can come sleep over whenever you want,” he said, hugging you closer, his voice soft and unwavering.

[nikkywrites]

hand in marriage prompt

Prompt: “Explain how you eldest child of the kingdom’s rulers, disguised yourself as a suitor and fought for your own hand in marriage in a competition, and won” by @writing-prompt-s

Minor spelling/grammar edits.

*****

Your father’s hands shake behind the podium when he announces the competition. It is an age old custom, one that has fallen out of practice but one that is being revived in an attempt to win back the people’s favor.

They are on the verge of a revolution, a coup. Granting people a chance at the throne is the only way to settle them, keep peace.

Disaster will strike if any of them take the throne.

You’re sitting pretty at his side, smiling demurely at the crowds before you like your mother taught you. Heat swells in your palms as you listen to the barely-even tone of your father’s voice.

The crowd cheers jovially, each hoping that they will be the one to take the throne. His speech ends and you all retreat back to the castle, your youngest brother tugging at your skirts with wide-eyes, wondering why your father’s shoulders collapsed down as soon as he was out of sight of the public.

“It’s all right, John,” you soothe him, a burning determination taking root in your chest. “I’ll fix this.”

You pry his fingers off and pass him to his caregiver, and he goes off to change out of the stifling clothes. You jog up your father with skirt bunched in your fists.

“Father,” you speak conversationally, ever wary of prying ears and slowing to match his pace. “Would it be all right if I entered a person of my choosing into the competition?”

His eyes spark like lightning when he looks at you, frowns. “That defeats the purpose,” he says, although you recognize careful royal-bound wording when you hear it. “You cannot choose your groom. It is too risky.”

“I won’t be choosing anyone,” you reply, nodding. “Stack the odds against them, if you must, but the others will be invigorated knowing that they are not the one in my favor.”

He mulls over your words, eyes running over the expansive halls. “I do not choose who makes it in,” his eyes settle forwards and he avoids looking at you. “But the Gamemaker will be having a luncheon with us the day after next.”

Being royal has taught you many things — the order of silverware, how to smile in the face of political ruin, how to word insults like compliments and how to decode the unspoken.

You stumble a step and fan your face. “I’ve been feeling a little warm, lately.” Your stride falters and fails to match his, dragging you behind as you tug at the tight wrap of your corset. “Must I be present at the luncheon?”

“I’ll make the servants aware that you’ll be retired to your rooms.”

He continues on to whatever he’s going — most likely to plan out the competition stages, speak with the Gamemaker to begin choosing eligible men. You turn and walk to your rooms, gait long and even.

There’s a hidden drawer in your closet. Hidden behind the puffiest of your dresses, there is a shelf of plainer clothes, borish pants and loose-fitting shirts. Peasant clothes. Boy clothes. A stack of caps that hide the length of your hair and the pristine golden sheen of it.

They’re not the clothes you go to change into, instead sliding into your riding clothes and tying your hair away from your face in an updo the public would gasp at the messiness of.

For appearances, you’re supposed to be regulated to your room, playing sick. You sneak into the stables and to a young guard you’ve sort of befriended who works there. He has his own horse, a gangly mare named Sandy that doesn’t compare to the royal-bred horses, but she’s sweet and she’s fast and that’s enough for her to stay.

She’s the horse you practice hard riding on. You’re taught proper side saddle riding from your tutor, but the guard has taught you how to gallop across a field while making yourself a small target. He teaches you how men ride horses.

Men like the ones who will compete for your hand in a week’s time.

After riding, you practice archery. You’re strained, and your fingers shake, but if you can hit a bullseye like this, it’ll be easier when you have a steady hand.

During luncheon, you sneak out of your room and switch a name from the jar. It’s a boy’s name, completely ambiguous and too common to pinpoint to a specific house on a week’s notice. It is one that’s carefully picked, and when they are announced at the end of the week, you don’t smile any more or less for that name than you do the others.

Thankfully, you’re not obligated to be present, and, even if you were, you have a loyal maid who is similar in feature, enough to fool anyone at a distance. You keep up your charade of sickness, while you slip on your boyish clothes, dusted brown from when you had a maid rub it in the dirt. Only those who lived in the palace had pristine white on their clothes. The leather covers it up quite well, though.

There are three legs to the completion. Riding, and mounted archery in the first, to emulate a hunt, although the targets stand still. The second leg is battle tactics, a game to test one’s strategic thinking, how they would manage armies in the face of war. The third is a fight among those who remain.

The competition is hard.

It’s supposed to be, of course, they’re competing for your hand and your father’s crown. That doesn’t make it any easier, but you have an advantage they don’t. You’ve been training, and that guard is a good teacher, or maybe you’re just a fast learner.

But you outrace and outshoot them in the first leg, grinning cockily and fighting the urge to blow a kiss to the losers.

Of the twenty men who joined, you among them, sixteen pass the first test. The war game is where many fail, underestimating a threat or losing too many troops. That one is easy for you, effortless. The number of men left is halved.

In the final part, most of them want your head. You realize that you should have held back some, in previous matches, to not make yourself such a large target, but it is too late now. It’s a bracket system where only the winners proceed and the peasants pay a week’s wage to watch (and bet on) who will become their next King.

You all fight in turns until only one is left. The sword you are given is steel, heavy and too long, unbalanced in your hand. Your first opponent — you will beat him, at the very least — seems happy to see how you struggle.

You’re the third pair to square off, and though he is bigger, you are faster. Your blades clash and you twist so your blade swings around to rest against his neck. It is over quickly.

You eye the other matches, your opponents and how you can defeat them. The one you had faced in your first match appears to not have been one of the more skilled ones. Pity.

As you step back into the ring for your second match, you become aware of the throb in your wrist. Using the wrong blade and swinging it a little too swiftly, making so you had to abruptly pull back so you didn’t chop off your opponent’s head had taken it’s toll.

You ignore the subtle pain and clench your jaw, doubling as a means to focus and a way to harden out the shape of it. You will not lose, no matter which stops you have to pull.

Even if you must rely on your family secret to save you.

It would be a dirty move to pull, knowing that they have no such talent and that if they did, they would have strategically dropped out in one of the earlier matches. It would be impossible for them to hide their non-humanness from their wife for the rest of their lives.

No. The only ones left were those who wished to take the throne of the King and you, who wanted that seat to remain empty until you decide otherwise.

You will not bow to tradition.

Invigorated, you meet your next opponent in the middle of the ring, spotting how his veins run thick in his hands, weathered from fighting. You narrow your eyes and lift your chin — needless, as you’re not much shorter than any of them there, and you were actually taller than some, something that’s a bane to a girl.

The start is called and you move swiftly. You take careful care to watch your energy levels, making sure to conserve some for your fight, the final one. The man before you, red-faced and ruddy, is merely another obstacle for you to overcome.

His cockiness becomes his weakness, him taking too-big swings that you easily dodge, sneaking in to press your blade to his throat, pressing so drops of blood swell over the edge and drip. Injuries were only frowned upon if major, this was nothing, a scratch that would quickly heal. A measure to remove doubt as you’d left your last opponent spotless.

When Kings were brought to war, when they got so desperate, there was no choice but to spill blood.

The last fight is where things go wrong.

This man is tall, corded with muscle and comfortable with the blade in his hand. His breath comes easily and he appears not to be at all winded, but he must for he won against two others.

Your flaw in this fight is underestimating him and not ducking far enough. He swipes the cap from your head and your hair is visible.

That is the moment that the winner is decided.

Rage leaps up in your throat, pushed by the fear that you’ll be disqualified, and fire rages from your hands and travels the length of your sword to meet your opposer’s arm.

He screams as he loses, dropping the heated blade in his hand, patting at the melting flesh of his arm. You stare at referee stoically, hair hanging in your face, giving him your best glare as he stutters out his results.

“The winner of the princess’ hand...” he shakes, still looking at you and hoping his words won’t cost him his head, watching crowd silent at the new turn, breaths held, “is the princess.”

There is no cheering, no booing, just echoing silence.

You match into the throne room after, loosely circled by guards and the referee. You don’t bother to change into a dress, barely bother to comb your hair out of your face.

Your father needs to hear what you’ve done.

By tradition, you wait outside the door. The referee stutters something about unprecedention, a surprise, what they should do. You can feel your father’s worry through the door.

He recognizes you when you step into the room, still boyish with your clenched jaw and narrow eyes, daring anyone to say anything about your current state of dress.

His face breaks out in relief.

Your family secret is still safe. Your bloodline not to be sullied by mortal blood. Later, your partner will be of your choosing and of your species. You won that right squarely and you will fight again if anyone challenges it.

You are coronated a moon’s phase later. You wear your hair long, some loose and some intricately braided, following tradition in every way but one. When the time comes for the crown to be upon your head, you don’t wear the crown of Queen.

The pastor coronates you with your father’s crown.

You are both Queen and King, until you decide to bequest one of the titles to another.

Until than, your kingdom is yours and no one else’s.

*****

I remember having a hard time keeping this a prompt. Still kind have the urge to do something bigger on this premise, specifically with the inhuman ruling family twist, but I don’t know if it’ll happen.

This is a good run down of how it would be, though. Still good as a prompt.

[zerochanges]

2020 Favorite Video Games

I don’t know if I am an outlier or if this is the same for everyone else but I really did not play a lot of games this year. 2020 was a very harsh year for all of us, especially for me for some personal reasons. So to get to the chase, I am just gonna say it left me not doing much in what little free time I did have, and I didn’t play much either. Usually I try to keep my lists for ‘favorite of the year’ to only titles released that year but since I played so little this year, screw it. I am gonna include any game I played this year regardless of release date.

Collection of SaGa

By far a flawed rerelease. It’s bare bones: there are no advance features you would usually expect out of these kinds of emulated rereleases like save states, fast forward, or rewind, and there was no real effort made to touch up almost 30 year old localizations that had to meet Nintendo of America’s then harsh standards. This really is just 3 roms slapped into a nice looking interface with an option to increase the game speed (which by the way you better use, the characters walk very slow in these old games). 

I am bit harsh here, but only because I thought the Romancing SaGa remasters and the upcoming SaGa Frontier remaster all looked like they got a great budget and a lot of love while this is just another Collection of Mana situation (moreso specifically talking about Seiken Densetsu 1/Final Fantasy Adventure/Adventures of Mana part of that collection). I would have loved to see Square Enix do a bit more for these older games. Or at least include the remakes. Seiken Densetsu 1 had two great remakes, both unused in Collection of Mana, and all three of these original SaGa titles have remakes that have never seen the light of day outside of Japan. How great would it have been to get the Wonderswan remake of SaGa 1, as well as the Nintendo DS remakes of Saga 2 and SaGa 3? 

But my gripes aside, these games are still fun as they ever were. Replaying SaGa 1 specifically during the holiday season really helped calm me down and made me feel at ease. It’s easy to forget but even in their Gameboy roots there are a lot of funky and weird experimental choices being made in these games. They aren’t your run-of-the-mil dragon quest (or considering the gameboy, maybe pokemon would be more apt) clones. 

Raging Loop

Perhaps my favorite game of the year, Raging Loop is one of the best visual novels I have ever played hands down. The level of creativity and splitting story paths that went into it is simply mind blowing. The basic premise is both a wonderful throwback to the old days of Chunsoft sound novels while still modern and somewhat reminiscent of both Higurashi and Danganronpa. Essentially you play as Haruaki, a poor slub that got lost in the mountains with no clue where to go until you stumble upon an old rural village with a strange history and even stranger superstitions. Before you know it there has been a murder and the Feast is now afoot.

The less said about Raging Loop the better, although I do want to say a lot about it one day if I ever can write a proper review of it. This is a gripping game that will take hold of you once you get into it though and never let go. I actually 100%-ed this and I very rarely do that. I got every ending, every bonus hidden ending, played the entire game twice to hear all the hidden details it purposely hides on your first play through, played all the bonus epilogue chapters, unlocked all the hidden voice actor interviews, collected all the art work, etc, etc. I was just obsessed with this game, it’s that damn good! And the main character is maybe the best troll in all of video games, god bless Haruaki. 

Root Double

From Takumi Nakazawa, long time contributor to Kotaro Uchikoshi’s work comes a game any fan of Zero Escape or Uchikoshi in general will probably enjoy. Root Double, like its name suggests is a visual novel with two different routes, hence Root Double. The first route stars Watase Kasasagi, the leader of an elite rescue team in the midst of their greatest crisis yet that could lead to nuclear devastation as they try to evacuate a nuclear research facility that has gone awry. 

The other route stars Natsuhiko Tenkawa, an everyday high schooler whose peaceful life is thrown into turmoil when he stumbles upon a terrorist plot to destroy the nuclear facility in the city and his attempts to stop them. Together the two separate plots weave into one and creates a really crazy ride. Part Chernobyl, part science fiction, any fan of the genre will easily enjoy it. And hey it’s kind of relevant to include on this list too since it just got a Switch port this year (I played it on steam though).  

Snack World

I was shocked upon starting Snack World as it is instantly incredibly charming, witty, and downright hilarious at times yet I heard almost zero people talk about it. EVER. This game is Dragon Quest levels of quirky though, and the localization is incredible. The game has such an oddball sense of humor that works really well with its presentation right down to the anime opening video that sings about the most bizarre things. Instead of the usual pump up song about the cool adventure ahead we get stuff like wanting to go out to a restaurant and eat pork chops. 

The self aware/fourth wall breaking humor is just enough to be really funny, but doesn't overstay its welcome and always makes it work right in the context of the dialogue. And finally, just everything; with the menus, the name of side quests and missions, and the character dialogue -- are all just so witty and full of quirky humor. This is one hell of a charming and funny game and addictive to boot.

Trials of Mana

Trials of Mana has gone from one of those legendary unlocalized games, to one of the first major breakthroughs in fan translation, to finally getting an official English release complete with a fully 3D remake. In a lot of ways from a western perspective this game has had an incredible journey. As for this remake itself, I really found myself having tons of fun with it. I loved the graphics, and the voice acting while a bit on the cheaper side almost kind of adds to the charm since both the graphics and acting really give it an old PS2 vibe. I know that is probably just more me being weird but yeah, I had to say it. 

