#fucking disappointing because its taking more priority than telling an original story

[inkybinkyboink]

hi sorry i need to vent a little bit bc i saw a post saying that they wanted to make barbie into a musical and im,,maybe its the withdrawal headache but like why are we in an era where every new popular movie gets moved to broadway. why arent we zesty anymore. wheres the originality. moving the biggest hollywood blockbuster to broadway is the equivalent of disney remaking their own films because they have nothing better to do like oh my god bro.

[the-stubborn-exchange-student]

Pride Cometh Before the Fall (Part 2)

Part one can be found here

Pairings: Lucifer X Alexis (...?), bits of Mammon X Alexis if ya squint

Summary: People don’t always make the best choices when upset.

Notes: Originally, I’d intended to write this big ol’ dramatic confrontation, specifically among the brothers, but when I started writing that wasn’t really the direction the story was heading in. So instead, we have....//gestures vaguely whatever this is. Maybe not quite as angsty as the first portion was, but as I was writing it seemed like I wanted to focus less on the hurt and more on (eventual) comfort, and the ties between the characters.

Tagging @kcabyap​ because I know they were interested in the hypothetical part 2, hopefully I don’t disappoint aaha;;

“Alexis, wait--!” He’d called, body rooted to the spot. Even as his previous words had come out, he’d known they were wrong. He’d wanted to take them back.

But it was too little, too late, it seemed. Alexis was in no mood to listen to another word.

Lucifer couldn’t blame her. She was just trying to protect the heart he’d broken so easily. All the same...there had to be a way to fix this. A way to make this up to her. A way to go back to how things were, how he wanted them to be--

“Lucifer? Is everything alright?” Diavolo frowned. “You seem distracted...”

“No. I’ve broken up with the love of my life, over a stupid matter. And I may never be able to repair the damage.”

“I apologize, my Lord. My brothers have merely caused a good deal of trouble today.”

“I see. There truly is never a dull moment among your brothers.” Diavolo chuckled. “But tell me, where is Alexis? I was looking forward to her joining us.”

“Alexis...sends her apologies. She isn’t feeling her best, and I assume she’s returned home.”

“‘Assume’?” Barbatos asked, looking up from the tea he’d been pouring. Even so, not a single drop was spilled. His expression was as neutral as ever, but something unmistakably concerned flickered in his eyes. “It isn’t like you to not know where Alexis is.”

Ah. Yes, there was that. Lucifer had been very adept at keeping track of the exchange student, even before he’d had any real emotional attachments to her. It was unlike him to fail at that...or to be almost dismissive of it.

“...Lucifer, are you certain you’re all right?” Diavolo asked again. “Tell me, please. Perhaps there’s something I can do to help.”

It needled at his pride like few other things did; he didn’t need help. And Lord Diavolo had far better things to do than help an underling like him settle a squabble...

...No. this was more than a mere “squabble”. And it was his damn pride that had caused this problem in the first place.

“Alexis ran off. I can only hope she ran home, but I don’t know for certain.”

“But why? She knows the dangers the Devildom can pose to a human, even one with the pacts that she’s made.”

“We...fought. I’ve upset her. Hurt her badly.”

“You...after everything, you’re...you’re dumping me because you think I make you look bad??”

“Oh...Lucifer, what happened?”

“No one worth your time is going to condemn you for having a heart, Lucifer!”

Lucifer was spared from answering Diavolo’s question when his D.D.D. went off. And then went off again. And again.

“Your brothers?” The Prince asked, even as Lucifer irritably tapped the screen to bring it to life.

He knew it was a slim chance, but a part of him was nevertheless disappointed that none of the missed calls or texts were from Alexis.

The brothers’ group chat, on the other hand, had flared to life, and it took a bit of scrolling to figure out everything that had happened.

[Lucifer: Beel, tell me you didn’t actually tear the kitchen apart.]

[Mammon: Yeahhh, he totally did.]

[Beelzebub: I’m sorry...]

[Beelzebub: I was hungry. No one’s made dinner yet.]

[Satan: Well, now no one is going to be able to make dinner for a while.]

[Mammon: Dammit, and it was Alexis’ turn to cook, too. Why’d ya keep her stuck at RAD, Lucifer?!]

The last message sent a bit of anger spiking through his chest, although it was almost immediately quelled by a fearful tightening.

They thought she was still with him.

He’d thought for sure that she’d gone home.

...Where was she?!

“I apologize, Lord Diavolo, something’s come up,” Lucifer said. The panic beginning to course through his veins had already propelled him out of his seat. “Alexis never made it back to the House of Lamentation.”

Similar expressions of alarm flickered across both Diavolo and Barbatos’ faces, and the former gestured to his right-hand man that there was no harm done.

“Barbatos and I will search the castle and surrounding grounds, just in case. Keep us posted, Lucifer.”

The firstborn nodded, quickly striding out of the student council room, gloved fingers flying across the D.D.D.’s keyboard.

[Lucifer: Alexis left RAD some time ago. She should be back at the house.]

[Mammon: Hey, hey, wait a sec! You just had her go back on her own?!]

[Satan: I never thought I’d say this, but Mammon’s actually right. Why wouldn’t you walk her back?]

[Belphegor: I guess he didn’t want to keep his precious Diavolo waiting.]

[Lucifer: That’s enough, Belphegor.]

[Belphegor: Tell me I’m wrong, you can’t. What, you just decided Alexis wasn’t important anymore?]

It must seem that way, especially to Alexis herself. But she was important to him. More important than his pride.

So why...why had he hurt her so badly?

[Lucifer: Belphie, do something productive with that energy and help me find Alexis.]

[Belphegor: Hmph. Fine, I’ll give you a hard time after we find her.]

[Mammon: I’ll get my crow familiars and have ‘em check out town!]

[Asmodeus: I’ll call Solomon!]

[Leviathan: I’ll wait at home in case she comes back!]

[Satan: Lucifer, as far as I’m concerned, whatever happens to Alexis while she’s gone is on your hands.]

He said that as if Lucifer didn’t already know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

When this sort of thing happened in movies and books, the weather was always almost storming. It was as if it was nature’s way of showing how the character’s world was ending, crumbling down around them.

No such weather was accompanying Alexis as she walked aimlessly along. It was a clear day in the Devildom, and if anything, the silence only drove home just how badly she was breaking.

At least if it was raining, like a movie, she’d be able to use the sound to try and drown out everything else running through her head.

Truth be told, Alexis had no idea how long she’d been moving, or how far she’d gone. She’d run for a good while longer than she would have thought herself to be capable of, and when the burning in her lungs and her legs forced her to slow down, she’d found herself pushing on at a slower pace.

Her D.D.D. vibrated in her bag, again and again--some part of her wished she’d left the damn thing back at RAD. After it rang for the fourth or fifth time, she let out an aggravated noise, pulling out the offending device.

[Mammon: Yo, Alexis! Where’re you at?!]

[Satan: Alexis, please let me know when you get this. I’m not sure what happened, but we’re all very worried about you.]

[Beelzebub: Alexis, please come back home. I’ll treat you to Madame Scream’s. Anything you want, just let me know you’re okay, please...]

[Solomon: Asmodeus just called me in a panic, asking if I know where you are. What’s happened? Are you okay?]

[Mammon: Darlin’, answer your phone, please. Ya don’t gotta tell me what’s wrong, just at least lemme know where you are so we can come get you.]

Her screen was filled with messages, a new one popping into existence almost faster than she could read the previous ones. Each new one made her heart ache--they were all so worried about her, probably losing their minds trying to find her, and here she was just...running off like a child, in a place she knew could still pose a very real threat to her.

[Lucifer: Alexis, please, talk to me.]

...God, she wanted to.

Newer messages were already taking its place, but Alexis didn’t seem to even register them. Her vision had blurred, hot tears rendering the phone screen nothing more than a blur of color and light.

She wanted to. She wanted to talk, to understand, to forgive, to forget this entire day ever happened...

...but she couldn’t. She couldn’t let herself.

[Alexis: No.]

[Alexis: You’ve already made your priorities clear. I’m not interested in anything you have to say.]

[Lucifer: Alexis, tell me where you are. Now is not the time for spite.]

She glared at the screen even as she let out a disbelieving noise. She wondered if Satan, somewhere, could feel the traces of wrath that had flared up inside her when she read that.

[Alexis: Are you fucking kidding me? You dumped me and now you’re mad that I’m upset? What right do you have to be upset??]

[Alexis: I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to even look at you right now.]

[Lucifer: I’ve made a mistake, love. Please.]

Oh...that was...

Even when they’d started dating, Alexis knew apologies did not come easily to Lucifer. When he’d admit he was wrong at all, it was through actions. Never exactly words. He...he was really being sincere...

...No. No, she couldn’t assume that. She’d thought he’d been sincere when he told her he loved her, but with how easily he’d just...cut her off...

[Alexis: Let me guess. The “mistake” was leading me on.]

[Alexis: Like I said, you’ve made your priorities clear. There’s nothing left to say.]

[Alexis: I hope you had your fun, at least.]

Even as she backed out of the chat, Lucifer was already typing, and Alexis was choking back another sob.

It was be easier if she could bring herself to hate him. Easier still to simply not care at all. But she couldn’t. She’d never be able to.

She loved him, truly and deeply, and that hurt most of all.

Alexis knelt down on a patch of grass, hands shaking as she opened another chat.

[Alexis: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking and just took off, I’m so sorry I made you worried...]

[Mammon: Alexis!! You’re not hurt, are you?!]

A difficult question. Physically, no. But the rest of her was a very different matter.

[Alexis: No, no...I’m not hurt. I am kind of lost, though. Some forest-y looking area.]

[Alexis: I just want to go home, Mammon...]

[Mammon: Okay, treasure. I’ve got my familiars out in full force, we’ll figure out where you are in no time. Sit tight, the Great Mammon’ll be there before ya know it.]

Alexis set her D.D.D. aside, leaned against a gnarled tree, and listened for the sounds of crows.

[uglypastels]

When You Say Nothing At All - Tom Holland movie AU (1/3)

(a/n) First story on the new blog!! I’m scared. 

This story is a Notting Hill AU. I have always loved this movie and when I recently rewatched it, I really realized how cheezy and pretty fanfic-y the plot it...so I decided to actually write a fanfic. The story is in a movie-turned-into-book format, so it is literally inspired by the movie. So, I do not own, nor claim any of this story as my own. Already putting it out there.

Alrighty then, here is part 1. I am not sure if I will actually post the other parts, because I’m not so sure if this is really that good. I also haven’t exactly finished the rest and it takes a loooooong time to do so. Tell me if you want to read the rest.

This is a re-post, because I am an idiot with anxiety and deleted the first one accidentally

word count: 10,281

warning: swearing, sexual themes, SPOILERS for NOTTING HILL

part 2

Tom’s POV - 1999 - London - Characters are in their late 20′s 

Of course, I have seen her films and always thought she was, well, gorgeous, but, you know, a million and million miles from the world I live in.

The world he lives in, which was here, Notting Hill. His favorite part of London.

Just as he did every day before going to work, Tom took a morning walk to enjoy the bizarre atmosphere that this region had. Like any other weekday, the market was spinning with people, where every fruit and vegetable known to man was sold and men were yelling: “Rock hard bananas, five for a pound!” To his right was the tattoo parlor, where a  man stepped through the door, looking rather confused at the new addition to his body. He looked as if he had just woken up on the couch that was inside and Tom wondered if he remembered why he had gotten “I love Ken” tattooed on his arm. He also wondered who Ken was and if he knew that his name was now permanently written on this blokes’ arm. Opposite the tattoo shop was the radical hairdressers, where everyone came out looking like the Cookie Monster, whether they wanted to or not. Just like the poor girl in the purple denim jacket.

Even though it was early in the morning, there were people everywhere. Tom was glad it wasn’t the weekend where from the break of day hundreds of stalls appear out of nowhere, filling Portobello Road, right up to Notting Hill Gate and wherever you look thousands of people are buying millions of antiques, some genuine, and some not quite so genuine.

Lots of friends have ended up in this part of London. For example Tony, who Tom could see talking to some delivery men, a bundle of fish in his hands. Tony looked rather happy with his new buy. Tom waved at him, hello, but his friend didn’t see it.  The architect turned chef had been busy for months with his new restaurant, which he invested in with all the money he ever earned.

That was pretty much all of Notting Hill, where Tom spend his days and years. In the small village in the middle of the city, in a house with a blue door that he had bought together with his wife who had left him after four years for a man who looked exactly like Harrison Ford. Which was ironic, because this was where he now lead a strange half-life with a lodger called:

“Harrison!” he yelled as he opened the blue door and almost immediately fell over a bike. Harrison ran down the stairs into the kitchen which was at the end of the corridor in which Tom stood right now. As usual, he wasn’t wearing anything but some khaki colored underwear. He didn’t want to think about if that was the original color.

“You couldn’t help me with an incredibly important decision, could you?” he said in his thick accent.  

“Is this important in comparison to, let’s say…” Tom started thinking as he walked to the kitchen to put down the loaf of bread that he had bought earlier. “Whether they should cancel Third World debt?”

“That’s right. I’m at last going out on a date with the great Janine and I just wanna be sure I’ve picked the right T-shirt.” He started explaining. Tom was turned with his back to him and couldn’t help but smile at the difference in their priorities.

“What are the choices?”

“Well, wait for it,” he said and ran back upstairs to his room. Tom waited as he put the bread in the toaster, taking his time. By the time he was done and in front of the stairs, Harrison was already running back down, pulling down the shirt. It was a slightly too big white t-shirt. It would have been fine if it wasn’t for the huge text that said: “I LOVE BLOOD” and the actual sticking out fish head in the middle of his torso in the pool of red.

“First, there’s this one,” He flicked the fish head, making it bounce back and forth, and made a little growl, “Cool, huh?” Tom stared at the shirt for a little bit, trying to figure out the right words to say to his flatmate. “Yeah, it might make it hard to strike a really romantic note,” he suggested.

“Point taken. Don’t despair.” Harrison ran back up the stairs, still talking: “if it’s romance we’re looking for, I believe I have just the thing.” Tom highly doubted it. He looked for some yogurt in the fridge while waiting for Harrison to get back.

He came back, with a now much tighter fitted shirt. The message was very simple: “GET IT HERE” together with a big black arrow pointed at his crotch.

“Yeah, well, there again, she might not think you had true love on your mind.”

“Right.” He seemed to understand but clearly didn’t have the same feeling about it as Tom did. “Just one more.” He ran away once again. Tom smiled to himself and walked back to the kitchen, grabbed something extra for his yogurt and then heard it was time again to take those three steps back to the stairs: “True love, here I come.” Harrison sang happily. Tom watched him run down those stairs for the tenth time and pulling down, another, white shirt over his upper body. Tom put a hand over his mouth at the sight of it. It was better than the last two options. Still not good, but better. The words “You’re the most beautiful woman in the WORLD” were surrounded by big red hearts. Harrison looked at him, awaiting an answer.

“Well, yeah. Yeah. that’s, that’s perfect.” he managed to say without laughing.

“Great. Thanks. Wish me luck.” Haz still looked at him waiting.

“Good luck.” He walked back upstairs with big steps of pride. When he had turned around Tom could see the message written on his back. “FANCY A FUCK?” He wanted to say something but thought better of it. He had to get to work.

It was just another hopeless Wednesday, as he walked a thousand yards through the market to work. Work, by the way, was the little travel bookshop “The Travel Book Co.”  which, well, sold travel books and to be frank, didn’t always sell many of those.

The store, just like the door of his house, was blue. The big window displayed a number of books that were for sale and two globes, in case it wasn’t clear to anyone that it was travel books that they could find here. In front of the window, outside, stood a small table on which more books were displayed.

“Morning, Martin” the small bell above the door rang as he pushed it open. The smell of old books was immediately present.

“Morning, Monseigneur,” said Martin as he was looking through some papers. He handed Tom the post and bills of the day. He knew what awaited them next. It was time to count up the sales. He walked up to the desk and pulled out the rest of the papers and a calculator. He dreaded this part of the day, that is why he had early on decided with Martin to do it in the morning. This way it would be over quickly, at least.

“Classic,” he sighed as the last numbers popped up on the small screen. “Profit from major sales push, minus £347.” He shared a look of disappointment with Martin and then wrote the sad number down in the notebook in front of him.

“Shall I go and get you a cappuccino?” Martin suggested. “You know, ease the pain a bit.”

“Yeah, yeah. Better make it a half. All I can afford.” his friend and employee laughed awkwardly. He just smiled, both of them were trying to ease the pain currently with some horrible humor.

“Get your logic. Demi-cappu coming right up.” He glanced at Tom and then walked to the door. The bell rang again as he pulled the door towards him. His green cardigan disappearing behind the corner as he walked to the small coffee house a few doors away. Tom wondered what he had done to deserve him in his life. Such a good person. Martin could easily find another job, a better job, but he didn’t want to leave his friend.

The moment he left, someone walked in. Tom barely glanced. The only thing he saw was a blur of black and white. The person carefully closed the door behind them. He looked again, feeling something familiar about them as he looked more properly. He couldn’t exactly place it, but it felt like he had seen the stranger before. Maybe she had visited the store earlier this week? Or the week before?

She was wearing a black, leather jacket over a plain white shirt. On her head, a black hat, with brown hair under it, and her eyes were covered by dark glasses. She walked over to the first bookcase and started to look around, every now and then pulling out a book and paging through it. From the position Tom was in, he could only see her shoulder properly, moving as she placed a book back in its original place.  

“Uhm, can I help you at all?” he asked. The woman peaked out her head from behind the shelves, looking a bit startled. At least he assumed so, as her eyes weren’t visible through the glasses.

“No, thanks, I’ll just look around.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. The American accent clear. He knew that this was a bookstore and people often tried to be quiet. But there was literally nobody else there except for them.

“Fine,” he said a bit dazed off. He still couldn’t place that face or that voice for that matter. He was sure he had at least heard her before but much louder. Not in the bookstore, then. She walked to the other side of the shelf, facing away from him. Now he could have a little more proper look at her…  or at least her back. Her shoulders were small, in a cute way. Her jacket oversized. From the way the top of her head reached a certain height of the shelves, he could assume that she wasn’t much shorter than him. He could also see a bag hanging off of her other shoulder. As she was looking through the books, she momentarily put her shopping bags on the ground.

She pulled out a book from the shelf, Tom could read the title, the Turkish Delights, from where he was standing behind the desk.  He had a great urge to say something to her, only he didn’t know what. As he looked at her go through the book, he blurted out: “That book’s really not great.”  She turned her head in his direction. “Er - just in case browsing turned to buying, you’d be wasting your money.”  he laughed nervously as he was clearly rambling on. She just smiled weakly. Letting him dig himself deeper into embarrassment. “But if it’s Turkey you’re interested in, this one,” Tom picked up a copy of a book that lay next to him on the desk, “on the other hand, is very good. Uhm...” he had no idea what to say, but she kept looking at him and he felt the need to keep talking. Her stare was getting a bit too much for him so he looked down at the book. “I think the man who wrote it has actually been to Turkey, which helps. Uhm, there’s also a very amusing incident with a kebab… which is one of many amusing incidents.”

The beautiful stranger (because she was definitely beautiful, there was no denying that) smiled and said: “Thanks, I’ll think about it.” She already looked away, putting her attention back to the book she was holding, but his tongue slipped up again and the rambling continued.

“Or, in the bigger hard-back variety, there’s…”  He looked at the bookcase behind him. While he did, his eyes slipped down to the small tv screen next to it, where he could see a man putting a book down his trousers. “I’m sorry, can you just give me a second?” He put the book down and walked to the back corner of the store, that was separated by a wall and slightly bigger shelves.

“Excuse me,” he said. The man popped up from behind the books. His eyes were wide, his hair all over the place and the shirt untucked messily.  “Yes?” he asked.

“Bad news.” Tom crossed his arms and looked at him.

“What?” The man looked very confused and startled. Tom pointed at the corner of the ceiling. “Er -We’ve got uhm, a security camera in this bit of the shop.” The man still didn’t seem to understand as he asked: “So?”

“So, I saw you put that book down your trousers.”

“What book?” He was changing his weight from one leg to the other, making it even more obvious that he was anxious. Tom sighed, pointing at his crotch and saying: “The one down your trousers.”

“I don’t have a book down my trousers.” His words were slightly slurred, making Tom worried that he could be drunk or high. He looked away from him in frustration.

“Right, I tell you what,  uhm, I’ll call the police and uhm, what can I say, if I’m wrong about the whole book-down-the-trousers scenario, I really apologize.”  Tom was not sure if it had been possible, but the stranger’ eyes widened even more.  

“Okay. What if I did have a book down my trousers?” Tom couldn’t believe this guy. Was he so drunk, or actually just that big of a moron?

“Well, ideally, when I went back to the desk you’d remove the Cadogan Guide to Bali from your trousers and either wipe it and put it back, or buy it.” He smiled at the drunk idiot. “I’ll see you in a sec.” he left him back there and walked back to the desk. The girl in the leather jacket was now standing there too. Tom had heard footsteps so he already expected it. “I’m sorry about that.” he walked behind the small piece of furniture. She was looking down at her book.

“No, it’s fine. I was gonna steal one but now I’ve changed my mind.” She smiled and Tom couldn’t help but laugh slightly. He glanced back at the tv screen to check up on the weirdo.

“Oh, signed by the author, I see.” she glanced at the front pages of the book. It made him look up from the screen.

“Uhmm, yeah, couldn’t stop him. If you can find an unsigned one, it’s worth an absolute fortune.” She puffed out a laugh. Right then the man from the back of the shop walked up. Tom was about to send him off when he approached his other customer. “Excuse me.”

“Yes?” she looked a bit uncomfortable at him.

“Can I have your autograph?” he handed her a piece of paper. The girl looked unsure at him and then around for something to write with. Tom gave her the pen he had in your hand: “Here.”

“What’s your name?” She asked. Her tone was very monotone and he knew that, really, she didn’t want to do it.  

“Rufus.” He rolled on the back of his feet like a child, scratching his patchy beard. Tom watched the girl in the leather jacket scribble down a few words on the paper. It took him some time to figure out the words as he had been looking at it from upside down, but once he had it, he let out a little snort. She handed the paper back to Rufus. He, apparently, still couldn’t read it because he asked: “What does it say?”

“That’s my signature, and above it,” she pointed at the top of the old paper, “it says, Dear Rufus, you belong in jail.” Rufus clearly didn’t seem to get it because he smiled and said: “Good one.” The girl gave him a smile that was the equivalent of an eye roll and turned to you. Rufus asked again: “Do you want my phone number?”

“Tempting, but no.” there was a silence. Rufus started walking away. Tom just stood there, trying to comprehend what had just happened. This girl was famous, he knew that. He had seen her before somewhere, but where?

“I will take this one.” she pushed the book a bit towards him and that got Tom out of his frozen state.

“Oh, right, right.” He opened the book to check the price, “So, well, on second thoughts maybe it’s not that bad after all.” He ticked in the numbers into the machine, the paper started printing. “Actually, it’s sort of a classic, really. None of those childish kebab stories you find in so many books these days.” He tried to joke. It didn’t work as she handed him a banknote without a reaction except for a polite smile. It was more than the prize, so he started to look for the correct coins to give as change.

“You know what, I’ll throw in one of these for free.” He showed her a book that just happened to lay nearby. He wished he could sink underground, or at least that she would say something back. Still, he couldn’t manage to close his own mouth: “Useful for, you know, lighting fires, wrapping fish, that sort of thing.” She finally managed to break out a smile. He packed the two books in the basic orange-brown bag and handed it back to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Pleasure,” he replied. Both of them smiled politely and she started to walk away. Soon that bell rang again and she was gone. Tom was alone in the store. The confusion now spread over his features. Who was she? Why did she feel so familiar? Should he have asked her for a signature too?

His legs moved him towards the table in the big space at the front of the shop. He wasn’t sure why he walked there. Maybe to get another glimpse of her? But by the time he got to the window, she was already gone. There was another movement on the street, though. The green cardigan and brown tie flopped around Martin as he walked back. Two cups of coffee balanced on top of each other in one hand as he tried to open the door with the other.

“Here we are. Cappuccino, as ordered.” he put one cup in front of Tom, who still looked out the window in a daydreaming kind of way. Only he wasn’t daydreaming. He knew that the girl was actually real. Only, who was she?

“Thanks,” Tom said as he watched the other man sip from his hot drink. Still, the thought of the girl was in his mind. Was it her? But what would she be doing in Notting Hill? Still, it couldn’t be... “I don’t think you’ll believe who was just in here.” Martin looked up from his cup, eyes full of excitement, but the excitement that could also be anxiety.

“Who?” His head shot towards the window and then back. “Was it someone famous?” Now that Martin had said it out loud, the idea seemed too crazy to be real.

“No, no, no,” Tom changed his mind.

“Would be exciting though, wouldn’t it, if someone famous came into the shop?” He was about to put the cup back up to his lips when another sentence formed: “Do you know, this is - this is pretty amazing, but I once saw Ringo Starr.”

“Where was that?” Tom asked curiously.

“Kensington High Street.” there was a scratch in his excitement. ‘At least I think it was Ringo. It might have been that man from Fiddler On The Roof. You know, Toppy.” He scratched his nose.

“Top-ol,” Tom corrected his friend. The story seemed more and more unlikely to have happened, but it was still rather enjoyable to listen.

“Yes, that’s right. Topol.” Martin drank some more of his coffee. The small amount of it was already mostly gone as he had to work for it to get into his mouth, Tom started thinking.

“Actually, Ringo Starr doesn’t look at all like Topol.”

“Yeah, but he was quite a long way away from me.”  

“So actually it could’ve been neither of them,” Tom suggested. There was a silence.

“Yes, I suppose so, yes.” Another silence between the two men.

“It’s not a classical anecdote, is it?”

“Not a classic, no. No.” They both agreed on it and once again, another silence fell as they both sipped from their incredibly small coffees. It was gone in less than two sips.

“Another one?”  Tom asked once they were both finished. Martin sighed deeply, looking down at his paper cup. Then, a spark lit up in him as he changed his mind: “No! Let’s go crazy. I’ll have an orange juice.”

As Martin was the one who had gotten the coffee the first time, it was only right if Tom bought the juice now. He stepped outside and started walking right. Behind him, there were two men trying to lift up a big painting that would be sold in the new Panton Gallery that would open soon opposite of the bookshop.

Once in the small coffee shop, which was really a sandwich shop, Tom ordered the orange juice and a something more for a second breakfast. He hadn’t gotten to eat as much as he had liked since Harrison kept on nagging about his upcoming date with Janine. While he waited for his order, he looked around at the already well-known to him purple walls and the new advertisements that were stuck to the notice board. There didn’t seem to be anything interesting.

“Okay, thanks. Bye-bye.” The clerk gave him his drink and sandwich.

“See you later,” Tom said and made his way back outside. It was crowded in the sandwich shop, with people sitting at all the tables, of which a few barely fit in the space by itself already. Outside, there were also some people sitting and enjoying their food and drinks.

The sun hit Tom in the eyes as he got out. He followed the collection of small trees that stood in front of the unused garages all the way to the corner of the street. The sun was even brighter, making Tom look away.

Suddenly he felt something solid against him, scaring him a bit and spilling the orange juice in his hand everywhere, including on himself and the girl he had just bumped into. They both exclaimed in shock. The girl, unfortunately, had caught most of the blow of the cold beverage. Her white shirt now mostly bright orange.

“Shit! Bugger!” Tom threw the cup and his forgotten sandwich on the floor.

“Oh my god!” The girl from the bookshop was still in shock from the sudden cold that hit her in the chest.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” He repeated himself. He had a tissue in his pocket and took it out to wipe off the possible. “Here let me…”

“Get your hands off!’ She shrieked. There was a little laugh hidden in there. Tom understood that the move wasn’t very appropriate. He could see a few people around them give him a few strange looks.

“I’m really sorry. I… live just over the street.” He pointed out front of himself, in the general direction of his house. The girl was trying to get any juice she could, off of herself and her bags. “I uhm, have water and soap. You can get cleaned up.” She didn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about the idea.

“No thank you. I just need to get my car back.” She shook off some last drops from her hands and started to walk away, looking around for (probably) her car. Annoyance was very clear in her tone.

“I also have a phone. I’m confident that in five minutes we can have you spick and span and back on the street again.” He realized quickly how that sounded. The girl had turned around to look at him. “In the non-prostitute sense, obviously.” She was still mad and didn’t want to laugh, but when she had turned her head away, he could see the corner of her lips go up just a little. She brushed off some hair that had stuck to her cheek.

“All right,” She gave in, but not completely yet, “Well, what do you mean “just over the street”? Give it to me in yards.” Tom wasn’t sure how many yards exactly it would be to his blue door, but he gave it a shot: “Uhm, eighteen yards. That’s my house there with the blue front door.” He pointed again to his door The girl turned around to look for herself. She looked very hesitant but agreed to it in the end. Probably because the now sticky shirt was getting uncomfortable.

