#fh meta

[autistic-sidestep]

while i was writing up the wiki article for the heartbreak incident (yes i've been working like a maniac on the wiki) i figured out why sidestep has the burning hair smell and blood in their mouth when they get super stressed out, they're having functional seizures (and auras)!

i didn't actually understand how sidestep could have seizures while not being epileptic, but then i found out that's still possible. anyways, sometimes people smell burning hair or other phantom smells when they're about to have a seizure, and burning hair in particular is a stress scent for sidestep. you can also bite your tongue during a seizure.

they (almost always) trigger when sidestep's facing something very traumatic eg:

the final hb flashback in rebirth (and malin confirmed they're having a seizure in their sleep for the december 2023 qna)

[i]Around you, the apartment shrinks into focus, the hallway ejecting you into the living room. A small, dead space, smelling of feet and antiseptic.[/i] (And burning hair.)

when they wake up in their body at the gala debut, they have the burning hair smell and the taste of blood in their mouth

"It takes a moment to tap in the right sequence, bringing the armor to life; green numbers scroll across the corner of your vision. You can taste metal on your tongue as you feel the Rat King cozy up against your hindbrain, the telltale stench of burning hair tickling your nose as the nanovores contained inside your glove come alive.

triggers if you fuck up setting off the sword of damocles left in argent's head during the bridge fight if you didn't already trigger it in rebirth

("You can feel their thoughts wrap themselves around yours, tugging at you, and you obey, falling back in their grasp, falling back in your body, gasping in pain as you're greeted by what must have been a seizure.")

release the catastrofiend in chapter 19 at the auction (even as the puppet it will trigger) or chapter 20 (mortum shoots you with the disintregun)

end up seeing chen's version of the heartbreak events while attempting to dethread him when you ask him to help you find the threads with too low friendship.

"What…happened?" Things start coming back, uneasy things, terrible memories. You must have blacked out again. Running on empty, too tired, and Chen's mind was a lot tougher to work with than you imagined. "You started seizing up. I was about to call an ambulance when…" His voice drifts off, and you can see it in his eyes. No ambulance. He wouldn't have. Not this time.

it's also possible that this is a defense mechanism against telepathic intrusion

[Ortega's immunity against telepathy as an epileptic] has something to do with the electrical storms in the brain that cause the seizures; there is enough static in there to make it nearly impossible to read ${his} mind. Or in this case, be influenced from the outside.

dunno how well this works if HB is riding shotgun inside their brain though. these moments are often (but not always) accompanied by sidestep's scar level increasing and/or a gate being opened

notably, rat king is Scared of you

    You must have had a panic attack. You're five blocks away from the casino; you've walked past your pickup point. Is anybody following you? Your head is hurting too badly to scan for it. Instead, you try to jog the Rat King to life, finding…     Nothing?     You stop, a cold shiver down your spine, checking the life support…still green. Still alive. They are still alive. Your worried wave of concern prompts a small, questioning reply.       [i]A tiny squeak. Barely.[/i]     Are you okay? Are you? The answer is no, the Rat King is…terrified. Of you? No. Not anymore. That doesn't make sense.

so it might've been the imposter (or heartbreak?) briefly taking the wheel.

also, food for thought, from yoinking carter's memories.

    It's hard to keep mental shields up under torture. You should know.     You do know.     Your helmet disguises the twitch on your face as you kneel down and take hold of Carter's face. Physical contact is not needed, but it makes it easier to focus.     Pain makes it easy to slip inside because that's the brain's priority alarm. Unlike panic, which can shut things down, or fear, which can lock things into loops, pain opens everything up. All the gates. All the hidden rooms. Enough pain, and it's impossible to focus on anything but, leaving defenses crumbling and hidden secrets crawling out.

[rowanyx]

So in the Adventuring Party, Brennan asked Beardsley whether there is a world in which Kristen gives up being a Cleric.

Mechanics-wise, I understand why the response was a no. That kind of big change would have a lot of restructuring to do, from the character sheet to minis to even plot changes, which would be difficult mid-season like this. (See Riz's sub-class change from Inquisitor to Arcane Trickster happening now, rather than when we actually met Pok)

Story-wise, though, I respectfully disagree. In fact, I posit there is many a world in which Kristen could change her class.