I really hope Square Enix sticks to this style of remake more often, instead of just doing Final Fantasy VII Remakes that break the bank and involve extensive tweaking to both plot and game play. I’ll take smaller budget projects that play more like the original game any day personally. I wouldn’t mind if they also deliver a brand new Mana game all together in this engine either. 

Utawarerumono Trilogy

This year saw the release of the first entry in the series, Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen--and thus finally after three years since the sequels Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception and Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth came out in 2017 the trilogy is now complete in English. I ended up binging through Prelude to the Fallen very fast shortly after it came out and immediately jumped on to the sequels. Perhaps the best part of 2020 was that I finally played all three of these fantastic games, and did so back-to-back-to-back. Playing the first Utawarerumono was an experience I will never forget, it was like visiting old friends again that I haven’t seen in ages, by and large thanks to the fact that I saw the anime adaption of the game when I was much younger, nearly a decade ago. Back then I would have never of dreamed that I would get to play the actual game and get the real experience. 

And it only got better from here, as all three games are such wonderful experiences from start to finish. The stories are all so deep, and by the time you get to the third entry, Mask of Truth, it’s crazy to see how they all connected over so many years and weaved together into a plot much bigger than they ever were. What carries it beyond all that though has to be the fun and addicting strategy role playing game aspect, which while a bit on the easy side, is still so much fun and helps make the game feel better paced since you get to play the conquests your characters go on and not just read about all the battles they fight. Beyond that the games are packed full of awesome characters, and I know I’ll never forget the amazing leads in all of them. Hakuowlo, Haku, and Oshtor will all go down as some of the greats to me. 

Ys: Memories of Celceta

Ys: Memories of Celceta is a full 3D remake of Ys IV, a rather infamous game in Falcom’s Ys series. Not to get bogged down too much into the history of Falcom but by this point they were facing a lot of hardship and had to outsource this entry to other developers, and thus passed it on to two particular developers they had a business relationship with, creating two unique versions of Ys IV. Tonkin House who had worked on Super Famicom port of Ys III with Falcom ended up creating their own YS IV entry, Mask of the Sun for the very same system, where Hudson soft who had produced the much beloved Ys Books I & II remakes for the Turbografix (PC Engine) CD add-on created their own Ys IV entry Dawn of Ys for that console. Both games followed guidelines and ideas outlined from Falcom themselves but both radically diverged from each other and turned into completely different games. 

Falcom finally putting an end to this debate on which version of Ys IV you should play have gone and created their own definitive Ys IV in 2012 for the Playstation Vita. I played the 2020 remastered version of this remake on my PS4. I even bought this on the Vita when it first came out but I am horrible and only horde games, never play them. So it was a lot of fun to finally play this. 

Memories of Celceta is probably one of the best starting points for anyone looking to get into Ys, especially if you only want to stay with the 3D titles as out of all the 3D entries this explains the most about the world and series protagonist Adol Christian. Beyond that it’s just another fantastic entry in a wonderful series that has a few good twists hidden behind it, especially for long time fans of the series. 

Random Video Game Console Stuff

Xbox Has Blue Dragon: I actually got an Xbox One this year for free from my brother. Because of that I started to play Blue Dragon again and there’s a lot I would love to say about this game. I don’t know if I am fully committed to replaying it all the way through however but I find myself putting in a couple hours every few days and enjoying myself again. Does anyone else remember Blue Dragon? I feel like it really missed its audience and had it come out nowadays and probably for the Switch it would have really resonated with the Dragon Quest fandom a lot more instead of being thrown out to die on Xbox and constantly compared to Final Fantasy VII and the like which it had nothing at all similar with. 

The Turbografx 16 Mini: This was probably one of the best mini consoles that have come out and I feel like thanks to the whole 2020 pandemic thing it was largely forgotten about. That’s a shame, it has a wonderful variety of great games, especially if you count the Japanese ones (god I wish I could play the Japanese version of Snatcher included), and a wonderful interface with fantastic music. One of these days I would really like to be able to play around with the console more seriously than I have already. 

Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon Never Existed: So Nintendo localized the first ever Fire Emblem game on Nintendo Switch which is awesome to see them touching Famicom games again--I haven’t seen Nintendo of America rerelease old Famicom titles since Mysterious Murasame Castle on the 3DS, but their trailer hilariously made it seem like this is the first time ever they released Fire Emblem when in fact they had already localized the remake Shadow Dragon on the Nintendo DS nearly 10 or 11 years ago. I and many other fans I talked to all found this really hilarious, probably solely because of how much they kept repeating the fact that this is the first time you will ever be able to experience Marth’s story.

All that aside though I have to say the collector edition for this newly localized Famicom game is probably the most gorgeous retro reproduction I have seen in a long time, and I really spent many many hours just staring at the all clear glass mock cartridge. I have found myself really obsessing over retro reproductions during 2020, and obtained quite a few this year. I really hope this trend continues to go on in 2021 as recreating classic console packaging and cartridges is a lot of fun. 

[retphienix]

I Have A Lot To Say So I'll Read More This.

The short of it?

I'm glad I played Joker- I played it because I wanted to know how DQM evolved when it reached the DS and I got my answer.

It's mediocre. Not bad exactly, I enjoyed playing it, it adds some REALLY appreciated features to the DQM series and if you were playing it at release it had online play which plays well with the post game content which I haven't touched by the time I wrote this:

-but there are some engine/console specific things that made it a drag and there are some parts of the game that are just weaker than the previous games which is amusing since the previous games were simple GBC titles.

And finally, I don't really recommend playing through Joker 1. Can't speak on the sequels, but Joker 1 was a pretty middling experience for me so I'm the wrong person to get a positive recommendation from.

And since the opportunity presents itself: If you like monster RPGs and haven't tried it- go emulate Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 for the GBC, it's really good and also if you emulate you can fast forward the GBC era grind if that's your taste- really a win all around.

On to my rambling:

I debated on writing, rewriting, rewriting, and better presenting my thoughts on this game and the series as a whole but nah, Joker ain't getting that, I'm ramblin'- lol

I will split it slightly between "The ending" and "The game as a whole" though.

Ending:

1:07 - This is slightly a 'game a a whole' thing but honestly it's funny to me that you unlock a permanent repel in this game by doing the main quest. I entered this dungeon feeling strong enough to beat the game, so I just avoided 90% of encounters entirely.

5:00 - I genuinely got a laugh out of Sparkpug's whole deal in this finale. Not story wise, that's fine, no complaints- I mean that Sparkpug is clearly built to be a monster that can carry an ineffective team. He's clearly meant to be bred a few times and a god tier member of a potentially inexperienced player's team- but I literally never used him after the intro.

So during this scene it's supposed to be like "I'm a demi-god monster, you can't possibly beat me" and I'm thinking "Dude, you're like level 10 and shit tier, you can't win, this is hilarious."

Obviously it's a real boss fight and not 'face the monster you once had' but I was having fun roasting him behind the scenes of this recording.

45:00 - What an entirely unexpected change of pace.

Like, I had it spoiled for me by a screenshot that Dr. Snap becomes a monster or something- but I thought maybe he was always a monster or something, and also I got a bad look at him.

HE TURNS INTO A BODY HORROR BEAST, THAT'S NUTS.

Genuinely a highlight of the game.

52:00 - I fucking laughed what a meaningless exchange where the payoff is saying "He was stupid!", it's honestly just silly and dumb but not necessarily bad just dumb lol

55:00 - Not a great 'you won' victory lap. Like at all. Kinda feels like they should have just made this all a cutscene where I appear back at town and see that Solitaire is the leader now etc etc.

I kinda don't understand why it's a victory lap at all? Because all anyone says is "They picked a weird successor to Snap >:(" or "Snap went to the island? I bet he was stopping the calamity :)"

If you have 2 lines of dialogue prepared, maybe don't make a victory lap???

1:00:00 - What a fucking stupid payoff lol

Like sincerely, Solitaire does NOTHING the entire game! She's meaningless from start to finish! And the 'surprise' is that she's the new commish??? And she got the position because she's a rich spoiled brat??? Like LITERALLY that's why????????

What a stupid fucking ending lol

Now her proposed evolution of the contest is fair enough, I mean it's childish as hell, but to be fair- more contests is a fine idea especially since prior games and this game demonstrated the public's interest in watching monster fights. And the goal being to fight her as the final fight is fucking egotistical and stupid- BUT- it does play into the fact that the player didn't get to fight her the whole game so it's whatever?

1:03:00 - This is both the best and worst lol.

This game has no story, like at all, it's fucking empty front to back, and only explodes with like- 1 event at the very end.

This moment is a montage of memorable moments with your 'best friend' Sparkpug. It's cinematically very nice to be honest! Even includes a moment I don't remember at the arena which probably didn't happen lol.

So visually it's cool- I dig seeing the camera zoom out as we run across the beach, and the flashback moments intersplice over us making our way to the scout memorial- that's very well done.

The content is empty lol

As I said there's no story, these moments are nothing lol

And that's that.

All said the ending was a very nice challenge to face with my team- I had to abuse items like mad but I MADE IT! It was a GOOD fight.

The rest I've already said.

On to the game as a whole:

I have issues with this game, but there's good too. It's really like 4 steps forward 6-7 steps back it's weird, it's really weird.

Positives are neat!

> First and foremost- TRAITS!

Monsters in Dragon Quest Monsters have always had a problem with keeping their identity for long. The way I'd explain it to an outsider to the series is that Monsters DO have special stat variance and intended movesets and all that jazz- but the breeding system completely and entirely destroys that relatively early into the game.

While a monster might normally have really high defense and low other stats while knowing buffing magic- breeding, EVEN UNINTENTIONALLY, will have that same monster come out with 9 billion attack and all ice magic.

Monsters in DQM have a habit of becoming canvases for the breeding effects rather than their own mons- and this is undeniably a downside. It makes the game feel unique, it doesn't 'hurt' it, but when by mid-game monsters are more easily identified as sprites rather than strengths and weaknesses or even types (family) it's a slight downer on the series.

Traits fix this a lot by making every specific monster have unchangeable traits which offer things like "immunity to x type of damage" or "higher crit chance"- it's small, but it gives each monster more identity.

> Second and secondmost- SKILLS!

The older games didn't use trees, it used each individual spell as a potential pass on during breeding.

Each monster could have 8 spells, and when you breed two monsters you pass on all 16 spells to the offspring (they don't learn them all at once, they learn them as they level up) as well as the natural spells the monster would learn by level up.

So in the older games it is really easy to end up with a refined and overpowered list of 8 spells on each of your monsters.

Now spells are tied to Skill trees and your monsters can have 3 skill trees total (which are passed on as OPTIONS when breeding).

All to say skills do a lot for removing the "Master of all, weakness of none" spell lists that the older games made trivial to make, now you have to limit your builds and be more specialized- also they added skills like "Attack up" to add more variance to a build- instead of having spells you might just have high stat buffs as skill trees.

Overall I think Skills are an improvement because coupled with Traits it makes each monster feel much more specialized and unique and less like a sprite with no identity.

> Breeding is improved.

This is very much because of skills and traits- again- but also the system is just improved in general. Instead of being told "That's a monster you haven't had before!" and judging your decisions based on the name of the offspring breed, now you get to see a small sprite of the resulting monster to help you decide- ALSO instead of getting 1 result for every combo (to the point where you have to back out and choose Monster A + Monster B and Monster B + Monster A as separate options), you now get up to 3 results to pick between for every breeding opportunity.

It's just better.

> The engine is impressive.

At least to me. This is a DS title using (from what I read) a rework of the DQ8 PS2 game's engine- it certainly looks like it.

Combat models are nice, using moves looks nice, overworld exploration looks nice- it looks nice.

Now for some negative and general nonsense- all of which is more often than not 'weird'.

> I gotta be unfair and say "The Story" first and foremost.

DQM 1 and 2 are not intense story games. They aren't.

But they both knew how to handle their story well for what they wanted to tell, I can and will praise both for their narratives because they know what they are and do it well.

DQM:J does not. It's fucking bad.

Basically: The overall story doesn't exist- you're told to be a spy, but that comes up 1 time towards the end of the game and LITERALLY doesn't matter at any other moment INCLUDING the one time it comes up.

You have NO meaningful objective from the start up until near the end of the game. You show up and have no goal- so you get told to get some crystals with no meaning behind it (not even a lie because they are clearly evil- not even a lie to motivate you! NO MEANING IS PRESENTED! JUST DO IT! TO DO THE CONTEST I GUESS! WHY? SHUT UP!)

So 90% of the game time you're not doing anything meaningful. So what about the islands? Any small narratives to keep things moving?

NO!

NOT AT ALL!

So you go 90% of the game having no real objective, just kinda wandering forward mindlessly- and then the game suddenly goes "Oh! Guy who seemed sus! He's evil! He's gonna unleash the calamity that you were 'kinda but not directly' working towards with your dog! You know, that plot point that's kept vague and paid 0% attention to the entire game? Yeah it's happening! Aaaaand you're done! GG!"

Basically there's just nothing going on in this game, it's all background noise until the last 10% of the game. And that's lame.

DQM1 had a light story- but from the very intro cutscene you have a clear objective which makes every action you do seem relevant as you are working towards that goal.

From the start of the game you know "My sister is gone! The king says a magic wish can get her back! I'll go do that!" and then you do!

DQM2 has a much better story!

You have a goal from the start (The kingdom is physically dying and you have to save it by getting a new plug!) AND it has stories for each world you visit!

THAT'S MILES BETTER! THIS GAME COULD HAVE DONE THAT FOR THE ISLANDS!

Anywho. Story is lacking and empty and lame especially when DQM2 has a similar format but does every part better- you have a clear objective you're working towards AND side stories to keep the light narrative moving!

WTH!

The spy plotline doesn't matter! It could have been used to build suspicion on who's the good guy!

The islands are so empty of story!

DQM2 has a fun mix on how a rival character works which makes every world interesting to see how they get involved!

This game has a rival that does NOTHING!!!!!!!!!

It's just such a step back from the previous games, it's weird to see DQM 1 land a solid simple story and DQM 2 build a great format to expand the story going forward- and then DQM:J just slams its head into the dirt and wipes out.

> Game's slow.