They walked in silence to his house. Tom prayed that Harrison had cleaned up at least a bit before he left to go see Janine. That was not the case.

“Come on in. I’ll just, I’ll just…” he ran in front of her into the corridor to clean up as much as he could before she could see the mess that the house actually was. There were old pizza boxes everywhere, shoes lying around in the middle of the floor. On the table lay plates from yesterday's breakfast. He didn’t know where to put them as the sink had been full for over four days already.

“Uhm, right. Right.” The girl was still at the door. “Come in. It’s not quite as tidy as it normally is, I fear.” He hoped she would believe him. “But the bathroom’s on the top floor. And the telephone’s just up here.” he showed her up the stairs and behind the wall. Even with a gigantic orange stain on her shirt, she still looked very well put together. She looked down at her bags, not sure what to do with them.

“Here, let me…” he took them from her and put them next to the stairs. She slowly walked up, not sure where to go next.

“Round the corner, straight on - straight on up.” She disappeared on the second part of the staircase. The time she was gone, Tom took to tidy up a bit more. He cursed Harrison for leaving it such a mess. He had clearly left him a message to clean up this morning. He started to gather around plates and cups and threw them next to the sink. There stood an old pan of baked beans too, he tried to throw it out, but the beans had gotten cold and hard and wouldn’t budge from their container.

He was about done swiping clean the table when he heard footsteps upstairs. He looked up. The girl looked stunning. She had exchanged her simple black pants - white shirt combo with a two-piece black sparkling ensemble… was he using that word correctly, he didn’t know for sure. The crop top and knee-length skirt showed her midriff perfectly. She was still wearing her oversized leather jacket and her beret and glasses were now gone. Tom could finally see her face properly. He couldn’t believe it. It was actually her!

They shared an awkward smile and Tom felt again the need to say something: “Er -” She let out a small sigh, looking a bit annoyed. It threw him off a bit. “Would you like a cup of tea before you go?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Coffee?”

“No.”

“Orange juice?” She gave him one of those are-you-kidding-me looks. “Probably not.” He felt like he owed her something. “Uhm, something else cold?” He went over to the fridge to look inside. She was looking at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Coke? Water?” He looked around some more. There wasn’t much else in the fridge that he could give her. “Some disgusting sugary drink pretending to have something to do with fruits of the forest?”

“No,” her voice came out as a whisper.

“Would you like something to eat? Something to nibble?” What was wrong with him? Those were not words you should say to strangers. “Apricots soaked in honey? Quite why, no one knows, because it stops them tasting of apricots and makes them taste like honey, and if you wanted honey you’d just buy honey instead of apricots.” He pulled the glass jar out of the fridge. He needed to have something in his hands or at least something else to look at except for her.

“But nevertheless, there we go, they’re yours if you want them.” He showed her the jar full of honey covered apricots.

“No.” It was the millionth time he heard her say it.

“Do you always say “no” to everything?” He was thinking out loud. She looked around, thinking about her answer and then said, with half a smile: “No.”  Tom closed the fridge. “I’d better be going. Thanks for your, uh,” She was looking for a word, “help.”

Tom leaned against the fridge. “You’re welcome. And may I also say, um, heavenly. I’ll just take my one chance to say it. After you’ve read that terrible book you’re certainly not gonna be coming back to the shop.” He looked down at the ground.

“Thank you.” She actually smiled.

“Yeah, well, my pleasure.” He smiled back. The girl now turned around and made her way through the tight corridor towards the door. Tom followed her.

“So… “ They stood next to the door now. “It was nice to meet you.” Looking at her, he had no idea what he was doing. He could feel his hand run through his hair as he said: “Surreal, but nice.” She just smiled, glancing at the door. Tom pulled at the lock and opened the door for her, saying a quick “sorry” for making her wait. She walked out without saying a word and he closed the door behind her.

“Surreal, but nice? What was I thinking?” he whispered to himself, in case she could still hear him through the heavy door. He was already walking back to the kitchen when the doorbell rang. He didn’t want the person to wait, so he jogged back to the door and opened it. There she was again. Her sunglasses back on her face. She smiled widely and said: “Hi.”

“Hi,” Tom replied, not expecting to see her again.

“I forgot my other bag,” she explained.

“Oh, right. Right.” A part of Tom was happy that he could see her again, but another was disappointed that she only rang the doorbell to get her bag. He let her back in. He walked to the chair he had put the bag on before and could hear the sound of the door closing. When he got back to her, she stood next to Harrison’s old bike. He handed her the bag and she mumbled “thanks”.  

Now they stood in silence again. She smiled and Tom could see her eyes glance down at his lips. So, he did too. Her lips were getting bigger, no closer. He wasn’t sure how that was possible. And then, he could feel them on his own. She put an arm around his neck to be even closer to him.

Tom couldn't move. His arms were on his side. It was a very simple kiss, but it lasted ages. Only when they needed to breathe, did she pull away. Very slowly. She took a step back. Tom didn’t know what to do. He had never been in a situation like this before. To be kissed by a girl he had just met? It was surreal! Surreal.

“I’m very sorry about the surreal, but nice comment. Disaster.” She kept looking back between his lips and his eyes.

“That’s okay.” She focused on his eyes. “I thought the apricot and honey thing was the real low point.” Tom laughed. They looked into each other's eyes in silence until the clattering of the doorknob broke the moment apart. She turned to look what it was, and so did he. Tom knew what was next to come.

“Oh, my god! My flatmate. I’m sorry. There is no excuse for him.” he quickly apologized for Harrison’s sake before the blond opened the door. The two watched the door open and Harrison walked in. Half a smoked cigarette still in his mouth. He was wearing a brown shirt, probably from the female section, that was two sizes too small and blue jogging pants, which were so low that half his ass was falling out. He walked past them, not even acknowledging their company.  Even though they exchanged “hi���s.

“I’m just going into the kitchen to get some food.” He shouted through the house as he walked. “Then I’m gonna tell you a story that will make your balls shrink to the size of raisins.” He heard the fridge door open.

“Probably best not to tell anyone about this.” She raised her eyebrows, implicating what they had just done.

“Right. Right, no one… I mean, I’ll tell myself sometimes, but, don’t worry, I won’t believe it.” She smiled and the two of them walked to the door. He opened it for her one more time and she walked through.

“Goodbye,” she smiled. Tom could only make out a small “Bye.” before the door was closed.  He leaned his arm against the lock and, just, stood there for a moment. Trying to comprehend what just happened. He had kissed (Y/F/N)! The (Y/F/N). The biggest up-and-coming actress Hollywood had to offer. How? What had he done to be able to say he kissed… no, she kissed him.

“There’s something wrong with this yogurt.” Harrison shook Tom out of his own thoughts. Tom looked at the small container. “It’s not yogurt. It’s mayonnaise.”

“Oh, right. There we are, then.” and he took another full spoon of the condiment into his mouth. “On for a video fest tonight?” he suggested with his mouth full. Tom was barely listening. The kiss still fresh in his memory. “I got some absolute classics.”

Tom wasn’t sure if Harrison was joking him, because the first movie he picked was one of hers. Gramercy Park, it was called. Her face was on the cover of the movie, together with some bloke named Matthew Modine. It didn’t look great, but Tom didn’t have anything else to do, so he agreed on watching it.

“Smile,” Modine’s character begged hers in an art gallery. For some artistic decisions, the movie was black and white. Tom couldn’t understand why. The two characters walked around, looking at the paintings in the room. He couldn’t remember why they were there, he wasn’t really paying attention to the movie itself, honestly. Just her. He still couldn’t believe it that he had met the beautiful girl on the screen. Of course, her hair was different, but for the rest, it was definitely her!

“No.,” she said.  

“Smile,” Modine repeated himself. He had done it already four times. Each time as annoying to watch.

“I’ve got nothing to smile about.” the two sat down on a bench that just happened to be in the otherwise, furniture free, gallery.

“Okay, in about seven seconds, I’m going to ask you to marry me.” the two characters shared a look. Then, (Y/N) started smiling.

“Imagine,” Harrison spoke up. In his hand a piece of pizza that had been hanging there since three scenes ago. “Somewhere in the world, there’s a man who’s allowed to kiss her.”

“Yeah, she is…” Tom couldn’t look away from the small tv screen, “fairly fabulous.”

____________________

Tom stood in his bookshop. As usual, it was empty, except for one man.  He had been standing around for a few minutes already. In the middle of the shop, just looking around himself. “Do you have any books by Dickens?” he finally asked. Tom looked up from his inventory.

“No. No, I’m afraid we’re a travel bookshop. We only sell travel books.” The man didn’t seem to understand. He didn’t look exactly to be well. A bit pale and dried up. His suit also looked slightly too big for him.

“Oh, right. How about the new John Grisham thriller?”

“Well, no, because that’s a novel, too, isn’t it?”

“Oh right.” His eyes looked a ��bit glassy as he continued to gaze around the room, nowhere in particular. The man sighed deeply. “Have you got Winnie-the-Pooh?” Tom was officially done with this individual. The knew that Martin should be there somewhere, so he called out: “Martin, your customer.” Martin, this time wearing a big red cardigan, purple shirt, and a blue tie, popped up from behind a wall. He definitely had not heard the conversation Tom had with the man because he pleasantly asked: “Can I help you?”

A ring of the bell above the entrance made Tom turn around. It was probably just the strong wind that had been roaming around the street the whole day because there was nobody there when he looked. What he did see, was a double-decker bus driving in front of them right then. On there, the advertisement for the movie HELIX. He knew it would be coming out in cinemas soon, but that was about it. As the bus moved along, he saw her face. Of course, she would be the star of it. There almost hasn’t been a movie without her for the last two years.

It had been two days since the orange juice incident, Tom felt like he couldn’t avoid (Y/N). Her perfect face was everywhere. It was sad because he knew that in reality, he would never see her again.

The next morning Tom was making his way up the stairs, to the bathroom, when Harrison came walking downstairs. For some unknown reason, he was wearing Tom’s red scuba gear. His flatmate walked past him with a nonchalant “Hey” and left Tom confused on the stairs.

“Just, incidentally, why are you wearing that?” Tom asked at the breakfast table. He was looking at Harrison who stood by the (still very full) sink eating a bowl of cereal, a cigarette between the same fingers in which he held the spoon...

“Combination of factors really,” he said as he ate. “Uhm, no clean clothes…”

“There never will be, you know, unless you actually clean your clothes.”

“Right,” he nodded, “Vicious circle.”

“Yeah.” Tom agreed.

“And I was, like, rooting round in your things and I found this and I thought: Cool.” Tom looked at Harrison properly. Cool, was not a word he would use. The scuba-suit was definitely one of the less extravagant pieces of wardrobe Harrison has ever worn, but it was still a scuba-suit.

“Kinda spacey,” he added.

It was a Saturday, so the two men decided to do what they usually did when they didn’t have plans. They went up to the roof. It was a very pleasant spot where you could look out on the city, without the city looking back at you.

Tom sat down on a chair, under a parasol, while Harrison lounged himself on a slightly higher bit of the roof, next to the flower pots of which the residents had died many moons ago. He lay down on his side.

“There’s something wrong with the goggles, though.” Harrison tried to adjust them to his face.

“No, they were prescription,” Tom explained, not looking up from whatever article he was reading.

“Groovy.” Harrison sat up.

“So I could see all the fishes properly.”

“You should do more of this stuff.” He adjusted the goggles again. Tom doubted if his friend over there could actually see anything through them whether or not he moved them around in some way.

“So, look, any messages today?”  He put down his article on the small table next to him.

“Yeah, I wrote a couple down. Harrison got up and walked over to another piece of the roof, where his own set of table and garden chairs stood. It was fully in the sun and Harrison often, unfortunately, lay there naked. Hoping to get a tan someday.

“So, there were two, there were two messages? Right?”  He watched as Harrison walked over to the other chairs and sat down, putting his feet up on another chair in front of him. He pulled down the goggles so they would hang around his neck. “You want me to write down all your messages?” He waved with his cigarette as he talked.

Tom didn’t understand how he managed to live with this idiot for this long. He also didn’t understand how he had not yet bought an answering machine. Massaging his temple, he asked: “Okay, Who are the ones that you didn’t write down from?” Harrison took a swing from his cigarette and thought for a moment.

“No, gone completely.” But immediately after that, he remembered again: “Oh, no, there was one from your mum. She said: don’t forget lunch, and her leg’s hurting again.”

“No one else?”

“Absolutely no one else.” Tom looked at Harrison for a moment, ready for him to add something to his sentence. But he only leaned back relaxed in his chair. After six seconds, Tom gave up and went back to the article he was reading. Of course, right at that moment, Harrison started talking again. “Though if we’re going for this obsessive writing-down-all-the-message thing, some American girl called (Y/N) called a few days ago.” Tom’s head shot back up. She called? How was that even possible?  He wanted to play it a bit cool.  “What did she say?” he asked.

“Well, it was genuinely bizarre. She said: Hi, it’s (Y/N). Then she said, Call me at The Ritz. And then gave herself a completely different name.”

“Which was?” Tom dragged him on.

“Absolutely no idea.” He took another breath of his cigarette. “Remembering one name’s hard enough.” Tom groaned in frustration and got up from his slightly uncomfortable chair. He made his way downstairs, to the living room-study where the phone was located. He had to look for the telephone book to find the number for the Ritz. Of course, it was hidden underneath a pile of Harrison’s dirty clothes.

Once he had the number for the hotel, he ticked it into the machine and waited for the other line to answer. It soon did. A man asked him who he wanted to speak to. Tom knew that it probably wouldn’t be (Y/F/N). It was probably the name that she had left with Harrison… which he forgot. He tried anyway. The man said that there was nobody staying here under this name.

“No, I know that. She said that. I know she’s using another name. The problem is she left the message with my flatmate,” Tom looked at Harrison who very calmly and casually sat down on the couch in front of him and opened up the newspaper. A new cigarette in his mouth. “Which was a very serious mistake. Uhm…” he didn’t know how to explain it to the man on the other line. “Imagine, if you will, the stupidest person you’ve ever met. Are you doing that?”

“Yes, sir, I have him in my mind.” he heard.

“And now double it. And that is the, what can I say, the git that I am living with. And he can’t remember this other…”

“Try Flintstone,” Harrison said. His voice sounded very nasally because he was wearing those goggles again. Tom looked up at him in complete disbelief.

“Sorry,” he said to the man from the hotel. “What?”  

“I think she said her name was Flintstone.” Tom rolled his eyes. A cartoon character? Really? But he had no other options, so he took his shot in the dark: “I don’t suppose Flintstone rings any bells, does it?’ He was expecting the man to laugh at him, but instead, the man said: ‘Well, I’ll put you right through, sir.”  He couldn’t believe it. While the line was being switched he tried to think of what he should say. That was cut short when her voice was heard. “Hello.” He put the phone back to his ear.

“Hi. Sorry. Uhm…It’s Tom, Holland.” He wasn’t sure she would know who he was.

“Yes?”

“We… I work in a bookshop.” He sat down, not sure his legs could hold him up during this conversation. He wasn’t very hopeful that she remembered who he was. But she did. “You played it pretty cool there, waiting for three days to call.”

“Oh, no, I promise you I’ve never played anything cool in my entire life. My flatmate, who I’ll stab to death later, never gave me the message.” he tried to explain himself. She didn’t say anything. This was his chance. “I don’t know, perhaps… uhm, I could drop round for tea later or something?” She didn’t say anything for a while.

‘Things are pretty busy here. I might be free at around 4:00.”

“Right. Right. Great.” They said their bye’s and he could hear the other line hang up. He held the phone in his hand for a second or nine before putting it down. He looked at Harrison, who had put down his paper and took a long swing from his cigarette. Before blowing out the smoke that had built up in his lungs, he put the goggles back over his eyes. Tom could suddenly see smoke coming out from underneath the goggles.

At around 3:30, Tom decided to leave the house. Not only have at least ten minutes to spare in case any traffic came up but also because he was starting to get tired of Harrison blowing smoke in his goggles and then yelling that his eyes burned.

He took the bus. Getting out as quickly as possible. He crossed the street and looked at the entrance of the Ritz. He had never even been close to the building. With his lower than low income, he didn’t exactly feel worthy to be around it.

Walking in, a whiff of richness could be felt. It wasn’t very pleasant. He had walked to the front desk and asked in which room “Miss Flintstone” was staying and then headed to the elevators. The man had said to go to the fortepiano and to the right. So that is what he did.

A man in a black suit walked in with him. In one hand he was holding a briefcase and in the other a cup of coffee.

“Which floor?” Tom asked.

“Three, please.” That just so happened to be the same as his. The doors closed and they were ascending. Not much later the elevator stopped and they got out. Tom glanced at the little navigation sign on which it stated which rooms were on each side of the corridor and made his way to the right. The man took a bit more time doing so but followed him in the same direction. He walked behind him until the very end of the corridor, all the way up to room number 38, the Trafalgar Suite. Before Tom knocked he turned around to the man. “Are you… sure?”  Was he here too to see (Y/N).

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, Sure.” He smiled. Tom knocked on the door. They waited for the door to be opened. Even though the other man stood a good distance away from him, Tom still had the feeling he could feel his breath on his neck. He felt very uncomfortable. Who was he? What was he doing here?

The door suddenly opened, revealing a woman around his (and maybe also the other man’s) age. Tom had never seen her before. She was barely looking at them, too occupied by whatever it was in her hands.

“Hi. Hi. I’m Karen.” Karen handed him a booklet, on which a the same picture was that he had been seeing all over town recently. It was (Y/N), in her futuristic bob-cut, from her new movie HELIX. “I’m sorry, things are running a little bit late. Here’s the uhm, thing. Do you wanna come this way?” She went back inside.”Through here.” Not knowing what to do, Tom just followed and so did the ginger man. There were many other people in the room. All looking like they have been waiting for a while, all holding the same booklet that Karen had given to him. Tom finally understood what was going on. This was a press conference.

“So what did you think of the film?” Karen clicked her pen, ready to write down their words.

“Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. I thought it was Close Encounters meets Jean de Florette.” the ginger man said. Karen smiled satisfied. Then the two of them looked at Tom, expecting him to add to it. He did not know what he thought of the movie as he had not seen it, nor - honestly - was he actually planning on seeing it. Because he had to say something, he choked out: “I agree.” The man nodded approvingly and swung his coffee cup back to drink the last bit of his drink.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get down what magazines you’re from.”

“Time Out.” the man said.

“Great,” she noted the name, then looked up at Tom, “and you’re from?” Tom was very much freaking out. He was definitely not from any magazine. He can’t even remember the last time he read one. He tried to look around unnoticed for some inspiration. Thankfully, on a small table nearby, there was a whole pile of magazines. Hidden behind a vase of flowers. It was the only option he got.

“Er- Horse & Hound.” The man next to him smiled impressed. Tom smirked back. Karen wrote down the name too. As (Y/N) had said that they could meet up today, he assumed that she was expecting him.

He cleared his throat: “The name’s Tom Holland. Actually, she might be expecting me.”

“Oh, okay.” She didn’t sound very impressed but went along with it. “Take a seat and I’ll go check.” Karen smiled and walked away. The ginger man still stood by him. He pointed at a small couch and asked if they should sit down. They did so. As they walked over to it, the man started a conversation: “I see you’ve… I see you’ve brought her some flowers.” he pointed at the small bouquet. Tom had completely forgotten about them. It was rather pathetic now that he thought about it. He started laughing: “No. These are.. for my… grandmother. She’s in a hospital down the road. Thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, you know.” The man nodded.

“Sure, right. Absolutely, yeah.” Tom turned around slightly, hoping the conversation was now over. Unfortunately, for him, it was not. “Which hospitals that?” Tom wanted to tell the man to mind his own business but thought it would be quite rude to do so.

“Do you mind me not saying? It’s a rather distressing thing, isn’t it?” he was impressed by himself, really. “The name of the hospital kind of gives it away.”

“Absolutely. Sure.” the man agreed. Tom thanked him with a “Cheers.” There was a very awkward silence between them. Tom did not know if this was much better than the conversation.

“Right, Mr. Holland,” Karen popped up through the crowd of journalists from a different corridor than into which one she had disappeared, “If you come this way.”

“Right.” Tom got up. He walked over to Karen who showed him towards a room a bit away from where everyone was standing and waiting. “You’ve got five minutes.” She opened a door for him and walked away. The room was oval shaped. Very roomy and very classy. The beige color of the walls was repeated in the furniture, ceiling, drapes, and carpet. Parallel to the door was a big window looking out on the city. In front of it stood (Y/N). she had her back facing him but turned around the moment he walked in. Just like the last time he saw her, she was beautiful. Even with the light making her only a silhouette. She walked away from the window with a big smile. Tom could now see her more properly. Yes, she was beautiful. Dressed in a full suit, including a tie, she showed all the power in her that the world needed to see. Her hair was tied back in a slick ponytail.

“Hi.” He said. She responded with a simple “Hello.”

“Uhm, I brought these, but clearly…” he looked around the room, where gigantic bushes of flowers stood in every spot that fit.

“No, they’re great. They’re great.” She smiled and took them from him. Tom didn’t know what to do.

“I’m sorry about not ringing back.” he apologized when she put down the flowers on the table in front of them. “The whole two-names concept was totally too much for my flatmate’s pea-sized intellect.”

“No, it’s a stupid privacy thing. I always pick a cartoon character.”  thankfully she didn’t seem to be very angry at him, technically, ignoring her for three days. “Last time I was Mrs. Bmbi.” she laughed at her own choice. The door of the room closed as a man stepped in, making them both look away from each other. The man was older, already at the point where his barely-there hair was completely white. He was wearing all black, so Tom assumed it was some type of security.

“Everything all right?”  he asked.

“Yes, thank you.” (Y/N) smiled at the man, who brought his attention to Tom.

“And you’re from Horse & Hound?” Tom just nodded. “Good.” Then he turned around and started going through some papers.

“Is that so?” (Y/N) smiled, probably holding in a bigger one underneath it, and sat down on the big couch. Not wanting to be inappropriate, Tom sat down in a chair next to it. His eyes were still on the man. He couldn’t have the conversation he wanted to have, while he was there. They would have him kicked out before he actually asked anything.

“So..uhm, I’ll just fire away, then, shall I?” he looked unsure at (Y/N), who glanced at the man in the round corner of the room and smirked. She waited for his first question.

“Right...er- The film’s great.” Always a good way to start, he thought. “And I just was wondering whether you ever thought of having more, uh, horses in it?” The man cleared his throat. It was unsure if it was towards Tom and his ridiculously idiotic question, or it was actually needed. Especially, that he didn’t even seem to be paying attention, as he was checking her mail. (Y/N) answered as she glanced over at him: “Well, we would have like to, but it was difficult, obviously, being set in space.” Tom seemed to blank out for a minute. At this moment he felt like a bigger idiot than Harrison.

“Space, right, yeah. Yeah, obviously very difficult.” The door opened again and the man left. Tom didn’t even wait to make sure he couldn’t hear them. “I’m so sorry. I arrived outside, they thrust this into my hand.” he showed her the movie booklet that he had earlier on put down.

“No, it’s my fault. I thought this would all be over by now.” she sighed. “I just wanted to sort of apologizing for the kissing thing. I seriously don’t know what came over me.” Tom could feel the smile on his face slowly lower itself. He didn’t know what he had expected from this conversation, but this somehow was not it. “I just wanted to make sure that you were fine about it.”

Tom froze for a moment. Of course, he was fine about it. The kiss was amazing. He knew that he probably should say it out loud too. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely fine.” He had to play it cool, though. Once again, the heavy door opened and closed. The bold man came in again.

“Do remember that Miss (Y/L/N) is also keen to talk about her next project which she is shooting later in the summer.” He walked over to them to pour a glass of water for (Y/N). Tom was sure she could perfectly well do it herself and that there was no particular reason for the man to be there now.

“Yes, excellent. Excellent.” He did not want to talk about her next project, but since the man was still there, he had no other choice. “Any horses in that one?” She looked at him with a sad smile. He knew very well that this attempt at an interview was not going great at all. “Or hounds for that matter?” he added quickly. “Our readers are equally intrigued by both species.”

“It takes place on a submarine,” she explained disappointedly.

“Oh, well, bad luck.” he glanced over at the man, who did not seem to be very keen on leaving. “But if there were horses in it, would you be riding them, or would you be getting a stunt-horse-double-man-thing?” he could hear the man walk away with a sigh, opening the door, and closing it behind him.

“I’m a complete moron, I apologize.” he took a deep breath. “This is very weird. It’s the sort of thing that happens in dreams, not in real life. I mean, good dreams. It’s a dream, in fact, to see you again.” He looked away, not believing what he had just said. Her next words were soft, almost a whisper: “What happens next in the dream?”

Her smile took his breath away for a moment there. Once he managed to talk, he thought for a moment. “I suppose that in the uhm, dream, dream scenario, I just change my personality,” he wished he was more confident around her, less of a bumbling idiot. “Because you can do that in dreams and uhm... “ They were looking into each other's eyes. Tom was not sure if she was actually moving closer to him or he was just imagining it. “And walk over and kiss the girl. But…” they both started to lean in. This was happening. Now he was prepared. He could do it.

The only problem was, it was not happening. The old security man came in through the door, making Tom and (Y/N) sit up and look away from each other. Breaking any tension there was between them.

“Time’s up, I’m afraid. Did you get what you wanted?” Tom wanted to punch the stupid grin off of his face. Of course, he didn’t get what he wanted. But he had to keep calm.

“Nearly. Nearly,” he said, fidgeting in his chair a bit.

“Well, maybe just one last question,” he smirked towards (Y/N). It was very unnerving to look at. She smiled and said: “sure, sure.” The man left again. It was all very annoying.

“Are you busy tonight?” Tom asked when the door clicked in the lock.

“Yes.” She simply stated.

“Right. Right.” He understood. Of course, the biggest movie star in Hollywood would be busy. She doesn’t have time for him. What was he thinking? There was a silence between them. Very awkward.

“Come in,” The man walked in, This time followed by a Clark Kent looking type. (Y/N) got up, so Tom assumed it was really time to go for him. They politely shook hands and she said: “Well, it was nice to meet you.”

“Yes, and you.”

“Surreal, but nice.” She smirked. Tom laughed at the comment. It will haunt him for the rest of his life, probably.

“Thank you,” he said, “You are Horse & Hound’s favorite actress.” the comment made her laugh out loud a little. “You and Black Beauty tied.” He wished he could kiss her, but the men next to them made it impossible. So, he walked away. Not looking back. He was not exactly pleasantly surprised to see the ginger man standing outside. When he saw Tom, he told whoever he was talking to on the phone, to hang on.

“How was she?” He asked interestedly.

“Oh, um…” the question threw him off a bit. “Fabulous.”

“Excellent.” they were about to part, but the man stopped him again. “Wait a minute, she took your grandmother’s flowers?” he looked confused. So did Tom. Grandmother’s flowers? What was he on about? Then he remembered his poor excuse.

“Yeah, yeah. That’s right. Bitch.”

“Mr. Holland.” It was Karen, coming out of a corridor. What was it now? Couldn’t he just leave? He was fine, honestly. “If you’d like to come with me, we can just rush you through the others.”

“The others?” Karen walked away, but Tom stood still in his spot. What others?  There weren’t any others for him. Just (Y/N). Karen didn’t stop or respond, so he had to follow her. The woman leads him into another room, where a gentleman was seated.

“Mr. Holland is from Horse & Hound,” she told him and walked away, but not before gesturing to Tom to sit down.

“How ’s it going?” the man asked. They shook hands.

“Very well. Thank you.” Tom was going to pass out. He couldn’t interview him! And Karen had talked about others. That was definitely plural. Was he expected to talk to the whole cast? He couldn’t.

“Have a seat.” They sat down. Tom was ready for the next hour of torture to begin.

-------

Should I write and post more of this story? Do you want to be tagged? Any other request or comment?

[xtremedespair3d]

New Year 2021: The Virus That Ruined Everything

WARNING: THIS POST IS EXTREMELY LONG, YOU CAN EITHER SKIM TO SOME IMPORTANT PARTS IF YOU'D LIKE.

The 2020 decade is finally here and... Quite a lot of stuff has happened for the absoltue worse, and I didn’t ask any of this.

Life continuously gets worse every time with bad stuff happening, mainly online drama and problems with my personal life, other things like celebrity deaths and among other things, but this year, no thanks to a certain virus and worse, my personal problems, this has definitely become the worst worst year yet!

(As for the thumbnail, I was gonna look for generic images of “2021″ but I realized I had saved this image since 2020 began, but looking at it now, I don’t think it has hold up because 2020 has become a far worse year of its own. Hopefully for a 2020 2 picture for 2021 in case if life continues to get worse and worse)

This is definitely the longest Tumblr post I’ve ever written, so be prepared!

First off, let me apologize for last year’s New Year post where I said it would be my last post and I would be retire from Tumblr, but after a few months, I got bored and I decided to come back because I can’t live without blogging, so I’ll continue doing what I like doing, even if nobody reads or cares about my posts most of the time.