The big one, I think, would be Paladin. Especially either Redemption or Oathbreaker. After all, you could easily argue that this whole situation (i.e. Cassandra seeing Kristen not putting her priesthood first, dying, and the new mysterious voice that taunted the party with the rotting corpse of the god Kristen already failed) cumulates into exactly the type of description for an Oathbreaker (going back on their word and then joining up with some evil entity instead). And, well, after two gods dying, one you've very much stated to want to be good for but can't get yourself to do so, sounds very much like the type of person that would seek Redemption. If not for themselves, at least for others.

And this could also work to show sort of backslide into the Applebee's family drama. After all, we know Bucky just started as a Paladin himself. He's probably not high enough leveled to have a sub-class of his own, but doesn't Redemption fit? The kid who was forced into Kristen's old role, who is already going around trying to save his classmates from Hell? If Kristen did switch to Paladin, they would most likely share classes (something like Gorgug's Artificier track, school-wise). A perfect opportunity to flesh out the relationship there, either to save Bucky from Mac and Donna or have him 'save' Kristen.

Of course, these are just two of the easier paths to see.

Porter did want another Bad Kid in his classes, didn't he?

Maybe Kristen finds she desires a guide and becomes a Totem Warrior Barbarian.

Maybe Kristen decides that just because her parents suck, doesn't mean the whole bloodline did. This causes her to delve into old records and come out of it as a Path of the Ancestral Guardian Barbarian.

Another idea, given the Buff Kristen movement, is a Fighter. Especially the training and power describing a Champion or the fighting spirit of a Samurai, to lose so many gods and keep going.

Or maybe she finds the issue is the evangelizing. That she cannot dedicate herself to bringing others into her path, but still desiring a higher being to help her. There are many to make a Warlock Contract with. She's even living with one, technically, by way of Fig's Archdevil job.

You could even argue for an Eloquence Bard, with all the speeches and now the Presidency campaign.

Or hey, Cassandra was a moon goddess, wasn't she? Maybe even a Lunar Sorcerer.

Unlikely but theoretically possible, she's just desperate to fix something and takes up Artificing. After all, how different can a Battle Smith really be? It's still healing and protecting, right?

Or, let's revisit an old topic. At the top of the game, Kristen was called the Chosen One. We saw that title following her even after leaving Helio. Sol treated her kindly for it, she invented YES! and even reinvented it into YES?. An argument can even be made that that's part of why Cassandra was fixed so easily after clinging to her. But what is that? Where is that power from? Perhaps some new magic awakens in Kristen. That of a Divine Soul Sorcerer.

Just, Kristen, taking a hard look at religion and Clericdom and deciding maybe it wasn't right for her.

[midnightfox450]

The fact that Riz Gukgak (the boy who doesn't know how to take a break, who is deeply afraid of drifting apart from his friends, who "has a hard time connecting to his dearest friends unless he can feel useful") was the one who manifested a creature that forced The Bad Kids to work together again and robbed them of having a proper summer break is so poetic.

[qaey]

it’s crazy how practically every time the bad kids split up it’s gorgug and fabian just kinda having a nice time with whoever they’re with and they go ‘i hope everyone else is doing as well as we are 🥰’ and it cuts to the other group and it’s just flames and screaming

[taiistired]

widow (not-quite mourning)

[doodlelesbians]

My self indulgent Flower Husbands headcanon is that Scott's weird epilogue is actually the parts of them that love each other ripped out by the watchers and put in storage. The tragedy of Flower Husbands to me is never that the love wasn't there but that it wasn't made for a death game.

