#he's a product of his environment

[capesch-arts]

It's so poetic(?) that Yoichi developed his good morals and AFO developed his want to be demon lord™ at the same time when they were reading comic books together

Like both were just "strays" doing whatever they do to survive. Not evil, not good. And then BAM!

I'm sorry it's such *chef's kiss* noice

[i-mean-technically]

#some of these words are just so???#''still believes in the system even after getting fucked with no lube by it'' is 100% a metal as hell line#tfa#maccadam#also your tags???#tfa megop is so hilarious when done right#And Optimus manages to beat his aft Several times even if he's just ''maintenance prime''#that's more times than fucking Sentinel has won against a Decepticon#Tfp au Optimus is honestly based a bit on tfa Optimus because i say so#and another fucked up bit is how fast things went downhill after Sentinel became magnus#that boy went full 100 with his paranoia

@transingthoseformers making another post bc i'm about to rant

first of all i'm gald you find my phrasing humorous XDDD life's too short not to enjoy it and since i wouldn't make it in prison unique phrasing will have to do lmao

and TFA megop!!!!! i think it has some of the most written for it but most of it is Not for me ya know? no shade, but Optimus is almost always made into some uwu baby when he's a GREMLIN and would sell Megatron's soul for one corn chip. (also Primus and Unicron apparently don't exist in TFA which has me 👀👀👀 bc that has some interesting connotations)

Optimus manages to make peace with an alien race, keep the Allspark out of Decepticon hands, regularly kicks their asses, while also basically raising an alien child that he got surprise custody of. and that's just season 1. Sentinel had his paranoia fanned and abused by Ultra Magnus, given power he wasn't ready for, and possibly also mind fucked to make him more compliant, bc it was Sentinel's idea to go down on Arachna 9.

both Optimus and Sentinel questioned things, and once Optimus was cut at the knees and thought to be neutered they turned their sights on Sentinel and made him into exactly what they wanted.

then he got a position that he never should have in the first place. bc his paranoia is so severe, imo, he shouldn't be in a position of power like that. he would be GREAT in an advisory setting tho.

and things shouldn't have gone to shit so fast when Sentinel became Magnus unless it was already that bad and his incompetence just brought the curtain down.

[14dayswithyou]

Hi, Howdy! Hey! I really love your novel!! I got a little confused by the 4 day, may maybe you help me please? who is it? why we got the bad end staying the night in Ren’s apartment and he disappear of the home screen? I can’t understand “unset memory” game, sorry if I wrote smth wrong or smth sounds rude, I swear that I didn’t mean it if happened, I’m really a fan of the novel, I’ve been playing the game since day 1 or 2 I guess, probably day 1, english isn’t my first language, but I tried lol

⌞♥⌝ I hope you don't mind me answering these as bullet points!! ^^

"It" will be revealed later in the game! So I won't reveal too much right now.

You can only get the Dead End in Day 4 by staying at Ren's apartment — the rest of your choices before that don't matter. I'd also pay closer attention to the black smoke and Ren's reaction towards it!

Ren disappears from the home screen because he promised to help the player out (and stop them from getting the Dead End again). Try replaying the game again from the beginning for a surprise!

"Unsent Memories" was another visual novel (initially being written by @10chimes / @unsentmemory, though the project has since been dropped and handed back to me /pos) and is set in the same universe as 14 Days With You. Its storyline and characters are completely separate from 14DWY, so you don't have to worry about them while playing 14DWY.

[emeraldspiral]

#who wants to form the Dib Membrane protection squad with me#bc jesus christ some of the people in this fandom just do NOT understand him on any level#I get that lines like the “autopsy video” one from the first episode probably influenced this#but chances are that he was on edge because he already KNEW why Zim came to earth#the kid's not out here cutting up wild animals for the hell of it tf??? 

I think people also need to take into account that the world Zim takes place in treats absurdly dark shit as incredibly mundane. Like, that’s literally the premise of the show, that things are so fucked up already Zim doesn’t even stand out as exceptionally odd. There are two 12-year-old children who look like an old man and a pig respectively in the same class as a green skinned earless boy. Librarians confiscate your retinas for having overdue books. A hobo kidnaps a man from a crowded diner and no one even reacts. Dib’s father is the world’s foremost humanitarian and he’s proud of his son for proposing that they replace human blood with coffee beans.