I should also tell you in advance that I’m dropping the scoring system in my top best of the year lists, not only they were usually rigged, biased* and repetitive, it was pretty confusing too. What I was basically trying to do with these scores is just matching different systems, like for example:

10/10 Rank: S++ 100%

The first one is a standard one, the second is common in some games but it’s more loosely based on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain where the top rank is S++, and the third part is of course based on Rotten Tomatoes, which thank god I’m not even checking that site anymore and I have the word muted on Twitter so I won’t be disappointed with how terrible the movies I want to see the most perform (And why should I really care about that to begin with?). In the end, numbers don’t matter, it’s all about how much I enjoy this media and how much do I love it or hate it to be top or bottom, that’s all what matters.

*Although my lists will always be biased regardless. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now, let’s kick off this post with some of the cursed shit that happened throughout this year, there were Australia wildfires, we almost had World War 3, police brutality, and now the worst thing of all, COVID-19. I’m not even gonna bother going into details on these other events other than COVID because it’s a very important issue that happened throughout life, even for my standards which I wouldn’t give an absolute shit about everything else that happens. A lot of major events got delayed, movies and games that I was looking forward the most got delayed, etc. Everything about COVID was a mess, but as usual, everything that happens in my life is far worse than every event. There’s a plethora of issues that happened throughout this year with plenty of things that really affected me, so I really hope you’ll understand (If not, it’s fine, nobody cares about these posts anyway).

When I was writing this draft, I put some titles to better indicate myself and to not forget about the important topics I want to talk about, and at some point I was debating myself whether or not I should leave these titles, but as I was writing without the titles when I got to certain topics, I realized how disorganized this post was looking, so I’m definitely putting these titles back as part of the actual post. I’ll probably do this in every New Year post too. Anyway, let’s start!

Quarantine and mental health: Let’s talk about the current situation we live in, quarantine. A lot of people miss being outside and being social, although to be honest, I’m not really missing out on anything, my family and I rarely go outside and we love staying indoors all the time anyways, except for going to the cinema, and the lockdown wasn’t really that strict in my town.

The best part of the quarantine was at one point my mom decided that I wouldn’t do online classes for my fine arts school since it’s not very convenient to learn stuff at home, and while I partially agree, the main reason why I didn’t want to continue studying is probably because I lost care about it, I’m always so distracted on my phone, I’m always so slow with sculpture and painting, not being able to go to school is the best thing the quarantine could happen... Except... There’s still some priority with my older sister, and when September came, it was time for the homeworks once again, my worst nightmare...

Doing my older sister’s homeworks really bring the worst of me, every time my mom always tells me there’s homework to do, I always say “ugh...” in varying tones and sometimes I get in trouble for it where my mom constantly gets triggered and tells me we must do it for my older sister’s sake, blah blah blah, and always, I shit you not, I ALWAYS fight with my mom when we do homeworks. I try to tell her the do’s and don’ts of how to use the internet and stuff, she sometimes takes too long researching for stuff, she constantly talks while figuring out and changes words when I’m supposed to be writing the things she’s supposed to tell me, I hate doing maps, etc. Just working with her is the absolute worst. I wish I could calm down in every situation, but I just can’t, I always get triggered and I insult my mom in said things.

Sometimes my mom tells me that my angry behavior comes from my lack of sleep, I always insist her that my bad sleep has nothing to do with my angry behavior, it’s the way I am. (Lately my sleep schedule is a bit messy but, like I said, I’m always angry because that’s how I am)

If you’ve been following me for a while and looked at how I tweet and interact with other Discord servers, you probably would have guessed that my behavior hasn’t gotten any better, and indeed it hasn’t. Of course I did promise I would change this year by trying to not attack people’s opinions and not being so mad at my mom, but being me as usual, I’m never going to change at all.

I don’t know what’s worse, attacking people’s opinions, or always figting with my mom in what to do with doing my older sister’s homeworks.

Before you tell me stuff like “Why can’t you tell your older sister to do her homeworks herself?” Because she doesn’t care and there’s one particular reason which I’m probably not gonna discuss in detail publicly (Unless you ask me to).

I've recently been hearing stuff about the COVID vaccine coming to Mexico, while that sounds great news, but at the same time, I can't help but have a feeling that I don't have the highest hopes for this and I don't think things would be fine, like, what if someone might be allergic to whatever the vaccine is made of? Not to mention that the vaccine is delivered in syringes, instead of going like the ending of Spider-Man PS4, I have a better idea: Why not try to make planes and spray out the vaccine everywhere so everyone outside can breath it, like it was some sort of pesticide but it has the opposite effect? It's kind of a messed up idea when I brought the pesticide thing, but that's the best thing I could think of.

Novel progress: This is something I was desperately trying to achieve, but the road has become a complete let down. I don’t want to disclose anything about my project, but I actually succeeded in publishing at least the first two chapters of my novel, the prologue and chapter 1, but I’ve been getting some rather harsh criticism in my website that I’m not really fond of, some of them are suggestions I’m not really sure I want to do, and even some that are just destructive, not only on my chapters but even on my blog posts when I’m trying to talk about some changes and other things, even my older sister’s harsh criticism doesn’t help me at all. All the negative comments combined with my eternal procrastination and having NO IDEA what the story even is and trying to figure that out and the monthly gap, I couldn’t help but give up on the project, I haven’t flat out cancelled the project out of my mind, but in terms of making it exist, I put it on hold. Yeah, I was really hurt and I have no idea what to do.

I don’t know about you but I’m just very sensitive about the kind of feedback I got with my project, it’s just something I never asked for and it really hurts me so much, it completely discourages me to keep going

I’ll talk about the future of my project in my resolutions, but the one last thing to say about this is that once my project exists and if I’m become successful, I really hope for once in my life my projects or I won’t get the same treatment as the next topic below.

The Last of Us 2 and YandereDev: This is seriously the most trigger inducing topic I’ve ever had to witness in my life, it’s beyond disgusting.

Literally every time over the last 3 years, everything that I’m interested in always ends up getting some form of backlash for no absolute reason. Fate/Apocrypha in 2017, Venom, Ready Player One and FLCL2&3 in 2018, Captain Marvel in 2019, now it’s TLOU2 in 2020.

First of all, I’m not a huge TLOU person, although I would have watched Let’s Play videos of people playing the first game, and from what I’ve seen, it was beloved by many, and then there’s the iconic “That’s the cutest fucking thing I have seen in my entire life” meme which I didn’t even know it was originated from TLOU to begin with.

The first game is a favorite, so the sequel should be an instant hype, but early this year, I started to see some hate around TLOU2, and it has been going for months, even some of my friends and artists I care about are joining the hate bandwagon for no reason...

LIKE, WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY???!!! THIS IS DISGUSTING!!!!! EVERYONE, LITERALLY EVERYONE ARE ABSOLUTE DISGUSTING MONSTERS!!!!!!

Literally, some of my friends and even some artists I care about talk shit about TLOU2 and they continue to do so! And then there’s other people I do care about like YouTubers who do care about TLOU2 and that’s enough to make me happy and I would LOVE to watch their videos but I’m too spoiled and self-conscious about watching TLOU2 videos and like it, so I have no idea whose should should I be on!

And then there’s The Game Awards which a lot of the nominees and even the winners were saturated with TLOU2, I can’t even bother getting into details for this but I definitely expected people to be so mad at TLOU2 winning almost every single award.

Now with how much shit TLOU2 has gotten, the future of the TLOU series which can even affect the upcoming HBO series is not gonna be so bright and everyone have turned against Naughty Dog completely.

You know what the saddest part is? Looking at the hate for TLOU2 makes me think on how will my project can get treated with whatever bullshit I may put with certain characters and other stuff, and that shit is beyond depressing, I absolutely WISH my beloved project I may or may never bring to life can get the same treatment as TLOU2, EVER! NOT EVEN FROM THE PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT! JUST DON’T!

Please let this shitty year end so no one can ever talk about TLOU2 EVER AGAIN!

Lastly I have to talk about YandereDev, although I wouldn’t like to get into details because I’m probably gonna get crucified that I’m still supporting them. I also don’t have much to comment on them but it really sucks seeing people I have highly regarded going down in infamy. Especially with YandereDev, I still watch KubzScout’s videos about Yandere Simulator and I like seeing how the game is progressing, and sure, YandereDev can be a shitty person but I can’t help but feel for him and his something is something I wish I wouldn’t be when defending my project, like I don’t want to be the next TLOU2 and the next YandereDev. And then I’ve seen some of the most unfunniest memes I’ve seen in my entire life.

Hololive disasters: This isn’t something that necessarily affected me pretty badly, but it’s worth pointing out, kinda like “I’ve seen some shit” situation.

As of late, Virtual YouTubers have become finally become a norm into our modern pop culture and global society as a whole, we’ve all become VTuber simps. Whether it’s Hololive, Nijisanji, Pikamee, Projekt Melody, Artemis of the Blue, everyone’s simping VTubers now.

Out of all the aforementioned groups and independent VTubers, the most popular group is of course Hololive. Hololive as of late has gained a huge following thanks to fan subtitled clips and even the Azur Lane collaboration early this year. Then Hololive English has launched and it became a success, and the biggest Japanese milestone is the 5th generation! But as soon as the 5th gen debuted, things don’t get any sweet with Mano Aloe where she leaked her Live2D before her debut stream and forgot to delete her leak and other things. For something like this seems too outrageous, but with that she completely decided to retire even after she debuted, which was really sad, but what makes it especially furious for me is that Guchico, Aloe’s designer, got his art completely wasted and I doubt he would make another VTuber design for Hololive after this.

Then there’s the infamous Kiryu Coco and Akai Haato Taiwan thing, which I don’t really understand what the hell happened with that, and I don’t want to be too offensive, but that’s kind of retarded on the Chinese part.

There were a plethora of other disasterous events with Hololive but I think those two of Mano Aloe and Coco/Haato Taiwan are the most important worth talking about, this wasn’t quite a good year for Hololive to say the least.

Artists: Another thing I didn’t like throughout this year was the artists, and this isn’t so much about dramas like last year, but I’ve started to hate a number of artists for various reasons, even Custom Maid people.

I’m not gonna call out people’s names, so I’m simply going to tell the actions which really turns me off. On the illustrators side, I got really tired of seeing artists complain about shit that I like and other things, and my absolute least favorite, artists completely being hard on themselves and being hardcore perfectionists. That is one of the worst things I hate seeing to artists, there’s just something about their ranting about their perfectionism and everything else that really turn me off so badly, as for the times they do their “I can’t draw, I hate my drawings” and whatever, it really pisses me off so much, why artists aren’t just happy with what they’re doing?! And to top it all off, they completely neglect their fans’ encouragement and they continue with the same shit over and over! Like, I don’t understand! I just want to see them happy and deliver the best works they can, but if that’s what they really feel all the time, why are they even drawing in the first place? Might as well they should retire for good and then I’m immediately gonna regret saying this afterwards!

Then there's also some of the artists I follow (At least the ones who speak English) who talk shit about some anime, games or movies that I like, and some what I've seen even join in the TLOU2 hate train for no reason like I previously mentioned, which gives me a huge sour taste in my mouth. Sometimes I even went so far arguing with at least two from what I recently remember when one tweeted where he sounded like he was talking ill of Rui Komatsuzaki's art with the Danganronpa x Akudama Drive crossover art, and another one who for some reason doesn't even care about the Azur Lane game, and the biggest irony is that this is an artist that drew Taihou quite a lot, and that thought process is downright stupid! Like, what's even the point of drawing fan arts of the characters from a game which made you successful but made you start to lose care for it to begin with?! You're so stupid!

In short: I hate perfectionists and I hate when artists talk shit on the things I like. Even if I hate the way they are, I just can't let go of them because I still support them for their art, I wish I would simply care for artists for their art and not so much for them (Except for their health and stuff, although I still feel selfish about it), but I've grown too caring for some of them (At least the ones who speak English) that I would occasionally read their tweets about certain things like games, anime, movies, etc, and some of them leave me a sour taste in my mouth.

Then there’s the Custom Maid people, although there’s not much to say but what pisses me off the most in some cases is that they abruptly started to retire and disappear without a trace and there’s not much I can do about that.

Throwing some Koikatsu artists in there as well, I don’t really follow many Koikatsu artists but the one I truly believe was the absolute worst is “renka.” (For some reason he deleted his Twitter, he might have ranted about something about his struggles but glad I didn’t even witness that to even care about him at this point, although his Pixiv is still open) From the very beginning early this year, the dude did some rants about his struggles and other things I can’t even bother to remember, but over the next few months I’ve grown to like the guy, we even followed each other and communicated for a while (That is until for some reason he decided to unfollow me so we’re no longer mutuals), but as of late, his content and his mental state have completely deteriorated, he stopped doing these “Good morning” posts I always interacted with, he abandoned his one OC, and the worst part of renka is that he’s become so hungry for attention and numbers, I mean, his posts always get over 1 thousand likes and he thinks it’s not enough. And the one thing that broke my heart the most about talking to this guy, I made these collab screenshots (Or just some よその子 (Yosonoko, someone else's OC) screenshots I did for fun) and renka never even bothered interacting with them. No likes, no retweets, no replies, NOTHING! The dude for no reason completely neglects my screenshots I did for fun, these screenshots I made are probably the screenshots I'm the least proud of ever making, the dude was so ungrateful, fuck the guy. Then there's also the time where renka out of the blue blocked a Custom Maid person I interacted with, which gives me more reason to not care about the guy.

I seriously wish I can at least counter some artists' opinions very often and to not get discouraged, basically virtually slapping in their faces like I always want, but I really wish people wouldn't take me as if I'm threatening them with a strong tone (Though sometimes I do it on purpose) to the point I would get instantly blocked, even when I try to make a rather innocent disagreement. This is all for directly interacting with these artists, in my private server, I ALWAYS talk shit to them behind their backs, their art and the artists themselves.

And yeah, even if I were to start drawing regularly and I face the same struggles the artists have which makes me an absolute hipocrite, but the thing is I’m still so inexperienced with digital art and the artists I care about are hella experienced, it’s completely ironic and it’s just frustrating to watch!

Private Discord server and downfall: Probably the most heartbreaking thing that happened to me and I have ever done this year. In 2018, for a while I’ve constantly been making test servers just to copy and paste some things and I always ended up deleting them afterwards, but one day I somehow have finally decided to make a server that’ll stay forever, and indeed has been which has become my personal journal where I can freely and privately talk about some things where I wouldn’t publicly do so in Twitter mainly for my controversial tone and opinions.

In 2020, a few months ago, I started bringing some people into my server, although one time I did bring someone to take a quick look at it and got out afterwards, but this time the people I brought were friends I recently made and the ones I care about now, which they happen to be Custom Maid creators and an artist (The following links contain NSFW content, click at your own risk), such as Ten Speed (Who was the only person active mainly because he’s the only second English speaking person, he’s a Filipino), hinosuna (Main account, he’s been using this more nowadays since June 30th, he seemingly retired from doing Custom Maid content), ryuuunnji, Shimotsuki Nagomi and Maidin (Who at the time he was about to delete his Twitter account for some drama, I asked him to make a Discord to better communicate rather than using Pixiv, then the Twitter account was remade into what you see in the link, no communication, screenshot posting only).

On December 4th, however, things started to take a dive. ryuuunnji had left the server, I asked him on the Twitter DM about it and he has indeed left the server because he wasn’t very active on it, which makes me sad. With that being said, it came into my mind that I would start trying to kick out the other inactive members of my server, so I tagged Nagomi and Hinosuna about it but to no response, but then I DM’d Maidin on his personal and communicational account, I was asleep for a few hours, I woke up and I found out he has cut ties with me. He softblocked me on Twitter, he blocked me on Discord, he deleted the MEGA link that contained all his screenshots (which I didn’t get a chance to download some of them, and I really hope he didn’t delete the collab screenshots he made with my characters), all of that without prior warning... Notihng. This put me in a really awful position.

Maidin and I had a pretty good history, I always liked, retweeted and interacted to his tweets, I brought him into my server because of some struggle he was having and we did interact a little bit in the server for a while,

This happened similarly to another Custom Maid creator known as gg_colombia, I made a TierMaker of ranking Custom Maid creators I follow and some I don’t but still know, even throwing a bit of Koikatsu people, where I put a friend of Colombia in the “Die” tier because that person I put in that tier blocked me a day after my birthday after telling them that my birthday happened the day after in Mexico and I got blocked for no reason, and apparently Colombia got really angry and blocked me, I communicated with other creators who followed me to vent my problem, and somehow Colombia and I eventually settled. But with Maidin... It seems like he really doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, I’m pretty sure I broke his heart. To this day I’m still trying really hard to contact him in different ways but he completely neglects me, and that really sucks how much I think about how I have instantly turned him against me, it’s just sad.

And then I got blocked by Maidin for good on the 28th after tweeting him begging to follow me again which makes things even worse now, at least I’m still not blocked on Pixiv, but I’m not having any high hopes for that, I’ve had enough.

I should never take Japanese people for granted, and I should never invite anyone into my private server ever again.

This one action that completely messed me up so bad, one of the moments that truly make me question my sanity, my being and my overall existence. I was pretty depressed for that entire weekend, it got me thinking for a while I really want to leave behind my current social media accounts and start from scratch with a new identity and stuff, but I got tired of doing that and when I got blocked some people, I didn’t care anymore, but now it’s coming back.

In late November, I made a Twitter thread ranting about my history of deleting accounts and even wanting to do the same thing over and over again as well as the cons for doing so. Now that I think about it, I don’t think it should even matter about the names I will use, it depends on the kind of person I actually am, and even though I try to change and try to be different, someone’s gotta be bound to recognize me for some things I might post or something. I’m also paranoid that people won’t support me at all, not as Hajime Komaeda, not as my pen name, but me in real life as a whole, no matter the names I go by.

I always think about doing aggressive call-outs to some people like it’s no big deal, but then when it comes to the execution, I get in very big trouble for it and I always feel bad, but now, I got what I deserved. 3 long years having the same problem with people’s opinions combined with telling a friend they were being kicked to my Discord server which left him heartbroken, not to mention always ALWAYS being aggressive towards my mom every time we do my older sister’s homeworks, I’m a really messed up person who doesn’t deserve to exist in this world. I don’t want to be a burden nor lose friends any longer.

Even if I've grown really close to Ten, there were times that we did argue and dear god, I really hope I won't get too salty about what we talk about, I don't want to break friendships any longer, especially towards someone who's now my #1 friend, fuck everyone else I talked with before.

Now, let’s move on to the more somewhat positive side of things throughout this year.

The positives

Pixelbuster and Phan-Site: Probably the best thing to come out of this year is Pixelbuster getting cancelled. Although I haven’t gotten a chance to witness this mess live as it was happening, I was asleep for a couple of hours, I woke up and started checking Twitter on my phone and I saw a tweet from MysticDistance talking about Pixelbuster and a couple of retweets and I was like “Holy shit, Pixelbuster is getting owned!” and his Discord server was gone, and with that said, I blocked Pixelbuster in Discord as well.

If you don’t remember, Pixelbuster was under controversy from some people at gaming news site Final Weapon where Pixel took advantage of their name to get free games with codes from developers. So yeah, that was quite a shitty move, but in all honesty, to this day I still feel like I don’t give a shit about that, when the controversy happened, I just capitalized in ranting about why Pixelbuster was so unlikeable, I made a post about it as well for more details as to why I hated him.

I was asleep for a few hours and I didn’t get a chance to see his downfall happen at the very moment, when I woke up, his Discord server was already gone and I wanted to see the shitstorm that happened in there, but it’s all gone.

PIxel even tried going back into social media to apologize to some people I assume he got blocked by under the name SpookyLava/Sp00kyLava with a picture of Sucy from Little Witch Academia as his profile picture. Of course this did not go well as people immediately started calling him out, and just like that, he completely disappeared without a trace for good. I don’t think I’ve seen any activity or a word from Pixel as far as I know, so he’s completely gone and I really hope I wouldn’t see him ever again.

A little while ago I came across his Nitomatta Twitter account being open for some reason, I can’t verify for sure this is Pixel himself since there’s only this one tweet that simply says some laughter and then Soul Kiwami’s tweet of the TwitLonger about Final Weapon’s experience working with Pixel that for some reason is actually pinned (Wait, how is it possible to pin someone else’s tweets? Don’t you simply pin your own tweets? How the hell does this work?), it’s even stranger when this account has been open and the one tweet where posted around the time the controversy happened.

As much as I hated Pixelbuster so much and I hated reading his tweets constantly complaining about the current media and franchises that I had muted Pixel for a while before the controversy happened, sometimes I can’t help but wonder what is actually Pixelbuster up to now, like for example, does he play Genshin Impact? There were other things that came into my mind, but the Genshin Impact thing is the one thing I have in mind the most.

The only thing I ever liked about Pixel were his shitposts, sometimes he was funny and I retweeted his memes. He also even got retweeted by some Japanese artists, including the creator of Pop Team Epic, bkub Okawa, where he retweeted a clip posted by Pixelbuster, I can’t remember what video was it exactly, maybe it might have been a Resident Evil 3 mod video or something.

To Pixelbuster, if you’re still here and you’re possibly reading this: GET FUCKED!

Next is Phan-Site and this one was quite a surprise. For a while I grew uninterested with Phan-Site’s Twitter, so I muted him. His Discord server also didn’t do any favors for me, so sometimes I did my usual complaining about people’s opinions and just being angry, after some time being inactive and just for my feeling of uninterest, I left the server.

Although not everything about Phan-Site’s Discord was necessarily bad, as I met Emanuel Gracia, a Persona fanfiction writer who I actually looked up to the guy for his writing skills and motivation, I never necessarily read his fanfictions (Sometimes I did take a peak at his Persona Next Gen fanfic, or as it’s now called Persona Grand Legacy, for reference in how to write novels), but sometimes I did give him some info about my top secret project as a symbol of trust as writers and I’m even in his Discord server as a mod.

(Gracia, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry)

Although our friendship is not going to last long after two years and by the time this post is published, it’s most likely going to happen because I grew completely dissatisfied with the guy and his Twitter for my same problem of hating to see his opinions and talks shit about other things I like so I muted him as well, and probably the worst of him is his fixation with One Piece, he’s so fixated to it that he treats it like god and he uses it to shit on My Hero Academia and possibly other modern Shounen (Though he utterly criticizes MHA the most) which really pisses me off. Not to mention I’m pretty toxic in his server with the same stuff I vent over and over and some other problems, so it really doesn’t help.

Anyways, back to Phan-Site, the controversy happened when MysticDistance posted a tweet of a screen video capture of his voice message from Phan-Site which I’m probably not gonna link the tweet because it’s quite scary to listen to, but what I can say is that Phan-Site definitely wasn’t in a good mood, as he was threatening Mystic to answer his phone in a very angry voice.

After that tweet was posted, Phan-Site disappeared just like that. The last thing I remember is someone taking up the mantle of the Phan-Site Facebook page, but some people were telling this person to better delete the account so the brand wouldn’t continue any longer because of what happened, and that’s it, haven’t heard anything about Phan-Site or the person behind him ever since.

After Pixelbuster and Phan-Site disappeared, it made me realize that I wouldn’t like to ever follow or even associate with these kinds of bigshots ever again, neither RedMakuzawa nor UltimaShadowX, or any other of these accounts in general, not even Karoshi of all people who I’m still somewhat attached for some reason, because they’re often very bland, they often tweet opinions in a very harsh and gatekeeping tone, etc. I just really hate these kinds of people, I don’t wanna see them nor I wanna be friends with them if they’re gonna talk shit about the stuff I love.

The Boys: This is something I never expected to do, but it was something I wanted to do for a long time when season 1 came out. One day, I heard my mom and my older sister having a conversation where instead of watching shitty YouTube videos, she should at least watch some series, and that got me thinking about it and somehow I randomly went to Amazon, subscribe for Prime, check Amazon Prime Video and I immediately saw The Boys on the homepage and I started watching it, and boy, I’m so hooked on it and I seriously wish I could have seen the series sooner!

And the most unexpected part is that this is my first time watching an exclusive series in a streaming platform, completely legally! I would normally go to some random pirated websites like swatchseries or whatever where I would pretty much watch everything, but not with The Boys, I actually paid for Amazon Prime Video, well, it was my first time being subscribed to Prime so my first subscription was for free. The best part of watching The Boys using Amazon Prime Video is that I can actually turn on the subtitles and even change the language dubs, so sometimes I watched a little bit of the series with Japanese dub, though I prefer watching the series in the original English language with English subtitles on, but it’s fun watching the series in Japanese dub. (Unrelated but at some point I rewatched Venom in Amazon Prime Video and I was sad that it doesn’t have Japanese dub in there)

I actually started watching The Boys a few days before season 2 even began, so I managed to watch the first season just in time and then I definitely watched season 2 weekly (Except for the finale, I did have to go to swatchseries for the finale because I wouldn’t use Amazon Prime for the rest of October).

Things get more hype when the news of No More Heroes 3 being delayed were being released, Suda51 also stated that he happened to hire the comic artist of The Boys, and I went all-out fanboying my ass off, it’s the best thing that has ever happened to my life by a mere coincidence of watching The Boys!

To end things off, I’ve been very frustrated with Agents of SHIELD and The Blacklist. The final season of Agents of SHIELD started off interestingly, but then until the second half of the final season was an absoltue let down, it was meh, I’m so glad Agents of SHIELD is over, the era of Marvel TV shows that made references to the MCU but weren’t even allowed to have crossovers anymore is over, and now with the Disney+ shows, we’re finally getting the TRUE MCU connected and crossover shows we deserve!

Then there’s The Blacklist, and oh boy, don’t even get me started on that series because lately it has gone consistently shit, and things get worse when in November, they literally premiered the first two episodes and then the series will continue in January 22nd which is too far and too long of a break for a season that came out this November! Not to mention that they literally recast Dom after the original actor passed away a few months ago, but only to kill him off in the second episode of the premiere, this was an absolute waste of a recast! After the original actor passed away, I always thought they would leave Dom in a coma and write him off of the show, but no, they decided to recast a new actor to continue the character and his story one last time, and then they did this shit, write the character again only for two episodes and the rest is history!

Elizabeth couldn’t have put a better way to describe my feelings on the show lately with this scene!

I don’t really know for sure what’s my future of watching The Blacklist is going to be, this episode was so bad that I ranted how bad it is to the point where I said “I’m done watching this show,” I mean, I really want to stop watching this show, I want to drop it, I want to stop caring about it, but once the season returns, I’m gonna feel so bad about missing out what’s going on in the story when I may come across tweets from the official Twitter account of the show. And then there’s this Japanese article where Nijisanji Vtuber, Shizuka Rin or ShizuRin, actually appeared and she watches The Blacklist! But even that doesn’t do me any favors to continue watching this shit any longer!

So yeah, fuck Agents of SHIELD! Fuck The Blacklist! The Boys is my new favorite TV show and I will never get tired of it! I love The Boys, I love these kinds of adult rated superhero stuff with gore, strong language, sex scenes and such, it makes me think of Kick-Ass!

Other major events: There are also some major events I forgot to address in last year’s New Year post, like the US Elections, the death of Adobe Flash and even the next gen consoles.

Then there’s the US Elections, although I don’t have much to say and I normally don’t care about politics in general, let alone foreign politics, but I’m glad we won’t have Trump again, although I’m not sure if I might have heard great things about John Biden but at least I wanted someone other than Trump. Now for Mexico, I’ll have to wait 4 more years to get a new president and remove AMLO, although Mexican presidents are always useless.

Next is the death of Adobe Flash Player, today is finally the day for to say our prayers to Flash, let’s press F to pay respects. There were also some news that Flash playback will stop being supported on January 12th 2021, which makes it even sadder because there’s still some things that still use Flash, like some really ancient Newgrounds stuff and even Chaturbate (Yeah, this is a little weird, I normally don’t use the site often but I had once for Projekt Melody), I even recently watched an old Madness fan cartoon that is now deleted on Newgrounds onto the Wayback Machine and Firefox asked me to use Flash, so I did that. And this current version of Firefox, version 84, is the last one to support the Adobe Flash Player.

Hopefully there will be some good alternatives to play some old SWF Flash content, like Ruffle which is an open source Flash emulator that is actually sponsored by Newgrounds of all people, and I recently found a tweet from Tom Fulp that Newgrounds will soon be using Ruffle. The demo page of the website even allows you to play the original Alien Hominid game before the remaster comes out, it’s not perfect but at least it’s something. As of the writing of this post on December 23rd, I didn’t know I can actually download the Ruffle extension, I always thought it was something that’ll take a long time to perfect and only has a demo page to test it out, but they actually have some download links for the standalone program and even browser extentions, although it’s probably still not the first major release or anything, it might be something (I tried but for some reason Firefox wouldn’t let me download the extension).