Flower Husbands works pretty well, Jimmy likes being doted on. He likes when someone is afraid for him, helps him build his house, is a little possessive over him. He even likes the bullying, he preens under the attention. Scott likes that Jimmy needs help because he likes feeling in control, of being able to do things for others. He likes that he can needle and show the uglier crueler parts of himself but still be loved because Jimmy doesn't mind. He's a romantic, he likes the idea of a happy domestic ending. Their relationship just doesn't work in the confines of a death game. Jimmy plays rough, he puts himself in unnecessary danger, he wants to get involved in the main skirmishes, he tries to negotiate as equals without the technical skill or resources to back it up. Scott is afraid. He's so aware of the danger and so focused on his own ideas of what the best path forward is. He stifles Jimmy, trying to force him to be comfortable in their little corner. Jimmy chafes even further against this attempt at controlling him, born from Scott's need to have some power over something in a situation they're all pawns in. And they end up hurting each other so much, both by living and by dying, and then they're dead. I think their love is tucked away in that little sliver, a version of the world built exactly in a way Scott can control and Jimmy can do what he wants without the sword of damocles hanging over him. And then in the real world, in the future games, they just have this pit inside them where their love used to be and no matter what they can't feel it anymore. They're aware it once existed. They know it once meant a lot but all they can actually still feel is the hurt.

Jimmy moves on. He finds other things to care about. His emotions burn hot and fast like his lifespan and he's adept at moving on from alliances season after season.

Scott keeps trying to find it. He offers flowers and says I love you and chases Jimmy down because he refuses to obey the game's rules. He never liked the lack of control and choice, didn't kill as the boogeyman, left his soulmate behind. And now, he refuses to let go and accept that the love is gone.

[orange-coloredsky-archive]

i cannot believe ive never posted this. probably because it looks like shit. anyways heres my pepe silva ass scrawlings about what i think this guy's mods are for.

translation of the nigh unreadable text under the cut

REAL AND CANON DIMA LORE PART ONE: What The Hell Are All Those Doo Dads

(i'll start from the head and go down)

HEAD

functionally blind. constant exposure to moisture from the fog pretty much turned a lot of him into mush and short circuits, including whatever optic nerves he had going on in there. so he mainly relies on sound and memory to get around. some of the shit sticking out of his head actually works like echolocation devices. pickinh up the sound around him and translating it into something that lets him know "oh, theres a fuckin table there. it does not always work. (fun fact: thats the reason why his memory game is based on abstractions and sound. while exploring nick/kellogg's brain we got visual input. dima doesnt have that)

all of the other tubes are basically just typical vacuum tubes. used to reroute voltage to make sure he doesnt overload himself with all the extra mods. make sure you dont stand too close to him during a thunderstorm

TORSO

basically an external disk drive. his main way of utilizing holotapes and shit. i like to draw a lil heart on it

looks like guts. gross. i cant figure out what this would do (i now believe its a liquid cooling system)

LEGS

so it turns out sitting in a damp ass cave on your ass in the dirt for 365 days doesnt do wonders for the skin. especially when that skin is just shitty rubber. basically his fuckin leg parts rotted away and just his metal skeleton remained, which is wrapped in his weird duct tape yoga pants. the metal frames are for extra support. because of this as well as his age he cant really stand for long periods of time (ignore the part where he stands in acadia forever after you get deeper into his questline) and when he INSISTS ON DOING SO he requires some form of mobility aid. usually in the form of faraday or chase walking alongside him

typical synth skeletal feet, but augmented to actually flex/extend like talons. he is weirdly skilled at picking things up with his feet.

BACK

basically his whole back is just Gone, minus the structures needed to hold up those ports because dima is very prone to overheating. was easier to just get rid of anything blocking the flow of air than to install a bunch of heat sinks. faraday's smart but hes on a budget.

these are the cerebral (spinal?) connections he uses to be plugged into his chair (not dissimilar to the placements of the connections in the institute mind wiping chair ☹️)

[aberfaeth]

like yes i would have liked for this battle to have been at all narratively interesting instead of just a sick beatdown, but yknow thats what fic is for! i had a good time! i chuckled even!

[freshmintbubble]

Springtrap Ethan Miller y la saga de estar en lugares donde no deberia continua.

ALT

[the-somwthing]

Welcome to my little meta analysis essay called

Why do we misremember Flower Husbands as being “nicer” than it was?