The engine switch is a good thing overall, but it makes combat slower (a lot), adds loading screens to combat (primarily), and they didn't bother speeding up the grind from previous games.

Because of the grind still existing which isn't a problem in and of itself- the game becomes SLOW AS HELL because the engine makes that grind take longer.

Also world exploration is slow which is to be expected when moving from 2d to 3d, but this is countered by adding things to the world to find or do- and Joker tries but it's still noticeable. The world exploration isn't a problem, it just stands out alongside the combat being slow as hell.

The engine change was a great thing- but it feels like they should have put more work into speeding up combat to counter the slowdown of load times and flashy animations.

A GOOD WAY TO FIX THAT MIGHT BE XP!

> Music ain't great in my opinion.

DQ has amazing music. This game has some weak renditions in my opinion. The CELL HQ theme song is a pretty good poster child for the worst there is, but just in general even the better music is lacking compared to the chiptunes of the GBC or the better mixes of the main series.

Maybe it's unfair, it's a DS game, I don't know, I just know I ended up just muting most of the game because it didn't sound great. I played the GBC games OSTs instead for a large portion of my playthrough. I listened to videos instead for the bulk of the game.

It's just not pleasant to me, sorry to say.

> XP!!!!!!!

I'm being a spoiled ass on this but yeah!

XP SUCKS IN THIS!

There aren't good placed to grind until you beat the game! (apparently)

The first level blatantly has too low xp which makes you grind before you can tackle the boss of the island- and the late game has you mindlessly grinding low xp rewards in order to be ready to face the final boss.

It's WEIRD!

Why is it so low!

> Tech is weird!

I could ramble on this alone but here's the short version:

DQ has a unique fantasy world aesthetic that each game has explored in its own way. It's basically "swords, magic, monsters, and charm- things feel light but aren't afraid to get scary sometimes :)"

This game... doesn't.

This game has fuckin' tech watches, jet skis, TOWER PCS????

This ISN'T dragon quest on a world building level.

It's like, contemporary modern world but with slimes.

And that could be good I guess, but it feels so fucking weird to see PCs right alongside swords and axes and a dracky.

Like... why?

It's a poor aesthetic according to my tastes. Maybe I'm an ass for that. The tech is weird.

All to say, in a poor rambling "I gotta get this out of me" kinda way, is Joker was fine.

I enjoyed breeding. I enjoyed seeing the engine. I enjoyed the unique additions like a 'hero monster'.

But I also had to grind mindlessly on a slower game.

I had to endure a story that forgot to show up until the very end.

I sat there thinking about replaying the older ones the whole time.

It was fine.

It's mediocre.

I'm glad I played it.

I'm done now :)

[dyke-a-saur]

Why Sia’s “Music” is a Cacophony of Tone-Deaf: Pt. 1 “The Scene”

(Disclaimer: The following is just my experience and review of a short scene from Sia’s 2021 film “Music”. I am not on the spectrum myself, nor have I seen the entire film. Feel free to leave comments, and if you’re on the spectrum yourself, please chime-in!)

Introduction

This the prologue for a three part series discussing the well-deserved controversy of Sia’s 2021 film Music. In part 1, I’m plan to dissect her responses to the issue and why it confirms that she wasn’t ready to dissect her own biases to make a better film. In part 2, I’m going to discuss her music video, Oh Body, it’s mockery of stimming, and blackfishing additions.

My Experience

(Names changed for privacy)

I remember having to help with a kid (Let’s call him Jay), who was on the spectrum, when I was in the fifth grade (he was in second). Jay wasn't a bad kid, and I did some research on understanding him and helping the teachers with that. We actually grew pretty close and he was pretty chill.

But the main teacher’s assistant (we’ll call her Sam) was really bad at this. I didn't like her, and Jay definitely didn't. But aside from bad vibes, I didn't have much issue with Sam.

(CW: Restraining/Ab*se)

Fast forward a couple years when I'm in eighth grade and my sister, who used to be in the same class as Jay, is telling me about the Sam and some of the stuff she used to do. Apparently, she freaking TACKLED Jay and held him down while he was SCREAMING for her to get off of him. What did he even do in the first place?

Doesn't matter.

Because Sam was a whole GROWN UP. And she thought it was a great idea to tackle an EIGHT-YEAR OLD  boy who was having a meltdown.

The woman also had a history of restraining kid’s like Jay by either grabbing their wrists, twisting their arms, or dragging them (kicking and screaming) to the principal’s office. 

The Scene

When I heard that Sia incorporated a prone restraint scene (featuring Leslie himself, c'mon man) I was pissed. Having a grown up hold down a kid who’s having a meltdown is not sweet or tender.

It’s DANGEROUS.

But since some people wanna say it’s not that bad, or are quick to cry “watch it first!”, let’s talk about it:

(CW: Restr*ining/Abl*ism/Ab*se/Suggested Implication of S*xual Assault)

Music (Maddie’s character) begins screaming in distress and hitting herself on the head.

Leslie’s character tells Zu (The older half-sister/caregiver for Music) he’s “not gonna climb on top of a small screaming white girl in a park” (how Sia’s even aware of all the connotations behind that, but couldn’t make a decent film is beyond me).

So what Leslie does is “coaches” Zu through “prone restraint”, a practice he describes as “crushing Music with your love”.

Leslie: It’s your turn...you can do this...Go ahead.

Zu then proceeds to pin Music’s arms down by the wrists and tells her “Okay, Music. It’s okay.”

Music freaks out even more, bawling and trying to get Zu off of her by hitting the woman.

(Content Warning Over)

What. The. Hell.

As Queerly Autistic explained in this awesome video: Sia's New Film Is Dangerous For Autistic People, the “technique” of prone restraint is carried out by climbing on top of someone and holding them face down to apparently stop them from hurting themselves or others. It’s mainly utilized by law enforcement and institutions that primarily take care of special needs individuals.

However, this technique causes intense sensory overload of the situation which can leave many people traumatised for the long term. It has resulted in the injury or even suffocation of individuals in the midst of a meltdown resulting in fatal situations. 

This happens, even in professional cases with licensed caregivers and nurses. But this kind of unprofessional attempt at prone restraint is just as deadly. Some victims of prone restraint end up suffering from asphyxiation after being pressed to the ground, on their stomachs, for an hour! 

People can DIE from this. And they have.

So excuse us, Sia, if we see through you trying to dress this scene (AND TWO OTHERS JUST LIKE THIS) up in a whole “crush them with your love UwU”. This practice isn’t cute or wholesome; it kills people.

There’s also the blatant dehumanization of neurodivergent people and treating them as if they’re a frightened cat who “doesn’t know you’re trying to help”. Putting the restrainer in a savior light is disgusting and dehumanizing towards autistic individuals.

Takeway

Knowing this now, I’m so happy that Jay was able to leave the school. It had a bad history of negatively interacting with neurodiverse classrooms and toxic relationships (not sexual) between teachers and students often. If they were to watch a movie like this, which portrays prone restraint a necessary and positive thing, they would try to emulate it, without a doubt. That’s what makes Music so dangerous. It could hurt kids.

Listen to neurodivergent people who are telling you that this film is bad representation, mockery, and straight-up dangerous. It's not a love letter, it's Sia and her team’s self-righteous and poorly done pat on the back.

Stay tuned for Pt 2: “What In The Tone-Deaf”

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Breath of Fire 3

So we're getting really close to beating the game. I can not wait till this is over. It's weird to want games to end, but games like this with a clear linear plot can too easily overstay their welcome. Truly, BoF3 doesn't really have enough mythology to warrant 40 hours, but they do their best to stretch it...

SO - we get the sea chart to the legendary mariner. I have no idea how to look at the sea chart, so I looked on the internet. We found the mysterious "section" and there's this maze of navigable waters, but you have about 30 seconds to get to the legendary mariner.

...it just hit me that the sea chart is the mini-map during this section...

This took a few tries. I felt bad for my son, having to watch me fail. I was also getting frustrated, because I didn't want to waste his time. I got to the house with 1 second left, but I wasn't facing the right direction, so we had to start over. This made my son extremely mad. We had to set the game down and discuss feeling frustrated. It seems my own frustration was fueling his. So we talked out our feelings and got on the same page about how to proceed.

Then we got it on the next try!!

Legendary Mariner admits he didn't actually sail across the sea. Forget how he came, actually... He says the only way to get across is to use the Black Ship. I mean...duh. So we ram the Black Ship and begin one of my favorite sections from when I was a kid.

For some reason, I thought the ship was filled with more mini-games and puzzles. Not so much, which is good--so we can keep the story moving. There's an obligatory boss fight and then we reach the other side. Not as mind blowing as I remember, but still a cool idea for a "medieval fantasy" game.

We find some folks working an industrialized dock and they seem really confused by our presence. I don't spend much time here and move on. The characters make a comment about the people not seeming human.

...are they androids?

Next, we find a factory. I'm really annoyed at this point. CAN WE JUST FINISH THE GAME?! We get it, the machines come from here...

We then find a new place with an Antenna. Wonder what that is? Inside is a transporter room Nina, Rei, and Honey used to escape the castle. How interesting...We decide to activate it. The puzzle here was borderline intimidating but it turned out to not be so bad. We get it activated and are auto-zipped back to steel beach.

My son was not happy about this. He wants to move forward, not backward.

A quick recalibration of the antenna using a cool minigame, trying to point away from static signals, and we're back to the other side.

But this time we go to Dragnier. Turns out, this place is filled with The Brood that have surrendered their powers to become human. It was an attempt to hide from the Goddess and Guardians...why they hid on the same side of the sea as the Goddess, I'm not sure. But after a creepy scene of an old man trying to get girls to kiss him in exchange for information, Ryu is granted the ultimate dragon power: Infinity.

The citizens of Dragnier have been expecting Ryu and they believe he will be their savior, and avenge their defeat at the hands of the Goddess. Why they didn't kill the Goddess at full force?...Anyway, Nina is concerned about whether Ryu is a "good" or "bad" dragon. The elder Dragnier laughs. Dragons are neither good or bad. Basically, they're just people. But they're also very powerful and could destroy the world if they chose. The Goddess feared this power...maybe, I don't know...

Next comes the desert part. This part is clever. You have to walk across a desert using the stars for navigation. You also have limited water supply. Walking during the day exhausts more energy, so walk at night. This sequence takes a looong time, and it's easy to mess up. I respected this part, but I didn't want to waste too much time with my son walking.

So I looked up a short cut and set the emulator into fast-forward mode. (Emulators are the best way to play).

On the other side of the desert, there's a boss fight and Nina is overcome with heat exhaustion. So we have to kill our Yakda to help her heal. This is an interesting part because the Yakda is the only way to save yourself from the desert. So you're basically committing to never returning to safety. While BoF3 isn't necessarily a well-told story of deep characters, I'm always impressed with how few punches they pull. The game creates a lot of touch scenarios, with complicated motivations and morality.

Anyway, we find a village, that may feature some racist grammar stylings. They help Nina and the team recover then refer us to the "ruins" of Caer Xhan. There, we find a futuristic city with paved roads, automatic doors, and laser traps. Simple puzzle and we activate an elevator to the Orbital Station Myria.

We're in the Endgame now.

After crossing the ocean, the game's pacing is a little weird. Everywhere you go is a quick stop, and you don't normally return to these locations. Very much unlike the starting side of the game, where you're constantly returning to the same locations over, and over again. It makes the game feel a bit uneven. While I like retracing my foot steps as an adult and seeing how things changed, it was a little too excessive. And now there's a whole half of the world that's never been seen, and we're barely stopping for a breather before moving on.

Really, I think once you cross the ocean, that just needs to be the ending chapter. All this expectation of meeting God and it's just one delay after another. The other side of the sea could have combined several dungeons and story beats (Dock, factory, transporter) -- and then arrive at Dragnier, and finally cross the desert to the ruins.

We'll see what we get done tonight!

[jungkookiebus]

The Surprise | kth

Genre: established relationship, smut, nonidol!au Pairing: nonidol!Tae x reader  Word Count: 2.1k  Warnings: pegging, ass play (eating that ass like I aspire to do), dirty talk  Summary: You’ve explored everything in the realm of sex with Tae, that includes using toys on him, but this time you decide to surprise him with a little more. 

It had all started from mild curiosity. You had each tried everything under the sun when it came to sex, but this was one thing neither one of you had breached. Casually, one evening, you had brought up the idea of a prostate orgasm and how you had read how powerful they were. At first, Tae was against it, but when you brought up the fact that you let him stick it in your ass, he decided to think on it. What was the harm? Obviously, you’d start slow and work your way up. You started just as you had, with a butt plug. The first time he had worn it throughout sex he had admitted that it wasn’t so bad, pleasurable even. The next time you tried, you used a small dildo of yours, experimenting by slowly thrusting it in and out of him while you stroked his cock and that was the first time he had had an orgasm that way and was, admittedly, blown away by it.

“Never thought I’d like something in my ass so much,” he had said through his post-orgasm bliss, eyes shut, and a smile spread across his fine features.

To you, it was the hottest thing you had ever seen; to have him come undone at your hands with something that didn’t involve your mouth or cunt.

Now, here you were pulling your latest purchase out of the black bag you just laid on your table. The strap on was one of the higher end brands, wanting only the best for him. The cock itself was purple, his favorite color, but the straps were a simple black. You had done your research and bought the type of harness where you could change the sizes of the dildo and opted for one that was the size of one you had already used. It would be a few hours until Tae came home so you decided to get used to your new “appendage”. Taking it into your room, you stripped off your work clothes and got to work trying it on, adjusting the straps until it was just right before you stood in front of your full length mirror. It was odd, of course, but didn’t seem totally foreign. Turning this way and that, you checked yourself out in the mirror and decided it looked and felt pretty good. It was suggested that you do mundane tasks to get used to it, so you decided to do just that. You started a load of laundry, folded clothes, changed the sheets on the bed, along with other things until you completely forgot that you were wearing it.

You were busy scrubbing the countertop when you heard the soft cough behind you. You whipped around in surprise, dildo thumping against the counter as you went, soap dripping down your arms and a very surprised, but amused Taehyung standing in the doorway.