Oh, and speaking of deaths, let’s press F to pay respects to Chadwick Boseman, Keiji Fujiwara and HorribleSubs. To Chadwick Boseman, especially, this was quite a shock he’s had colon cancer for the last 4 years, he fought quite a long battle like a true warrior, Wakanda Forever! And Keiji Fujiwara amd Kobe too, god damn, we lost a lot of great ones this year!

As for the console next gen, the Playstation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S, although we’ll stick to PS5 because I’ve always been a Playstation person, don’t judge me. This is something I’m not quite fond of it happening now because my biggest problem is that my family bought the PS4 last year and it felt like it was way too late. Sometimes I do feel tempted on wanting to get a PS5 so bad now, but there’s still gonna be some games coming to the PS4 (inb4 people are gonna be playing those PS4 games into the PS5) and there’s still like a shitton of games that I haven’t played in years and who knows if my older sister and I are gonna have time to play them all. it’s still gonna have some time left because there will be games coming to the PS5 entirely for good in like 3 or 4 years. Looks like I’ll have to wait for another 6 years to own the PS5, and then the next year, the PS6 would be released.

Really the only thing that could have sold me on the PS5 is if it was colored black and most importantly, if it was actually fully backwards compatible with every Playstation game, that could have been an absolute win so I could have replayed some PS2 games I still own, but sadly it’s not.

Home improvements: We’ve also had some home improvements, like adding a gate around my bedroom’s hallway where the staircase goes so my dogs won’t annoy me at my door, but the biggest improvement we’ve made is finally upgrading our internet modem and we finally got proper home Wi-Fi... For better and for worse.

I didn’t know I wanted this to happen but it was about time to upgrade our internet, but the results have been mixed. On one hand, I guess the internet is mostly the same, it’s not faster or anything but at least we finally got proper Wi-Fi on our house, but at the same time, the Wi-Fi can be absolute garbage especially when it barely reaches my bedroom which I’m in the second floor and that doesn’t make sense considering we live in a small house and even if I’m on top, the router should be closer to me! When I’m really frustrated with the Wi-Fi’s poor signal, I continue to use the Windows 10 mobile hotspot thing which I’ve been using for years. Not to mention that my internet on my laptop goes on and off randomly and that really annoys me, I swear when we had our old router, this didn’t happen before.

Despite these problems, at least it’s better than having no internet in FOREVER when the lights go out like it happened with our old router. Sometimes the Wi-Fi signal works, but sometimes it doesn’t, it drives me insane. That is until I finally decided I would start using the Wi-Fi for my laptop since as of the writing of this post in the 29th, the Wi-Fi has been working rather nicely, the speed of my Wi-Fi on my laptop so far is kinda the same as my ethernet, so hopefully it’ll be fine. Until the Wi-Fi goes slow, I’m switching back to the ethernet.

As of the publishing of this post, I haven’t gotten any problem with using the Wi-Fi and that makes me jump into the conclusion that my issue with having my internet randomly turn on and off really comes from my ethernet cable. Sometimes I did run into some slow uploading problems but most of the Wi-Fi is fine.

That’s all I have to discuss about my life this year, it was an absolute disaster and even I do think I wish I was dead, I didn’t want to exist in this planet any longer yet I continue to fight and suffer through a lot of things. What do I even want to accomplish by arguing people by forcing my opinions against theirs and stuff? Power and attention, but it never turns out like I want. People tell me over and over not to care about what people say, but I continue ignoring and doing the same fight with no success over and over, my problem is indeed that I’m too caring. Yes, I’m too caring about everything, and ignorance is almost never my solution. There’s seriously nothing I can do about it.

Anyway, here’s a silly meme about my 2020 to enlighten this up.

Best and worst of the year and anticipated releases

Let’s finally move on to my favorite part of making these New Year posts, the good old top best lists and most anticipated releases of whatever media I love! This year is going to be a little different, as I’m making these top best lists of each category, I’ll be talking about the most anticipated releases of the same categories I talk about simultaneously! And looking at the upcoming releases, 2021 is looking to be the most lit year ever!

Better keep in mind that not all releases could be for 2021, they may be bound to be delayed to 2022 or beyond.

Top 15 best anime of the year

I already have my top 4 contenders figured out for quite a while (Which you’ll find out), but as usual, figuring out the rest is quite difficult. At first I thought I had this list to top 10 maximum but now I got some perfect candidates to make this a top 15 list instead, a little shorter than last year’s with 20, but it’s worth it.

15.- Watanuki-san Chi To: It’s probably gonna be a permanent pattern where the Watanuki-san Chi series (if it’ll get more seasons, that is) will always be the first, or the bottom depending on how you read these top lists, since it’s a dorama and not an “anime,” but it’s still a good series regardless. And no it’s not honorable mention worthy because I really like the Watanuki-san Chi series.

Also, there are many people who make subtitled highlight clips of various VTubers, why aren’t they making fansubs of Watanuki-san Chi To or no streaming platform has picked up the series yet? smh.

14.- Eizouken

13.- Hentatsu (TV): I’m usually biased to Tatsuki’s works now that should have been amongst the top 3, and not to say this series is rather disappointing (I would never call any of Tatsuki’s works disappointing, bad or worst), but given that this is a short series, let alone EXTREMELY short with 1 minute and 30 seconds long (The size of openings and endings), I feel like it wasn’t enough.

There’s also this one episode in the TV series that is kind of the same as the one from the web series with some changes, like Tatsuki kinda threw this episode in there to fill the gap anyways.

(Web series - TV series comparison)

I kinda wish this was instead a full fledged TV series for Keifuku-san since Tatsuki tweeted this and even Crunchyroll thought it would be a Keifuku-san series, but he jebaited us all, but I do admit that I admire the troll marketing, that was quite an unexpected move.

Now it seems like we’re gonna have to wait until 2022 so we see a new Tatsuki release, I hope it is the Keifuku-san series that was supposedly teased, but if it’s gonna be another remake of Tatsuki’s old works like Kemurikusa or a brand new series, I’m down for whatever it may be.

(Also, let me painfully remind you that Tatsuki will never make Kemurikusa 12.2, so whatever happened at 12.1 will remain as a cliffhanger)

12.- Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai

11.- Girls’ Frontline Healing Chapter season 2

10.- Osomatsu-san season 3

8.- Magia Record: I don’t know about Magia Record as a game with its story, and in my opinion this one is probably not as messed up or even “revolutionary” as the main series back in the day, but it’s still an interesting series. regardless. I also reward Magia Record for having the Best Anime Soundtrack of the Year! Just listen to this masterpiece!

8.- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Gou

7.- Kaguya-sama season 2

6.- D4DJ First Mix: Sanzigen absolutely dominated this year with a ton of releases I never knew I needed, but with all these releases, we’ll have to pick TWO of the very best for this list BanG Dream season 3 and D4DJ, but first, we’ll start off with D4DJ First Mix!

I have made pretty much all the Sanzigen shows of the year but Bandori season 3 as A-tier anime (While the aforementioned Bandori S3 is S-tier), this was going to be another A-tier anime for the sake of being a new franchise, but after watching 5 episodes of the series, it already changed my mind that this is S-tier, I’m liking the concept and the characters very much!

5.- BanG Dream! season 3: Bandori season 3 is in my opinion is the series’ best season, mainly because I’ve been waiting for the plotline of Rokka being a member of RAS since I researched in the Wiki and stuff and saw these images of RAS that has Rokka in it, and this season overall made me like RAS a lot more, I would go so far to say that their chemistry and development are more interesting than their songs, not that I don’t like them or anything but I haven’t gotten the time to listen to them in Spotify.

But with my new-found love for RAS came at a cost and it was not very good: Their wasted potential in Garupa Pico Ohmori, you’ll find out why in my list of Worst Anime of the Year above.

4.- Fruits Basket season 2

3.- Ishuzoku Reviewers

I had trouble deciding on whether or not Ishuzoku Reviewers or Fruits Basket season 2 would be third place.

On one hand, Ishuzoku Reviewers is the most risk-taking and controversial ecchi series I’ve seen with very good hentai-worthy sex scenes and the series really speaks out to me the most since I’ve grown to have a very NSFW image, particularly with my few Custom Order Maid 3D2 content as well as my daily retweet spam of everything NSFW. With Fruits Basket, the story and character development continues to fascinate me and I can’t wait to see the final season next year.

But on the other hand, and mainly with Ishuzoku Reviewers, there are the cons like the show being biased with disgusting fetishes and even elfcist (That’s kind of a weird word I came up with. To put it better: elf discrimination), with Fruits Basket, I really don’t have much problems with the series overall except for the Student Council characters, they’re the absolute worst (Except Machi, she’s a good girl), and then there’s episode 9 of the season with Kyo talking to Akito and that was absolutely painful to watch (The main reason why is because the episode was too dark for me idk).

2.- ID:INVADED:To this day I still can’t get over how amazing the series is, from its animation from a struggling studio, to its story which actually got me a bit into theory crafting, my theories didn’t get paid off nor they were answered in the series which leads to plot holes, but I was very fascinated for the series.

1.- Akudama Drive: This is my grand savior of 2020, this is the one Tookyo Games project I was excited the most since the studio was founded and announced three other projects! Yes, call me biased due to my old love for Danganronpa, but I love this show! So much so that I would occasionally tell an old friend of mine to watch the series, I haven’t asked him too much about it nowadays, but I doubt he would still watch the series because he’s quite busy.

Honorable mentions

Sakura Wars: The Animation and Argonavis from BanG Dream: Counting double because they’re both Sanzigen shows. And they probably would have been in my main list, probably make one entry focused on all Sanzigen shows, but I had to pick Bandori season 3 and D4DJ separately if only Sanzigen didn’t abuse the hand drawn background characters way too much in Sakura Wars: The Animation, and the atrocious episode 13 of Argonavis.

Heya Camp

Nekopara

Brand New Animal

Attack on Titan The Final Season: I’m not convinced this has got to be Best Anime of 2020 material based on 4 episodes alone, I’m still going to wait until the series ends so I can officially declare this as Best Anime of 2021.

Aggretsuko season 3

Munou na Nana

Arknights Holy Knight Light: This came out in the 1st anniversary livestreams for global Arknights, which was around Christmas Eve. But despite the timing of the release, this is actually more like a New Year mini anime special, so it’s definitely worth rewatching a billion times every New Year!

Fate Grand Carnival: LAST MINUTE POST-PUBLISH EDITING BUT YOOOOOOOOOOOO, A BRAND NEW CARNIVAL PHANTASM WITH FGO SKIN?! SIGN ME UP!

OH WAIT, THERE WILL BE A SERIES TOO IN SUMMER?! LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

(Source)

AFTER A YEAR WITH A DISAPPOINTING FATE SPECIAL IN 2019 WITH NOTHING BUT PURE FGO BABYLONIA, NOT ONLY THEY DELIVERED A TOTALLY NEW FATE SPECIAL ANIMATION, BUT ALSO A BRAND NEW CARNIVAL PHANTASM SERIES!!! BEST OF ALL, IT’S LERCHE THAT’S DOING THIS SERIES AGAIN! THE KING RETURNS!!!

OF COURSE THIS OVA ITSELF IS S TIER AND I’LL INCLUDE IT IN THE WINTER 2021 TIER!

Dishonorable mentions

Donkyuu Hentai HxEROS - Worst: This is my #1 dishonorable mention because, first of all, I should point out that pretty much the entire series is rather okay, in fact, it’s got some pretty good fanservice scenes (despite the jarring censors), I did like the series a bit and shouldn’t be considered the “worst” of the year, but there’s one character in particular who pretty much kills my interest in the series:

I stressed enough how much I hate Kirara to death! I’m not even gonna go bother going into details as to why do I hate Kirara, you can either read my previous anime review posts to see why do I absolutely hate her. She was truly painful to watch.

I have quite a list of waifus but I never necessarily hated a waifu ever, sure, there are those I don’t like or care but they’re not hate or worst worthy, but Kirara has become the first waifu I would officially call her as the worst waifu EVER. End of story.

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Danmachi season 3 and Castlevania season 3: Both have delivered some storylines I wasn’t particularly fond with (In the case of Castlevania S3, this is my unpopular opinion given that it was otherwise well-received), but that doesn’t mean they’re flat out disappointing like the following list.

Top 6 disappointing and worst anime of the year

6.- Welcome to the Japari Park season 2 - Disappointing: For a while I was kinda sad and wondering when will there be new episodes so the series can continue where episode 24 left off with Ceval being launched into Riukiu region, that is until on April 26th, I randomly found out the series was continuing, I was really excited to see the series continue! I was quite happy with the series returning and all, but what’s the catch with this second season (?) being so disappointing? Well, for the sole reason that this season is one cour shorter than the first season, lots of plot holes and rushed pacing that makes this final season unsatisfying (Given that this is a short series after all),

The problem is I didn’t know this was going to be the final season of the series, although I should have seen it coming from the very beginning but halfway through, it was time for the endgame.

So, after Welcome to the Japari Park ended, what about the future of Kemono Friends in the anime side of things? Should we expect a third Kemono Friends season this 2021? Although there hasn’t been signs of a third Kemono Friends season coming and it’s still debatable whether or not it should be a continuation of the first two seasons or make it an adaptation of the game with the same name, which it’s extremely baffling that the game called “Kemono Friends 3″ exists in the first place (Maybe it is the third Kemono Friends game in the series? I don’t know).

5.- BanG Dream! Garupa Pico Ohmori - Disappointing: I never watched the Garupa Pico series, so when Ohmori was announced, or rather, announced that RAISE A SUILEN and Morfonica were announced to appear in the series, I had to binge through the first season, and it was... Okay? I mean, it seems like a good series but I wasn’t really impressed.

I never knew there was a second season happening, that is until I randomly checked AIR’s Twitter and they posted a tweet of Garupa Pico Ohmori having a new visual that features RAS and Morfonica, which that means RAS and Morfonica are confirmed to appear in the series. I was of course excited to see RAS in this comedy spin-off, along with a band I haven’t seen in the main anime series yet, but one of the upcoming movies is going to feature Morfonica. Now, after seeing that AIR tweet, I don’t want to get into detail, but I saw a reply of some rando saying “The good Bandori series is here!” and I went into an argument with the guy, and the dude annoyingly repeats the word “Forced drama” to the main Bandori series. I was quite pissed throughout all that morning, but thankfully I didn’t become spoiled and my opinion on the main Bandori anime series hasn’t changed.

Anyways, moving on to actually talk about the series, it started quite strangely with an alien artifact of a guitar and all of a sudden the town where the girls usually go to CiRCLE has turned into a city with CiRCLE being nowhere to be found, the next few episodes were nothing really special, but then we finally got into episode 7 where it finally introduces RAS and Morfonica, I was so excited seeing my girls RAS appearing in the chibi spin-off series, episode 10 came out and it had Rei, which was nice and all, but then as more episodes went on and on, there was another episode that featured CHU2 and Pareo which is episode 22, the finale came which the RAS girls showed up again, and... I just realized... THEY ABSOLUTELY WASTED RAS AND THEY NEVER GOT A DEDICATED EPISODE! Even Morfonica of all bands actually got a dedicated episode for fuck’s sake! (Episode 19)

This is an absolute embarrassment, I grew to love RAS so much since Bandori season 3, I didn’t know the second season of Garupa Pico was coming which was announced for some time and they happened to reveal RAS and Morfonica, which leads me to believe they were never meant to have as much screentime like I hoped they would be, but they absolutely did RAS so dirty, I hate this!

I may be fixated the new characters, so what about the rest of the series with the original characters? Well, there’s not much to say other than for this season, I couldn’t care less for the OG cast as much as the new bands like I wanted to, and sometimes I did laugh into some episodes, but I wasn’t really impressed with the series AT ALL, like about 80% I didn’t find the humor at all.

So yeah, this was quite a disappointing season with not only being not very funny and interesting, but also wasting new characters, especially the one band I grew to love in Bandori S3. And to the guy I argued about the main Bandori anime series where he constantly said “forced drama” and he called the Garupa Pico series as “the good Bandori series,” I’m sorry but this ain’t it, chief.

One thing I do gotta compliment the series for is how nice the animation is, but also introducing Morfonica into the anime media before the main series did and after the Second Live film, I really hope Sanzigen could make a fourth season so it’ll properly introduce Morfonica into the series and that’s where I would start caring about them.

Speaking of Sanzigen, for some reason I always neglected this series in particular when talking about how many other shows Sanzigen released this year, at least the CG ones. And yes, believe it or not, the Garupa Pico series is actually made by Sanzigen, or at least co-produced by Sanzigen since there’s other studios attached, so this is more of a miscellaneous release compared to the rest of Sanzigen’s library that came out this year, the CG shows.

4.- Toji no Miko Tomoshibi - Worst: The Toji no Miko franchise continues to fail to impress me, and this OVA doesn’t really do any favors, the second part of the OVA completely bleed out my interest for its horrible writing and animation.

3.- Guraburu - Worst: Throughout the year, Cygames has released a couple of trash adaptations this year, but first let’s talk about Guraburu.

At first I thought this is the most offensively bad Cygames anime I watched, but it’s a little extreme, the better word I would describe this series is “bland” because everything about it is bland. The tone and direction seems awkward but the animation is almost Queen Bee-tier bad.

This is one media I truly think it should have stayed as it is and didn’t need to be brought to life in anime.

2.- Princess Connect Re:Dive - Worst: At first I thought Guraburu is the more offensively bad Cygames anime I watched this year but bland is kind of a different level of bad, but this one gave me a sour taste in my mouth. The series is pretty much a Konosuba wannabe, from the tone and goofy minor character designs, it just really turns me off, it just feels like this is not for me.

To make matters worse, it’s getting a second season this 2021, well, let’s see if this will make me feel better or worse with this adaptation.

One person who randomly found me on Twitter told me that this anime is more of a prologue for the non-Priconne players and doesn’t spoil some of the major arcs, I’m not sure if I can verify that since I haven’t really played Priconne but I’ll take it as a solid opinion to attack me for talking shit about the Priconne anime.

I’ve kind of come to realize that Cygames and their IPs don’t really resonate well with me at all, I’m probably not the biggest Cygames person or maybe I’ve grown to have a very complicated relationship with Cygames as a whole which makes me think I don’t even like how they’ve grown into. Probably the anime I’m okay with is Manaria Friends, in retrospect before I rewatch it, I think it was an alright series, but what I will never forget about the anime is how the series was originally gonna come out in 2016 but was delayed for 3 long years and I think that fact alone is more interesting than the series itself.

And for one last time, don’t even get me started on the Shadowverse anime, the way it is, is automatically trash because it’s not like the Shadowverse game I’ve seen my older sister play occasionally, and they even made a game based on this and I’m even shocked the series lasted this long. Glad I didn’t even watch it and thank god it’s about to end soon.

Interestingly, the English version of Priconne is coming out in 2021, with Crunchyroll Games handling the localization. While it’s interesting the game is finally getting localized after 3 years the game came out in Japan, but Crunchyroll Games doesn’t have quite a good history with their games, especially since the whole Danmachi game censorship false advertising controversy from 2018, so I don’t think I might have high hopes of playing the game if they might have any potential features removed, not to mention having THREE years of content behind from the JP version, this is worse than waiting 2 years for FGO content from JP to EN. Besides, I don’t even have space to play the game on my phone because it’s saturated with FGO, Azur Lane, Arknights and 5 thousand screenshots (Which I stored in my laptop because I didn’t have enough space. Though the only way to fixed the low space was just uninstalling and reinstalling Azur Lane which I did but I wish I didn’t drag all my 5k screenshots and I was trying so hard to put them back but it would take forever, so might as well save my 5k screenshots in my laptop and start from scratch).

1.- Isekai Quartet 2 - Disappointing: If Bandori Garupa Pico Ohmori’s waste of new characters wasn’t bad enough, Isekai Quartet season 2 does it a lot worse and this one in particular completely broke my heart the most, this is indeed the most disappointing anime of the year.

Just the #1 thing to explain why Isekai Quartet 2 let me down: WASTING THE SHIELD HERO CHARACTERS HARD!

Both Garupa Pico Ohmori and Isekai Quartet 2 just wasted the new characters so bad I have trouble on deciding which one’s worse, or if I would make a tie, but I had to go with Isekai Quartet 2 because the more I think about it, the more painful it gets, even more so than Garupa Pico Ohmori.

Garupa Pico Ohmori broke my heart the most because I’ve grown to really like RAS with Bandori season 3 the season prior to Garupa Pico Ohmori, Isekai Quartet 2 broke my heart the most because I binged Shield Hero In December of last year and I really liked it months prior to Isekai Quartet 2, BUT THE WORST PART IS that they COMPLETELY overhyped the Shield Hero characters and they turned out to be minor characters! I can’t believe I’ve grown to really like characters only for their potential in sequel appearances to be absolutely wasted in just a span of months! Not to mention both of the shows are absolutely unfunny and couldn’t care less for the OG cast more than the new characters which I wanted to like so bad if only they didn’t fuck up with their poor screentime.

With Isekai Quartet 3 coming this 2021, even though I will continue watching the series regardless, I don’t have high hopes for the series anymore, if they’ll continue adding new characters from properties I don’t know of or care to even bother binging their anime of origin, they’ll always end up overhyping them only for them to become minor character status.

Most anticipated anime of 2021

There’s like a lot of anime coming out next year and I kind of lost track of what’s coming out so I had to research and refresh my memory, there’s also other announced anime that are yet to resurface into the light of day (And no, don’t expect Girls’ Work, we all know that’s never gonna happen 100%).

In my previous HajiKo Anime Fall 2020 post, I mentioned my anticipated Winter 2021 releases, you can check that out as well, but what I’m going to talk about here is a general most anticipated anime of the year coming out.

Azur Lane Bisoku Zenshin: I talked about this in my previous post which I suggest you to check it out for more in-depth details as to why is this my most anticipated show of the season, but in this case, let me simply put because I love Azur Lane and I want more Azur Lane anime in my life, even if people would hate them or not (Preferably don’t hate on them).

Dr. Stone: Stone Wars: I was seriously amazed by the series and I wish I had watched it sooner or even completely binged the series when I did the first time with the first 3 episodes at some point, although having binged the first season early this month was a pretty good time to do so as the perfect prep for season 2.

Shield Hero season 2: Isekai Quartet 2 may have disappointed me with how hard it wasted the Shield Hero characters by overhyping and making them minor characters, but by surprise, we’re getting the second season which really deserves it!

Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Hopefully no last minute delays this time, and it’s actually about to be screened in Japanese theaters soon, but what matters to me the most is whether we’ll see it just in time for the Mexican release of the film. I’m pretty sure every Mexican is gonna be thriving so hard seeing this film given my some of my previous anime film experiences in the cinema.

There’s no way Mexico wouldn’t have Evangelion 4.0, it’s one of the most celebrated franchises in the world, probably not in the same vein as Dragon Ball which is overly popular in Mexico, and Evangelion 4.0 probably won’t have that high of a marketing or having a lot of cinemas available to my theaters, even with just one or two cinemas available, they’ll end up being filled to completely and a lot of people will scream their asses of in what’s going to happen.

Fate/Grand Carnival (Series): The best and most insane Type-Moon comedy series returns! But this time it’s all FGO-centered now!

Given that the old Carnival Phantasm was all Fate with Melty-Blood, not everyone may like the direction of this series given that FGO is a huge success. BUT WHO CARES?! I LOVE FGO AND I LOVE CARNIVAL PHANTASM, THIS IS A DREAM COME TRUE!!!

And why is the second season coming out in my older sister’s birthday, August 25th, of all things?!

Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Train film: Just hoping for the film being released in Mexico. And I really hope ufotable can continue making seasons or films of the series given that the manga has now ended this year.

I just really hope they don’t make the Kimetsu no Yaiba franchise as another vaporware like Girls’ Work and the Katsugeki Touken Ranbu movie, although it’s unlikely they’ll do so given that Kimetsu no Yaiba has become a huge blockbuster series as of late, from topping One Piece’s manga sales to the Infinity Train film being the #1 highest grossing film in Japan OF ALL TIME, it’s crazy a Shonen series got to this scale! Fate (specifically the Stay Night series) and Kimetsu no Yaiba are ufotable’s cash cows, so it’s unlikely they would drop them and make them vaporware like their other projects.

Tokyo Babylon: This and Winter 2021′s Project Scard are actually two of GoHands’ TV series I’m excited, although I’m more hyped for Tokyo Bablyon than Project Scard because I would occasionally forget Project Scard’s name, at least the full name, that is until now which I haven’t been forgetting about it.

There’s something I have to address first because this was supposed to come out on April but it got delayed because of costume designs being referenced without permission for some reason, I find this reason incredibly weird and I don’t really understand what the hell is that supposed to mean.

As far as the trailers go, the animation is looking akin to the K series, not exactly the same but somewhere...? Which I think that’s what people are gonna like unlike Project Scard which is in the vein of Hand Shakers and W’z, but I don’t really mind, though.

The fact that this is an adaptation, an anime adaptation of a manga by CLAMP to top it all off, is quite surprising. I haven’t really watched any of GoHands’ adaptations and I’m not sure if I would have the time to do so, but I’m more biased towards the original stuff, and come to think of it, this is actually going to be the first adaptation by GoHands I’m ever going to watch.

B: The Beginning Succession: It’s been 2 long years (at least at the time of writing and publishing of this post) since I watched the first season and I really liked it, back when it was released in 2018, they even announced season 2 was happening and I completely forgot about it for so long!

World’s End Harem: I may or may not have heard good things about the series, probably the tone of the negative reception of the series is more like people are meme-ing this series in a terrified way for its concept or something, all of it in a very funny way, so I’m definitely checking this out. What could go wrong? And I really hope it has better waifus than HxEROS.

Fruits Basket The Final: Now we’ve finally come to the point where this anime is definitely going to adapt the manga finale for good where the original 2001 series couldn’t because the manga hadn’t ended at the time.

As I was researching in the Fruits Basket Wiki, there’s a three chapter arc focused on Shigure, Ayame and Hatori which takes place around the same time as the manga’s finale. This was actually published around the same time the first season of the remake had started airing, I don’t know anything about this and I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t assume if this is worth reading and even worth adapting, although I do wish this is actually adapted in the final season.

Uzaki-chan season 2

Zombieland Saga Revenge: I may have a complicated relationship with Cygames nowadays with their premiere IPs, but the most decent IP they made is this one, and as a birthday present in 2018, I was impressed. Not actually quite what I was expected from looking at the first promo poster, but it was quite an entertaining idol series.

I’m of course excited for the second season and what I’d really love to see the most is paying off the teaser from the final episode, that teaser is too good to be wasted in this season.

SSSS.DYNAZENON: I’d still watch this because it’s a follow-up of sorts to GRIDMAN, but my main gripe would be the character designs, some of them look cool but I’m not very impressed, none of them scream absolute material like Rikka and Akane because boy, there’s really a shitton of fan art and cosplays of them.

The Way of the Househusband/Gokushufudou: I’ve seen a lot of people talking about the manga, they get hyped about it a lot, it’s got a live-action series and now it’s finally getting an anime, so might as well check it out.

Godzilla Singular Point: About time a Godzilla anime that’s not made by Polygon Pictures, and to make things better, this is actually made by Bones AND Orange, talk about a dream team!

Speaking of Polygon Pictures...

Pacific Rim: The Black: This is what Polygon Pictures are currently making, which is coming to 2021 and I might check it out as well, even though I’m pretty lukewarm with Polygon as a studio and the Godzilla films were an absolute mess, what the hell were those? After the widely hated sequel of the original film (Though I actually liked it) and with this upcoming anime, I hope the future of the Pacific Rim franchise can be in good hands, even if it’s from a studio I may have a mixed relationship with.

There’s just something about Polygon that doesn’t sit well with me. Sure, the CG animation can be absolutely gorgeous and even I can admit that they’re way better than Sanzigen and Orange where they don’t even do hand drawn background characters, but something still feels off with me, like the tone or whatever. I’m probably just blindly hating on Polygon years after watching the Godzilla films and I should at least check out HUMAN LOST to get a better impression on Polygon overall.

Kaguya-sama season 3 and OVA: I was very impressed with the second season, so might as well follow the Kaguya-sama series now.

Dragon Maid S: Hopefully what I’m about to say isn’t of bad taste. The Kyoto Animation arson was one of the worst events of 2019, while the majority of the staff members are safe, there are those who did not, including the director of the first season of Dragon Maid.

One year later after millions of dollars in donations, KyoAni seems to be doing fine as of late, with their latest release being Violet Evergarden The Movie which was released this September.

Although I haven’t seen any footage of Violet Evergarden The Movie for me to judge how KyoAni’s animation style after the arson would still hold up. And that’s where the second season of Dragon Maid comes in.

Even though KyoAni isn’t my most favorite anime studio, I do hope they have recovered well and got a handful of new and good staff members so they’ll keep their magic going.

Okay, I’d better stop right there before it can get any worse. NEXT!

Shenmue anime: Shenmue 3 finally came out a few years ago but literally nobody, at least from what I know, have even talked about it, whether it was worth the wait or not, just nothing.

Given that people hate video game adaptations, this in no way shape or form could regain interest in Shenmue, or maybe it will by making people play the games in order to forget about the anime, however it may end up being.

