#happens less and less often

[ghostscrown]

Finished rewatching season 1 of Angel's Friends (childhood cartoons rewatches, my beloved) and.

Gotta love how Sulfus is all like "look at me I'm a typical bad guy I hit walls when I'm mad, I cheat whenever I can, I annoy people on purpose and I pretend I don't care about anything" but then he acts like "no guys we can't do this bad thing are you crazy. Yes I actually respect consent. I give friendship advices. I'll do anything for you, let's hold hands 🥺"

Then at the same time, Raf is like "see how I'm the typical perfect nice girl. I'll do anything for my friends. I'm kinda naive uwu ! I don't want anyone to suffer because of me... I write in my diary !" but then she acts like "yeah I'm so good at lying I manipulated my teacher. Let's break all of the most important rules idc, I want to you help me wheiter you like it or not. You start a fight with me I'm gonna throw hands ! I'm gonna break this door- 👿"

That is actually so funny to watch lmao, I was expecting their relationship to be the most toxic thing ever I didn't notice as a kid / young teenager, but actually it's not that bad ? Still didn't rewatch season 2 yet tho, from what I remember if there's a single typical toxic arc in this show, it's probably in this season but my memories about it are kinda blurry so I'll see

(Also this show was so uncensored wth, how did they manage to put an episode about gambling and another one about drugs in a kid show, even if the moral was to not do it, HOW did they get this approved 😭)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The Yiling Band Tour!

[heliomanteia]

I think Nico's ability to survive is less so about his will to live and more so about his refusal (less so personal and more so narrative-wise) to die. Nico, for the lack of a better word, is like a cockroach: you cannot kill him in a way that matters so he survives and keeps haunting the scene.

There was once a marvelous post on Nico's function as a narrative tool and it was so beautifully pointed out that he's a near-omniscient deus ex machina (to simplify) which cannot be overlooked when characterizing him. Nico carries so much narrative weight on his back (which arguably could be an example of either good or bad writing depending on your perspective) that he cannot just go and die.

His road towards healing (though definitely not walked alone/individually) is his own, that's his choice to make as a character, but his disposition as a guy that perseveres resides more within his function, in my opinion.

He's not the tragic prince doomed for self-destruction people often draw him out to be but his capacity for survival is also not a product of his continuous work as a character, at least not just that — but is rather a result of his narrative function. Simply saying, you cannot, narratively, kill off Nico di Angelo.

[starridge]

whenever ppl tell me they like the way i draw tenna i kick my feet and giggle

[devilledminion]

lee "i support stobotnik art" & "toxic yaoi is the shit" majdoub 🤝 assad "i have always said i am more than willing to go down the devil's minion route with eric or luke or both" zaman

[queenlua]

i love getting Really Obsessed When An Author & reading Everything They Wrote b/c it's so interesting to see how their themes/craft/preoccupations develop over time

(the example i always go to is "bro have you ever experienced Mark Twain's Hugely Bitter Depressed Old Guy Energy because it is spooky and so so good)

but i also enjoy it because, often, there's something kind of comforting about reading their really early stuff & seeing how amateurish and not-fully-formed it is

like, i remember reading Le Guin's The Wind Twelve Quarters in high school and thinking: these stories from the 1960s just aren't what i think of as Le Guin levels of quality. especially the early ones. and she didn't even publish the early ones until her mid 30s! and it's not like she was late to writing in general; she'd been writing stories and novels & working on her craft continuously since she was little, and that was all stuff she couldn't even get published

once she gets going, she does hit her stride relatively quickly—Earthsea comes about five years after hear earliest stories, and The Dispossessed about five years after that—but like damn you can imagine a universe where she gave up before all that. and what a shame that'd be.

it just seems like, pretty often, writing is a really really long apprenticeship, and how long it takes someone to develop seems to only have the loosest correlation with how masterful their work eventually becomes, or something

[3liza]

"why do you talk about something awful so much" it has surprised me quite a bit as I've gotten older but the 2000s-2010s SA culture has only become more relevant to current events and media as time goes on, i assume from the natural watershed effects from people aging into their 30s and making media properties that go on to become incredibly influential. I was never a big poster there, I was a lurker 99% of the time and had zero influence on the site, so it's really not personal for me except for stuff like Dropsy, since I was there for the original thread. the SA millennials started popping up in noticeable ways as early as 30 Rock (recall the "lemon party" recurring joke for example) and as the younger members age into their prime output years we're just going to keep seeing more of it.

[budd-ie]

“Mu Qing is too logical for his own good” is such a real problem that he deals with and as tragic as it makes his life I also think it’s really funny when someone is accusing him of something and instead of telling them to shut up or leave him alone the first thing he does is pull out the 95 fucking theses detailing every single thing wrong with their argument WITH historical evidence and additional considerations from scholarly psychology articles, MLA format works cited and completely annotated. It could use an editor and some bias correction, but he actually makes a pretty good point. anyways tgcf ace attorney au when

[fadedapparition]

i think that in hindsight, people tend to describe origins as a game where your choices in dialogues mattered, but extrinsically, i don't know that's true. there’s plenty of cases where you can say 5-6 wild things and still get one of the two or three primary responses the npc has available. they matter intrinsically because of the impact on the history of the character. even if the npc the character's interacting with breezes past to ask them to run the same errand they would have anyway, the dialogue doesn’t need to make any noticeable change to the game world for its impact to be felt -- it's still slowly creating a defined past, expressed convictions, a particular mode of speech, and everything else that, in conjunction, turns a vague silhouette of something into a fully-formed person. it turns the player character into an actual character.

a common excuse for placing serious limitations on dialogue (3 potential responses, all communicating the same thing in the same tone with near-imperceptible alterations in phrasing) is that branching plotlines expend highly limited resources, but when people plead for more choice in dialogue, i don’t think that’s actually the ask. the value of varied, specific dialogue choices persists whether or not they're referenced again or even able to impact the direction of the conversation. characterization of this kind can be done entirely through text on a shoestring budget, and it does so much more to invest a player in the fiction that addressing the player directly

[uncanny-tranny]

So often, twink death is framed as a bad thing. However, the "twink death" for trans men* is frankly one of the most healing things you will bear witness to (pun intended).