“Whatcha got there, babe?” He sat his bag on the counter before leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. You saw something flash in his eyes, they softened momentarily, before they seemed to darken the more he drank you in.

You gulped and sat the sponge down, rubbing your hand across your shirt before speaking. “A surprise.”

“Color me surprised then,” he said pushing off the doorframe and moving over to you. He placed his hands on your waist as his eyes travelled from your face to the dildo. His fingers traced along the straps of the harness and his growing erection did not go unnoticed by you.

“You look beautiful in this.” His hand came to cup your jaw as his lips came down on yours. Pushing your back against the counter he ground his hips into yours, the dildo pushed upwards between the both of you.

“You plan on fucking me with that?” he asked when he pulled away.

You whimpered at the thought of having him writhing beneath you. “If you’ll let me.”

“I’d love nothing more,” he said while pulling you along behind him, but once in your room, it was you who guided him to the bed.

Crawling over him, you leant down and kissed him deeply while he fumbled with his own belt and pants, whisking them off as fast as possible. You were caught by surprise as he caught the dildo in his hand and began pumping it over it. That action alone had turned you on more than anything else had so far this evening. His lips ghosted past your ear as you moved your head.

“God I can’t wait to have you inside of me,” he whispered.

You wanted nothing more than to be fucking him into oblivion in that moment, but you also wanted to take your time.

“I will, baby,” you whispered back. Kissing the side of his neck, then collarbone, down past his chest, hipbones, and then the base of his cock, you travelled down his body.

“Please,” he begged above you.

“Please what?” you asked innocently enough as you continued to place small kisses to his cock while you gripped the base.

“Anything,” he breathed.

You sank your mouth down his cock until he was hitting the back of your throat. Moaning around him, his hips thrust upwards in your mouth and you brought both hands to his hips to hold him down. You worked your mouth over him, taking him further each time and clenching your throat as you choked on him. As soon as his thighs began to shake you pulled off him, leaving a trail of spit in your wake. You looked at him to see that he had started to sweat, the light sheen sparkling on his face and abdomen and in that moment, you had sworn you had never seen anything more beautiful. Gripping the backs of his thighs, you pushed his knees as far to his chest as you could before leaning down once more. You kissed the inside of his thighs, past his cock, until you were exactly where you planned to be for the rest of the evening. Tae’s entire body trembled in anticipation as you teased him, placing small kisses and licks across his hole. Digging your fingers into the skin of his thighs you pushed your tongue inside, basking in the satisfied cry that left his lips. Burying your face further, you let go of one of his legs, trusting him to hold himself as your hand came to cup and slide past his balls and gripped his cock. His hips bucked into your face as you ate him out and your fingers ran through your leftover spit and the precum on his cock. He started to whimper louder and louder and you knew he wanted more, he always wanted more. Moving from his ass, you pulled one of his balls into your mouth and sucked gently, causing the sounds escaping him to become a little more pitched. You moved forward once more and as you got closer to his face, he desperately grabbed you and pulled you in for a sloppy kiss, wet with no direction.

“Fuck me,” he breathed.

You reached for the lube in the bedside table and Tae caught your wrist as you came back.

“Let me do it.” He sounded so fucked out and beyond reason, his eyes soft, but desperate as he looked at you.

You handed him the bottle and he put a large amount in his hand before he was running it over the dildo, moaning as he did so.

“You want this cock inside of you, baby?” You watched as his eyes fluttered shut, hand still working over the toy, and he groaned deeply. “Want me to fuck that pretty ass of yours?”

His lips were wet as he continuously drew his bottom lip in his mouth, released it, and panted heavily. By now, he was tugging at the dildo, trying to get you down to where he wanted.

“Yes, please,” he begged.

You pushed his legs once more as you sat on your feet in front of him, legs spread and knees on either side of his ass. Sitting up a little, you lined the toy up and started to push slowly inside.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he began to chant as you slid further and further. You waited a beat once you were fully seated, watching as Tae’s chest heaved with each breath.

“Give me a second to adjust,” you asked as you held onto his legs. “I’ve never thrust before.”

You hadn’t thought this far ahead, suddenly very aware that this motion was going to be foreign to you. What you had planned to be a surprise for him might be a disaster at the hands of your inadequacy. Tae reached forward for your wrist and brought you almost flush with his chest.

“You’ve got this baby,” he said kissing your palm. “Roll your hips against me.”

Keeping your stomach against him, you rolled your hips backwards, and back down on him, trying to emulate a wave with your body. He moaned as his mouth fell open, lip catching on the palm of your hand, and his breath heating your skin.

“Do that again.”

Mimicking the motion, you started to gain more confidence.

“Does it feel good?”

“Yes,” he moaned. His head sank further into the pillows as your newly found confidence seemed to also quicken your pace.

Sitting up, you grabbed more lube and poured more as you thrust, ensuring his comfort. His hands were all over the place; one second, they were at your waist, then his cock, and then his hair. You wrapped your hand around the base of his cock and squeezed lightly, causing a rumble deep in his chest. Working your hand over him just as he liked it, you watched as the dildo slipped in and out of his ass with ease.

“You look so good spread out for me like this,” you said. You were absolutely out of breath, but the look on Tae’s face as you fucked him spurred you on.

You fisted his cock in your hand as your hips snapped against him and every obscenity known to man fell from his lips. Tae reached out for your hand once more and pulled you from his cock and to him, kissing you deeply.

“I want to come like this alone.”

You were so turned on right now that it hurt. The dildo did little in the way of giving you any relief as it did not have any direct contact with your clit, but god only knew that the sounds he made alone could have you coming untouched. You were looking at his face as you fucked him, his hands on your ass now, pulling you into him harder. He looked absolutely radiant, the pink that dusted his cheeks gave him a healthy glow and the sweat along his browbone gleamed in the low lights of the room. His long lashes brushed his cheekbones and his full lips fell open in ecstasy. His eyes opened briefly to look at you as you hovered over him.

“I love you,” he muttered between breaths.

You kissed him once more as you rolled your hips harder against him, knowing you were hitting his prostate based on the moans coming from deep within his chest. Threading your fingers through his hair, you deepened the kiss as you felt his body shudder and cum coated his and your stomach as he came. His moans became desperate sobs in your mouth as he wrapped his arms around your waist and held you closer. Your hips stilled, the dildo still inside of him, letting him come down from his high.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

Slowly, you pulled out to avoid discomfort as you sat up.

“You’ve ruined me,” he said finally.

“In a good way?”

“For the rest of my life,” he said as he sat up and pulled you closer, kissing you so passionately that you felt his love in every inch of your body. “Let me take care of you.”

He fingered at the straps of the harness, not quite sure how it was removed.

“We’re in for a long night, aren’t we?” you laughed against his lips.

“I don’t know what ever gave you that impression,” he said before flipping you over to your back and kissing down your neck. “I just want to eat you out and maybe fuck you so good that you’re crying, but I don’t have to…”

“I’d love nothing more,” you interjected.

With a laugh, Tae tugged at the harness once more, eager to keep his promise.

[ruhibrun-cialisectip]

RAIN STOPS PLAY - 6th May 2021

I should be writing this blog after having spent the past three days having been in Portsmouth filming our video for our project. One of those points are true, I was in Portsmouth, but the video is not filmed. We went out to film and was really good to finally meet the group in person, but after we shot our first take the skies opened and poured down on us. We were soaked in seconds. Its not the end of the world though as we now have solid ideas on what and how we are going to shoot. Unfortunately, it means I will not be there as I cannot get down to Portsmouth again next week when they want to film but I am pleased we have a solid idea, and it will get done very soon. We have changed our idea slightly to a more story-based film where we ‘call’ the future and show how our sustainable energy supplying footsteps can produce electricity. I think we will also aim to film enough footage to play around with our original ideas as well. We also decided that the video should feature music that is fast paced to emulate the feeling of electric charging up the city. This music should allow the video to ‘flow’ in the same way electric does when powering a circuit. 

As a group we are kind of working in reverse as we have done most of a script for our final 20-minute presentation before even finishing the video. It was good to see the group yesterday and we all thought that being in person allowed ideas to flow much better than when you are all talking to each other on zoom. I suppose that is something we all took for granted when our lives were not being lived through a computer screen, and definitely something we are all looking forward to when we can all get back into Uni together. Me and James were even saying we were looking forward to a two-hour lecture in a big hall even if it is at 9am, we must have been stuck inside our homes to long!

Between now and my last blog post, myself and James felt that the group project had sort of come to a stop. probably because of the Easter holidays and deadlines in other modules. To try and get the ball rolling again we wrote a poem that could accompany the video, originally we started it as a sort of jokey poem but then we really got into it. Gabriel had said that he was going to write a poem but he had said he did not know if he will get it done in time to shoot the video because of other commitments so me and James sent ours to the group via WhatsApp and they all seemed happy to use it and pleased we had turned it around in such quick time.    

This week I also helped by doing a voiceover for another groups video, do I wish we were doing something like that? perhaps. But that may just be because they have a finished artefact while we don’t, I’m sure when we are done I will be just as pleased with ours.  

I am pleased that the video is being sorted and probably better than it would have been if we rushed it in the rain yesterday, disappointed that I can’t be there to do it with them. However, I can get on with the presentation while they are all out doing the video.

[firebirdsdaughter]

Random Writing Tidbit When in Doubt…

… Show it to strangers on the internet. XD

Well, I couldn’t continue this in a way that made me happy yet, so we’re just gonna leave it here and see if it grows at all.

Also yet another tidbit featuring Ansatsu-chan. In case you needed proof I wrote this before episode 12… XD

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“Horobi!” Jin’s voice through the stunned silence, a frantic scream that seemed to ricochet off the walls, and even their very hearing, hitting decibels the human ear couldn’t quite handle. While most of the humans were frozen in shock, he flashed into movement, scrambling up and even shoving Yua bodily out of the way, racing toward Horobi as the other HumaGear struggled back up to a kneel, practically skidding to his knees beside him, clutching Horobi’s arm. “Horobi!”

“Well…” There was a chuckle in Thouser’s voice, “That saves some trouble…” Energy crackled in the air around him again as he raised his weapon once more, levelling it at both MetsubouJinrai Riders.

“Oi! Wait a minute!” The shout was unexpectedly from Isamu, sluggishly fumbling his way to his own feet, reaching out. Aruto started forward, too, and even Yua let out a surprised cry and threw out an arm like she could stop him, even from yards away.

Jin noticed the danger first—it seemed Horobi’s attention had fixated on the other HumaGear the instant he’d reached him, and his reaction was slightly slower. With a frightened yelp, Jin dove forward, trying to throw his arms around Horobi’s shoulders in an attempt to shield him from the shot with his back—only to jolt to a stop, hands still gripping  the other HumaGear’s coat, when Horobi’s arm shot up to block him.

“… Jin…” Slowly, Horobi’s other hand came up, reaching out to touch the other HumaGear’s face through the helmet. Though a HumaGear couldn’t be hoarse, his voice sounded tired and weak, and almost as if he were crying. Jin just stared back at him, emulated breathing shaky and scared, while Horobi’s was mysteriously even and slow, though his hand was trembling against the other HumaGear’s helm. “… You are the only one I have ever loved.”

Then he planted both hands Jin’s chest and shoved him away—right as Thouser fired, sending the other HumaGear crashing into the ground, just barely missing the resulting explosion, sparks nipping at the fringes of his clothes. The others threw up their arms to protect their faces as smoke, fire, and ash flew everywhere.

As the effects of the blast settled and faded, everyone began righting themselves, trying to squint through the smoke. Jin rolled over, dehenshined, struggling back up, his expression a mixture between panic and confusion, like he was unable to understand why Horobi had pushed him. As the smog finally cleared enough to see, however, his look settled on horror.

The attack had shattered Horobi’s transformation, leaving him sprawled across the pavement, completely still, eyes closed, amongst the swirling scorches left on the ground by the explosion—and the slowly growing blue stains, almost black in the dying firelight, from the hydraulic fluid seeping from his wounds. Aruto’s mind immediately flashed back to the Daybreak incident at the sight, almost identical to the condition his father’s HumaGear had been in. Sections of Horobi’s body were cracked open, exposing sparking and partially melted mechanics where the energy had also burned through his clothes, the fabric still smouldering.

Jin let out another scream that began as Horobi’s name and ended wordless, scrambling over to the other HumaGear’s side on all fours, not even making it all the way up. Whispering Horobi’s name on repeat, interspersed with pleading, desperate ‘no’s and ‘please’s and ‘why’s—as unending as a HumaGear’s voice could never tire—he frantically tried to avoid the injuries to find safe place to touch on the other HumaGear’s chest and face, trying to wake him. As he anxiously pulled Horobi’s head up straight, more blue oozed from the other HumaGear’s lips, dripping from the corner of his mouth across his fractured cheek, smearing onto Jin’s fingertips when they brushed there during his befuddled efforts to cautiously shake Horobi awake while trying not to worsen the damage.

But when Horobi still didn’t respond, the whispers faded in another way, morphing into unintelligible, pitiful sobs. Burying his face in the remains of Horobi’s chest, his shoulders shaking erratically, Jin cupped the other HumaGear’s face in his hands, his fingers intertwining into the other HumaGear’s hair, the only unscathed place to cling to. His messy weeping was the only sound as everything else was consumed by stunned silence.

Thouser broke it. “… And that’s that.” He announced, like he’d just finished painting a dry wall. “Seems like the other one isn’t going to be a threat anymore.” Looking over his shoulder at the people he’d brought with him, he jerked his head toward Jin. “Lock it down.” With curt nods, the uniforms lowered their own weapons and started toward the two HumaGear, ignoring Aruto’s protests and Yua and Isamu’s attempts to call them off.

They were only a few paces away when, in an eruption of dust and small rubble, the transformed Dodo MaGear crashed down between them and Jin, leaving a small crater in the cement. The MaGear seemed just as surprised as everyone else, staring around at the armed humans, tilting his head and blinking curiously.

The sound, however, also roused Jin—dragging his head back up, he freed one hand from Horobi’s hair to pad frantically at the MaGear’s arm. “An… Ansatsu-chan… Ansatsu-chan! Horobi… Horobi is… Is…!” The words were still all blurred together, but the hysterical tone was more than enough to make the MaGear turn and look down at him.