Speaking of video game anime adaptations...

The World Ends With You anime: I never played TWEWY in my life and a lot of people really love the game, and 2021 is looking to be the best year for TWEWY fans with not only this new anime, but also a long-awaited brand new game! (Not sure if I would call it a “sequel” of sorts but it’s 100% a brand new game).

Since this is a game adaptation and usually people hate video game adaptations, I never played TWEWY before and this is my one way to experience the story, and the animation is looking nice too. So here’s hoping for me as a non-TWEWY player that I wouldn’t be gatekept by hardcore TWEWY fans with how terrible the anime is and whatever, I don’t care!

Now, like I mentioned earlier, there should be anime that have been relatively recently announced or has been announced for over a year, and they should resurface into the light of day this time. Starting with...

New Touken Ranbu Hanamaru anime: For a while I always thought the Touken Ranbu franchise is dormant at this point, mainly with no new anime, especially the Katsugeki Touken Ranbu movie being another one of ufotable’s vaporware works or they probably ditched it for good in favor of Kimetsu no Yaiba and who knows if we’ll ever see anything from it.

Not that I think the Touken Ranbu series is dead, there’s still figures and other merchandise and most importantly, the game is still alive, although I don’t hear much about it but it’s definitely still alive thanks to fujo power, but I think the anime is probably what keeps me intact about the franchise’s relevancy. (And this is coming from a guy who’s hardcore into stuff for male demographic with lots of female characters and has a strong thirst for them. Hey, I gotta change teh pace every once in a while, okay? I do care about male characters sometimes, even my own)

One day, in January 2020, I randomly came across a post from Crunchyroll that a new Touken Ranbu Hanamaru project is coming! Finally, about time for some more Hanamaru! Now I should point out that YES the post explicitly says “project” which it could be an anime, a game or whatever, and I said that this could possibly be an anime, but I still want to hope it is a new anime because that’s the #1 thing I want the most.

Now that I think about it, since this was vaguely said as a project which means it can be a different media... Is there by any chance like some sort of manga or whatever media has actually been released throughout this entire 2020 and I may have never heard of it? I really hope there isn’t any other media that I might have overlooked, and if I do find out it exists, I’m going to be utterly disappointed.

Magia Record second cour: Given that this is a Madoka Magica series, I expected Magia Record to be an all two-cour series... But unfortunately it’s not, and to make it worse, the second cour wasn’t even made until the first cour finale aired and they announced it’s in production. Like... Really? Even some ufotable shows and even the second cour of Re:Zero season 2 wouldn’t announce something like that!

Inferno Cop season 2: I honestly kinda wish this shouldn’t made because it’s been so long since they announced it and no new information has come out of it so far, but my main reason why I don’t want this to be made is because the seiyuu of Inferno Cop himself passed away, and hearing Inferno Cop with a different seiyuu may not feel the same.

Megalobox season 2: I’m still wondering if this is even needed given how the first season ended and how much TMS has been working on Fruits Basket and even Dr. Stone.

Made in Abyss season 2: With the film recently being released, it is now confirmed that season 2 (?) is a go. I can see this being potentially released in 2022, but I’m still going to mention it anyways.

Anenarumono OVA: It’s been forever since this was announced, like very early into 2020 in fact and when we get to 2021, it’s going to be a full year since this was announced and so far nothing has come of it.

This is most likely going to be an adaptation of the SFW manga series since there is an R-18 doujin series as well, if this would be a hentai OVA from the R-18 doujin series, I probably wouldn’t have seen big anime news sites like Natalie Comics, AIR or even Anime News Network reporting on it and Pochi herself would have tweeted or retweeted the trailers of the hentai OVA or something.

The animation in the Okaa-san Desu Ka (Isekai MILF) series was absolutely garbage, so I really hope the animation in this one is good.

And finally, I decided to put this one to last because it’s something that it recently just got announced, it may or may not come in 2021 but I’m very excited might as well be my #1 anticipated anime of 2021:

Chainsaw Man: A while ago, I read the first chapter of Chainsaw Man a while ago, and I thought it was cool and stuff but I wasn’t sure if I would read it for my entire life, as of late I’ve been seeing quite a lot of fan art

The announcement of the anime as well as the manga ending as Part 1 were actually all leaked a few days prior to the release of the final chapter of the manga, which was December 13th, later I started hearing stuff about how the editor is straight up telling people and news pages to not do any reports about it until the official formal announcement, which that definitely confirmed it was a thing, it was pretty much an open secret.

The funniest thing is, as I was reading the manga a while ago, I thought to myself “I kind of see Chainsaw Man getting adapted by MAPPA with the looks of Dorohedoro,” I never watched Dorohedoro but from what I’ve seen with how the series look with the CG and its aesthetic, it’s perfect for Chainsaw Man, and now... The dream of MAPPA adapting the Chainsaw Man anime became true, so it’s either a dumb fantasy that came true or I actually predicted MAPPA doing the Chainsaw Man anime, you can interpret however you’d like. But with that being said about MAPPA doing the Chainsaw Man anime, it may or may not look like Dorohedoro, I don’t think I would mind if the Chainsaw Man anime wouldn’t look like Dorohedoro.

Now my biggest concern with the series is that it might get heavily censored because it is a pretty grotesque series and sometimes sexual, but for the most part it’s absolutely gorey, and that’s the kind of series I like. In my Fall 2020 anime review post, in my review of Akudama Drive, I criticized how Japanese media can be inconsistent in how much can they get away with gore in some cases, and in others they’ll just paste black blurs. If the censorship can be extremely bad in the Chainsaw Man anime, it would probably be the one thing that would disappoint me so bad, and I don’t want them to tone down the gore either because it would be equally lame, if not, lamer. When I read the manga, every time I see the blood, I always think of the red blood given that it’s usually colored in black, but when I see colored promos and stuff, I see the blood in various different colors other than red, I’m not sure why it is, but if that’s what the series in full color is, especially for the anime, I think it would be perfect for the anime to be censorship-free but it’s still unlikely, who knows, we’ll see what happens.

Around the time of the announcement of the anime, I made a rant about how MAPPA can be a hit or miss for me in terms of their animation, and now that I think about it, their portofolio even, but the animation is a bigger issue for me. I also thought I would see MAPPA as a somewhat alternative to Madhouse, which is funny given that it was founded by a former Madhouse producer, but at the same time that’s not enough for me to care about MAPPA as I do with Madhouse, or old Madhouse, I’m probably not a fan of current Madhouse, and this goes back to their animation styles. Even if I’m lukewarm with MAPPA, their Chainsaw Man anime is something I’m genuinely excited for, it was something that randomly came into my mind and somehow it became true.

I might have a really high expectation that the Chainsaw Man anime should look like Dorohedoro, I really should try to lower my expectations and try to not care for how would the anime end up looking. Something with the likes of Kakegurui would be nice, maybe Jujuutsu Kaisen too (Even though I don’t really watch the series but it seems like it’s quite popular right now), I just really don’t want something like Granblue Fantasy season 2 because that show absolutely made me sick.

Anyway, I really love Chainsaw Man now, I wish I had read the manga sooner, especially when it came out, but now having read the manga now was a good time to do so given that the manga ended (at least in Part 1) and the anime being announced. (Although I probably forgot what the story is at this point (Except some “key moments”), so the anime can help me refresh my mind)

Top 4 best video games of the year

This is my least favorite list to make in these New Year posts because I never play a single new release because for years I never had a PS4 and even now I still don’t have money to buy games or to buy a Switch and games if I want to, so whenever I make these lists, I always tend to watch Let’s Plays from YouTubers I like the most (GTFO Jacksepticeye), I rarely watch all cutscenes only videos nowadays, and doing so makes me feel like this is cheating because doing these lists is more about experience by one self. Sure, some people would say you would still try to like a game just by watching, but in my honest opinion, it’s just not the same. But now this list is going to be different!

So for this list, I’m only gonna choose the games I actually happen to play for once, I usually make these lists by including a bunch of games I haven’t even played at all, so it’s finally time to make an unbiased list of video games of the year, not including ports and/or re-releases of old games or an obscure game suddenly getting attention, even if this list is awfully short but it’s the bare minimum I could make.

I’m not sure what to make of this list, I haven’t played some of the games in this list but I’m just gonna put them for how impressive they are even by just watching anyways:

4.- Helltaker: This game became quite a sleeper hit amongst the internet, spawning countless fanart and Helltaker dance parodies. The game might be very short, but the future of the characters doesn’t end there, as the creator would occasionally make comics and sometimes small art with the characters.

3.- The Henry Stickmin Collection: Believe it or not, I grew up with Newgrounds during my childhood, but I’ve never really played a Henry Stickmin game EVER in my entire life.

2.- Arknights: Over the last year, 2019, I’ve been seeing quite a lot of fan art of the game, there’s a lot of really good character designs, I really like them all. The game at the time was only released in China, however, at the end of 2019, I was hearing that Arknights was being localized into Japanese and English simultaneously, a “global” release, if you call it. It’s localized none other than Yostar of Azur Lane fame. Anyways, enough with that talk, let’s talk about the game.

I did get to start playing the game on day 1 launch, I was quite intrigued the story, the characters, etc. Although I was at a point where I wouldn’t play the game as much and only do logins, but after a few months, as I was progressing through the game and when the Grani event came out, I actually quit playing the game because... It was very hard! There’s a lot of strategies I have to do because there can be really hard enemies, not to mention I was quite underpowered with operators not well leveled enough.

I stopped playing Arknights for a while, that is until late April to early May where my older sister has started playing Arknights, that’s where I immediately decided to play Arknights again, and now it has become my third game I religiously play, the first being FGO and second being Azur Lane. Over the course of the entire year, I’ve been leveling up some operators and as of now I have 10 operators I have E2′d, so I made some significant progress, although I’m still rough in having fully built operators because grinding for the materials is a huge pain in the ass, but sometimes it can be rewarding.

My luck with the gacha is hit or miss, sometimes I get the characters I wanted, sometimes I don’t for the absolute worse. Now with the first anniversary coming, my most wanted operator is W, she and Ch’en are my most wanted operators, but after trying to get Ch’en so many times with definitely NO LUCK AT ALL, but my greatest disappointment was W yesterday, I never got W at all and only got a Phantom and TWO Weedys for six stars and I was so furious! I’ve been wanting her for so long, and the saddest part is that she’s limited and I won’t be able to get her ever again! After all my efforts in saving a lot of orundum, materials and even making this meme, everything has gone into an absolute waste and I really bummed out!

On a lighter note, W was originally going to be a Girls’ Frontline character but she was scrapped, which makes her a lot more interesting. (Someone even made this). I gotta say, releasing chapter 7 and W now instead of actually waiting until the day the game launched which is in January 16th, they certainly ended the year with a bang! (And with a bummer of not getting W, but still...)

UPDATE - JANUARY 2ND 2021: SHE’S FINALLY HOME!!!!!!! OFF TO A GREAT START INTO 2021!!!!

End of update.

In fact, Arknights was created by former Girls’ Frontline developers, quite surprising. I wouldn’t say Arknights is a competitor nor a spiritual successor to Girls’ Frontline, both have completely different concepts, also, I wouldn’t expect for them to ever make collab events for each other in either game. Then there’s the character W which I mentioned previously, she actually happens to be spawned from a scrapped Girls’ Frontline character for the AR Team, I like how people joke about W being the AR Team’s long lost sister. As of late I’m feeling really obsessed about W, and for a while, the fact that she was a scrapped T-Doll makes her a lot more interesting.

Given that Arknights was released last year in 2019 and we got the global versions early this year, having 1 year away from content isn’t necessarily bad and I’m better off playing the English version right now, but as of late, Yostar appears to be rushing some content released from CN into global, which that’s a plus for me, they’re slowly catching up to CN, just like how EN Azur Lane started with slow content but recently they’ve been releasing content ALMOST simultaneously (Not that I particularly care for EN since I’ve been playing JP a month after launch back in 2017 anyway), but the biggest problem is as I started following some Arknights dedicated accounts where they report stuff from CN and even took a bit of some livestreams, recently CN’s going crazy with amazing content that it may take a few months or a year for global to catch up, so I really hope Yostar does their best to try to release content for Arknights semi-simultaneously between CN and global a la Azur Lane.

I mainly play the EN version of the game and tend to follow the official EN channels (Though I follow JP’s too), but I found some problems with the PR behind EN. My biggest problem is that EN make some absolutely painful to watch livestreams with no seiyuu like JP does and having total nobodies as hosts (Except Intern-kun which he is kinda known and was a meme but I don’t think he’s quite a meme anymore), sometimes there were two other hosts with big animal heads, and some other plethora of issues addressed by Tectone in this video, in short, some of the exclusive YouTube content the EN Arknights channel comes up with like the livestreams can be absolutely garbage.

By the way, Arknights gave us a pretty good content creator who was quite a meme, he was actually sponsored and got his infamous ad which I didn’t even know this was a thing and still find it hard to believe since I use uBlock Origin to block ads. Even though he probably wasn’t the best go-to content creator for Arknights news and stuff, nobody agreed on what he says and he was occasionally criticized, he was especially fun to watch his suffering in every roll. At some point around the beginning of the second half of the year, he started to do livestreams and uploaded highlight clips of said streams of games like Fall Guys and Among Us, which I thought it was a nice change of pace considering there wasn’t much Arknights content at the time, but at that point, Genshin Impact was around the corner and he started making a lot of videos for it which now he’s pretty much become the Genshin Impact guy, and then he finally released that video completely declaring he absolutely retired from Arknights for good which I linked earlier in the PR issues, so after that, I stopped caring about Tectone completely. It’s a real shame because I actually wanted to see him pull for W this first anniversary, but there are some things that pissed me off about him, he never even cared about the story, or rather the game as a whole to begin with, talk about being ungrateful to the game that made you successful and get a cult following to begin with, but the dude was harassed, so I’d better cut him some slack.

Speaking of sponsors, I actually wished Yostar continued to sponsor Arknights but on better YouTubers like Whang, ThatGamerFromMars, the Vanoss crew, and all the other ones who get sponsored to death by Raid Shadow Legends (Raid Shitty Legends, am I right?), and the last channel they sponsored was fucking WatchMojo of all things. I mean, seriously?

Although not everything about the EN PR is bad, most of the Twitter and YouTube stuff is pretty much stuf about the game like upcoming new operators and events, and English subtitled trailers which for the most part is nothing really worth noting but this is pretty much my go-to for the news and trailers. They also have a Fankit website which I can download wallpapers and stickers, and yes, I do use the wallpapers, sometimes I do use some stickers but I like keeping them. They even team up with DJs and they actually release some pretty good music with cool CG animated music videos. Said artists happen to be from Steve Aoki’s record label Dim Mak, and even Steve Aoki himself did some music for the game and actually appeared in the Arknights 1st anniversary livestream from the EN channel to make comments about his latest track and saying he loves anime which I didn’t know Steve was a weeb. (Here’s the full livestream if you wanna watch it).

Anyways, enough PR talk, this is a pretty fun game! I probably never had prior experience in playing tower defense games, though the closest would be the PS3 demo of Plants vs Zombies, so I can say this is my #1 tower defense game and I’d absolutely recommend to everyone.

1.- Genshin Impact: My main contender for my #1 GOTY was No More Heroes 3, but since it got delayed to 2021, there was nothing else that’s #1 worthy for me, but enter Genshin Impact, a AAA gacha game at its finest, this became quite a big surprise of the year!

At first I wasn’t hugely interested in it, but then I was constantly seeing fan arts and people talking about the game in my timeline and I was feeling left out, so I tried playing the game a bit on my phone but I barely had any space left, so I had to uninstall Girls’ Frontline from my phone (sorry), so I had barely some space left, but the game ran extremely slow for my phone, as expected, it’s a very intensive game. Later I tried installing the game on my laptop, but because of my problem with my ethernet in my laptop constantly turning on and off, it took HOURS upon HOURS instalilng the game, that is until I got fatal errors at the last minute which completely made the installer download from 0%... TWICE! And I was done with it.

Then I was chatting with my older sister and she mentioned that the game is on Playstation, so she downloaded it, and upon seeing her play the game, it looks gorgeous, especially on her flat screen TV! It’s better having to play the game in better graphics and in a bigger screen, so I made a separate PSN account for myself and played it and I’m very hooked.

Probably the biggest things I’ve been seeing when the game came out were Paimon emergency food memes, I’ve been seeing a lot of memes and fan art related to these and they range from hilarious to downright disturbing (As people would meme Paimon as an “emergency onahole” as well). Nowadays I continue to see fan arts of Genshin Impact, particularly those of Mona, occasionally Barbara, Lisa, etc, but Mona is the most frequent.

But the problem is I'm so far behind of adventure rank and everything else from everyone else, even Ten and my older sister, I don't have a lot of characters and I don't have enough Primogens and the gacha system can really suck pretty bad with it being mostly saturated with weapons over characters. Not even FGO and Action Taimanin would they give me craft essences and weapons would be this bad, although in the case of FGO, I do get more CEs than Servants and stuff, but the way Genshin Impact presents me with low star weapons and literally no characters, it's just a hideous sight to look at.

The other problem is that since we only have one PS4 and our home consoles have always been shared, my older sister and I switch turns, but when it comes to single player games, we've always been using my older sister's PSN account, but with Genshin Impact, this is definitely our first time playing games on different accounts for the both of us for once. But the thing is, my older sister ALWAYS plays Genshin Impact, I admire her dedication but that barely gives me some time to play the game myself along with other factors why I don't do so, such as sleeping for hours, busy with other games and stuff, etc.

Playing Genshin Impact, given that it's an open world game, definitely reminds me of the good old days when I used to play Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, I destroyed that game with pretty much beating everything, but with Genshin Impact, I'm feeling like I'm out of practice with patience and playing games for hours due to my addiction of social media and other gacha games.

Then there’s also some performance issues specifically on the PS4, sometimes there can be quite the lag on location rendering (Like when I spawn in Mondstadt and textures take seconds to render sometimes), frame drops when I did co-op in the Unreconciled Stars event, etc. I don’t know about PC or PS5, but I’m pretty sure the game would run somewhat better on PC especially.

I rarely encounter bugs in a game, but Genshin Impact is the one game that I can definitely find more noticeable bugs and other flaws more than any other game I’ve ever played in my life.

Aside from performance issues and despite not playing the game as religiously like I want to, it’s still a very solid game. Gacha has been a genre that I’ve religiously been playing for 3 years and this really speaks to me, as I used to play a lot of video games for hours in the past and just a few months after playing DMC5 on our PS4, I’ve come back to the console and spend some hours playing on it again.

If I had a PS5 for myself but with a better TV in my bedroom right now, I would have absolutely made a lot of progress on my own and boy, my older sister must be way too far ahead with our adventure ranks, the campaign and even getting better characters than I do... ;-;

Honorable mentions

And here we are, the lamest part of doing these top game lists, whether main or honorable mentions, it’s always acknowledging games for their existence and sometimes simply from watching Let’s Plays which kind of defeat the purpose of making these lists based on actual experience, but who cares? Let’s talk about the games that I may not have played but peaked my interest in the least.

DOOM Eternal: Around the time of DOOM Eternal’s release, I somehow finally got into Doom by playing the classic games (Except Doom 3, I wouldn’t mind playing it, though), so I think I totally consider myself a big fan of Doom now (Even I played some WADs was breifly interested in wanting to make one), but what about Doom Eternal? Even if I had watched videos of Doom 2016, I of course liked the game for how it looks, but with Doom Eternal, it is absolutely better.

Based on what I remember seeing from Doom 2016 and with Doom Eternal, they’re like the modern equivalents of Doom 1 and 2, particularly with the final bosses being the Spider Mastermind in Doom 2016 and the Icon of Sin in Eternal.

When I first saw Doom Eternal being announced in Bethesda’s E3 2018 conference, as far as I can remember, I thought it would be like a random new game that has nothing to do with Doom 2016 or something, but as time went on and I kind of forgot about what I thought but now thinking back, looking at the trailers and even the actual game, my expectations have exceeded. Looking back at Doom 2016, it now pales in comparison towards Doom Eternal, from its UI to some of its more faithful monster designs from the classic Doom games!

Although even if Doom Eternal is great, there were some problems about Mick Gordon not being able to do the sound mixing for the soundtrack and all that drama, that could have ruined the game for being GOTY or something. (I’m exaggerating but it was quite a serious problem back then).

Speaking of Doom Eternal being GOTY, I’m seeing quite a lot of people saying that this is their GOTY, which is funny because I originally had Doom Eternal as my #1 GOTY in the main list which I later changed it to Genshin Impact in my TRUE best games of the year list with games I actually played, I still think this is GOTY, but without actual experience, it’s not worth counting it on the main list.

Resident Evil 3 Remake: Surprisingly RE3 Remake was rather divisive, probably the biggest reason I can think of as to why the game is divisive is because it’s rather short. Sure, the game is short but calling it a disappointment is an absolute understatement, as long as the game continues to have beautiful graphics from RE2 Remake, the gameplay is satisfying and has quite some spooks, it’s still good enough for me.

Call me crazy to judge the game this way considering I’ve only ever played the demo in my PS4.

Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition: I was quite surprised they actually went ahead in making a Special Edition of DMC5, I mean, I thought they wouldn’t based on what they said about “no more developments” for DMC5, but with the PS5, that all changed. And of course, it cannot be a Special Edition without playable Vergil who not only has a really awesome gameplay, but he has the absolute BEST theme that actually surpassed Devil Trigger. Man, Vergil always gets the best themes.

The only caviat with DMC5: Special Edition is that it’s only made for the next-gen consoles. or it has rather become the current-gen consoles as of now, that is all because Capcom wants to take advantage of the PS5 and Xbox Series’ technologies with the ray tracing and turbo mode, but not all hope is lost as they actually made Vergil available for previous gen consoles as DLC, so that’s an absolute win!

A few days after he was released as the DLC, I got a chance to play as Vergil and I pretty much speedran through the Devil Hunter difficulty in 6 and a half hours, and I think I’m almost not out of practice on playing Vergil since DMC3SE. By almost I mean that most of the time I was familiar with the controls and the movesets, but at the same time they tweaked a little bit of some of those familiar controls from what I remember and added some cool new combos. Oh, by all that I meant that he’s absolutely fun to play.

I kinda wish they did make Trish and Lady playable as well, just like in DMC4SE, but they kinda turned out to be useless throughout the story, so this could have been the only chance for Capcom to redeem themselves with the characters, but I guess not.

Among Us: The game came out in 2018, but out of the blue, it has now become a massively popular game. I had always thought Henry Stickmin was part of why Among Us is popular, but not really, it was a streamer with a lot of followers to make it happen.

To be honest, I kind of wish Henry Stickmin was as popular as Among Us, the only thing from Henry Stickmin that was apparently a big meme (Which I wasn’t even aware of and never seen such memes in my Twitter timeline) is the distraction dance.

Persona 4 Golden PC: For a while I’ve been seeing news about leaks and stuff like that, I was skeptical about it, but it has finally become real.

For a while I did want to buy the game, but I didn’t want to spend quite the amount of money and I was kind of skeptical of how demanding the game might be, but out of the blue, my good old Japanese friend gamer Hinosuna came to the rescue and gifted me the game (He also had gifted me Mortal Kombat 9 after it was removed from Steam a few months earlier, and with Persona 4 Golden, this is probably the last game he’ll ever gift me).

Upon opening the game, the first problem I immediately encountered is the cutscenes running extremely atrocious, they were running extremely stuttery, it was so bad I had to find an all cutscenes video with Japanese language (Since I had the game set in Japanese audio), but then when it was time for the gameplay, the game isn’t insanely demanding like I thought it would be for my laptop, it’s an absolute win! From what I heard about this problem with the cutscenes, it’s probably a problem that’s only affected on laptops, so I believe people must have the cutscenes running like normal in their insanely powerful desktop computers, lucky you.

A few months later, they eventually fixed the cutscenes... Supposedly. The cutscenes for me run a little better, but they still work just as badly. Instead of having the cutscenes extremely stuttery, like I previously had, instead I may have a bit of lag but the visuals can get very glitchy, like scratched DVDs.

By the way, this happens to be the most successful PC port on Steam, given how successful it is, I completely forgot that the Catherine PC port exists and looking back at it, I can’t help but laugh at how the PC port of Catherine wouldn’t get to this level of success P4G has, especially because it’s a fan favorite enhanced version of a Persona game and because you probably wouldn’t find a copy of the game for PS Vita if you still have a PS Vita lying around which makes this port ten times more accessible, this is how successful it turned out to be, in my opinion. I could be wrong and there can be other reasons why it’s successful, but this is my main theory.

Now, since I’m traumatized from my PS2 dying in 2014 when I was doing Shadow Yukiko or Kanji in New Game+ after doing the bad ending, this is my chance to redeem myself, I want to get the true ending this time, especially with a new port of the better version of Persona 4 Golden! ...Or so I thought I wanted to be.

When I was playing P4G, I was trying to get 100% on my first playthrough and it puts me quite a lot of compromise, there’s just something about playing the game windowed while looking through guides at the same time that not only makes it distracting, it completely slows me down, not to mention I’ve actually been burned out from playing the game overall...

As of now I’m on June 29th and already doing Shadow Rise’s world, I think it’s decent progress but that’s how far I am by early December this year after not playing the game for... MONTHS. At this point I also try not to care about following guides and just do whatever is best for me and I can try to do better when I do New Game+.

I want to go back and finish the game once and for all, but I’m very busy with other games and other things, I’ve been held back very much on them and even when I try to play the game, sometimes on midnight, I immediately lose my patience. I don’t know what to do...

Hopefully next year, I’ll try to go back and try to finish the game once and for all, I don’t want to make Hinosuna’s gift a waste, I’m really proud of him gifting me the game.

Final Fantasy VII Remake: I can’t remember when was the first trailer shown in E3, 2015? We’ve come a long way and FFVII remake is finally here. Apparently I heard this is a two-part game, so I hope we won’t wait for a really long time for the second time, probably not the same amount of time as we waited for the first part, but worse, perhaps even longer.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Action Taimanin (English and PC): I played Action Taimanin back when it was released on mobile in Japanese in 2019, but since I was done with the campaign and there was nothing else to do, I decided to stop playing it and uninstalled it from my phone to make space, but to my surprise, I randomly happened to find out that an English version AND PC port of the game was released on Steam in October 6th, I kinda wish it did came out on my birthday so it could have been more enjoyable, but whatever.

Having known that Action Taimanin was gonna be released on PC with English translation, that’s where I thought “It’s time to return to Action Taimanin!” unlike the one time I said I would because Rinko Akiyama was released as a playable character in the mobile game, but now I have her AND Mizuki Shiranui, which I got them both at their launch dates, I also got Emily Simmons as well but not right on time for her launch but it was still worth the wait.

Speaking of Asagi, one other surprising thing I found out about Asagi when I started playing the PC port is that they actually patched out Asagi’s voice by recasting her with a different actress, apparently it happened since late June for rather unknown reasons. For those who don’t know, Asagi was originally voiced by Ami Koshimizu and now she’s voiced by Sayumi Watabe (Who’s claim to fame is Els from Beastars and Manaka from Aggretsuko season 3).

Square Enix Avengers: I wanted to like this game because I always had thought this would be part of the Spider-Man PS4 universe, a Marvel Gaming Universe of sorts, even if it isn’t, I was still interested and I didn’t tolerate how people would trash the game. The game now came out, mixed reviews and a plethora of far worse problems, like how very little the game made and low playerbase on Steam and what not. None of that stuff is my problem, I would really love to play the game now.

Dishonorable mention (?):

This is hardly a dishonorable mention in an ill matter, but something that completely shocks me, so might as well be in a disappointing sense.

Cyberpunk 2077: I was never interested in The Witcher series, but I admire them as a video game adaptation of a novel which aspires me in wanting to write novels for them to get adapted primarily into games, however, Cyberpunk 2077 was the CD Projekt Red title I was genuinely interested.

The game came out and I saw a tweet from Nibel that it’s got quite some good reviews, but over the next few days... Things started to get very sour...

The game launched at a very buggy state, it even got removed on console digital stores, the game is unplayable on consoles and money loss... Everything just feels disheartening, and it’s not fair...

This is the one game from CD Projekt Red that I wanted to start caring about as well as the studio, but after the PR mess and constant delays leading up to a messy release (at least on consoles from what I mainly hear), and everything else that’s been happening, now it seems like people are turning against CD Projket Red which they were once highly regarded, I just hope Cyberpunk 2077 can recover so it’ll eventually turn into the next timeless masterpiece like it was supposed to be after The Witcher 3.

Although not all hope can be lost as I still see some people playing Cyberpunk 2077 fine, at least on PC maybe, and that’s enough to make me confident that not everything is all bad.

Most anticipated video games of 2021

Now we’re finally on my favorite category, and first and foremost, my most MOST anticipated game of the year is of course...

