#evil illusions

[tobiasdrake]

My understanding of evil, age 0-10: MY NAME IS SMOG SMOKESLY AND I RUN THE POLLUTION FACTORY, IT PRODUCES POLLUTION!!! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

My understanding of evil, in my teens: You can't really boil things down to good and evil. People are complicated. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and someone who seems evil to you is actually doing their best from their own perspective. If you could walk a mile in their shoes, you'd understand. There is no such thing as evil.

My understanding of evil, in my twenties: Look, it's basically just tribalism. We are all necessarily thrust into competition with one another. There are always going to be winners and losers. Whining about evil is just being upset that you lost the game.

My understanding of evil, in my thirties: MY NAME IS SMOG SMOKESLY AND I RUN THE POLLUTION FACTORY, IT PRODUCES POLLUTION!!! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

[rozugold]

People were booping the pi blog

[myokk]

first dada class😳✨

[beedalee]

"this was supposed to be a warm-up" drawing of my V Rising-sona. I called her Moonlight to go with naf's Sunset. it's a fun game!!! 🦇

[potatounicoorn]

Ninjago but it's Wu getting grayer hair because Lloyd is a supernatural 9y prat (like father like son <3)

[icewindandboringhorror]

Some fantasy traveler inventory details (like what they would carry in their bags), based on two of the recent costumes I did.. love finding random little scraps and items and putting them together lol

[dykedvonte]

wanted to say I appreciate your nuanced takes on MW and especially Curly. i don't get the claim that the fandom is full of Curly apologists when majority (esp yt and tiktok) say he's worse than Jimmy. Yes there's commentary about bro culture defending people, he def messed up in trying to placate Jimmy (tbh "we'll fix this" sounded more like trying to keep someone prone to outbursts like Jim calm and not hurt Anya/himself) but I don't think he did nothing to help Anya, since she continued to confide in him and he had less than a week to resolve it before the crash (I also don't get everyone saying he knew for ages when it seems like Anya told him that same week). I get Jimmy's a pos but saying stuff like Curly should've known he'd crash the ship or that Jim had a criminal record he ignored, reducing them to obviously horrible villain and willfully ignorant sidekick feels like a disservice to the game. If your best friend turned out to be horrible, what would you do in a confined space in the span of a few days to respond? I'd say some of the horror comes from trying to do good but ultimately failing, Curly's state after the crash is meant to be tragic horror not revenge/punishment

Thank you and this is what I want to get across.

A lot of information we have to supplement when it comes to how long things have been happening on this current ship. I think people try to add on to the horror and negligence by making things more obvious so it can feel like it was easier to avoid when, true to life, its not. Jimmy clearly didn't deserve or appreciate what Curly did for him in getting him the job, but do you think if Jimmy was that big of a menace on Earth he would've given him a position where he could have that level of power over people's lives? There's something in the fact he specifically chose to pick a position so close to himself where he could watch Jimmy.

I hate the bro code argument because that is a whole can of worms people really don't get. That sort of mentality is born from the general respect and preference of male matter over female ones. Curly is clearly not that guy, he is absent minded about the issue and inadvertently dismissive but he clearly believes Anya, he just can't understand what she's going through. It's an onslaught of information that no one really reacts right to. Additonally, the entire discussion of her assualt plays to heavy into the idea that there is fault outside of the perpertratior when it comes to SA. It's too close if she only did this or if Curly had protected her better but the fact of the matter is Jimmy did what he did. He did it before any of the conversations with Anya about it and it's why her behavior seemed to change so drastically in those last two days.

He has other conflicting thought and while his role as a Captain should've taken over, people act like it's not a very human thing to have such a toxic presence cloud your judgement. It is never easy to separate friend from coworker once that connection is formed, you want to help them, especially if they were friend first and for a long while like in this case. It's not right, but people act like it would be easy when the game clearly points out that no choice is easy to make, especially when you have to make it for more than one person. You have the weigh the consequences, look at all the options and make a plan. People can headcanon and decide how long things where happening, but if we look at what we were presented through the characters eyes, the only person given time to do that was Jimmy.

He waited two months after the crash to appoint himself Captain. Every time a problem was brought up he immediately took action and refused to sit on it and find a better solution. I think it's important to look at the warped way Jimmy takes initiative where Curly didn't as it works as a good contrast of why you don't just run in to "fix" things. The quickest and easiest option may not be the safest or most beneficial. I think some thoughts on the game suffer from the black and white thinking the game doesn't operate on along with us being voyeurs. We see what exactly led to what but the characters don't. They don't have the hindsight and foresight we do and even ours is scrambled by the non-linear story telling.