 The Dodo started slightly at the state Horobi was in, his head tilting even further to the side. With clipped, quick movements, he spun back around to stare at the people surrounding them—and then his head flipped to the other side in a similar, fast motion. “… Emergency situation detected. Initiating failsafe protocol.” Twirling his blades around, he sent a few blinding slashes to force the humans back, then tucked both away. Satisfied he’d bought some time, he whirled back around and grabbed Jin’s elbow, pulling. “We go.”

Jin stared at him, shocked out of his distress for a moment before shaking his head in panic, trying to pull free, other hand flying to lay hold of the remains of Horobi’s sleeve as an anchor. “No!” Once more his voice hit frequencies above the human range, “No! We can’t leave him! We can’t…! We…! No!” When the MaGear continued pulling, his resistance became even wilder, his shrieking devolving once more into incomprehensible hysterics “No no no no no no no!”

But the MaGear wouldn’t budge, shaking his head. “Failsafe protocol initiated,” He repeated, matter-of-factly, “Protect Jin.”

Jin froze again, jaw dropping open. Without missing a beat, the MaGear bent down, using his hold on the HuamGear’s arm to haul him up and throw him over his shoulder like a sack, easily breaking Jin’s relaxed grip on Horobi’s sleeve. Spinning around the MaGear swung one of his swords again, sending out another arc of light to force the humans to duck and cover—and when they all recovered, both he and Jin were gone.

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Jin does not handle Horobi being hurt, esp Horobi being hurt really badly, well.

Also, Gai is a jerk.

[scyllua]

While chap.203 hasn't stirred that much of a reaction in the Japanese fandom as the previous chapter did, it prompted many fans to emulate Sugimoto's art style. Nothing of this comes as a particular surprise, as the chapter serves as sort of a recap of the events from vol.14 (the Abashiri Prison assault)... and because Sugimoto's drawing talent would be on par with his sniping skills.

The highlights of this chapter have to do with the confirmation of the Russian sniper's identity and goals and the hint at Noda pursuing the plotline regarding the Partisans. It was rather obvious who that Russian sniper was from the very moment he (re)appeared in the manga, but given this is Golden Kamuy and the weird things that have already transpired in the plot made me think it's a very crazy Meiji era the one they are living in, I'd rather wait for the author's clear confirmation on ANY matter before taking anything for granted. Let us not forget that, for starters, I think most of us had already assumed our Russian sniper pretty dead. We can always speculate, however, and this chapter leaves enough room to reflect on a certain other sniper (this one, Japanese and now one-eyed) and how soon (or not) he could make it back to the plot.

I should work on my summaries so they aren't that long. In the meantime and to everyone who had the patience to read my previous chapter post: thank you very much and fear not, for I have no random movie comments to make here! There should be some fan comments, of course, and the usual warnings about mistakes and mistranslations apply as well. Onto the fun of two amateur artists sharing their Ogata fanarts then!

In short, as no further shots are made, Tsukishima believes Sugimoto got to the sniper and Asirpa runs off to meet him. Meanwhile, Sugimoto and the sniper -now confirmed to be Vasily- overcome the language barrier by using the latter's hand-drawn pictures to explain to each other the circumstances in which they crossed paths/met Ogata. Upon the arrival of the rest of the group and after Asirpa recognizes Vasily as probably one of the men who ambushed them in the frontier, Tsukishima explains to him Kiroranke is already dead and they don't know about the current whereabouts of Ogata, their only purpose in Karafuto being finding Asirpa and going back with her. As a rather annoyed Shiraishi complains to Vasily for shooting him, it's revealed he can't speak because of the shot wounds he sustained. As Sugimoto's group resumes their journey, Vasily keeps following them on horseback from a distance. They deduce he's now keen on meeting Ogata again and engaging in another snipers' duel, and that he's sticking around convinced the wildcat will eventually come after them. Questioned by Asirpa, Sugimoto says as long as they're still looking for the Ainu gold, there's always the possibility of Ogata coming back; as per his motivations, Sugimoto adds it might be that Ogata is simply messing with them as opposed to being after an actual goal. In their way back, the group visits Svetlana's parents to hand them a letter she wrote; even though Sugimoto would rather search for Sofia and find out the truth, he understands their primary purpose in Karafuto has been fulfilled already. The chapter ends with Sofia meeting Gansoku and Svetlana in a port city in Russian territory. After exchanging a few hits, Sofia invites Gansoku to come with her, but he turns down the offering, stating he'll travel west with Svetlana. Sofia then states she'll go to Hokkaidou in pursue of their hope... and revenge.

Ever wondered why streets are always so conveniently empty whenever there's a chasing or a shooting going on? I have, even if my question is probably answered in the same question already (because... they're so conveniently empty: easier to describe, draw or animate, and with a minimum of casualties, as well!) In any case, and even though our group seemed to be the only bystanders at the time the shooting began, there's now the usual traffic and activity you'd expect in a town street. In fact, a man in a sled is just walking down the street when, alerted by Koito and Tsukishima not to come that way or otherwise risk being shot, he good-naturally asked what the soldiers are doing. Tsukishima comments it seems as though Sugimoto has already done his magic, ie. he did what he's best at (hint: it isn't sniping or drawing, as we'll see in this chapter), and Asirpa runs off to meet him.

Here follows some good 4 pages of Sugimoto and Vasily proving the language barrier isn't an hindrance when it comes to relatively difficult tasks, such as explaining the events from vol.14 up to that point or how both of them have survived being shot in the head by the same sniper. It turns out Vasily has made enough drawings of Ogata to start his own Pixiv account -putting aside the fact that he's one century ago from that website being created-; actually, Vasily could begin posting full illustration logs, as he even took the care and time to draw the wildcat sporting different expressions, including one smiling. I'm suspecting he might have more study sketches of Ogata in the fiction than author Noda in the real world. This would pose a question for me: just how well could he see Ogata during their snipers' duel? In the extended passage as it was compiled in vol.17, they do spend many hours watching and studying each other... but let us not forget that Ogata's face was obscured in such a way, Vasily couldn't tell for sure where it was him or not. Well, following last chapter's caption at the end, I'm just going to assume here Vasily has nothing short of a photographic memory, sharpened to perfection through his sniping skills, and that he could commit to memory the features of a man he only seemed to have caught fleeting glimpses of partly because the wildcat is unforgettable. Being shot can arise that kind of reaction in people, after all. Going back to the chapter, and given the amount of Ogata portraits he has, Sugimoto asks him whether he's been requested to find him -bounty hunter-style, we may speculate-, but then Vasily uses some of his many (MANY) drawings to explain he went into a showdown with Ogata... and lost. This chapter's title could be translated as "portrait" (似顔絵, nigaoe), though its exact meaning would be more in the lines of a "drawn sketch/picture of a face". Why, yes, a portrait indeed, only that the term in Japanese suggests it isn't as precise as a taken photograph, but a close enough depiction.

I'm always making jokes and complaining about the cast in this manga being so prone to trust in others no matter what terms they might have been on in the past, but I have to admit that being able not to hold grudges, apart from preventing bitterness and anxiety in addition to other negative feelings, also helps greatly when it comes to pace the story forward. Remember how Sugimoto was about to kill Vasily in the best of Friday the 13th traditions (only that less bloody I might presume, given this is still a seinen manga and not a R-rated story), all of this happening in the previous chapter, 7 days ago in real time, 2 pages prior in the manga, like 10 seconds previously in the story's timeline? Well, let's put aside all that negativity for the sake of a couple of souls bonded by the same sniper (different bullet obviously, same rifle and all) sharing an artistic moment.

In addition to their fanboying over Ogata -for the wrong reasons, though, as they'd be both after the wildcat to settle some scores-, Sugimoto and Vasily manage to summarize the manga from vol.14 up to that point, using their respective drawings to explain to each other the events. "Explaining to each other" wouldn't be a wrong statement in this case because they do appear to be understanding the other quite well through the drawings, some gesturing, and the usefulness of somatic language, even though Vasily doesn't seem to know Japanese (as he's puzzled at Sugimoto's questions). When he produces drawings of Kiroranke, Shiraishi and Asirpa, Sugimoto explains to him the latter two aren't related to the Partisans: the bad guy here, no doubt about it, is Ogata, as he emphatically conveys by hitting his portrait with his fist. Now in quite the roll because Vasily is assimilating the ideas very fast (as he also hits Ogata's portrait), Sugimoto then explains he was also shot by the wildcat... and reveals his artistic sense might be on par with his sniping skills. ...and while I'll keep joking about his awful aiming until the day he finally manages to shoot anything down -as opposed to pummel or pierce it with his rifle or affixed bayonet-, I won't make much fun of his artistic capabilities because, I'm afraid, he might draw better than I. As I state in my blog's sidebar, I color manga panels partly because I can't draw a straight... or crooked... line for the love of it.

Sugimoto explains Ogata was in cahoots with Kiroranke -and as well as the readers, he doesn't how for how long-, shot him in the head in Abashiri Prison and then ran away taking Asirpa with him. Unlike their previous exchange, I can deduce Vasily didn't get a single word of any of it, as he mistakes Sugimoto's drawing of himself for a spider. And I must confess it took me some time to realize Sugimoto drew himself being shot: those tendril-like things sticking out of his head -that Vasily takes for a spider's legs, it seems- are meant to show the bullet's trajectory when impacting him. A parenthesis here: Let's just check Sugimoto's drawing of Ogata running away on horseback. I don't pretend to make fun of it, but I still find quite the noteworthy detail that he draws Ogata with an arrow sticking out of his right eye, and not sparing even the lock of hair that frames his face. Or at least, I'm assuming that's a lock of hair on Ogata's head. The caption Sugimoto writes in katakana reads, "Ogata escaped". That scene, may I add, has been a fan favorite -mine included- and a source of inspiration for many works in the Japanese fandom. Some speculative fanworks have to do with the circumstances Ogata runs away, and thus some fans have posed quite the questions, ranging from where he got that horse, to whether it didn't hurt too much to ride it in such conditions as, you might remember, he was wearing a hospital gown only and had no underwear to speak of. If you take a closer look at the panel, however, you'll notice Ogata is carrying a sack when he's riding away, implying he managed to gather his belongings and probably a couple more things for the road, and thus wouldn't be dying on us due to exposure or some painful horse riding to wherever it was he ran away .

Back to our amateur artists (because I'm assuming Vasily's main occupation revolves about being a sniper... with an eidetic memory for faces and some outstanding artistic talent as bonus) and resuming his recapping of the latter half of the manga and unabated by the debatable poor reception his drawing skills might be getting, Sugimoto explains Asirpa involuntarily shot an arrow that hit Ogata in the eye. Here comes a short passage -it's a single panel, in fact- that killed my Japanese pretty dead, so I wouldn't risk a translation of it... though I think, it seems to me, I could grasp that blah blah etc. etc., Sugimoto further and quite lively states Ogata's death would have "stained" Asirpa -meaning, would have dirtied her hands-, and thus he saved the wildcat because he'd do anything in his power to keep everything surrounding her pure for her sake. The actual word in Japanese he uses is 綺麗 (kirei), which you might know as meaning "cute" and "pretty", but it can also be understood in the sense of "clean", "pure" or "neat." Given Sugimoto literally uses 汚い (kitanai), "dirty", "unclean" or "foul" (used as a verb in this case) to describe how Ogata's death would have impacted Asirpa, I'm going with "pure" in my previous sentence. ...I'm aware my explanation of Sugimoto's statement makes it sound as though he's belittling saving Ogata, but I can reassure you that his lines are way more poetic and moving: it's just that my Japanese -and my English, come to that- is just that lacking, sorry about this! The scene is more moving because Asirpa arrives at the precise moment to hear Sugimoto's words, but he doesn't notice her.

The rest of the group arrives and cuts off Sugimoto and Vasily's artistically driven moment of plot exposition, though. And now, please allow me to state that God bless Tsukishima for being himself, acting as the sane man every story needs, accompanying the group in this journey, and knowing Russian, not in that particular order: I'm 100% convinced this manga wouldn't progress half as smoothly as it does weren't he around. And Tsurumi and Koito wouldn't be probably around either if he didn't have that presence of mind and swiftness of action, specifically when projectiles and explosions are involved. After Asirpa says she thinks Vasily was part of the group of men that ambushed them in the frontier, Tsukishima explains to him Kiroranke is already dead and Ogata ran away, his whereabouts unknown to them. Their only purpose in Karafuto was to find Asirpa and go back with her, he adds, and they have nothing to do with the Czar's assassination by the Partisans. Vasily says nothing in the metaphorical sense, as he keeps quiet and seems to accept the explanation. Now, and I've already written above, I've always complained about the GK cast for being this trusty and, let's say, think nothing of the repeated risk of a headshot by accepting in their ranks a traitorous character who left their previous party after shooting a couple people in the head, but I have to admit yet again the characters being this quick to understand, accept and come to terms with practically anything and everything does help move forward the plot. Very much so.

I wrote Vasily said nothing in the metaphorical sense because it's revealed -just as we were speculating- he can't speak due to the shot wounds he sustained during his duel with Ogata. Once outside, Shiraishi complains to him about shooting him; when our Escape King snaps whether he doesn't have anything to say or it's just that Russians don't know how to apologize (he literally asks whether there are no words for apologizing in Russian), Vasily shows him his face, prompting a reaction in Shiraishi that might make readers grateful we aren't shown the state of his lower face. Sugimoto comments at that moment he might not be able to speak due to those wounds. I was also wondering whether Vasily knew or at the very least could grasp a little Japanese. It seems to me he might not after all, as there are some panels throughout the chapter that show him with an interrogation mark -indicating he isn't understanding- when Sugimoto was talking to him. In the above panels as well, Tsukishima seems to be translating Shiraishi's complaints for him.