No More Heroes 3: With NMH3 finally being delayed to 2021, that was my last final nail in the coffin to care about 2020 as a whole, BUT, not ALL hope is lost! As on October 28th 2020, Suda51 actually released THE FIRST TWO GAMES into Nintendo Switch! This is an absolute win-win, I can finally play ALL No More Heroes games in the most recent console possible... Except I still don’t have a Switch and I seriously need it so bad now. 😭 (And now I’m hearing news that the first two games might actually come out on PC, which I don’t think I’ll need a Switch anymore, at least for this, I still need it so bad to play NMH3 on launch) I’m so glad Travis Strikes Again sold so well to make NMH3 happening, hell, it it didn’t, the post-credits scene could have been a total waste and I would have been forever heartbroken!

For a long time I was skeptical for the soundtrack, I always thought it wouldn’t sound anywhere near as good as the first two games without Masafumi Takada, but in reality, Takada never actually composed the soundtrack for NMH2 to begin with, in fact, he had already left Grasshopper around NMH2′s release. But regardless, I still thought the NMH3 soundtrack wouldn’t sound as good as the first two games (Sorry TSA, I haven’t paid attention to your OST), but then I listened to WILD TOKYO, the first album by RED ORCA, a band formed by composer Nobuaki Kaneko, and I was very impressed, so I guess it changed my mind. Actually, the album contains three tracks that have been heard on the trailers, like “ORCA FORCE,” “beast test,” and “Octopus.” That’s not to say that the album is the ENTIRE soundtrack for NMH3, only these three are what are currently known based on the trailers, so who knows if the rest of the album is actually the NMH3 OST or there’s gonna be entirely original tracks for different things.

However, there’s one thing that I’m scared the most is the probability of recasting Quinton Flynn from Henry (in case he might appear in NMH3 since Travis Strikes Again) due to some allegations towards him, I really hope everything that I’m hearing is just made up bullshit that people want to cancel others they hate for no absolute reason. Although I’m hearing all of this from word-of-mouth and nobody sources, if there’s something that’ll immediately convince these allegations are true, is by seeing legit sources like Anime News Network, OR EVEN other actors speaking about it (Though they would most likely easily jump into the conclusion and easily agree to the allegations without any solid solid proof (Yes, I’ve seen a screenshot but I don’t want to believe it)). If Henry does appear in NMH3 but he gets recast before launch or worse, AFTER launch, I’m going to be very sad and it’ll probably be one of the things that NMH3 may disappoint me.

And lastly, I̵ ̵S̵W̵E̴A̸R̴ ̶T̵O̸ ̸G̶O̸D̵ ̷I̷ ̴R̴E̷A̷L̷L̶Y̶ ̴H̵O̷P̷E̴ ̴T̴H̴I̵S̸ ̵W̴O̷N̶’̶T̴ ̶B̸E̶ ̴T̶R̴E̷A̵T̵E̸D̷ ̴I̸N̷ ̷T̴H̶E̵ ̶S̴A̶M̷E̶ ̷W̵A̸Y̵ ̷A̷S̸ ̵T̷L̷O̴U̴2̸ ̸O̸R̵ ̴T̷H̴E̸ ̷O̶T̷H̴E̸R̷ ̴T̵H̸I̵N̶G̸S̴ ̴F̸R̵O̸M̸ ̷T̶H̵E̸ ̵L̸A̵S̵T̴ ̴3̶ ̸Y̴E̵A̷R̸S̶ ̷W̴H̷I̸C̵H̶ ̴I̷ ̸M̴E̴N̵T̸I̵O̷N̷E̴D̴ ̴A̴G̷E̴S̶ ̸A̷G̶O̵!̷!̶!̶!̷!̴!̶

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¡̶̗͎̭̲̯̑̀̑̋̃͂̆̕͝¡̶͇̹̗̙̖̀̇͂̈́̚̚͝¡̶̜̀́̐͆̉͂̊͜͠͝M̵̢̰̭̪͎̥̩̂͗͋ͅĂ̶̻͗̕ͅĻ̴͉̗̼̤̈́͑D̶͓͎̋Į̶̨̛͔̝̫̳̝̭̮̈̈́̈́͊͑̂Ṱ̵͗͑̋̒͑Ȏ̷̲͌̄S̸͚͙̲̀͋͘͠ͅ!̸̨̖̠̮̩͍͒͝ͅ!̴̧̼̬̩̖͎̉̾̓!̵̨̛̝͓͎̙̺͉̃̔̒̏̑͒͒͜ ̷̛̘͙͈̰̦͎̪̖̍͊͋̈̾Į̸̠̝͙͖̙̗̏̓̓̏̋̂̚'̶̹̩̆M̴̭̠͈͈̐́̌ ̸̺̰̮̔͛́̂̊̂̄̑͘Ģ̵̘͈̳͎͇̰̮͇͗̑͂̉͘̚͠Ở̴̝͖̟͖̾͌͌̐̒̏͘N̶͙̽̇̾͐̐̆̐͗͘͜N̸̙͊͌̀̇͜͜A̶̢̜͉̣̘͖̹̎̃̈́̀́̂͆ͅ ̶̭͖̹̰͔͓̅C̶̛̹̜̉̂͒̀͋͑̔͠Ȕ̴͕̟͇̯̭̭̓͜T̷̡͖̱͇̳̗̺̓͂ ̶̗͕̩̘̀̈̍̆͋́̒̒Y̸̹̣̬̿ͅO̶̢̢͈̣͗̀̽͜͠͝Ų̷̗̺̩̤̹̙̤͎̍͐̚͠R̵̝̱̘̥͙̠͈͐̀͆̄͌̉̐͜ ̷̙̹͆̓̓̑D̵̟̺͇͕͌Į̶̨̡̬̫̞͍͋͑Ć̶̢͕͖̮͘͜͝K̵̰͍͑͑͗͆͑̂̏̚̕S̶̭̭̼̤͔̳͊̀̈́͋ͅ ̷̝͖͇̹̪̲̜͕̀͆̔͑͜Ơ̵̧͔̖̣͌̓͛̃̊̆̕͜F̷̛̫̙̣͖͊͛̾͗͌̈́̃̎F̶̡̤̭̟͔̬͖̼̙̎̈́̿͗̌͋!̵̢̛̪͇̣̦̥̿̌̊͆̔̒!̷̡̤̪͓̒̋̽̿!̸͓̻̱́̽̋̓̌̕ ̵̡̼͓̪̟̓͊́̚͝Ḯ̵̬̫̪̰̯͍̂̉͝ ̶̨̺̟̘̱̤͙̻̆̋͆͒̀̀S̶̪̪͖̩̮̗̬̰̉͒̓͗̚W̸̢̭͔̪̱̺̅̌E̴̯̥̿͛̅̔̋̎̿̕A̸̖̠̝̙͖͗̋̔R̷̼̔̌̀̿̈́̍̽͠ ̸̤̾̄̀̒̀̍̃͝T̴̫͙̦̗̦̤͌̔̈̈́͜ͅƠ̶̗̜̝̽̂̑̑̓͆ ̷͔͉̗̞̭̣̣̔̎̒̌͠͝G̸̢͙̅͐͆̐O̷̹̭̼͙̔̏̈́̔͜͝D̷̤͍̦͝ ̴̨̦͈̟͙̱̘͎̅̿̉̅̂̋̈́̄I̷̬͖̐̒͌̾F̴̜͉̻͈̟͍̈́͑̃ ̷̹͈̦͇͈͗̎Ÿ̶̛̬͇̫̼̝̤̑̎̂̐̕͘͠Ơ̸̢̙̹͉͉͉͙̠̦̂̍͂̄U̷̠̬̥̪̥̞͆̍̒̿̆̾̕͝ͅ ̵̤̀̄̆̍̐͂D̷͕̞̎́̍͘O̶̧̢̨̗̠͓̓̍͌̓͘͜ͅ ̴̢͖̟̗̭̦̱̦͊̏̉͆̊̓̐͜͝T̸̙̳̙̟̪̟̪̈́̽̌͒̅̅͂͘̚ͅH̵̘̤͎͎͊̅I̶̡̧͎̗͓͔͖͐̓̀̑́Ş̶͓̻͓̼͙̘̜̱̾͒̿̊̕ ̸̡͍͔̤̹͒̽̈̽͑̈́T̷̨̢̨͓͈̝͚͇̘̔̑̊̐̂O̴̖̎͆̏̇̐͐̄͘͠ ̶͔̗͉̩͕̒͗̄̒͛̈̎̚M̴͉̠̾̔Ę̵̤̼̲̘̤̜̈́̃͂,̴̬̦̳̲͖̖̲͒̾̏̔̌̉̽͐̚ ̵̡̨̜̤̯̬̌̾͆̿̓̉͝͠͝I̴̺̝̐̽̃̒̀͝'̴͎̂͐̿M̷̡̳̜͚͍̼̬͋ ̴̢̢̫͇̈́̐̓̀̅͝G̷͍̞̔͗͗͑̀́̏͐̾ͅO̶̠̐́́̓̂̊̈́N̶͓͓͔̗̪͍̈̂͑͝N̵̢̛̛̳͎̞̒̔͑Ą̵̒̆ ̴̛̳̝̍̌̈́̌B̴͎̖̤͎̜̟̳͇͋Ḻ̷̒̅̔́́O̷̖͑͆͑̈̈́̆Ĉ̴̨͖̪̪͇̣͎͚̘̀Ķ̷̼̺̝̠̮̥͓̈͐̅͆̎̀̚̕̚ ̸̡̘͇̣̹͇͌͊͛͠Ý̶͕̥̦̜̗͉̉̐̿̆̄̃ͅÖ̸̧̳͈̞̳̤̤̌͐͒̍͘ͅU̴̜̔͛͂͗͐͜R̸̨̫͈̥͍̰̀ ̷̨̩̘͓̇̽͘À̴͙̈̀̈̃ͅS̴̠͈̙̎̽̒̓͂̐͛S̶̡̼͉̟̝͚͖̔́̍̀̄̓̕E̷̳͍̞̊͂͝S̸̛̥̠̻̤͆̐̌̋̉̿͘͝ ̶̣̩̖̘̦̂̆̇̔̀̅̕O̴̦̬̦̟͆̂͂͋̈͂́F̷̡̛̠̝̹͖͉̱̗͌̿̀̎͆͘F̸̹̖͓̖̎̉ ̴̤̹̗̯̊̔̏̀͆͒́̅͝Ǒ̷͖͙̻̭͎͕̌͗͒́̍̚F̶̜̳̭̺̱̖͔̒͋ ̷̢̹̩̝̗̙̎͂̽̐͝M̵̫͓̮̪͕̹̳͗̽̔̈͊̓̎͘͝Y̵̡͙̟̝̓̊ ̴̻̪̗̙̭̊̓͌̈́̀̒͠L̷̢̠̩̳̦̺͚̦̚Ȉ̸̝̲͗͊̃F̴̺̘͂͑͂E̴͓̓͋̑̔̏̎̌̏ ̶̫͚͎̜͔͂͂́Ą̴̨̦͈͌̆͒ͅN̷̺͕̻͙̄̽̋̄D̸̳͎͖̰̎̑́̔́ ̶̦͉̘̖͍̹̏̆͛̍̑̎N̷̞̟͋͂̓̈͊͘͝Ę̶̤̟̠͉͇̓́́̄͝͠V̸̤͋͑͠͝Ě̵̛̬͕͒͆̒̽͑Ŕ̸͕̼͈̠̰̦̼͚̍̐͜ ̵̢̰͙̯͇̝͖̑̆͑̇͘͘͝ͅS̷̡̲̣̖͚͊̌͐̇̚E̵̟̒̇̈͂͂Ĕ̴͓̬̪͖̙͚͚̓̇͒͋̅͋̿ ̷̢̳͚̼͂̆͠Y̵͇͔̎̊͌̀Ơ̵̢̫̟̠͖̣͒̇͋͛ͅǕ̶̡̧͈͚̜̻͍̝ ̵̼̬̤̥͚̟̎͌͜A̷̧̪̰̻͓̗̿́G̸̜̠͓̙̜̬͇̭̒̐͠A̸̹̩̾͗͆̆̒I̷̹̬̗͖̐̽̈́̓̎̓͐͗͘ͅͅŅ̸̧͈̹̭̝͇̝͕͗̏̓͐̽͛͊͐̕,̴̡͓̼̜̖̮̮́͗͒̍̀̇̚ ̷̳̰́̉Ỳ̵̦͓̞̻̩̐͜ͅỚ̷̺̰̻̝̰̤̣͓̾̂͗̽̍Ů̸̢̡͈̟̪̬̜̝̼̈́̃̂̓̄́̚͝'̷̟̳̓͂́̅͐R̷̹͖̆͊̕É̶̛̯͈͆̓͒̄̂̈́͌ ̸̠͍͍͙̪̀̏̅ͅǦ̶̝̯̦͕͙̈́͛͛͝ͅÖ̷͉̗͎́̔̏̓̒ͅṊ̸̡̝̾̂̅̆Ǹ̸̢̗͖̲̋̂̿̽͝A̴̖̮̰͎̪͂̂̈ ̷̨͖̖̹̦̈́̉P̵̞̩͔̱͔̲̦̟̤͂̄̈́́̓À̷̺̽̄͌͋̃͝Y̵̳͓͐́͐͆͘ ̴̼͈̻̲̟͎̩̿̍͗͌́̃̄̇͛Y̵̱̲͐̒̌̕Ơ̶͎̫̦̠̈́̄̒Ử̷̜̙̪͉̪̖̓̒̚ ̵͙̗̫̉̒̓̐͒̂̓̕F̴̱̠͎͝U̷̦̬̘̓̽͐ͅC̵͍̿̈́̂͌͐̅́͋̚Ķ̵̨͂̈͐̔̆̒̔̅́Ǐ̸̧̱̻̪̪͖̈́̾̃̀͘N̴̟̭͉̲̰͉̍̽̊͒̕Ğ̸͓̰̖̎̂ ̴̧͎̥̜̹͒̃̑̌̈́̒̅̊C̷̨͈̪̫̥̲̜̱̿̐͋U̶̲̮͈̪͆͋͐̊́̍͌͐͘N̴̬͈̝͓̆̄̔̍͝T̸̙̖̼͎̻̬̀̌̃͐̔̅͋͗ͅS̴̨̰̋̆͒̆͝,̵̞̭̜̭̹͕̱̃̚͝ ̵̗̬̆̚͠ͅY̵̗͕͌̾͂̂͂̒Ò̶̥̙́̄͝U̸̗͗̂̐̀͐͜͠ͅ'̴̹̱̤̇̃̓̀̏̽̀̽R̵̡̫̙̙̯̗̒̉̾̔̎͗͋̈̇ͅE̷̖̒̒̒͑̔̇ ̴͑͜��Ǵ̵̨̝̟̙̰͓́̓ͅO̸̡̘̤̗̭͔̬͖͒̎̓͗̊̇͐͘͘Ṉ̸̱̆̔͑̈́͘Ǹ̴̡̩̼̃̀̍̕ͅÄ̴͕̠̂ ̸̧͓̭̟͔̹̖̥̔̂͐̃͆P̶̮͎̫̳͚̃Ą̷̨̪̖̟͋ͅY̵̧̘̟͇̮̥̏͛̓͜ ̴̢̨̜̞̹̭̼́͑̽̀͜͝F̵̛̞̤̺̈́̆̇̋̋̔O̴̜̜͇̽́Ŗ̴̯̟͈̱̳̲͆͑̂͐̈̍͂͝ ̵̞̻̇̌̋͑T̷̝̯̭̖͖̼̏͐̄͆͗̀͠H̶̨̧̛̗̤̮͕͕̙̉́̊̾́̚͜͠E̸̗̪͉̩̤͖͆̅̐̄̎̂̃̾̚͜ ̵̧̪̱̦̪̞̫͔͕̀̋R̸̗̭͓̖͔̻̟̮̈́̀̅̋̀̇̒͜͝Ȩ̸̟͇̮͇͂̿S̵͕̯͕͌̓͂̀͊͒̀̊̍Ţ̶͇̭̖̰̊͛̓̅͒̈́͝ ̷̟̜͍̦͇͍͒͑O̶͎͋̊́̈͌̚͝F̵̨̧̖̯̗̞̯͎̭̌͊̅̾̂̂͌̕̕ ̶̤̹̖̱̦̐̆̓́̉̐̑̕ͅỶ̵̨̮̠̬͚̤̱͎̄̒̚Ơ̶̢̬̦͙͚̝̒̏̈́̚Ŭ̶͕̗̣̎͘͝Ŗ̴̨̱̪̹͉̰͆ ̸̪͓̱̒̀̊͑͑Ļ̵͖͖̉I̵̡̨̭̺̼̺̟͌̏̾̽͌V̴̢̢̛͚̫͌͗͑͜͜ͅẺ̸̮͖̹͇̰̀̐̊S̸̨̲̜̖͍͚̙͉̥͊̀!̶̮̱̻͑!̶̩̦̫̓͑̇̿͛ͅ!̵̹̲̯̦̗̹̗̹̃̈́͛̐͝!̵̼̿͑̃̉̕͜!̷͍̮̝͖̙̫̫̺́̅̐̔!̶̭̻̫̭̗̗̼̏̈̆͒͝!̷̗͚̣͇̑̓̒̂͑̔́̈̄

Ä̶͇̪̘̹̦̰̥̪̞̺́͆̉͂̀̆̈̈̈́̌̽͊̏͠Ą̶̨̧̪̻̗̯̘̭̺́̅͒͊͌̈́̑̈́̓̑̿͆̕͝ͅÄ̵̢͇͍̉́̿̔͋͌͛̾̿̂̚͝͝Ą̸̢̯̬̹͖͉̻͇̘̱̙̖́̓ͅĄ̶̛̯̝̰̜͍̬͇̹̈̀̋͑̅̉̚͝Â̷̢̡͈͍̞̮͖̥͌̊̈́͐͝Ã̶̛̦̠͕A̶̖͎̗̜̳̘̪͈͙̍̍̒̀̑͜ͅA̷͚̰͕̻̯̪̔͆͆͗A̶̘̝̞͖̹̙͖͚̥͎̫͈̓͗͐̒́̈́͌̊̓̇̽̒͌͋͝A̸̭͕͋͋̎̀͂͛̈́̕͠À̵̼̓̑͋̅̍̿̀͗͗͊̂̓̚͝Ạ̶̧̨̧̤͖̠͍̜̱͐̆̽̿̆̇́͗͝͝͠Ä̷̱̼̝͇̱͐̈̐̈́̏͆̽͌͂̏̈́̀̐̅A̵̛̛̱̥͐̂̈́̃̐̀́̏͝Ä̷̼͕͉̭͖̣̼̺̺̩͍̯̭́̽̒̎̑̓͘ͅͅA̵̳̰͋̌̀̍́̈͑̿̋̃ͅĄ̷͈͎̮̬̠̻̀͐Ạ̵̢̢̣̻̻̯̰̦͉̮͓̯̔̏́̍͒̋̀͆̓͒̆͝͝͝A̶̝̝̻͉̼̫̹̱͇̓̑́̌̌̐̍̄͝A̴̛͕̫̰̹͈͙͖̪͒͂͆̈́͋̚Ą̸̖̻̹̹̣̹͓̩̩̲̓͆́͋̇͋̃̽͝͝A̸̻͔̲̥̠͐̏̈̅͆̀̍̒̀͌̕Ä̸̮͖̱͐̅̀Ǡ̶̧̡̛͍͉̠͇̗̉̇̔̽̇͛̔̂̉̌̚A̷̛͈͈̫̲͙̾̈́͂ͅA̸̢̢̝͉̼̫̔̆̑͑̔̊̓̎̚͝͝ͅA̵̢̧̛̗̮̮̭̫̹͔̹̮̫͌͂͌̔̔̄͒̌͑̌͘͜͝͝A̷̠̋A̸̡̜̭̫̤̝̩͎̦͑̃͋̏͠ͅA̸̡̨̯̮͕̭̠̺͈̜͖̗͂͒̐̈͆Â̵̟͔̘͂̃̏͌̓͒͋͊̀̇͐̚̕̚A̶̡̲͉̗̲̬̜͈̻̟͚͈̠͉̩̋̌̈́̐͂̍̓͐̉̆̇̃̕͝͝Â̴̳̻͍̯̗͉̣̞̥̙͋͌͂͊͗̏̃̈́͘Á̶̢̧̧̠̞͕̞͎̼̪̻̠̩̫̄́̋̅͆̀̊̇͘͘Ä̸̢̡̬̬̜̻́͊̈́̇̌̂́̋́̅̍͜Ã̴͍̫̲̤͈̐̄͒͋͗̋͑̓̾̓͒̃͘A̴̢̛̗͕͔̝͖͛̅̀̍̔̑Ā̷̧̛̩̘̘̹̭͈͇̣̗͉͙̣̈A̵̮̣͙͊̑͐̈́͠Ą̵̛̠̖͍̥̜̟͇͎͎̅͆͐̄͋̊̌̔̋̾̒̚͝ͅA̶̦̖̗̫̜̼̦̯͎̲̔̀̎̂̅̔̍͑͑̂͗̈́̕͘͝ͅA̴̢̢̧̞͕̺͍̣̳̹̮̜̥̅̑̈͠Ḁ̶̛̟̘̉̈́͑̐̔̂̑͝Ḁ̶̥͕͓̩̩͈̘͒͛͑͝͠Ả̸̧̞͉͈̊̀̈́͐͊̐̉̀͒Å̵̳͕͕̼̦̜̱A̵̧͉̖̦̼̺͉̙̗͈͓̹̠̦̅͜A̴̩̓̂̌ͅǍ̶̛̗̬͕̼̩͙͎͐̓́̔̊̾̓̽̾́̚Ǻ̴͖̤̯̈̈́̉͗̊̾̍͘̕͝͠͝Ą̷̩̬͇̹̮̺̇Ȃ̴̳͙͋̓͌̌̆͐̂̄̚͠͝Ǟ̸̻̹̲̜͎́͐̃̓̕͠͝͝Ą̸̬͚̪̳͕͙͓͖͚̹̘͑̀̈̅͛̿͋̃́̋͘͠A̵̹̮͖̣̻̘̗̟̋̐̋̓̉̇̍̈̓́̔̅̉̊͜Ȃ̵̧͙̽͊̌̔̂͝A̶̮̒̔̂A̷̧̛͎̞̗̽̏̀̔͌̎̂̀A̶̤̻͎͌̊̍̒̀̓̅͛̿͂̊̀͘̚͠A̷̳̝̝̓̿͘Ǎ̶̛̖̜͕̖̤̲̣̠̥͚̆͑̏̓͂̌̈́͋̑͗̚͠͠À̶̢̢̙̩̟̖͔̳̎̈́̈̒ͅẠ̶̘̹̦͉̬̰̝̘̫̈̋̽͌͒̑͊̌̍̾͑͝A̷̡̢̧̙̰̮̠̠̫͈̯͗͊̀͗͒͋̄̑́̍͆͒͠Ä̷̧͕̖͖͕̗̲̲͓̞̟̣̲̙̐̽̊͝͠ͅA̶̛̰̝̙̣̤̙̝̗͋̆̓͊̀͘͠͝ͅA̶̢̢̯̰̜͈̭̯̰̯̫̎̔̋̀̌̇̓̽̽Ȁ̶̧̨̨̺̜̤̈̉̎̒̀͠A̵̪̩̼̮̻̜͕͍̓͒̓̉̈́̍̈̂͘͜Ą̴͖͙̜̦̄̏͗ͅA̵̡̙̱̳̭̪̙̰̐̄͋̈́̄̉̋͆̐̽̋̿͜A̷͉͋͑͋̂́̋̆̈́̿͛̂̚Ḁ̴̛̃̏ (Headphone warning)

Ahem, my apologies. :3c

Also, I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO SEE SPOILERS, I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THE GAME FOR A LONG TIME AND I DON’T WANT TO SEE ANYTHING UNTIL I ACTUALLY PLAY THE GAME MYSELF IF WE EVER END UP BUYING A SWITCH AND THE GAME! I’m definitely gonna try boycotting the internet, boycott Twitter, boycott YouTube, mute every news site and journalist, etc.

By the way, on the morning of the 29th, when I made myself breakfast, I happened to talk to my mom that I want to buy NMH3 so bad and we agreed that starting on January, we’re gonna start saving for a Switch and the game, didn’t expect to tell her about it sooner but I actually did it! We seriously need to buy a Switch ASAP, and I cannot afford to wait for a long time to buy a Switch AND the game even if it’ll come out in other consoles, I want to play the game right on launch, I’ve been waiting for this game for a seriously long time!

I had considered making this list with NMH3 as my only most anticipated game, but there are some other releases I should look out for (Which of course I’ll probably never play because of money):

Resident Evil Village: The remake period is over (Though it ended in a conflicted way with RE3) and we’re finally back on track with completely new games, especially the sequel to RE7.

Not only there’s a new Resident Evil game but there’s going to be a new CGI series following Leon and Claire on Netflix as well. So we’re getting new game that continues Ethan’s story and whatever the hell is happening to Chris, while we’re also getting a new series that continues Leon and Claire’s story.

Shin Megami Tensei V: It’s been years since we haven’t heard anything about SMTV until this July where we finally got a brand new trailer and teased to be coming this year. My older sister would seriously love to play this, but we don’t have a Switch yet...

MADNESS: Project Nexus (Madness Project Nexus 2): I really hope for sure they’ll release Project Nexus 2 this 2021, the game’s been in development for a very long time and it’s constantly getting delayed, so I don’t think I might have high hopes to see the game being released at this point, but even so, I’m still going to count it as my anticipated release of 2021 (Hopefully).

I played the demo of the game, however, and I had a blast, although it’s certainly a little confusing, but my bigger problem was the framerate I’ve been getting, which the game is a little intensive and I expected the game would perform well on low end computers, but at least I manged to play it.

I’m not very happy with how they changed the title, it went from “Madness Project Nexus 2″ to “MADNESS: Project Nexus,” the new name is absolutely confusing and someone might get mixed up with the original Flash game, or so I thought it would be as the original Flash game was eventually renamed to “Madness: Project Nexus (Classic),” which part of it makes me think it’s a remake of its own but at the same time there’s still new additions, like new enemies and new story campaign that kinda justifies that the new Project Nexus game is still a sequel.

On the topic of Newgrounds games...

Alien Hominid Invasion: With the Castle Crashers remaster, the next Behemoth remaster is the classic Alien Hominid. Depending on how much the game will cost on Steam, I will for sure buy and play it immediately. I think Newgrounds games are best played on PC.

Before you experience the Alien Hominid remaster, you should check out the original version available in Ruffle’s demo page, which Ruffle is a new open source replacement for Adobe Flash. (Be warned that the game’s one-hit death might frustrate you, it sure does to me and I really hope that’s not a thing in the remaster, if not, then I guess that’s Alien Hominid’s intended nature, although it’s probably what every side-scrolling shooter is)

Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery: Girls’ Frontline may not be my top gacha games I religiously play like I wanted, and then there’s a plethora of Girls’ Frontline games coming out sooner, some of them are spin-offs and then there’s Girls’ Frontline 2: Exilium, which I’m not interested in the least, to be honest, but there is one game that is now being re-released and localized for global audiences, and even getting retconned to be more connected towards Girls’ Frontline, this is a game that came out years before Girls’ Frontline and for a long time it was widely believed this game was a sequel to Girls’ Frontline, taking place over 30 YEARS after GFL and now it is indeed confirmed! I’m talking about Code Name Bakery, or originally called as Codename: Bakery Girl.

Even if I’m not a huge avid player of Girls’ Frontline like I wanted to since I’ve always been a gun aficionado and I almost don’t know much about what’s going on in the story (But there’s my Philipino friend, Ten, to tell me), I certainly wouldn’t mind to play Code Name Bakery.

Back 4 Blood: Everyone’s pretty much referring this game as Left 4 Dead 3 because it was created by the creators of the first L4D (While L4D2 was all developed and published by Valve in-house). I kid you not, when I saw the reveal trailer in this The Game Awards, I was definitely like “I’m getting some Left 4 Dead vibes” maybe because of the characters and the special zombies, and then the title “Back 4 Blood” was shown and I was like “Is this like a spiritual successor or something?” but now everyone’s calling it Left 4 Dead 3, so I’ll have to stick with it.

And to be honest, I’m not really sure if I’m really interested on this one. Even if this is a new Left 4 Dead game from the creators of the original game, now known as Turtle Rock Studios, there’s just something about the game’s identity that doesn’t sit right with me. And then looking at the pre-alpha gameplay, it just looks like any other generic first person zombie survival game with the modern graphics and stuff, the characters and the zombies don’t look anything brightful and special like the first two L4D games, I wouldn’t call the aesthetic bland, but everything about it just doesn’t do anything to me, at least it’s not a brand new L4D by name or even by Valve, which this is published by Warner Bros Games instead and I’m not really sure about them as publishers or their products.