[satsuha]

i've been thinking about nahyuta's title as the "last rites prosecutor" because i think it's an interesting part of his character that's immediately apparent from his first appearance... in japanese it's written as トムライの検事 (tomurai no kenji) with tomurai meaning funeral/burial. this is pretty self-explanatory considering his tendency to pray for the victim but i actually think it's really interesting that the localization opted for the term "last rites" instead

last rites are a specifically christian practice of praying for the dying to absolve them of their sins before they die - in other words, prayers given to the deceased wouldn't be considered last rites (x)

this is a pretty blatant contradiction of the original's meaning and what nahyuta actually does in the game but i think it's interesting to consider that the person he might be praying for is the defendant (and under khura'in's DC act, the defense as well), not the victim... even outside of khura'in we see that those who are proven guilty in murder trials are executed, and we know that nahyuta has been acting as a prosecutor under ga'ran, almost definitely sending several rebels and defense attorneys to their deaths in the process.

it would just be really tragic if his habit of praying came out of desperation at being forced to send innocents or even former comrades/friends to their deaths... whether it being interpreted as a funeral rite for the victim arose from the people around him or as another act of desperation from nahyuta to cover his actual intentions doesn't matter as much since i think one would have led to the other anyway...

[astro-duck]

“The Door”

I tried something different with how I posted this one, trying to find out the best way to do it. I think “Punchline below the cut” could be good. Lemme know if you like it!

Reblogs are so appreciated! <3

[the-one-who-lambs]

I'm sorry this chapter is taking so long. I don't have a good excuse, I'm just losing against my own brain rn.

[maeamian]

Also hello everyone who's new here, I promise I don't actually have very much that's all that interesting or worthwhile to say but I appreciate you giving me the benefit of the doubt that I might at some point again produce something worth considering.

[mylittleredgirl]

cutting off the top and bottom of tv shows filmed in 4:3 aspect ratio to squeeze into 16:9 is Bad and the original tv directors should be allowed to commit crimes about it. sometimes you just know this episode was a gorgeous piece of art in its original format and now it’s like it was filmed by a toddler with a zoom lens. let me see people’s whole foreheads i’m begging.

[cinnamonsikwate]

i'm really curious about what marcille's mother's deal is. seems like she's not too big on the rest of elven society. here's what we know about her so far:

mage at a human royal court (adventurer's bible)

courtship with marcille's father donato lasted 17 years (adventurer's bible)

specialty is roast pork, which was also donato's favorite (chapter 81)

had a cheerful personality up until the point donato got too sick to eat his favorite food. her extreme emotional reaction to this left a lasting impression on marcille (chapter 81)

remarried to a gnome and moved away from the city at some point after donato died (adventurer's bible)

several portraits of her appear in marcille's nightmare (chapter 42); this is the second time we see marcille dream of her (chapter 3)

preferred non-elven food and didn't introduce marcille to any traditional elven dishes (chapter 74)

from the canaries' reactions in chapter 74, it appears elven society looks down on elves who go to live among and work for short-lived races. they seemed especially put off that she would have a mixed-blood child. when they're talking about the lyrikmumare to get marcille to trip up, marcille envisions her mother saying that the food "here" (i.e., the northern continent) tastes so much better. so the picture we're getting here is of an elf who has removed herself from elven culture, but the question is, did she do it willingly or was she forced to?

keeping her other actions in mind, i'm leaning more towards the former. the most intriguing thing for me is that she eventually married a gnome, despite elves and gnomes having infamously waged war against each other over differences in the practice of magic and presently tending to discriminate against the other on sight. (one thing's for sure — marcille's mother is winning the idgaf war!)

marcille never talks about her gnome stepfather though, and it's unclear what she thinks of her mother's remarriage. the timing of the remarriage is also a mystery. donato married marcille's mother when he was 32 (after having courted her for 17 years) and died at 82, meaning they were married for 50 years. marcille is also currently 50 years old, but we know she wasn't born immediately after the marriage: in chapter 81, donato's doppelganger says marcille was born when he'd started "getting on in years." based on marcille's memories of him and the established fact that the average tall-man lifespan is 60 years, i'd hazard that he was in his 50s then. this gives him 30 years or less with marcille — definitely less than 35, which we know is the age at which she left for the magic academy.

we don't know if marcille's mother remarries before or after marcille leaves (if before, than that's definitely a shockingly short time), but it's interesting that she chose to marry someone from a long-lived race this time. maybe this is her way of ensuring she spares herself another heartbreak? or maybe she *is* still heartbroken and is trying to cover it up.

but. i can't help but kind of agree with chilchuck in chapter 81, that marcille's parents are not blameless for marcille becoming the dungeon lord. since it's apparently well-documented, they surely must have known — as well-educated people — that mixed-blood children face not just discrimination but also mental anguish that comes with their unstable aging (not to mention the sterility). so the way they raised marcille feels frankly irresponsible 😭

anyway. i'd love to get spin-off content where post-adventure marcille and her mother meet again. i feel like there's a lot of unresolved issues there (that can of course be hashed out over a good meal).