Just before the group resumes their journey, Shiraishi tells Vasily -in not so kind words- to go back to Russia, but he's shown to keep following them from a distance. Shiraishi ponders whether he doesn't believe Kiroranke is already dead, but Asirpa points out he used the back of Kiro's wanted poster to make some of his drawings, leading her to conclude he isn't interested in the latter anymore. As discussed by the our main protagonist trio, it seems Vasily is sticking to them under the belief they'll eventually cross paths with Ogata; as Sugimoto puts it, given he's still alive, he considers their snipers' duel to be not finished (I suppose a more poetic way to put it would be, "as long as he draws breath, he can keep fighting"). The immortal also thinks there's always the possibility of Ogata coming after them because of the Ainu gold, prompting Asirpa to wonder if that's actually his goal: let us not forget he showed quite the intent to kill her (chap.187) and thus, eliminate the one person who holds the key to solving the tattoo puzzle. A somewhat serious and pensive Sugimoto comments it might be that Ogata... is simply messing or toying around with them. Cue a full-page panel depicting a lynx (in Japanese, an ooyamaneko) crossing the path in the snowy forest. (I should point out I'm assuming it's a lynx because of its ears, making it very similar to the one shown in chap.169, vol.17.)

A not-so-random fan comment here: I always refer to Sugimoto as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer. Actually, I'd say he's the kind to smash the drawer against a wall and use the sharpest fragments of it to cut open whatever it is he might need cut, even if I'm compelled yet again to admit his approach, while not the most strategically planned, tends to work. But he also seems to be quite understanding of others in addition to his natural kindness, and it comes as not much of a surprise then that he could be the person with the better grasp at Ogata's personality. Or the only person who might have any grasp on it at all, in any case. I must say my opinion of Ogata's character pretty much coincides with that of Sugimoto as he stated it in chap.196 and now in this chapter: specifically, that Ogata doesn't have a particular motivation to act as he does (apart from being driven by the most negative and dangerous of his traits, of course). I think his character isn't meant to have any specific motivations or goals other than being chaotic for the sake of it; however, as Noda has given a background to every single recurrent and relevant character in the manga and spares no revelations for some of them no matter how far into the plot we might be (the most recent flashback regarding Koito's past should be an example), I can't discard the possibility of the author having in store some plot twist or equal revelation about Ogata.

Given Sofia is the only one who knows the truth now (I'm assuming here Sugimoto thinks Ogata might have sided with Kiroranke for a reason that lies with the Partisans' intentions), our immortal comments he'd liked to look for her. He's aware, though, that Tsukishima and Koito's mission was to find Asirpa and get back with her to Hokkaido, whereas Tanigaki joined in the entourage for the sake of the girl as well and thus, they should have no reason to pursue other ends at the time. They still stop by the lighthouse to hand Svetlana's letter to her parents, and just as the manga implies they won't be going after more subplots, Asirpa points out Sofia was planning to reunite with her comrades in the continent and then go back to Japan: she wouldn't just run away to Europe after everything that just happened.

Right in cue, Sofia meets Gansoku and Svetlana in a port town in Russia. Just as Gansoku seemed to be involved in yet another cathartic moment pummeling around men who can't put a dent on him, he's challenged by Sofia but refuses, stating he only fights other men. He's quick to change his mind and declare the world does have many surprises in store ("The world is so wide!") after Sofia not only punches him, but manages to get in quite the equal grounds with him. This yet again poses another question for me: given Gansoku is one of the toughest men in this story -in the strictest physical sense at the very least: we can't forget everything Nikaidou has gone through the manga, after all-, how come Sofia can beat him so badly? The obvious answer would be that Sofia happens to be just that tough -or the toughest woman of the Meiji era-, but since this is a Shueisha and a Jump-published manga, I also want to believe she might be using Haki to hit that hard. Just as Nami in One Piece, her blows manage to harm a man's heart and soul.

Before their fight can further escalate (but after Sofia has pulled off the almost obligatory Rip Open my Shirt scene, only that she isn't exactly wearing a shirt and the scene isn't that common when female characters are involved because of censorship), Svetlana intervenes and stops them, saying it'll be quite the problem for her if Sofia kills her bodyguard. Implying here she was at least sure of what the outcome of the fight would have been. The three of them have a talk then and Sofia invites Gansoku to join her, but he turns down the offer and explains both he and Svetlana intend to make their way to the west, to the cities where a larger population means a larger possibility to find stronger people (to beat the **** out of them in more cathartic instances, I'm presuming). As Svetlana asks Sofia where she's planning to go now, she replies that she's going to Hokkaido... for their hope and revenge.

I should note I'm not including any more panels of Sofia in this chapter because I'm assuming Tumblr would flag this entry otherwise. I was never told why they put my blog "under review" when I barely had any posts on it, so my best guess has to with an entry I wrote explaining about the terrorist groups that operated in my country. I made that post partly because to poke some fun at Sugimoto's wielding a hammer and a sickle in chap.145 (vol.15), and how that would have been merited a ban for this manga were some conservative Congressmen in my country to see the panels (the largest terrorist group operating in my country originally followed the Communist ideology). Well, as Sofia begins exchanging blows with Gansoku, she uncovers her torso and her breasts remain visible for the rest of the chapter, even when she's speaking with him and Svetlana in the freezing Russian landscape. Her breasts are so big, they cover part of the chapter's title in the last page... making me suspect Tumblr could flag this entry just because her nipples are equally big.

Some (more) fan comments on this chapter: The story is unfolding as I'd anticipated in a very broad way, as it seems Vasily will stick around with the group for at least some more chapters. While none has proposed an alliance, I don't think any will have any inconvenience cooperating with each other as long as their goals align: even if it's true Sugimoto's group isn't that elated at the possibility of meeting Ogata again, they're obviously expecting to cross paths with him in the future, and extra help is always welcomed. Specially if things come to a sniper against another sniper, I'd say: the manga is hinting at another confrontation between Vasily and Ogata. After all, Noda is a noteworthy narrator and all of his plot elements turn out to be relevant (even those related to food and cultural traditions which could have been seen at first as more trivia-informative to the reader than important to the plot), so I don't think he brought Vasily back to the story for no reason. Or just to show off Vasily's artistic talent, in any case, * ahem *. The plot would still have to take shape, but it seems to me all elements are aligning so that Noda can solve several pending subplots: Vasily's reappearance can tie up with the plot regarding the remaining member of the Partisans trio, Sofia, and also provides the proper scenario for Ogata to make it back to the story. It'd be a viable, solid and swift way to focus in the current open subplots before focusing on the main premise of the Ainu gold in Hokkaido.

I'd just speculate then about how soon the subplots would meet a resolution. I'm wondering whether we'll see the rest of this arc taking place in Karafuto, as Sugimoto's group has already made their way back to its southern region, whereas Sofia is in Russian soil, but making her way to Hokkaido. If Vasily doesn't have any trouble with following them to Hokkaido -given he's already in Japanese soil-, then I see no reason as to why the action might not unfold in the island that is the main stage of this manga, but I'm thinking this arc could wrap up while the group is still in Karafuto. We'd need to see at least one more chapter to see how things progress from this point on; unless Noda suddenly feels like jumping back to Hokkaido and showing us what Hijikata has been up to since vol.18 and whether Tsurumi reunited with his men already, with the arc “introduction“ over and the situation laid out to both the cast and the readers, chap.204 should serve as the starting point for the resolution of the current subplots.

My last fan comment of the entry has to do with Vasily. While I'm happy to see him back in the plot and sticking to the protagonist cast for the time being (and hoping he stays in the plot and with the cast for at least the remainder of this volume), his personality as shown in the current events has caught my attention. I wouldn't say he's that different or plain out-of-character in comparison to his first appearance in vol.17, but it's also true he now acts carefree enough as to join Sugimoto in a fanart-sharing moment, and is more emotional as opposed to his cool-headed demeanor during the ambush in the frontier. And adding to his minor hairstyle change, he also looks more youthful now, even if the only we get to see of his face are his eyes. We'd need to see more of him in upcoming chapters to have a better grasp at his character... but if you'd ask me, I'd say Noda has made some changes to his personality, or rather, is shaping his character in a different, though not drastic, way. Why? Well, it seems to me Vasily would fit our protagonist cast and all the weird things bound to happen in this convulsed Meiji era just fine and even better now; in comparison, the group he first appeared as part of acted colder, more focused and serious. Until we see more of him, I'm just going to assume Noda decided to give his character another direction because Tsukishima was plenty of a sane, serious man for the group. Any more sane men in the same group at the same time and I might begin doubting what happened to this manga.

[epicforblackmadonnas-blog]