As much as I’d like to get interested in this game from the creators of the first game and people call it Left 4 Dead 3, I’m better off with the first two games. Oh, even Left 4 Dead 2 even got updated a few months ago. Despite my skepticism, I will continue watching Let’s Players’ videos and see if it’ll change my mind.

Fate/Extra Record: This is probably gonna be a 2022 release, but I’ll be damned if it would actually come out later this 2021, so I’m still gonna mention it here anyways.

Tookyo Games releases: This one’s a little tricky because we all know Tookyo Games has a plethora of projects coming out, but what we don’t know for sure is when some of these will come out, maybe the closest one could be Tribe Nine, but I’m more curious about the other projects and hopefully they’ll come out this year.

And finally...

Tsukihime remake: HOLY SHIT! I can’t believe it’s finally happening after all these years!

Um... I always thought that whenever we see stuff about the Tsukihime remake, I would immediately play the original game. BUT I NEVER EXPECTED THEY WOULD ACTUALLY ANNOUNCE IT FOR THIS SUMMER!

Once I'm done with some things, I'm definitely gonna go play the original!

Top 6 best movies of the Year

At first I listed all the following films in a nearly chronological order from what I remember when have seen these films throughout the entire year, but I decided that maybe I should make this list as a ranked list, even if some of the films don’t necessarily impressed me so much in the least, if it weren’t for COVID-19, Venom: Let There Be Carnage would have been my #1, and Morbius would have been my #2. Anyways, let’s go:

6.- The New Mutants: I wasn’t able to watch New Mutants in the cinema the day it was released like I wanted, but some time later I was able to watch the film and it was pretty interesting, I liked it.

5.- Birds of Prey: Never knew I needed a full R rated DCEU movie (Though it’s not the first one. The first one is the R rated cut of Batman v Superman but I don’t know how it’s different from the theatrical cut), there’s still some ties but I feel like this kinda feels more like a standalone film, but it was quite fun. This kind of serves as a good road to The Suicide Squad.

4.- My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising: I mentioned this a couple of times because this is probably the only thing I can say about the film, but this is actually the last film I saw before the pandemic broke out.

Though one thing I have to say about the My Hero Academia movies is that I wish the manga can actually make references to the films so it would acknowledge they exist because sometimes I can’t thoroughly figure out the timeline or flat out call them non-canon (Which they aren’t), and the villains are immediately forgettable. Although given what’s currently happening in the manga (and it’s completely nuts), I doubt the manga would ever reference the films.

3.- Parasite: This was a 2019 release (I think), but after the Oscars this year, it was ran in my theaters so I had to watch it before I watched Sonic the Hedgehog next. After seeing the film, I find it pretty interesting, not to mention the ending shocked me, but in all honesty, I wasn’t like completely amazed as I was with Joker, even my family thinks that they prefer Joker over Parasite, that’s not to say it didn’t deserve to win Best Picture in the Oscars, but Parasite as a film doesn’t mean anything special to me.

2.- Wonder Woman 1984: I wasn’t looking forward to see the film in my birthday because I didn’t want anything other than Venom 2 since it got delayed because of COVID, but later it got delayed to Christmas and I was glad.

December came, the film comes out a week earlier in Mexico than in US and HBO Max, I saw the film and it was actually better than I expected, I think I like it better than the first film. Now that I think about it, maybe I wished Wonder Woman 1984 wasn’t delayed because my birthday was so disappointing and boring without anything special to see. Although even if I liked WW1984 so much, I don’t think it probably would have been the best birthday film I would have seen if it didn’t get delayed, but it was still worth it.

There’s one particular thing about the film I liked very much, but since the film recently came out, it’s too soon for me to put spoilers, but I’ll redact them in ROT13, you may or may not want to decode this, it’s your choice:

[V ybir jung gurl qvq gb gur Jbaqre Jbzna punenpgre, gurl jrag shyy pynffvp Jbaqre Jbzna jvgu gur vaivfvoyr wrg naq sylvat, juvpu vf fbzrguvat V unira'g frra irel bsgra va ure zbqrea vapneangvbaf nf bs yngr.]

But then there’s the moment when I start getting the feeling of wanting to pee so bad, and the worst part is it started around halfway or the quarter of the film. Then in the film’s climax, my bladder was dying so bad that... Believe it or not, I had to empty my soda cup and actually pee on it! I DIDN’T HAVE ANY OTHER CHOICE, OKAY?! Geez, I really should limit myself how much soda should I drink, but I even took a pee in my home before leaving! What an awful way to end my older sister and I’s cinema experience of the year, having our bladders nearly exploding.

When the credits started rolling, I was slowly standing up, I was putting my belt on and somehow I happened to see a mid-credits scene I never knew it would have, although it’s nothing hugely worldbuilding significant, but [Vg'f whfg n fznyy sha fprar jvgu Ylaqn Pnegre nf Nfgrevn.]

At this point the DCEU is definitely going to have post-credits scenes, maybe I should check the news beforehand whether the upcoming movies have post-credits scenes or not, I always thought the DCEU wouldn’t have post-credits scenes, but since Suicide Squad, Justice League and even recently Aquaman, it should be time that I should sit all the way to the credits, maybe just any other movie in general too.

1.- Sonic the Hedgehog: I had some fun watching this film and I think I actually liked it better than Detective Pikachu in terms of pacing. Can you imagine watching this film with the awful old Sonic design from the very first trailer? I don’t think I would have liked this film with the old Sonic design the same way as I do now. I’m glad that a sequel is even happening now.

Honorable mention

Promare: This was a 2019 release and I’ve been waiting for so long for it to come out in my theaters, Konnichiwa Festival disappointed me with the 2020 line-up and all of it was history for early in the year before the pandemic.

When the pandemic has broke out, I randomly happened to watch Promare in my house, torrented from the Blu-Ray rip, and BOY, I WAS SO AMAZED WITH THE FILM, SERIOUSLY! I think it was for the best seeing Promare at home in case the cinema might have had full of Mexican weebs screaming their asses off.

Around September, my dream of Promare coming out to my cinema has finally come true! The day my family and I went to see The New Mutants, we have planned to see Promare right after we finished watching The New Mutants, although we didn’t get to see TNM because there were some technical issues with the screenings in the cinema for some reason.

So we waited over 3 hours to see Promare, my older sister and I got into the cinema to see the film, and the experience... Was rather lukewarm.

In one hand, my older sister and I were the ONLY ones seeing Promare late that night, but on the other hand, the way the film was screened was an absolute mess. I don’t know what to blame, the aspect ratio or the subtitles because the subtitles were almost non-existent, it was as if we were seeing a raw anime film in Japan. It was so bad that my older sister did NOT understand what even happened in the story. Given that I had seen the film, I tried my best to try to explain her what was Gray planning with the Burnish but my brain pooped out and couldn’t continue. Later I told her to look for spoilery summaries or something and she says she may have somewhat gotten the context of the film, but it doesn’t feel right to me. I’m not sure if she has looked up on spoiler summaries now.

Things get worse when I realized seeing The New Mutants and Promare in the same day could have been the second time I could have seen two films in the cinema in the same day since February with Parasite and Sonic The Hedgehog.

Another weird thing I haven’t thought a lot is that this wasn’t actually distributed by Konnichiwa Festival like most other films, this was actually distributed by none other than Cinépolis themselves with the +QUE CINE thing, and that makes me lead to believe that either the screenings from the cinema or Cinepolis themselves butchered really badly the subtitles.

The cinema experience may have been an absolute disappointment, but it was no doubt a very good experience seeing the film upclose in the cinema with the gorgeous animations and visuals, and my older sister and I being literally the only ones who have seen the film, it makes a new record of seeing a film with my family all alone since 2017 with Kong: Skull Island with me, my mom and a random dude.

Most anticipated movies of 2021

This next list is going to be different, as I’m going to count a couple of movies per entry, more like categories for different kinds of franchises that I’m most excited to see, so here goes.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Spider-Man 3 and Morbius: Since 2018, this is the second best time to be a Spider-Man fan! (However, we won’t see Spider-Verse 2 until 2022) My #1 most anticipated film of 2020 was of course Venom: Let There be Carnage, I seriously wanted to see it so bad but because of COVID, the film got delayed until like June or July. I was seriously pissed as the film was gonna be released on October 2nd which that could have been my one chance to see a Venom film IN MY BIRTHDAY, ONE FUCKING CHANCE, and Sony wasted it! Given that it was October, it could have been a good time to have the film released but seems like the COVID situation wasn't getting any better.

There's also Morbius which I'm genuinely curious as to how they're actually building up the Sony Venomverse with the MCU since the end of the trailer features Michael Keaton's Adriam Toomes from Spider-Man: Homecoming. Yeah, so far this sounds really complicated, but I'm sure it'll all be clear once we see the film.

And lastly there's Spider-Man 3 (Working title) which is probably the hypest out of the three films on this list. For a while, the news I've seen were about the posiblity of Kraven the Hunter being the film's villain, and there wasn't anything else after that, there wasn't much special things for the film and I always saw it as a follow up to Far From Home which I would still see. Then there were news of Doctor Strange being the next MCU hero to be featured in a Spider-Man film since Iron Man in Homecoming and Nick Fury in Far From Home (who turned out to be Talos the Skrull from Captain Marvel throughout most of the movie), this was certainly interesting, but as time went on... Things started to get wild. There were reports of Jamie Foxx returning to Spider-Man 3 as Electro, possibly the very same version from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 or just an MCU version of Electro, who knows but the fact that they're casting Jamie Foxx since TASM2 was quite interesting, but wait, that's not the craziest part, later I started to see news of Alfred Molina cast as the Doctor Octopus AGAIN, and for the final blow... Rumors of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield possibly returning into Spider-Man 3 and a leaked video from an official Latin American Sony channel that said "Who's your favorite Spider-Man? You might see all Spider-Men at once, anything is possible" or something like that...

OKAY, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?! THEY'RE DOING LIVE-ACTION SPIDER-VERSE?! HOLY SHIT, DON'T DO ME LIKE THIS! I'M NOT PREPARED!

The rumors about Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield returning for Spider-Man 3 as their Spider-Men might be a hoax and it's all rumors, sure, but it might not even be a hoax at all! For more solid proof that this could potentially be a live-action Spider-Verse film, in the Disney investors meeting, they confirmed that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Which happens to be directed by Sam Raimi of all people, and it's coming in 2022) CONFIRMED that actually ties to Wandavision and... "THE NEXT SPIDER-MAN FILM." So there you go! That pretty much confirms it now that they might actually be doing live-action Spider-Verse now! This is actually going to be the BEST live-action Spider-Man film ever!

With all these Spider-Man 3 live-action Spider-Verse news, I completely forgot about the news that Kraven was gonna be in the film, I really hope they might still include him in some way in the film as Tom Holland Spider-Man's villain, and it isn't explicitly confirmed that Jamie Foxx's Electro and Alfred Molina's Doc Ock are either the same versions as their original versions or completely new MCU versions of the characters, who knows.

This is lowkey confirmed with the Disney investors meeting that the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ties to the next Spider-Man film, but what if all the live-action Spider-Verse stuff may not end up being true? In case if it's not true and it'll be just like Far From Home where it can continue Spider-Man's story from where the post-credits left off, I would still see Spider-Man 3 anyway, I'm always down for whatever MCU or Spider-Man film may end up be.

I know I wanted to see Venom: Let There be Carnage so bad, especially for my 21st birthday which I didn't get anything to watch and my birthday end up being a disappointment, but the problem is, we still haven't seen a proper trailer or anything, even for a film that was supposed to come out in October before it was delayed because of COVID! So far they only released a teaser trailer of the title and the new release window, and I really hope early this year, we can expect some trailers anytime soon, although the first Spider-Man film coming out this 2021 is Morbius.

So yeah, since 2018, 2021 is going to be the second best year to be a Spider-Man fan!

Black Widow, Eternals and Shang-Chi: First let’s talk about Black Widow because I’m the most scared of how the film is gonna be received given that when the concept art was shown at Comic Con and then the first trailer was released, people absolutely hate Taskmaster’s design, I mean, sure, he may not look comic accurate but aspects of it still kinda look like the comics and HE LOOKS BADASS! WHAT’S WRONG WITH EVERYONE?! THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH TASKMASTER’S DESIGN! Another thing is that I’m feeling that Black Widow may become Captain Marvel 2.0 where people hate the film for no reason, for a while there was some hate around the film because of some shit with Brie Larson and whatever, but most of the hate I’ve seen all goes towards the film quality, I don’t really see anything wrong with the film when I saw it, it’s rather decent, but with that said, I couldn’t stop thinking for the entire movie that there’s nothing wrong with this, etc.

I don't think even my older sister would wanna see Black Widow either as she never even cared about the character in Avengers: Endgame and she liked a tweet where someone said "Marvel making everything military sucks so much" which NO, IT FUCKING DOESN'T! I LOVE MILITARY AESTHETICS AND SHIT, YOU JUST HAVE SHIT TASTE, MY GUY!

The next films coming out are The Eternals and Shiang-Chi, although there's not much to talk about them since we haven't seen any trailers or anything so far, but I'm definitely gonna watch them.

I'm of course gonna be watching every single MCU-related thing, whether it's the movies or the Disney+ shows, I will follow everything! And no, I don't do this out of obligation (Someone in the RPG Site Discord server told me that and I'm forever pissed about it), it's called doing things religiously!

And speaking of the Disney+ shows...

BONUS: Wandavision, The Falcon & Winter Soldier, Loki, What If?: This is kind of a miscellaneous list as these are actually series in a movies list, that’s weird but deal with it. Say what you want about Disney+, and there’s quite a lot of MCU Disney+ shows coming I’m losing track which ones are coming out in 2021, but I think these four are what are coming this year.

Probably the series I’m most excited to see is Falcon & Winter Soldier, I have no idea what is even going on with Wandavision and Loki, as for Wandavision, since that one’s coming out in two weeks, I have to watch it as a lead up to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022, as for Loki, I don’t realy understand it in the least so far. What If, there’s not much to talk about, it’s literally just “What If” with alternate versions of the films’ events, although I do admire the animation, it’s not Spider-Verse tier but it looks very nice.

I got a mail from PayPal offering me 250 pesos to subscribe to Disney+, I don’t think there may be an expiration date somewhere in the mail so I really hope the offer would still last, but until Wandavision comes out, I’m definitely willing to pay for Disney+.

Several Warner Bros. releases: Around early December, it was announced that all of the upcoming Warner Bros films of 2021 will be released on theaters AND HBO Max at the same time! That’s insane! It sounds really interesting, although I’m not sure if I would watch all the films in HBO Max, I would still love to go to the movie theater, depending on how much HBO Max costs and when is it coming out in Mexico. Also, that’s not to say that I would like to see them ALL, no no, I will only see the films that I’m interested the most:

Mortal Kombat: I actually loved the original Mortal Kombat films when I was a kid, although I’ve actually seen the second one and I still have the DVD which I bought when MK9 was released, although even that scene with CGI dragon Liu Kang cringed the shit out of me when I was a kid. For a while I heard this would be coming out in January 15th 2021 but it’s now coming to April, which is for the best because I haven’t seen any trailers or anything from it so far.

Tom & Jerry: I’m not sure if i would like to watch this, I’m feeling that maybe I would like to do so, so far this is kind of a bizarre concept but what I greatly admire is how Tom and Jerry are animated, it makes me think of Space Jam.

Godzilla vs. Kong: I started following the Monsterverse since Kong: Skull Island and before I’ve seen Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the cinema, I saw the first film, I like this series so far, and I can’t wait to see this one.

Space Jam: A New Legacy: I’m surprised how secretive the news and the marketing has been, every time I’ve seen this trending on Twitter, I never see these big movie news sites like The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, not even IGN were reporting about a legit Space Jam 2 teaser trailer at some point, or the film in general as of late, for that matter.

The Suicide Squad: Just my usual tradition of watching whatever DC films, whether they’re DCEU or not, and this appears to be DCEU, or at least having the same actors playing certain characters. If there’s one thing I would complain about this, is the title, just “The Suicide Squad” when the first Suicide Squad film which is titled “Suicide Squad” is really stupid.

Dune: I just need something to watch on cinemas in my birthday, this year was a disappointment since Venom: Let There Be Carnage was delayed, if it weren’t for COVID-19, I would have gotten a great birthday film that might have even surpassed Joker.

The Matrix 4: This one I’m genuinely curious to see and know what the hell is even going to happen in the film considering how the original trilogy ended. And for a while before COVID broke out, it was originally gonna be released with John Wick Chapter 4 at the same time, it would have been insane to have double Keanu Reeves films being released simultaneously and I have to choose one over the other, but I’m glad both films got delayed and they’re not being released simultaneously anymore.

Justice League Snyder Cut: This one’s kinda miscellaneous since this entire list is basically the recently announced films that are coming to the cinema and HBO Max at the same time, and I actually kept forgetting about this one and this one’s treated more as a series. We’ve come a long way since the Release the Snyder Cut campaign happened for years, and by a miracle, it’s finally happening. This film, or rather series, feels more like a remake of the Justice League film with some of the archived footage from the Snyder Cut before Zack Snyder left the project from his daughter’s passing, but apparently new scenes are being filmed. I really hope this saves the DCEU because as of late I can’t tell if the films are actually connected anymore (With the exceptions of Joker, The Batman, etc).

Mission Impossible 7: Since Fallout, I think I’m going to start following the Mission Impossible series from now on. Note that there’s Mission Impossible 8 coming out in 2022 as well.

That's all I have to discuss about my best and worst of 2020 and my most anticipated 2021 releases, boy, I seriously wrote a lot for everything and that's probably what took the most of my time to write this post (Aside from my laziness), but I really hope you liked my best and worst of 2020 and my most anticipated releases of 2021. And moving on...

Now it’s time for the one category that it’s always all talk and never deliver, I may contradict what the following headline will be, but it's pretty much what's going to be true...

No more resolutions

Yeah, I can't even bother writing these same tiring resolutions I'm not gonna even fulfill over and over. It's an endless cycle.

Drawing every day.

Behaving better.

Working out.

Writing my novel.

Give me a break. Is there seriously a point in telling you all these resolutions that I supposedly want to do but I never end up doing anything anyways? And if I were to actually do these resolutions, I wouldn’t tell you about it. (I read a study with a headline “If you want to be successful, don’t tell others about it” or something like that, which I’m still telling you about these resolutions I want to do and end up failing anyways)

Let me break things down in parts about my expected future:

Behavior:

In terms of doing homeworks with my mom: Yesterday on the 30th, she just told me there's already homework but it's for January 11th and we'll do it on the 4th, it's not even 2021 and we're already off to a great start, although it's something that my mom has to read from, so I hope it'll be fine for now, but for future homeworks, I don't have the highest hopes for it because I'm easily trigger happy in these homeworks, there's seriously a lot wrong between all of us in how we do these homeworks, we make our lives miserable if it weren't for my older sister's stupid forced pension that she has to study no matter what, and then like my mom's pension, my pension or whatever there is that we get money, either they don't give us enough money or my mom always end up spending most of the money in groceries that would last for a week and other things, this is bullshit!

In terms of people's opinions: I seriously wish I could not give a shit about what literally everyone says about certain things, not even my family, but that shit is just everywhere and I really can't help but make at least one comment that something's not bad or whatever, I said this countless times but I'm very trigger happy.

In terms of artists: I'm going to continue be a douchebag and criticize their art and themselves behind their backs in my private Discord server, whether in public channels or privately if shit gets insanely serious.

Working out:

I'd seriously love to start working out immediately right now, but given how extremely cold as shit my country is, it just motivates me a lot less to start working out! Besides, my mom hasn't even bought the mat like we talked about for ages, she always forgets about it and I'm always waiting for her to deliver, but even if I would like to start working out, I would still have to eat fats instead of actually going in a diet, can't go back to the gym because of COVID, and most of all, I'm so fucking lazy. I always tend to do one workout for one day and that's it, I never do it daily. This and what I'm going to talk about above are something I can't develop a daily routine of!

My drawing skills and my future of my project:

I now have a Wacom Intuos that is bundled with 3 programs, but I only installed Clip Studio Paint because that's what I care the most, the other programs are trials and they're worthless as shit, I did make at least two pictures to mess around but as of late I've barely been touching it because I'm still having a hard time figuring out what to do with the brushes and stuff and I'm so obsessed in having the brushes default, default brushes with default settings, etc. I'm just not too comfortable tweaking the brushes to my preference and changing the sizes is gonna be extremely hard depending on what canvas size for my pictures would be and having to tweak the brush sizes for the canvas is so inconsistent!

As for the future of my project, I really want to continue bringing my project to life, and now that I have a Wacom Intuos, if I really put myself to try to sketch every day and everything in order to improve my art style, hopefully drastically, I can actually try to make my project in a much better format, especially comics, I would love to return to draw comics because, I said this numerous times, I used to draw comics mindlessly when I was a kid, but two years later, I somehow got a slump and just like that, I stopped drawing comics for good, but now if I try to figure out my story right, I may actually bring my project as comics, literature can suck my dick! And because I'm an artist, it's best to make art for my project all by myself since literally nobody I asked wants to work with me!

I seriously had no idea how to write, never even bothered to read books and everything else to even care about the basics and essential of writing, I always thought it would have been an easier way to bring my story to life and make adaptations of them as soon as possible. I seriously had no idea what kind of story should my project be, I was extremely unconfident about it and... I don't want to say this but I seriously hated what I was doing with my novel, my writing was obviously shit and it gave me nothing but headaches, I gave up. Although it's not like I completely cancelled the project and lost interest in it, it will always live on... inside my head with constant brainstorming and headcanons.

I had a plan to deliver my project and make it successful immediately overnight and try to make the series go big ASAP in 10 YEARS, but now after giving up writing the novel, I completely wasted 1 year, so now I have 9 years to do this shit. The reason why I want to rush now is because I want my franchise to exist, I want to work with my favorite actors and other creators before some of them retire or pass away, and I SERIOUSLY cannot let this opportunity and dream go to waste!

Even though I have Clip Studio Paint now and I would love to make comics, my copy of Clip Studio Paint that was bundled in my Wacom Intuos is Pro, the features are very limited, so there's not much I can do about that. My other options in trying to bring my story to life are either making visual novels or RPG Maker games, those sound like very valid choices, but there are still some limits. If I were to make VNs, I would have to learn how to use Renpy, my art has to be good and I have to hire some people to do some extra things like I don't know, backgrounds and even the background music and sound effects which I can't even afford to do all that. Then there's RPG Maker, I bought RPG Maker MV when it was at a crazy good discount in the Steam Summer Sale but I opened it for a few minutes and I have no idea what to do, I try to watch numerous tutorials on how to use it but I still don't understand, another thing that I don't like about RPG Maker is that some programming is still needed somewhere, I have no fucking clue about programming, and RPG Maker always advertises itself as a somewhat easy engine, talk about false advertising. Besides, RPG Maker games aren’t as relevant where they become overnight hits and turn into franchises as they used to be anymore, so it really doesn’t do me any favors. So I guess my only choice is try to continue creative writing in some form, I have a better way in how to do things without the old fashion boring ass way, I would have to indicate what character says what and everything has to be in present tense, kinda like the visual novel elements in some games, and I won't give a shit about what anyone says about my writing format, there's no other way.

Even though I haven't really abandoned the project out of my life and will always continue brainstorming headcanons and different stuff, I hate to say this, but I think my project has grown to have an identity crisis. Everything I brainstorm are pretty much copying from literally everything I see, like movie scenes or even the entire movies, especially the MCU movies with wanting to make my own version of Avengers: Endgame mixed with Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Another weird thing about my brain is that, for years, I've always had a mood on wanting to make a Kingdom Hearts-like series with my project and some other franchises, and believe it or not, my crossover candidates were Persona and Danganronpa. No, this wasn't intended to be for fanfiction purposes, I wanted to legitimately make them into a reality! One day I eventually dropped the Persona and Danganronpa crossover idea with my project and opted towards literally making Americanized discount rip-off characters to be copyright-free and to fit in my story (Although eventually they have evolved into their own characters). Everything seemed well enough but my brain is coming back to this fantasy of making a Kingdom Hearts series but with Arknights. There's a lot to discuss about that but I don't want to get into further details.

So yeah, pretty much my originality only resides within the characters and their designs, everything else like the stories and some elements, rather of calling them "inspiration," it's more like heavily borrowing or straight-up copying, so I have no idea what to do with my series at this point. Not to mention that I constantly brainstorm all these things which they're all for stuff that comes LONG after the first installment of my project which I'll never release, and it makes me not wanting to go back into that. Another criticism my older sister gave me about my project is that I tend to create a lot of characters only to show off their designs and never give them any purpose, and I guess it shows.

I said this before but I’ll say it again:

What I love about my project is that I always use my imagination, everything just feels satisfying when I can think of every scenario possible and even make drawings because pictures are worth a thousand words. Whate I hate about my project is the act of doing it, showing it off, explain to some people if you're prepared, something like that.

Maybe my project shouldn't exist. In fact, it already exists, how I want the video game and other adaptations, everything exists, inside my head. They have and will always be in my head, and there's a lot more stories and characters to come. I have seen everything and they're exactly like I always wanted, I'm completely satisfied. There's no need for my project to really exist, only for me to become poor, a total nobody, and even if it were a best seller, it might get adapted in the wrong hands, but in the end, it doesn't matter because I always know I won't even succeed, it won't be an instant crazy hit and it will never be as time passes.

(That two paragraphs above is pretty much my copypasta to talk about my project)

Another thing I'm questioning in my life right now is...

My future as a Custom Maid Twitter account:

Lately I don't really make a lot of Custom Maid screenshots on my own, sometimes I do but they're mostly collabs, and I would occasionally tell people to make collab pictures with our OCs together, sometimes it does happen but the frequency of these collab screenshots happening have decreased drastically, not to mention that there are some that weren't interested, which kinda sucks

To be honest, I really haven't been motivated on making Custom Maid screenshots at all. The game runs so slow given that I have a lot of the game's content and mods which most of them I barely use, and I have no idea what screenshots to make, even if I were to look at prompts, not to mention I created some characters which I barely ever used and I almost never get immediate attention when I post my screenshots. I seriously want to retire from doing Custom Maid because of what I just said with my motivation and stuff, and then there's the whole drama with maidin which I mentioned a long scroll up ago which really affected me so much. I even had prepared some legacy files compiling my presets and my screenshots.

Even if I say numerous times that I want to retire or I'm done, I'm still considering that maybe I shouldn't quit, but even if I'm not retired, I still have no plans or even interest to make screenshots again, so I'll have to talk to some of my JP mutuals and Ten about it. After what I did to maidin, I feel like I'm no longer want to be part of the Custom Maid community and I don't want to be a burden on it. Hinosuna who was the one person I followed the most hasn't made screenshots at all as of late for 6 months and I doubt he will ever return, let alone talking to the guy ever again, and there's another person who blocked me for no reason after telling him about my birthday a day later which I did tell him I was from Mexico, talk about being xenophobic.

So there you go, my not-so category talking about my resolutions, I seriously didn't want to talk about this since I'm not even gonna do shit about the things that I want anyway, but I did it. Still, keep in mind that I'm probably not gonna be able to do any of these because of my sheer laziness and gaming addiction. Please let me know what to do with all this and hopefully it can change my mind.

Conclusion

Phew! This was an insanely long ride! I never expected I would write so much shit, and if you managed to read literally everything, congratulations, you're a madman. This is definitely the longest post I've ever written in my life!

Pretty much everything I've written here have been made with a lot of thought and effort, most of the stuff I wrote on this post for a while was my Best and Worst of the Year and Anticipated Releases category, although most of the time I was kinda lazy and only wrote little by little with everything else, and hours prior to the publishing of this post, I kinda rushed on the very end of the post, but I think I did a pretty good job into everything I made. And no, I won't even bother making a TL;DR about it.

Although to make things short, everything was an absolute mess, but my personal problems are always the worst of my life which makes every year automatically bad for my health, but on the bright side, 2021 is looking to be the very best year with the best releases ever, so I'm really looking forward to all of that!

I did mention my private server, I wouldn't like to disclose anything about it, but as of late, it has become more like a home to me, I don't check Twitter as much like I used to and this server is why I rarely go to any other Discord servers ever. Always being on my Discord server and keeping an eye on it be like:

(I know I said I wouldn't like to invite anyone into my private server ever again, and I also choose to not make my server public, but if there's a mutual that I REMOTELY like, I can DM you the invite link, if you're someone I find meh or I don't like, you can fuck off)

As for my resolutions, and most importantly on what to do with my drawing skills and project, I guess we'll have to see if I can deliver or not.

Anyways, this was a really tough year but thanks for continuing to support me throughout this entire year, for better and for worse. Hopefully things will get better this 2021 and we can be free again.

Happy New Year!

My Carrd - I did some improvements as well!

Every image featured in this post in high resolution - Because if you’re reading this post from the link I send instead of the Tumblr homepage (which I don’t think anyone even uses Tumblr anymore), my theme makes the images look incredibly small and as much as I like this theme, this is something I definitely hate. (I’ve been redoing this album numerous times by fixing something and adding at least one new image)

[alasademon]

alasdair &&. kora sidian’s magic shop part one to be continued.