Disclaimer: I’m not here to talk about whether or not FH is “toxic” or anything like that. It’s just a fact that many old fans rewatching FH POV and new fans who are watching it for the first time after seeing fan content tend to be surprised at how they actually behaved in the series compared to how everyone remembered them being back in the day. This will NOT go over whether or not I think FH is unhealthy or whatever and instead just discuss why I believe this phenomenon has happened.

So, if I try to make this a fancy well written essay, I’ll be here all day, so I’ll just get to the point. 3rd Life came out during the DSMP era of mcyt. MCRP has been around for ages, but the DSMP style of RP (which I’ll be calling “smp rp”) was pretty much popularized by DSMP, mostly towards the end of 2020. For reference, 3rd Life started early 2021, so there’s about a half a year between these two events, and DSMP kept going for years so 3rd Life was absolutely happening during the golden era of DSMP.

But what does DSMP have to do with this? Well, it sort of created this idea of “lore” and only specific things being “canon”. You can make fun of me for the way I worded that, but you know what I mean, DSMP was weird about that stuff. I don’t really blame them as it was kind of a new style of RP they accidentally spawned, but still, it was a confusing time for SMPs.

3rd Life was actually less like DSMP and more like the modern SMP RPs, where there’s no (known, lol) scripted events and the fandom itself deciphers what is or isn’t “canon” rather than it being told to them, with mostly everything being considered canon. HOWEVER, I do believe that DSMP’s style did still affect the fandom, specifically with the topic of this essay, Flower Husbands.

But why would it only really affect Flower Husbands? Now we get into a rough topic: shipping discourse. Back in those days, shipping in the mcyt fandom was heavily frowned upon. Moreso than it is today (I know it’s still around, but it was a lot worse the earlier we go lol). I’ve even seen old relics of ppl saying flower husbands should only be portrayed as platonic cuz it’s wrong to ship them, despite their team name literally being husbands. But more importantly, for A LOT of people, flower husbands was the One Ship people felt “allowed” to ship, BECAUSE it was canon. So they would allow FH and shun every other ship.

My point isn’t actually that, with it being the only “acceptable” ship everyone tried to make it more wholesome, though I suppose that could be a contributor. But my ACTUAL point is where all the things I laid out finally close in on each other:

Ships were a Dangerous territory in mcyt fandom, and ships being “canon” was something a lot of people weren’t prepared to deal with. People don’t want to get too close to RPF territory, but back in the day their ideas of c! vs cc! wasn’t as great, so they default to the DSMP Rule of “if it’s stated to be roleplay, then it’s canon to the characters, if not, it’s noncanon and just the CCs hanging out”.

You see where I’m going with this? When trying to follow this rule for a character relationship where they don’t explicitly state what is or isn’t RP, they hear “we’re married” and instantly mark that as canon to the characters since it clearly isn’t true to the CCs, and tend to block out anything else, otherwise you’re risking it not actually being true to the characters. Especially when it’s things like Scott saying something mean about Jimmy; that directly contradicts the “these characters are in love” thing, so it must not be canon, right?

But wouldn’t people still remember that these things happened, or did they actually straight up not process any of it? My answer to that is: of course everyone was paying attention, but with the context that it’s the CCs playing a video game, all of the teasing and other behavior seems WAY less serious. It just looks like average friends playing a hunger games smp together. And as I explained earlier, the fandom was ONLY processing this as a CC thing, so Scott’s treatment of Jimmy never stood out because that’s just how it is playing games.

Back to DSMP, I’m not active in that fandom anymore but I’ll see snippets sometimes, and I’ve seen the claim that beeduo was actually boring in canon and the fandom was the one that made it interesting. I feel like this is exactly what happened with FH. Nobody was actually expecting anyone to go hard into romantic roleplay, so the fans just take whichever pair says they’re getting married and fill in the blanks themselves. And that was normal back then, it wasn’t fans making stuff up for no reason, it was kind of expected of us.

So yeah, I personally believe that this whole confusion about FH is a result of its time. Whether you want to finally look at the actual substance of the relationship rather than following weird rules about what is or isn’t “canon”, or you believe that since FH was from a time where romantic RP was confusing and weird it would make the most sense to take into account the time period it came from and ignore the less appealing bits in favor of the fanon, I don’t really care honestly. But man isn’t this an interesting situation.