The Break Down

I visited the birthplace of Hip Hop at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx, on a Friday afternoon.The neighborhood that birthed the genre is quiet, the building is tall and unassuming and nestled off the side of the highway. Few people are out, even mid day. The character of the neighborhood and it’s history are only made clear to me by the graffiti that laces the side of apartment buildings, flags that hang from windows, and the occasional car cruising by with it’s windows rolled down and the driver playing music. In the tight knit, neighborly community, everyone communes at the bus stop to pick up their children as they arrive from school.   I can understand how only about 50 years ago a genre grew infectious among this small community at block parties and neighborhood gatherings and eventually spread to other parts of the borough, city and world. According to data and statistics from market.com Hip Hop and Rap is one of the most popular genres of music in the past 10 years only falling behind pop and classic rock. The genre is especially popular among millenials (16-24 year olds), data from statista.com illustrates that Hip Hop/Rap is the second most popular genre of music for that age demographic. Like with most media, music has both indirect and direct influence over it’s consumers. Hip Hop is no different. This essay will explore the ways in which Hip Hop and beauty standards overlap and the effect on it’s consumers, particularly black femmes.        Hip Hop began in the Bronx, in the late 1970s. The genre was one that initially only included male artists until MC Lyte’s debut album release of Lyte as a Rock in 1988. Lyte was a pioneer for women in the genre and culture and created space for other Black female MCs within the genre. Contrary to modern day Hip Hop and beauty ideals, MC Lyte was said to have purposely worked to separate her image from her sound or appeal to her music. She “underplayed her beauty, without hiding it, because she was so determined to be respected as an artist and a person.” (hiphoparchive) While Black women became more prevalent and visible in Hip Hop as both Muses (in music videos) and rappers, the sexualization of Black women within the Genre also became more present. In the late 90s early 2000s, sex became ingrained in Hip Hop culture, this of course had an effect on the community of Black women looking to infiltrate it. Rappers like Lil’ Kim embraced their sexuality and were embraced by the Hip Hop community (but ultimately were still met with unattainable standards of beauty). Black women looking to be embraced by the culture but didn’t fit the expectation beauty put forth, sought other means of fulfilling Black beauty standards, like cosmetic surgery. A study published by the US library of Medicine National Institutes of Health depicts and discusses the increase in cosmetic surgeries from the year of 2006 to 2007. The most popular procedure among the Black community in that year was a Rhinoplasty (nose job). In recent years liposuction, breast augmentations and buttock enhancements like augmentations or lifts have increased. In her article “Are Beauty Standards Pushing Black Women Into Dangerous Back-Alley Surgeries?” Health journalist Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez says that the increase in the procedures in the Black community come from “the extreme societal pressure put on Black women to have an hourglass figure.” what she regards as the “ideal Black body type.”    Body type aside the Hip Hop community has also put forth ideals about hair type and skin tone within the Black community. An article on BET.com features some of the most forward lyrics by Rappers that blatantly express their preference or profess their love for lighter skinned women. On Eric Benet’s song “Red Bone Girl” Lil Wayne raps “I like them light skin, lighter than a feather/ And if she red hot, I’m biting that pepper.” The article also features a Travis Scott Lyric “Nothin' like the light-skinned mamacitas in H-Town /They got them pornstar big booties” which both glorifies women with lighter skin and sexualizes women with “big booties”. In a controversial 1997 cover story by Black feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks for Paper Magazine Kim. One of hook’s most notable pieces is Gangsta rap and the piano where she compares white maleness of Steward a possessive and predatorial male love interest of a mute woman named Ava in the movie, his presence strips her of her artistic dedication to playing the piano, sex becomes what takes precedence over her music. Yet their love is seen as non threatening, “natural” as hooks puts it. Where Black men in Hip Hop are considered misogynist and murderers so as depicted by white critics of the culture for rapping about these same sexual desires and committing the same offenses as white men. Hooks also points out that when critiqued for the culture of violence portrayed in gangsta rap, white critics don’t consider Blackness within the context of white supremacy. Hooks speaks to this when she writes  “To see gangsta rap as a reflection of dominant values in our culture rather than as an aberrant "pathological" standpoint does not mean that a rigorous feminist critique of the sexism and misogyny expressed in this music is not needed. Without a doubt black males, young and old, must be held politically accountable for their sexism. Yet this critique must always be contextualized or we risk making it appear that the behaviors this thinking supports and condones,--rape, male violence against women, etc.-- is a black male thing. And this is what is happening. Young black males are forced to take the "heat" for encouraging, via their music, the hatred of and violence against women that is a central core of patriarchy.”     In Paper Magazine Lil’ Kim speaks on her sexual image and music from an empowerment perspective. When hooks asks about her right to be a sexual being, with sexual desire, Kim’s response is about letting go of shame and taking ownership, when she says "We havin' sex. Tell whoever — make sure you tell 'em how good I did it!" Kim says she represents both, the liberated woman and the sexy girl of men’s dreams when asked. In many ways she was right her image became the quintessential image for Black femmes both in and outside of the Genre. Petite, yet curvy, skin that was a palatable brown tone and long straight dark hair. With this, even she had insecurities projected on her by men and the genre, she says in the interview she is still rebuilding her self esteem. Fast forward to modern day hip hop, between MC Lyte and Cardi B. Hip Hop is more forward than ever about who and what is beautiful, sexy, attractive, desirable. Especially in the age of social media. Data from smartinsights.com shows the growth of visual based social media platforms like instagram and snapchat among the millennial demographic. According to the data half of instagram’s users use the app daily and according to mediakix.com 50 million followers are maintained by the top 10 beauty instagram influencers,  meaning that, on the platform millions of people see their posts informing beauty standards daily. Black beauty standards are also informed by Hip Hop when taste makers of the culture   choose spouses who they go public with. Rapper, Kanye West for instance who is one of the most talked about artists in the genre right now, has used his brand to leverage his socialite wife Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian is a white woman who has often come under fire for appropriating Black culture, emulating Black features and profiting from it. While Black women who boast these same features naturally, are ostracized and even systematically discriminated against for these same things. Kardashian posed for the winter 2014 issue of Paper Magazine and the picture on the cover of the issue bore a striking resemblance to photos taken of a former slave and south african woman named Saartjie Baartman who was recruited and exploited by a white German man to be a spectacle for masses throughout Europe showing her nude body, special attention was brought to her large buttocks. In the picture Kim Kardashian mimics this by poking her own surgically enlarged butt out. Baartman’s naked body was a source of curiosity for Europeans, sometimes she was asked to perform native dances or play instruments while nude for audiences according to TIME. Kendall Jenner sister of Kim Kardashian has also been scrutinized for appropriating and benefitting from Black culture and emulating Black beauty standards. Jenner much like her elder sister, dates another Black rapper, Travis Scott, according to statista.com she follows close behind her older sister Kim, with the 7th most instagram followers in the world. She is known for her beauty brand Kylie Cosmetics that is most notable for its lip kits, that include a variety of lip glosses, sticks and liners. However, her marquee feature, her lips are cosmetically enhanced to emulate the features of Black women. While Black women have been ostracized for having large lips, the personality’s lips and lip kits have launched her to the top of the Forbes celebrity 100 after just three years of business according to the site, Jenner grossed almost a billion dollars. Many rappers and other taste makers in the culture (i.e. DJs, Hosts, Record executives, producers etc.) date women who fit into the ideal mold of Black beauty standards which according to Hip Hop Historian and Podcaster Byron Morgan includes being shaped similarly to a barbie doll in stature, with large breast, a large butt but a contrasting small waist. Rapper Merci D of rap trio Blemme says these same standards of beauty include Fair skin and eurocentric facial features like a narrow nose, smaller eyes and full but not oversized lips. The image of the most beautiful woman to hip hop is a woman who is not “too imposing” the rapper said in our interview. In 2016 Hip Hop producer Swizz Beatz posted a post VMA photo of he and other Hip Hop moguls Jay Z, Steve Stoute, Kanye West and Diddy with their wives/partners after the Video Music Awards. This photo perfectly illustrates that the features both Morgan and D refer in our interviews are necessary to be considered beautiful by the culture. When the photo first surfaced some took to the comments to point out the stark difference between the skin tones of these men and their wives. One comment read “Beautiful pic. Interesting that it’s mostly dark-skinned black guys with light-skinned women. We’ve come so far in the black community.” and ended with a thinking emoji. The women in the photo from Alicia Keys all the way down to Cassie fit into the aforementioned ideal beauty standard. Comments like the one under that photo that Swizz Beatz posted are much like comments other rappers and Hip Hop influencers have received when expressing a dislike or distaste for women who are conversely dark-skinned, with coarser textured hair, are fat or not coke bottle shaped, with wide noses and thick lips, women who are undeniably black and are not ambiguous as rapper Merci D put it. This younger generation of rappers has been unapologetic about their dislike for Black women, especially darker-skinned Black women. Rappers like Kodak Black and ASAP Rocky have made comments in recent years about dark-skinned Black women that fueled anger among many. In an interview with The Coveteur in 2013 rapper ASAP Rocky said that women had to be “fair skinned” to “get away with” wearing red lipstick. Rocky’s interview has since been removed from the site, however, his original remark can be found here. That comment from the interview with the site spurred many hateful memes about the subject matter. One meme portrays Black women as the character Mr.Popo from Dragon Ball Z a character that is literally the color black with bright red lips, who don’s a turban and gold hoop earrings. The meme reads “when darkskin girls put on red lipstick.”  A quick twitter search of “darkskin girls red lipstick” yields some pretty disturbing search results one tweet remarked “Dark skin girls with red lipstick give me nightmares.” Similarly Kodak Black took to an instagram live stream in 2017 where he remarked I dont really like Black girls like that sorta kinda after the backlash he received for his initial comments on the subject matter he responded by saying he only likes “red bones, he doesn’t like Black b------, like this” the rapper says as he gestures at his own skin, he only likes “yellow h---.” (6/26/17). Many took to the internet to say that the Rapper’s dating preferences were a reflection of self hate. What I would like to consider is how instances like the ones above and others, pressure Black women to conform to the standards of beauty that were previously outlined. In my interview with Merci D she states explicitly that getting a Brazilian Butt Lift and a breast augmentation are at the top of her list in terms of physical desires when she strikes big with music or writing, she also remarks that this desire could be rooted in the fact that she’s seeing women with these enhancements frequently in mainstream media and in the culture. The rapper also details the ways she feels pushed outside of the mold of ideal Black beauty standards due to her size. She says that at her first Kiki ball she didn’t feel completely comfortable because of the fact that she was fat and because she felt as if her expression of femininity wasn’t fully appreciated. Singer\songwriter K Michelle and even rappers like the esteemed Lil’ Kim are great Black women celebrity examples of how the negative effects of the pressures to be a “Beautiful” Black woman can be unsafe and detrimental to not only their self esteem but physical health. K. Michelle went on the talk show the real to talk about the state of her health following her enhancements to her buttocks. The songstress said “I’m having trouble with men right now, I thought maybe if I had a big ol’ a huge butt I’d get even bigger love.” She says she also got work done on her teeth and hips. The pain from complications of her buttocks surgeries even caused her to get checked for lupus. In the interview Michelle sympathizes with women who have gotten the same enhancement and are similarly having complications due to them but may not have the money to seek removal or help as she did. Rapper Lil’ Kim has been forthcoming about her love for plastic surgery and over the years she has grown to look much different from when debuted in the 90s. In 2016 when the rapper made an appearance on the reality show Love and Hip Hop fans and spectators made comments about the stark difference in skin color and facial features, comments accused the rapper of bleaching her skin. Although the rapper denied these allegations, the incident caused comments made by the rapper in the 2000 in Newsweek to resurface in the Newsweek article she  remarked “Guys always cheated on me with women who were European-looking. You know, the long-haired type. Really beautiful women [who] left me thinking, ‘How I can I compete with that?’ Being a regular black girl wasn’t good enough.” Through my interviews with Black Hair Specialist/Scholar Kameesha Tate, Rapper/Storyteller Merci D, Musician/Multi-instrumentalist Tyrone Wilkins Jr., and Hip Hop Historian/Podcaster Byron Morgan and  I also heard about the ways that these harmful standards of beauty birthed movements of resistance and self-love. The natural hair and body positivity movements were heavily referenced in my interviews with those listed above. As Tate stated in her interview the natural hair movement was born of the Black is Beautiful and Black power movements of the 60s. In the PBS documentary Black is Beautiful historian Tricia Rose says the the “Black is Beautiful Movement was an effort to sort of throw off the shackles of the way White supremacy constructed Black bodies they’re not as intelligent, they’re not human, they’re not as beautiful, they’re not valuable she also said that in order “to undo that one has to directly attack that ideology.” Which Tate elaborated more on in  my interview where she details her big chop and embracing of her natural hair despite negative comments from people some of whom were even her family, she says that the natural hair movement is about black women embracing their natural hair which is inherently political, because it can often be a matter of of contention in places of employment and schools. Merci D referenced Fatima Jamal, fatfemme on instagram as a source of inspiration and for being encouraged to accept her own body through being encourage to wear what she wants by the model. She says she’s witnessed Jamal embrace her body by wearing “dainty” and “feminine” clothes that hug curves that aren’t celebrated like her stomach. According to ThePerspective.com, the body positivity movement was founded in 1996 and encouraged self love and self acceptance as opposed to shame about one’s body and getting rid self imposed food restrictions.

[weecb1983]

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation…

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation…

 O would, or I had seen the day

That treason thus could sell us,

My auld gray head had lien in clay,

Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!

But pith and power, till my last hour,

I'll mak' this declaration;

We're bought and sold for English gold -

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

 Interpretation of poetry has never been my strong point, but I’d hazard a guess that The Bard was pretty pissed off when he wrote these words.  More than 200 years later, I have to wonder – are we still a “parcel of rogues in a nation”?

 I started off 2019 with two resolutions:

1.     Don’t worry about things until they happen

2.    Stop tweeting

 I lasted until the 2nd of January before I came across a tweet from the Scotsman…”End indyref2 talk in 2019, campaigners TELL @NicolaSturgeon” and felt compelled to retweet with a sarcastic comment and a bemused emoji. Fast forward a few hours and I’m awake at 3am, anxious about the state of the country and a Brexit that hasn’t happened yet.

Earlier in the year, to relieve my anxiety, the “other half” begrudgingly agreed to me stockpiling food.  So I set about compiling a “Brexit Cupboard” filled with pasta, rice and other staples from the continent such as olive oil and sundried tomatoes that may be hard to come by in the even a no-deal Brexit scenario.  I received a lot of stick for this from friends and family, who suggested that I was catastrophising and perhaps I had too much time on my hands, being on maternity leave at the time.  It was time I went back to work.

 Brexit cupboard ready to go, I still find myself awake at stupid o’clock in the morning, so in another attempt to get a decent night’s sleep I thought I’d try to take the thoughts that are troubling me and put them down on paper….

 Back in 2014 when Scotland voted No, I was heartbroken but I understood and accepted the result.  I don’t blame my friends and family who voted No (openly).  Initially, my gut reaction was No.  It was a risk, but I decided that since it was such a serious decision, I should partake in some research.  I had never been interested in politics before and, prior to 2013, wasn’t even registered to vote.  Coming from a predominantly socialist family, I was conscious that my vote should be an informed decision and not based on what those around me thought.  The more I read, the more convinced I was that Scotland should be independent, and the more incensed I became that we weren’t already.

 I joined Twitter, entered into discussion with “Unionists”, asking questions and looking for a reason as to why Scotland should remain as part of the UK. I am still looking.  For one single reason.  Instead I have received nothing but condescending replies, questioning my intelligence and level of education, or lack thereof.  One lovely chap asking, “not very bright are you?”. Regarding the ever divisive topic of Scottish Independence, polite discourse quickly descends into “sharing and pooling” and “fiscal transfer” and “go away, you don’t understand”.  I’ve tried with GERS.  I really have, and I don’t think it’s that GERS figures are beyond the comprehension of the average “cybernat”.  Just that they are far too dull to hold the attention of all but the most dogged “Britnat”, who would rather see Scotland burn to the ground than be independent (they might get their wish come April).  They wait eagerly for “GERS-figures day” every year and, like a dog with a bone, rip them to shreds and shout “See!  They are your own government’s figures and they show that Scotland is too wee, too poor!  Get back in your box”.  From what I can understand, these figures are based on Scotland being part of the so-called “United” Kingdom and can’t be used to predict what an independent Scotland would look like so I really don’t see what all the hoo-hah is about to be honest.

 Sometimes I think, in an alternative universe, where Scotland voted Yes four years ago, what would my unionist friends and family think if the country was in the state that it is now?  I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be biting their tongue, going by the continuous loop of “SNP-bad” rhetoric that still prevails, despite none of this current shit-show being of their doing.

 Looking at the state of affairs, it is extremely disturbing to see what people will accept nowadays.  If you had told me four years ago that the UK would be stockpiling food and medicine, preparing the army for civil unrest and that Schrödinger’s drones would cause Gatwick airport to grind to a halt, I would have said, no one in their right mind would vote for that….but then again, they didn’t put that on the big red bus.

 Credit where it’s due to the Westminster establishment, they have been extremely clever in this respect.  Of course it would never have worked to put “Vote for martial law” on the bus!  Instead, over two years they have, little by little, gone from “£350 million for the NHS!” to “a no-deal scenario wouldn’t be the end of the world” with Westminster’s very own resident hobbit Michael Gove kindly suggesting that we allow people to scavenge on rubbish heaps.  Even better, it will give us a chance to go back to the good old days of the Blitz when everyone pulled together.  To anyone who says that, I say, get yourself down a trench during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  I visited the WW1 battlefields in 2015 after 97 years of peace, and it was traumatising enough.

 To anyone who is (even now!) unsure about whether Brexit is all bad, I simply say, look at who supports it…for the love of God!  Imagine, stumbling across a party and looking around to see Boris Johnson, Hobbit Gove, Nigel Farage, Andrea Leadsom, Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, John Redwood, Vladimir Putin and last but by no means least, the smiling assassin, Jacob Rees-Mogg and his fellow Dickensian panto-villain Julia Hartley-Brewer (never trust anyone with a double-barrelled surname).  I would be turning on my heel and getting out of that place before they started burning £50 notes (or as it will be known post-brexit…$5,000,000).

 I happen to think Theresa May herself would also be at that party.  I am not for a minute buying that she was ever a Remainer.  I reckon her husband (senior executive at an investment fund that profits from tax-avoiding companies) would stand to lose a pretty penny from the EU’s Anti Tax Avoidance Directive which was presented on 28th January 2016 (!) and requires its member states to apply these measures as of 1st January 2019…3 months before the Brexit deadline.  Coincidence?  No deal has always been the end goal and who better to run down the clock than the cringe-worthy curtseying Theresa May who campaigned so emphatically for Remain? Theresa May, who is trying to broker a deal that is best for the WHOLE country and one that supports the democratic vote…the last democratic vote you’ll ever have, by the way.  Because now democracy means that when you voted once, based on an illegal campaign that no-one has been held accountable for, you are no longer entitled to change your mind because that is what democracy means now. Is Theresa May the Keyser Söze of Westminster?  Albeit her daft walk at the end is to the tune of Abba?  Is she that clever and forward-thinking to have orchestrated this whole clusterbourach?

 No, she is merely a puppet and her strings are being pulled by disaster capitalists who know exactly what they are doing.  They will have prepared for every eventuality.

 Panto villain Mogg has been popping his polite, well-spoken, over-privileged and under-achieving head up recently to air his views whenever he can on the main-stream media.  I noted that he voiced his support of the late Margaret Thatcher featuring on the new £50 note.  Margaret Thatcher, who was a known admirer of General Pinochet.

 This is a quote from Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine:

 “The British prime minister was well acquainted with what she called “the remarkable success of the Chilean economy”, describing it as a “striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons”.  Yet despite her admiration for Pinochet, when Hayek first suggested that she emulate his shock therapy policies, Thatcher was far from convinced.  In February 1982, the prime minister bluntly explained the problem in a private letter to her intellectual guru.  “I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.  Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution.  At times the process may seem painfully slow.”