The door opened to give off a burst of heat compared to the cold outside but Alasdair could hardly tell the difference. As he walked into the magic shop, his eyes scanned around at the shelves, taking in the different odds and ends. This was the first time he’d visited the magic shop and while he did have a specific reason for coming today, he also wanted to admire the trinkets. Would it be insulting to call them trinkets? Maybe he’d avoid saying that. “My, my… everything in here is so… eclectic.” Alasdair mused as he slowly walked, fingers reached out to graze whatever was in his reach.

Kora tensed the moment she heard the little bell chime, altering her of a presence within the magic shop. Taking a calming breath, she placed the gardening tools she was working with down and dusted loose soil from her jeans. Walking back to the front of the shop, she popped her head out from the doorway, eyes scanning the room before they landed upon a master she had seen pass her cell a time or two. “Sidian takes pride in his search for things to add to his…” She waves a hand toward a shelf filled with rare, beautiful crystals. “Unique collection.” Stepping further into the room, Kora reminded herself this was Sidian’s space, familiar - safe. “Is there anything I can help you find?” 

A unique collection. That’s certainly what it was and Alasdair was curious about every inch of it. “I would if I were Sidian, it’s a fine collection.” As he shifted to move down an aisle, eyes peering over for anything that caught his attention. Alasdair had been a long time in hell before he came back up so he was out of touch with the was of new witches and warlocks. But he’d always admired them. “Ah, yes. I’m looking for something. Whatever would give me the abilities to.. find someone if they were lost. Or find them if they were injured.” Alasdair stopped near Kora, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Anything in this neat little collection that could help with that? Or am I going to need a house call from Sidian?”

“I’ll be sure to tell him of your compliment.” Kora said, moving to stand behind the front desk, if only to put more space between herself and a demon with cheekbones straight from hell. The pretty ones couldn’t be trusted - she had learned that the hard way. As he explained what it was that he was looking for, instinctively the shewolf touched the necklace around her neck - her own little protection charm. It allowed Sidian to find her - where ever she may be, injured or not.

She shrugs her shoulders, “Hes got some chicken bones around here that rattle when someone dies.” There is amused sarcasm laced within her tone.  “Does this person happen to live within Crown Point? Because if they do - a bracelet or a necklace of your choosing, something personal could be charmed for your intent.”

She takes out a notepad, planning to jot down his information and what he needs. “I can’t do that for you as I’m a werewolf with no magical abilities but - I can let him know.”

Alasdair raised his eyebrows as he slowly came around an aisle and made his way toward the front desk that she’d disappeared behind. “Chicken bones that rattle when someone dies… do they go off often? Just walk down the aisle to put something away and the bones just rattle around? Sidian is an odd one to keep such a thing….” He wondered curiously, eyes only briefly looking around the shop to try to catch a glance of these mysterious bones. There wasn’t much that he knew about witchcraft, but he had some doubt that there could be such a thing.

“They do live here in Crown Point. It’s for my claim,” Alasdair finally answered, going back to their original topic but he was still all the more curious in the chicken bones now. And what Sidian was doing in his spare time. “So a bracelet or a necklace would be perfect. Anything ease for him to wear that will allow me to get a bead on him if the occasion needed it.” He leaned against the counter, chin in his palm. “So Sidian got himself a pretty little werewolf?”

“…Pretty much. I suppose it could put a banshee out of a job.” Kora says with a quick wave of her hand, thinking of a particular guard. She is convinced the witch is merely fucking with her half the time but it does make for a good story to tell new customers. “Actually I think half the old shit in here has a malevolent spirit attached. So do be careful with what you touch.” Her words are spoken airily, but they do hold a warning as she watches the demon make his way toward her. Customer service hadn’t exactly been her forte.

“Oh - congratulations.” Because even though some may find her or her kind uncivilized, Kora does have manners. But shes still all too stiff standing there behind the counter. “I uh…” She briefly glances down, thinking about how to articulate her next words. “I should warn you that..it doesn’t always work.” At least - it hadn’t worked for her last time. “It they are anywhere that blocks a witches magic.” As she speaks she is jotting down what he needs.

She looks up as he leans in - the wolf can feel his eyes upon her and she feels her hear thump loudly within her chest. “Some would call him quite the idiot, but yes - I’m…his.” That isn’t something she is used to saying out loud.

“Noted. I suppose there isn’t a way around that. Although, if I’m not able to pick up where he would be, I could at least narrow down the options that way.” Keeping Deus safe would be a top priority. The magic of witches is useful in these situations but they’re not limitless. “I don’t think that should be an issue when it comes to the attacks. It’s the main reason I’m looking into getting such an item. While the rebels have been quiet for now, I don’t trust they’ll stay that way if history has anything to say about it.”

Alasdair sighed softly, but he couldn’t be entirely sad about the situation. If the rebels did attack again, it meant he’d get to get his hands dirty and Alasdair couldn’t say no to that.

“An idiot?” He questioned as his eyes found Kora once again. “Why would anyone call him an idiot? You seem like a lovely woman, beautiful.” He flashed a charming smile. “I would hardly call him an idiot.”

“That is true. Personally mine gives me added comfort in this place. And it should for your claim as well.” Kora knew even with out the necklace around her neck Sidian would still find her, protect her - this just made things a hell of a lot quicker when this town practically had a target upon its back. “I was stuck in the middle of the rebels last attack - when all those bombs went off. If that is your reason, I’m sure you wont be disappointed.” And Sidian had found her then - found her here within the walls of this city. She hardly ever removed it, not even when she’d run from him.

“Ah -” A cheeky little smile spreads across her mouth and she tucks a stubborn strand of hair behind her ear. “You never met me down in the cells. Ask any guard - I was more than a handful.” Which she supposed now fell back upon Sidian and put him at constant risk with his Elder. “He isn’t.” Look at her defending her grumpy and spoiled witch. An improvement after recent events.

The look of surprise was genuine when she mentioned she’d been caught in the middle of the rebels last attack. It had been one that impacted the city heavily and Alasdair couldn’t have imagined being so close to everything. At least he could take comfort in knowing that Sidian would be able to provide him with what he was searching for and that it would work. If anyone could do it in this city, it’d be Sidian.

“You’d be surprised what being taken out of the cells can do for some in terms of behavior. I may be a demon, but I’m hardly what one would call cold-hearted. I can see how the cells would cause some to be… well… temperamental might be the word?” Alasdair stood up straight, his elbow needing a break and he opted for leaning against the counter with his hip. “Does he leave you to run the storefront often?”

“Oh - don’t look at me like that. I’ve been through worse. A few human rebels were nothing.” Granted Kora had still been branded. But even branded without her proper strength, she had her skills a quick mind. She might be small, underestimated, but she had learned quickly to use that to her advantage.

“I’ve met a few of your kind down there. - you seem - quite different. But that could very well be a facade. You demons are tricky like that.” She said, giving the pretty demon a once over again, painter fingers gestureing as if quietly judge him. “Some of them even like getting me confused with a hellhound.” Words held a bitter undertone but she was careful to keep her feelings in check.

“We are usually here together, but he had business with his elder. He usually spends most of his time in the greenhouse in the back.  Would you like to see it?” Now that was Sidian true pride and joy.

Different. Alasdair wondered if that was something he could be proud of or if he should be worried. There were plenty of demons in Crown Point as of late but if there was anything he knew about his species it was the fact that they varied immensely. “I promise my behavior here is not a facade and I pride myself in being honest. I am a demon for a reason, but my… flavor of chaos is different than that of others.” He can’t help the smile as he watches her, wondering just what she’d pegged him as from their interaction.

“A werewolf and a hellhound are far different, I apologize if someone treated you in a manner meant for one of a hound than what you are. Do come find me if it happens again, please? I’d prefer to have that matter settled.” Besides, if Alasdair wanted the help of Sidian for more than just a charm, he saw the value in keeping Kora safe.

“There’s a greenhouse?” That piqued his interest. “I’d love to see it if he wouldn’t mind my intrusion. I’ve never been one to have a green thumb unfortunately. You’d pale at the sight of my plants at home, they’re all suffering and I can admit that I’ve tried my hardest.”

“I can respect that.” Honestly the other two seemed to have far too many screws loose in their heads. But she also knew that not all demons were the same. They came in many different shapes, sizes, and forms of chaos. The thought alone of the first causes a far off look to dim her sweet expression. The things they did to her were truly unspeakable. She stiffens and shakes her head as if to rattle her brain to knock such thoughts loose and away.

“That particular demon tried to make me eat…dog biscuits.” Specifically those made for a hound. They tasted of death and burnt ash. She could hardly stand their taste, let alone stomach them as they were shoved into her mouth. And this was coming from someone who had eaten human hearts. Her wolf could surely be vicious when it went for the kill. “The other - well, I’d rather not discuss as I hope it never happens again. Are you the new elder?” As they were the only ones who could truly ever get anything done.

“Maybe I can sneak you a small bag of his soil - surely your plants will thrive then.” She smiles - this one finally reaching her eyes as excitement bubbles up within her at mentions of the greenhouse. “Yes, it’s in the back.” As she speaks, she put her notebook away and waves him back behind the counter so that she can lead him back there. “Just - try not to touch them.” She’s referring to the plants. “They can be a bit - shy toward strangers.” More like - temperamental.

Dog biscuits. It took far more effort than Alasdair would like to admit to not roll his eyes. Which one of them, he could only guess. There were many demons that he could list off who would likely try to do such a thing. For amusement? There are much better ways to get amusement. And much more fun people to play with. As for what other trials the poor werewolf could have gone through, he could only imagine. Perhaps if it had been a random werewolf from outside the city, it wouldn’t have mattered. But Kora belonged to Sidian and Sidian was important to the city. The last thing Alasdair wanted was for it to also end up involving Matthias.

“I am, in fact. A newly acquired title that I’m still attempt to get used to and sort out. Who knew there’d be so much paperwork behind it all,” he laughed softly. At the very least it finally gave him the eyes and ears he needed in the city.

Alasdair followed toward the back in the direction of the greenhouse. His interest is piqued and he can only imagine what has happened within the sanctuary. A witch’s domain. “I shall be cautious. I would hate for anything to happen to them.” Alasdair said as he stepped inside, an arm across his stomach as if to physically hold himself back. “Death likes to follow me, I’d hate to see these suffer the same fate as my own plants.”

[mst3kproject]

516: Alien From LA

The first thing I did in preparing for this review was look up 'Kathy Ireland interviews' on YouTube, and I am relieved to report that no, that is not her normal voice.  Apparently it is her normal smile, though.

Cowardly nerd Wanda Saknussem recieves word that her father has died in Africa.  When she goes to investigate or something, she falls down a hole to the lost continent of Atlantis, which is apparently a UFO that crashed into Earth a long time ago and is inhabited by people rejected from Mad Max movies. The ruler of this improbable place thinks Wanda and her father are spies, sent to scout out Atlantis in preparation for an invasion by the world above.  Before they can find their way back to the surface, they must escape both the oppressive government and the many lower-level opportunists who would love to find themselves in possession of an 'alien' from the beyond!

This is a dumb movie that never lives up to its rather modest potential, but one thing I do kinda like about it is its worldbuilding.  A lot of Journey to the Centre of the Earth stories, from Jules Verne onward, have been obliged to posit some kind of supernatural energy source to fuel their ecosystems.  Most often this takes the form of a miniature sun at the center of a hollow shell (as in DC comics' Skartaris), providing the inner world with a sky that seems to defeat the whole concept of a land under the ground. At the Earth's Core shows us a subterranean world that runs on lava, but both Alien from LA and The Mole People tried to do something a bit more 'realistic'.

(I guess this means I have to watch The Mole People next week.  Fuck!  I hate The Mole People and I hate John Agar's oily face.)

The underground world we see in Alien from LA is filthy and gritty, without plant or animal life to give it any colour.  The human environments are cramped, ugly, and utilitarian, even the parts we would be tempted to consider 'outdoors'.  For once there's some justification for all the pipes and tubes, since one of the top priorities for such a colony would be getting air and water to everybody.  We get an impression of the impossibly futuristic technology of the original spacecraft and of the cruder, more recent layer built overtop of it.  And what do people living in such a place eat?  Insects, of course!  There's practically nothing else down there!

We also get an idea of how the Atlanteans see their universe.  The government's official position is that there is no 'surface world' and therefore that 'aliens' who come from there cannot possibly exist.  This suggests that they imagine their world as a cavern inside an infinite expanse of stone.  Or perhaps they are aware of the Earth as a planet, but believe that nothing can exist on the surface because it would be exposed directly to space.  Either interpretation suggests that Professor Saknussem's Atlantean counterpart, the scientist who was planning a trip to the surface to see for himself, is a very brave man and probably deserved a bigger part in the movie.

Unfortunately, by trying to be ‘realistic’ the movie encourages us to think about a number of questions that probably wouldn't come up in a more fantastical setting.  For starters, where are the Atlanteans getting things like rubber for their tyres and cloth for their clothing?  Up here these are plant and animal products, but there are no plants or animals in Atlantis.  A character says she's never seen fabric like the cotton of Wanda's dress but there's no suggestion of what they use instead.  Then there's the question of what this underground city runs on.  I think we're supposed to assume that the spaceship has some kind of inexhaustible power source that the Atlanteans drawn on for their electricity, which is all well and good, but you can’t eat it.  If the people here eat insects, then what do the insects eat?  The food chain in a cave is usually connected to the outside world somehow, most often by bat droppings (I told you bats are awesome).  There are deep ocean ecosystems that run off geothermal power, but even those get gifts from above in the form of dead whales and the occasional can of spam.

Not only do we have no idea how energy comes in to this sytem, we don't see how waste gets out.  All these people will produce not only bodily wastes, but carbon dioxide, heat, garbage, and whatever the waste products of their industries are. The vehicles appear to run on gasoline – we even see a filling station.  What happens to the pollutants to keep them from poisoning the air?  Where is the oxygen coming from if there are no plants? Presumably the spaceship itself would have systems to cope with some of this, but they'd be designed to work in a vacuum, not in a pocket of atmosphere surrounded by rock – and the city itself has clearly expanded far beyond the spaceship.  How does any of this work?

So much for the world, now for the characters who populate it.  The only one we ever really get to know is Wanda – others are only important in how they relate to her.  Her father is just her father, her jerk ex-boyfriend is just her jerk ex-boyfriend, the Atlanteans are either allies, foes, or mere background.  We don't know why Gus decides to help her (besides maybe because his girlfriend threw him out and he has nothing better to do) or what Charmin sees in her.  It is entirely Wanda's movie.  This is rather rare, to see an adventure movie focused on a woman's journey, and the rarity of it makes it even more annoying that Wanda herself is kind of a joke.

Wanda Saknussem starts the movie as a stock pathetic nerd, a character we're supposed to like out of sheer pity, but it's taken so far that she becomes very difficult to identify with.  Her ex-boyfriend, explaining why he broke up with her, tells her “your glasses make you look stupid, your hair is ugly, you dress like a nerd, you walk like a clod, and your voice gives me a headache” – and when she demands to know why he ever went out with her in the first place, he does not have an answer for her.  We're told Wanda has no sense of adventure, but we see her as somebody with no self-respect.  She begs the boyfriend who insulted her to take her back, and her squeaky voice makes everything she says sound unbearably whiny.

Her character development is supposed to represent her becoming more confident and adventurous, but of course what we see is her becoming more attractive.  Over the course of the movie Wanda first loses her glasses, then cleans her skin in a steam vent, and finally puts on a dress with a low neckline instead of the shapeless tent she'd been wearing in the beginning.  I'm a little surprised they didn't have her lose her squeaky voice while she was at it. This trope, in which a woman's appearance is used as shorthand for her entire being, is annoying, but I've always gotten particularly mad at the bit where she has to give up wearing glasses.  It suggests that whether a woman is sexy is more important than whether she can see where she's fucking going, and as a person who wears glasses I must vigorously disagree.  At least in The Princess Diaries the girl got contacts.  Wanda just breaks her glasses and then apparently discovers she never needed them in the first place.

I do have to admit, though, that Kathy Ireland gave the part her all.  For somebody to be a model, to put themselves on display in front of the whole world often in very little clothing, must require enormous confidence, but Ireland works hard to embody Wanda's lack of confidence at the beginning of this movie.  Her body language while arguing with her ex-boyfriend or reading the letter at the diner is very turned-inward, with her arms kept close to her body, the posture of somebody who's trying to be unobtrusive and not take up space.  At the end, she is not only less covered but walks more freely, swinging her arms and taking bigger steps as if she no longer cares whose way she gets in.  Ireland's dedication to doing the Wanda Voice is also admirable... that must have been hard on the vocal cords.  I'm left with the distinct impression that she could have been a decent actress if anybody had ever thought to put her in a decent movie.

After sitting through a movie in which Wanda becomes more confident and searches for her father, one would expect the 'happily ever after' to celebrate both her newfound spirit of adventure and renewed family relationship.  The ending, however, contains neither.  Wanda is wearing a bikini now, but she's back on the same beach where she liked to hang out before her trip to the bowels of the Earth, and her father is not with her. Instead, the movie tries to give us emotional closure by having the guy she kissed in Atlantis show up on a motorcycle to charm her.

That doesn't make any sense!  How did he get here? How'd he get the motorcycle?  How'd he get the driver's license?! Where's her father?  Did he run off to Africa and leave her again? Did her trip accomplish anything at all?  This isn't an ending, this is a distraction!

Alien from LA comes across as a movie that had some potential, but as usual, all the best ideas just fall by the wayside and instead we get a series of cliches strung together by writers who think we'd rather see the end of a shallow love story than a resolution to what the movie was actually about.  Every time I watch this episode, the movie sucks me in – but every time, the ending disappoints me.

[a-panda-reads-act-omega]

ACT OMEGA PART 25

THE 04/07/17 UPDATE

THE DREAM IS NOT DEAD YOUR HOPE IS NOT LOST

IM A FUCKING LAZY PIECE OF SHIT

Hey wow, betcha didn’t think you’d ever see another one of these now didja? You can always count on me to disappear for like 9 days, come back one day and realize i got 10 followers, and fail to deliver promised effort. But hEY look who’s here now for another UPDATE.  Lets just hope I remember at all how to work tumblr.

And also gdi i forgot where we left off im gonna need to reread the last few pages

~one glance at a panel later~

oh y e a h its Aranea. Im gonna try to remain MATURE. PROFESSIONAL. And most of all, CALM. Because I really do like Aranea as a character. I just. Hate the stuffs she does a lotta the time.

Alright, time to hear about whatever Aranea knows. Looks like we’re starting off with a flashback of her getting destructified by the bish fish herself.

ARANEA: As a few of you may know, some time ago I attempted to 8reak free from the shackles of death and o8scurity 8y endeavoring to mold the alpha timeline to my will. The outcome notwithstanding, the crux of the scheme was that I would ensure the universe Lord English was 8orn into was never cre8ed in the first place, and thus completely avert his disastrous influence on all of reality. Of course, my actions would merely have resulted in a doomed timeline, 8ut I was confident in my a8ility to heal my “doomed” 8ranch to the point where it could functionally supercede the alpha timeline.

Y e a h yeah we all know about your fuckup. But actually that is kinda a helpful reminder of how it went down. God, it was so long since I’ve read normal Homestuck.

MEENAH: man this sounds just as nuts as it did last time you were glubbin aboat it MEENAH: smh ARANEA: Meenah! I thought you said there would 8e no interruptions?? ARANEA: I’m HARDLY proud of my conceited maneuver either, 8ut this is important context!

Aranea needs to hit the chill switch j e e z she snapped

MEENAH: yeah yeah sorry ARANEA: Thank you. ARANEA: That 8eing said, I am still fairly confident that the essence of the plan was well-founded. It just so happened my scope of understanding was far too narrow. My priorities were all askew. MEENAH: (no shit)

No shit indeed. A little life lesson; if you are conjuring up a plan that risks destroying the lives of everybody 

[Alright so everything past this lil note here was written on a different day thant the stuffs before it]

ARANEA: Her Imperious Condescension proved far more ten8cious an o8stacle than I had anticip8ed. Despite her many efforts to 8reak free from Lord English’s servitude, her determin8tion to see that universe made has always 8een in line with the preserv8tion of his eventual arrival. And so long as she continues to oper8 in his 8est interests, she will continue to draw considera8le power from her connection with him. A connection only he can sever. 

So I dunno if they’re talking about physical majyyk power or just position power, but if its the former that could explain how she was still alive. So basically my theory now is: The condesce will not die until Lord English is dead, or wants her to die. And depending on which actually happens, she might be a more direct threat than Lord English himself. We’ll see though.

VRISKA: (........) VRISKA: (Shit.)

wait huH WHat. Did Vriska realize she fucked something up, or is that just her reaction to the condesce’s advantages.

ARANEA: With the current st8 of things, it is far more efficient to simply address the pro8lem at its source. Which of course was the purpose of our original plan. Nonetheless, I grew determined to scour the Furthest Ring for more inform8tion on Lord English’s weaknesses. I had a hunch that there was likely much more to the story than I had initially realized. There were a number of differing theories linked to Lord English’s f8. Though each spun a unique tale, there was one central element common to all of them: a weapon. Presuma8ly, the same weapon that the Lord of Time is currently preoccupied with.

Alright, so IF Aranea’s stories are correct, then the house is going to be responsible Lord English’s death.  And about all these stories, I have a feeling all of them are gonna be true one way or another.

LE I think you gotta give it up buddy. I mean what are you even doing.

As a quick aside, in case any of you were wondering: For the moment, English poses very little threat to us. His attention has shifted to matters far more urgent than terrorizing our small gathering. That is to say, he is entirely focused on the weapon.

Yeah no shit. I just think. He should maybe kill you and then get back to that. LIke. Is he an idiot.

The utilities and nature of this weapon are still shrouded in mystery. That alone should have 8een something of a red flag, 8ut I digress. It was said that the Lord of Time once trapped inside it a 8and of heroes who had challenged him, and that they were destined to 8e released from their prison and finish what they started. It was also suggested the weapon was a juju that had 8een in Lord English’s possession, which upon outlasting its use, thereafter functioned purely as the instrument of his demise. Others assumed that was merely a tool meant to unleash some sort of coup de grâce. At another point all signs seemed to indic8 the weapon was in fact a person--the ghost of the Lord’s long dead female counterpart, whom he had killed to assume control of their shared 8ody. The counterpart he would stop at nothing to eradic8 all traces of from existence.

Jesus fucking Christ that’s a lot of possibilities. Alright, so if all of them are correct, that means: The juju is dead!tier calliope. It’s Lord English’s weapon and weakness. There are four heroes inside. And it will also kill him with the final blow. I have no clue how any of that is possible but whatever I’ll take it.

After my thorough investig8tion, I can tell you with confidence that all of these things are true in one way or another. However... we put the pieces of the puzzle together all wrong. We entirely dismissed the tale of the Lost Cheru8 and assumed that the weapon must be the very juju we discovered in the void. We expected it to wipe out Lord English in one fell swoop through some am8iguous onslaught.

OK so what the fuck. The juju ISNT the weapon. well, in that case I’m gonna assume that the weapon is the god tier clock. That’d make sense, I guess. That’s how he killed godtiers, and it will serve to kill him as well. Yeah, that works out. I just don’t know who the four heroes are and how it’s Calliope. Or I’m entirely wrong but come on the god tier clock would just make SO much sense.

LORD ENGLISH FUCKIN’ CHILL. The house ain’t killing you now is it? Just. WALK AROUND AND MURDER THEM. Or don’t cause that’d piss me off.

As you can see, these preconceptions were entirely unsu8stanti8ed. Lord English has 8een weakened, 8ut remains undefeated. However, that does not mean the weapon failed to perform its proper function. The truth of the weapon is as such: It is a juju that once 8elonged to Lord English as a powerful tool that once used, thereafter could only 8e used against him. When English was challenged by a party of valiant and worthy warriors, he resorted to the juju to entrap them and cast them aside. Then he 8anished it to the void in an attempt to prevent it from 8eing found. This was a fools' errand, as we cleverly managed to loc8 the weapon regardless. It unleashed SOMETHING upon him, and now... 8oth remain. It’s likely many of you were aware of this inform8tion already. The rest, while far more enlightening, will 8egin to delve more into the realm of conjecture. 8ut I am confident in my deductions.

Nothing much to say here, that’s basically exactly what I predicted. I guess all I’m still not sure about is what the weapon actually is. 

Aw it got all cleaned up and mosied of to the void.

As far as I can discern, the juju draws its power from a source completely 8eyond our current comprehension. 8eyond Lord English, 8eyond Skaia, and perhaps even 8eyond this plane of existence altogether! Perhaps it even plays an invisi8le role in shaping reality as we know it. Whatever its true n8ture, it seems that Lord English himself also draws some measure of power from that same source. It may very well 8e the origin of his unconditional immortality and of how causality itself appears to 8end to his will. So. What did the juju do? I 8elieve that it severed his connection to that higher plane. And along with the destruction of one of his other power sources--the Green Sun--he has 8een left vulnera8le, unsta8le, and perhaps even finally mortal.

oly shit, does that mean they can just CHARGE on in and whack ‘em up? AND HOLY SHit. IF VRISKA HAD JUST GOTTEN A gOOD ROLL HE’D BE DEAD

AAAAA

a.

RIP. Paradox Space. Forever-Wherever.

Now, I understand that some of you may 8e wholly unaware of the destruction of the Green Sun. It happened only recently, so don't worry. I will be sure to fill you in. I think that the more o8servant of you may have already managed to take a moment to look up at the infinitely-fracturing void that surrounds this 8u88le. If you haven’t, I suggest that you do so now. That “g8ping hole” in the Furthest Ring is what is known as The Pocket. It is the work of the final piece of the puzzle: the Lost Cheru8.

Yeah, Calliope wrecked that green sun. The only disappointing part of this is the possibility of an affect on Jade.

Ohhh that’s cool art. But yeah, what’s deadiope doing now anyways? Is she more dead?

part of me is actually not sure if she was dead to begin with or not. I forget. OOPs.

We were far too quick to dismiss her role in this story, though our h8ste is ultimately inconsequential. She was always 8eyond our grasp, and she would have done her duty just as readily, no matter our thoughts or feelings of her. 

Spellcheck thinks h8ste is a word but not 8eyond. ok. And yeah, in retrospect the  whole hunt for calliope was pretty pointless.

The Lost Cheru8 turned out to 8e another manner of weapon in her own right. She was also far more than that. Her mere existence is something of a miracle. The Muse of Space should have never emerged victorious in the 8attle against her more determined male counterpart. And yet, she defied the odds stacked against her just as deftly as Lord English had. In some lonely offshoot timeline, she asserted her iron will and managed to predomin8 over her 8rother. She played the game that was 8uilt for her to lose, and she made The Choice that her 8rother would never have possi8ly made.

Man MOS Calliope is fuckin badass.

She’s so smol

The Lord of Time, upon meeting with his Denizen, took the path of the Conqueror. The Muse of Space, given a similar opportunity, took the path of the Martyr. And in doing so, she dedic8ed her life, and her su8sequent death, to the Conqueror's destruction.

Man that’s just a pretty sad existence. I mean, YAY you get to be the hero and all. But FUCK you’re gonna die for it? Then what’s the PO I N T

I 8elieve that, on some level, Lord English knew this. His relentless quest to find and destroy her was as much a la8or of self-preserv8tion as it was of h8tred. 8ut this too would lead to his undoing. The Muse used herself as 88, goading him into his misguided ramp8ge across the Furthest Ring while simultaneously forging a path for us to cl8im his long-forgotten juju.

Oh wow. So She kinda knew about the ghost army all along, and was super dedicated to helping them find the juju. She was pulling ALL the fuckin strings here.

And so the Lost Cheru8 w8ed patiently until all the other pieces were in place for her final gam8it. She travelled to the Green Sun to fulfill her destiny as Lord English’s foil.

SHE’S FOILED ALL HIS PLANS.  H A H.

Okay yeah, so she died when destroying the sun i guess.

lil green SWORL.

There, she performed her final act as the Martyr. She cre8ed a singularity which a8sor8ed the incredi8le mass and energy of the Green Sun. The singularity 8ecame so dense and so powerful that it tore a cataclysmic rift into the very fa8ric of paradox space. The Pocket will continue to rip apart and consume reality until nothing is left. And Lord English is no exception.

What does this mean for the kids then? And the new universe.  Are they all temporary due to this fuCKIN HOLE

godDAMMIT

Hey don’t you fucking look cool.  You’re not allowed to look cool.

So you see now, don’t you? Our failure was not in defeating Lord English. It was in stopping the rest of reality as we know it from 8ecoming collateral in his destruction.

I’m a little confused by that, but I’m guessing it means they were supposed to find a way to protect everything from being destroyed. Huh.

ALRIght. Whatever. this was fun. Im SUPER sorry for the delay on this, but hey it was a pretty long update so maybe that makes up for it.

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