[midnightdemonhunter]

Narcissus meets Echo's echo. (Or, what's with Fabian and mirrors?)

[autistic-sidestep]

the other day I was thinking

what if you only got to pick your sidestep's name when Ortega met you at the diner?logically I know that choice of games convention is to pick it in the first chapter, and the end of the free section before you have to pay to read the rest, so by convention, you Can't just have your mc not have a name for the whole time you're playing the free trial

But

given that it's the first instance of you being named by someone you know/knew in the present day it's a lot more fluid/less clunky than setting your name in a dream sequence tbh

and it would drive home the impact of ortega representing the past coming back to haunt you, it's a name you haven't heard or been called in years

possibly the dream sequence could've avoided naming sidestep entirely and just used sidestep or those black boxes to censor it like sidestep's actively repressing it and moving on from their old identity and then In Comes Ortega like the kool aid man

idk just. stuff I'm noticing while skimming forums and the asks about malin writing rebirth and saying he hadn't read any of the other choicescript games aside from maybe(?) choice of robots and how he writes the games as a novel first rather than a game and that intent definitely affects the design process and result

And like, yes, the first of anything you write/make is always gonna be a bit wonky, but because the interactivity/game aspect comes in later, it leads to the slight jank of rebirth because he's not quite reconciled the game part with the novel. which makes running into the occasional capital G Gaming Choice moment look kind of hamfisted in and abrupt. you can't just intuit the form's specific conventions by writing it, you've gotta learn by example how other things in the same medium you're writing in, what the reactivity does to the story and that balance of not too railroady vs the impossibility of accounting for all the options a player would want to make (ohhh retri scope creep. the scope creep.)

I definitely think he's gotten better at working with the IF conventions now, from him having read cogs like tin star, samurai of hyuga, the passenger etc. you can see he's gotten more to grips with the format and what you can do with it so it feels a lot more seamless now, I just agree with cigs' assessment that the exile's author understands the medium better from the get go; it's not Just about managing the branching, it's about the more intricate parts of game balance too

this is probably incoherent actually from it being 2am. whatever lol

[midnightfox450]

Y'know at first I was kinda bummed that this season started with a full combat episode because it set a weird opening tone for me that wasn't the comfort I was expecting. But then I realized that's likely entirely The Point.

Most Fantasy High seasons and oneshots start out with the Bad Kids at home. Brennan gives everyone a little time to introduce themselves, their families, and what they've been doing outside of adventuring. Typically it would make sense to start a new season with a bit of an "npc parade" reintroducing friendly faces to get everyone settled into the world again. It's been three and a half years since we've last seen them, after all. But there's no settling that needs to be done because in-universe there was no break at all.

There's literally no time for introductions. The Bad Kids have gone through so many changes over the summer but neither them nor we get any time to digest it. Besides essential battle companions, the episode is noticeably devoid of any friendly faces. No parents, no partners, no classmates. Instead there's all these new people so purposefully out of place. Who the hell is Balthazar? Who even cares? They have school in three days. It's the end of the world for the third time in two years and they have school in three days. And school just means the world will find a way to end itself all over again.

[under-no-disguise]

the amount of people who will (in mourning or in schadenfreude) declare a ship "over" and "dead" just because creators said they won't do a(nother) whole romance plot is testing me

shipping is fandom business. instead of harassing creators for "crumbs" (which is rude and might only put them off creating more shippable content), might I suggest:

writing or drawing the content you want to see. engaging with and sharing what others have created. commissioning or taking part in prompt events or just sharing imagines/meta/etc to get more of what you, specifically, want to see for the ship.

fandom problems require fandom solutions.

[loosebaron]

Collapsing to the floor

just now realized that kristen started off fantasy high choosing the path of doubt & uncertainty by choosing to go with the bad kids. for unrelated reasons i need to lie down forever.

[orange-coloredsky-archive]

quick -- someone who's smarter than me: why/how could this much erosion/change in land mass vs water mass happen in just 200 years. did the aftereffect of the nukes do this somehow