 I wonder if 30 odd years is slow enough and I think by “quite unacceptable”, she means this…

 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-pinochet-affair-i-saw-them-herded-to-their-death-i-heard-the-gunfire-as-they-died-1179543.html

Make no mistake, this is a right-wing coup.  It’s just that it’s being carried out in an orderly fashion – the British way.

 No one wants to talk about Brexit anymore.  The majority of the people in my life are completely ignorant about the consequences of a no-deal scenario, blissfully so, and encourage me to join them. The apathy shown towards the biggest political disaster to happen to this country in living memory is beyond my comprehension.  So half the country is sleepwalking and half have just about reached Brexit saturation point and all the time we are being nudged, slowly towards the edge of the cliff. ….and when we’re pushed over the edge, there will be Sajid Javid waiting on an armed boat shouting “CRISIS! - NO MIGRANTS ALLOWED!”.  The neoliberals stand to make a tidy profit while the country is reeling from the chaos that would inevitably ensue from a No-deal. We can look forward to the swift privatisation of our Health Service, abolition of the welfare state, chlorinated chicken, etc.

 In 2014, Scottish independence was about hope and the ability to control our own affairs.  Now, it’s about the survival of our democracy.  If Scotland is not independent come March 29th 2019, I predict that, freed from the burden of EU laws, Westminster will adopt Henry VIII powers to abolish the devolved parliaments.  It has already shown what it is capable of, and its contempt of the Scottish parliament, by taking them to court over the Continuity Bill.  Scotland has barely been mentioned throughout the Brexit “negotiations” and has been disregarded and disrespected at every turn.  We are absolutely not, as was promised, “Better Together”. Independence is the only option now and I, for one, hope to begin 2020 as part of an independent Scotland with my human rights still intact.

 However, if anyone is reading this in a post-Brexit version of “The Handmaid’s Tale”….nothing to see here!  All left-wing views out the window.  God save the Queen.

[plumprussianpiglets]

The Legend of Neesan

Liam Neeson  (Neesan) was a sensitive soul. A man blessed with a native irish accent, unfortunately sounding like a cheap rasping third rate imitation. You see, it was not poor Neesan’s fault that he could not muster his own sweet brogue. Neesan felt himself severing from the spirit of the emerald Isles, and had grown nervous and scared to speak his native tongue. Imbued with insecurity, he spent weeks wrapped in a duvet sobbing and watching classis irish films like... Anyway. He spent this time morose, yet contemplative. He wracked his mind for the answer, his thought plagued with nothing else. 

One night while warming some hot milk, he got it. A voicebox. Neesan cackled gleefully as he pondered his scheme, how those critics would fall to their knees with prostration of error. He sent his minions at once to work, to fetch him his prized career saving auditory gold. His minions were sent to only the finest larynx outfitters, but they spent all of poor Neeson’s money on crack and got him some voice boxes from the car boot sale. You see, it began with Mandela. Mandela had always rejected Neeson, sexually and spiritually, finding him to be, in Mandela's words not mine, 'the most repugnant shit in the entire world', but Neeson had viewed Mandela as a tough nut to crack, a tease, a flirt. Neeson knew Mandela wanted it, Mandela just wasn't aware of it yet. Neeson had hit that sexy apartheid fighting slut with all his most sensual of charms. He couldn't understand why his smile seemed to have no positive effect on Mandela, infact, Neeson recalled how Mandela had promptly expelled fluids from both ends repeatedly and with a stench straight from hell to accompany. Neeson just didnt understand. He gazed like a proud gazelle into the distance, hungry for the truth searching for answers with every thought that pulsated through him, pondering the complexity and decisiveness of the situation, the mystery that was Mandela. 

Neeson vowed he'd have Mandela- he wasn't used to being rejected like this. Plus as we all know, Neeson has had designs on South Africa since he aligned with Gillette and time travelled with dire consequences (see Volume 4: origin of the smile) so Mandela was a target he couldn't ignore. Plus that tight little ass on him made Neeson froth at the mouth and howl like an angry weasel into the moon's depths. Neeson had a plan. Knowing he could trust his beloved minions with his business given their intense psychological fear of him, he sent them out to find a south african voice box. 'Get a south african voice box from the same series the others came in, whatever boxset it was, those others are simply divine minions, simply divine.' His minions glanced at eachother, their faces ones of sheer disbelief, an expression almost permanently fixed on these poor minions mugs ever since coming into Neeson's employment. His minions watched as he swarthed around in his robes, preening and changing his voice boxes. 'God, i'm gorgeous' he mused as he caught his smiling face in the mirror. The mirror proceeded to crack and shatter, and with that his minions ran off into the night before Neeson's cries enveloped them. After all, they had some crack and a budget south african voice box to buy. 

Neeson paced his halls, thinking of his conquest of Mandela. A maniacal laugh escaped his lips as he trembled with glee, shaking and snorting and howling he didnt notice his robes getting caught on his hot wheels set and promptly fell down his sixty story staircase shrieking. Neeson wasn't having a good day. Soon he'd make Mandela his though, he thought grinning, the blood pooling in the corner of his mouth. He knew the voice box would be the key, that sultry, sensual, sexy south African drawl... his cock hardened just thinking about it, he knew it was the final piece of the Mandela puzzle, and he, Liam Neeson's acquisition of further power! Curling up like a snake, he dozed off where he had landed on the floor, snoring and drooling and murmering about Mandela's tight asshole as he slumbered. 

The morning came, and with it brought the influx of minions, spent from their crack binge and with a shitty cracked pirate south african voice box in tow.

 'He'll never know the difference, Neeson's eyes aint too sharp anymore after his stint in Iraq you know...' a minion laughed , pushing open the door, only to be met with the sight of Neeson lying on the ground, pools of sticky crimson surrounding him. 

'NEESONS DEED MATE! HES FUCKIN DEED! SOUND OUT THE BELLS, PRAISE ONE OR MORE OF YOUR GODS LADS, THE TYRANT HAS FALLEN!' the minions celebrated and cheered, embracing one another and crying with joy. Neeson's reign was over! Amongst the happy chatter though, they didn't hear the light breathing... Neeson was listening. His lips curved menacingly as he began to smile, a small laugh escaping him. 'G-g-guys? Can you... can you feel that?... the air just... changed. I can feel an icy coldness in my bones... Its almost as though pure evil just walked into the room... Like the devil himsel- OH FUCK ITS NEESON! NEESONS ALIVE!' 

Neeson has locked eyes with the minion, smiling as he did, and like a viper, he jumped effortlessly into stance. 

'Well well WELL boys, celebrating my death were we? Planning on getting a nice big cake? A celebratory pie binge at Mrs Miggin's Cafe? A communal nineway to truly set the news off with a bang? Hurhurhurhurur...' Neeson glared at his minions, laughing hysterically, his head thrown back in manic shoulder heaving guffaws. 

His minions looked at one another uneasily. They knew what Neeson could do. One Minion, Meen-yon, smiled to himself quietly. He'd kept himself at the back of the troop, but now came forward to meet Neeson eye to eye. 

'You're all washed up Neeson! We've got the youth and the ninja skills to take you down old man. There's only one of you, and nine of us, I don't like those odds for you Neeson. Perhaps my courage to stand against you will motivate the others to stand alongside me, eternally bound in the quest for noble revenge, I will avenge the souls you have wronged NEEEEEEEEESAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!' Neeson pinged the cuban cigar he had acquired from nowhere.

 'FUCKINNNN MOAAAANNNNN THENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!' he shrieked, and with that, double back-flipped the entire length of the sixty story flight of stairs in one swift swoop. 

'My god, are the legends true!? He's a demon, a demon!' screamed one of Neeson's crack addled minions. 

'OH. YOU'RE NOT WRONG THERE.' came a booming tone from the darkness. 

The minions eyes darted around... Neeson could be anywhere in the inky darkness that stretched out seemingly for miles before them, Swallowing hard, the ballsy minion that confronted Neeson cautiously moved forward.

 'You're done for ya auld git. let the new blood take over the power of the Smile! You're nothing but a husk Neeson, A HUS-’ 

‘AAAAAAAAAIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!' Neeson shot down from the impenetrable darkness and engulfed the minion in his cloak, as he swooped upwards once more, an audible crack was heard as the minions neck broke under Neeson's strength. 

'MUWHUAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHWAHWHHWEHWEHEHWHAHHHEWHEHWEHHH' echoed around the dark hall. 'Come little minions, I've got a date with Mandela and this is taking up my beautifying time, LETS END THIS NOW!' And with a final lunge from the upstairs chandelier, Neeson descended 100 feet in as many microseconds, swirling in a vortex of Neeson Power.

 'ILL SHOW YOU WHAT THIS OLD MAN CAN DO, BOAYZ!' And with that, Neeson was unleashed. Grabbing as many minions as he could at once by the hair, he emulated his favourite fighter with a hammerthrow takedown. Dear Agatha Trunchbull. He grabbed at any hair he could, and with his intense Neeson-strength began spinning at lightspeed, becoming nothing but a blur of a smile and a wink as his minions flew around, screaming as their hair pulled at the roots, leaving bloodied clumping masses on the floor, the scarlet fluid cascading everywhere as no features other than Neeson's smile could be distinguished in the swirling chaos, only the blood spatters that stained the surrounding area were visible. 

'I CALL THIS ONE THE MATILDA FUCKER LADS!' he cackled as he sent them crashing through the walls of his fortress, dead on impact with the force of hitting the stone. Blood seeped down Neeson's face as he cackled, hands filled with two thirds of his minions hair. He laughed as the balding corpses lay twitching, wishing to butter their heads, but now was not the time. He adjusted his leather coat and shades inexplicably acquired in the fighting process and spun round, searching for the voice box amongst the fallen. 

'Not so fast, Neeson.' Neeson's heart skipped a beat. All his minions were eliminated, were they not? And he was really going to have to quicken pace if he wanted time for his seaweed mud mask to take effect. Sighing, Neeson swiveled his head around 360 degrees with a horrific snap to meet the face of his foe. The minion that had given him the auld cheek stood before him, dangling the voice box in front of neeson and sucking hard on his crack pipe like he was the only choirboy in the vatican.

 'Looking for this, Neeson? Its your only method of getting Mandela getting hooked on your cock... I know all about your plans you idiot, you would tell us all, loudly and proudly about your evil schemes. Guess that's coming to bite you on your decrepit old ass now huh Neeson. I wonder what would happen if I just...-' before Neeson could spring into action, his natural cat like agility in full swing, the minion spewed out his own voice box and quick as a flash, inserted Neeson's only South African voice box deep into his larynx. An explosion of purple smoke enveloped the two at that time, the wind howled and Neeson could, if he was not mistaken, detect some ominous string section, which meant evil was afoot, of course. The smoke cleared slowly, Neeson had been thrown off his feet into a nearby painting of himself. 

'I am a GOD' he thought as he emerged from his behind his ripped canvas smile. 

'YOU GIVE ME THAT VOICE BOX BACK, REGARDLESS, ITS THE END FOR YOU, BOY, MY IRISH CHARMS CAN STUN A MAN AT FIFTY PACES-' 

'FUCK AFFF NEESON! FUCK AFFFFF! THE SOUTH AFRICAN VOAAAWCEE BOAAAXXX HAS GIVEN ME THE POWERS I NEED TO DESTROY YOU ONCE AND FOR ALL!' Neeson casually lit up the minions crack pipe, and with a bow of his head uttered, 'Lets do it, ya jive ass MUTHAFUCCKAAAAAAAAAAAAA!' The two launched themselves at eachother with a ferocity only seen in the finest of gay pornographic films. Neeson flung the crack pipe expertly at the minion, severing his left ear in one swift strike. 'That was a truly CRACK-ing shot wasn't it?' Neeson howled to himself, tears streaming down his face. The minion clawed at the floor, pulling himself up with a roar. 

'I WONT LET YOU WIN NEESON, FUCK AFFFFFFFFF!' and with a leap, proceeded to downwards headbutt Neeson. 'Oh you fool!' shrieked Neeson mirthily. 'You forget, us Neeson's are made of stone after all!' the minions skull cracked instantaneously upon impact, sending a spike of pain throughout his entire body. His face contorted, teeth shattered, blood staining every pore, he lay on the ground next to Neeson catching his breath. Was Neeson truly unstoppable? No, he couldnt be... But his power, his skill, his strength, his overpowered nature... Could it be... COULD IT BE NEESON WAS... IMMORTAL!?!?' With a wink, Neeson, cloaked in all his full glory bend down over his mangled minion. A fire burned in his eyes, and with one swift motion proceeded to shove his fist into the minions mouth and dislodge the precious South African voice box. Neesons eyes bubbled with tears as he swallowed the device, contemplating his final acquistion of Mandela. His vanity got the better of him as he preened and swooned at the prospect. 

'Naoowww minion, how do I sound? Shexehh baybeeh?' 

'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NEESON, NEESON IT SOUNDS... IT SOUNDS TERRIBLE, MY EARS BLEED, PLEASE GOD WHY, WHY WOULD SUCH A CREATURE EXIST TO MASSACRE ACCENTS THE WAY HE DOES, NEESON, NEESON YOU ARE... TRULY EVIL!' the minion writhed on the floor, the sound unbearable. Neeson's face dropped as he stifled a small cry. 'How... dare. you.' Neeson shook with rage. The half dead minion could see something swelling up inside of him, an attack so potent, so powerful, he would surely destroy everything in the surrounding area. His face contorted, smoke shot from his eyes as his entire body became framed with a firey ring. 'Say goodbye, minion' and in that instance, Neeson shot out a smile so warped, so vile, so disgusting and hideous, the enitre room sighed 'NEESON' in hushed demonic tones. A shadow erupted from his hingin' agape mouth and swirled around Neeson, protecting him so the Smile could do its work. The minion shrieked in horror as he witnessed Neeson's smile contort and twist in ways he had never seen before. His entire body felt stiff, and as Neeson continued to grin like a broken madman, the minion turned to stone. Neeson continued to smile to himself, marvelling at his fine work. And with a last look at himself in the mirror, went to find Mandela to turn on the old Neeson charm.