Like it's hard to talk abuou those grey zones without sounding like an apologist because you're explaining why taking responsibility isn't easy. It's not and it's weird to act like it would be in a scenerio that led up to the events of the game knowing what we know. We see all these characters in such isolated moments with various things before, in between, after and even during we aren't privy too. The idea that Jimmy is worse than Curly heavily banks on the words Jimmy was saying to Jimmy before he crashed the ship. That whatever happened on the ship was his responsibility to bare, which is true due to his position. But, are they not still not responsible for taking the actions Curly then must bare?

Like i feel like people think that these are situation that become easier with age or when you are in a postion of authority and they aren't. You don't lose your biases or gain some sudden knowledge that makes it easier. It just becomes more tiring as you keep dealing with it. I would be first in line to say Curly fucked up and should've done more but the idea he knew how bad it could get or he really saw the worst in the people around him and ignored it pretty much ignores a huge aspect of his character and the game.

[sleepyblr-heart]

in a town of lies who's going to tell you you're real?

[whensomethingelsecries]

as much as i get Why i've seen people say battler's gameboards feel like ooc fanfiction versions of the family - and to an extent they probably are - i kind of am also like. i think we need to remember that most of what we see of the family is as pieces written by an author who is also a character in umineko with their own experiences and motivations, and their characters are largely established in the two episodes written by someone who was willing to literally blow all of them up

acting like there's no way kinzo would ever cutely fawn over his grandkids is so. like okay i Get that it is a bit of whiplash when you've just finished episode 7 and learned everything you've learned there, but like, if you can accept eva and hideyoshi flirting or krauss and natsuhi cuddling together or rudolf kissing the receiver when talking to kyrie on the phone or rosa making them late just to buy maria a treat, then you grasp that shitty people are capable of genuine love, often even towards the exact same people they mistreat

we barely even see kinzo alive in umineko and much of his character throughout the gameboards is pretty explicitly other people's impressions, projections, and fantasies of what he might be like, almost exclusively by characters who were direct victims of his abuse or knew about kuwadorian beatrice

and it's not that they're wrong at all to remember kinzo that way, it's just that like. what part of that is mutually exclusive with kinzo being emotional and over-excited to see his grandkids? the idea that he despises his family so much he has no interest in seeing them is explicitly a fabrication, and not even one the siblings are really able to buy - they just play nice while they figure out how to prove their suspicions about it

i think i'm just like. umineko spends a large amount of its runtime trying very hard to explain to you that both things can be - and often are - equally true about a person. and that love is not at all mutually exclusive with cruelty or abuse

battler's gameboards may at times stretch the limits of the rule that pieces must act in-character, but like, the point is that the capacity for this, too, existed in everyone, under the right circumstances.

and i think mechanically it's trying to make you understand the gameboards' capacity to pick one facet of a character and push it to the extreme - perhaps to make you interrogate whether something similarly biased may have been happening this whole time, gone unnoticed because the previous narrators all told it that way so consistently. ep8's gameboard wants you to ask yourself: what makes you trust one unreliable narrator more than another? if this is so fake, what does that say about other gameboards built under the same constraints as this one?

[bloogers-boogers]

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[transmascutena]

thinking about how akio sees his younger self in utena and wondering if there's any fondness there. doesn't change the horror of what he does to her obviously but i do wonder

[dangermousie]

“What are birds and bees?”

“Let me tell you about all my STDs”

I am gonna enjoy this drama!!!

[fisheito]

@trainto1925 coincidentally i have just arrived

The soft ones ARE choosing violence 🥰

[stlangels]

I am shaking with fucking rage listening to this state of the union i think maybe two other faces have made me instantly get this angry.

I am not your "fellow American." I refuse to be American if this is what it means to be American. I am human before I am an American.

I refuse to die before I see a free Palestine. I will see a free Palestine in my lifetime. I refuse to die before I can see a free world. I will see everyone free in my lifetime because I refuse to die without seeing it. It's probably impossible but I don't care because I have to see it. I'm sick of seeing anything else.

[drrav3nb]

SHIN HA KYUN & KIM YOUNG KWANG in EVILIVE [E5-8]

[witherfide]

eclipse is back in town! (to kill you)