Canon Dib: An intelligent 12-year-old kid with an interest in the paranormal, who wants to prove that it’s real so everyone will stop calling him crazy. He can be a bit unhinged when dealing with Zim, and gets angry with people who doubt or mislead him, but is otherwise a good kid who genuinely wants to stop humanity from being enslaved. The end of one episode showed that, despite his experiences with Zim, he still wants to explore the stars and see all the alien life that’s out there, out of a genuine sense of wonder for it.

Some of the fandom, apparently: He dissects innocent animals and looks at gore for fun!!1!

[scumvillainess]

honestly i never really agreed with the popular shen qingqiu had a good shizun headcanon because if shen qingqiu actually had someone who he knew cared about him, he definitely wouldn’t have turned out the way he did in canon.

[on-leatheredwings]

reader: [blushes] my love language is quality time... how about you?

damian wayne: my love language is skirmishing. why, i love a good skirmish. i love feuding and contenting in order to establish social hierarchy

[afurtivecake]

It's easy to get the impression that Tetsuji never cared enough to rein in Riko's behaviour and temper but I think it's the opposite. I think Riko grew up constantly being told stuff like, "You have to learn to control your temper" and, "Is that any way to behave?" by Tetsuji. I think Tetsuji would have even disciplined him harshly every time he was caught acting out of anger. But all that is coming from Tetsuji - the man who would beat a kid if they displeased him in any way. How can you ever really take to heart the words of someone who demonstrates the exact opposite of what they preach? How are you supposed to not learn that the real lesson is, "Become the one who has all the power over everyone else and you will never have to suffer criticism for how you behave ever again."

[killugon-truther]

“illumi loves killua, it’s just toxic/twisted.”

illumi literally views killua as his property that is his to control as he pleases. all he ever does is abuse & manipulate killua, so how about we stop calling it “love” and start calling it what it ACTUALLY is?

wanting to constantly control, manipulate, hurt, & abusive someone is NOT fucking love, pls learn that, and fast. it’s a bit concerning and incredibly disappointing that some of you don’t know that already, seriously. 💀

genuinely, get some help if you think that shit is “love”.

[a-sketchy]

man i think yosuke is like, more obsessed with the idea of women than he is attracted to them as people. i don’t think he’s so far gone that he doesn’t think women are people, and i do generally interpret him as being attracted to women, but i think the concepts are a little separated in his head, and a little mythologized. like for example, there’s such a visible shift in his behaviour when he’s thinking of chie as a person and when he’s thinking of her as a girl. like, i think he considers chie the person as someone that’s ultimately really important to him, a good friend that he cares about a great deal, but is also super irritating and not his first choice of person to spend very extended amounts of time around. chie the girl is a Girl. and yosuke Likes Girls, as like a relatively important part of his identity, so he hits on her despite having less than a snowball’s chance in hell. i don’t think he’s even all that attracted to her specifically, he’s just attracted to the concept of girls that’s been built up in his head

[usercelestial]

I sort of enjoy that Isaac, seemingly Colins closest friend (at least on the team), was the one to make a casual homophobic comment. I think straight people tend to forget how hurtful those comments can be especially when they don't have any gay friends, and obviously football is a sport rooted in homophobia and toxic masculinity so I think that Isaac's comments and that whole conversation where being gay is sort of "the joke" is realistic in the way its normalized amongst the locker room talk. Even though he's Colin's (best?) friend, he still makes jokes and comments that he doesn't recognize as hurtful or bigoted because they work in a culture of homophobia. I think this also leaves a lot of room for growth for Isaac. When he finds out Colin is gay, he may be hesitant and come around eventually or he could become defensive over Colin, maybe recognizing the way he's made Colin feel uncomfortable and trying to over correct by punching a fan who may have made homophobic remarks to Colin (or in general but more likely to Colin). Isaac doesn't seem overly aggressive about this or anything honestly, and he seemed genuinely worried about Colin this episode by earnestly checking in and saying "You're alright" to Colin's mantra- that honestly could have been made fun of because of its vulnerability but Isaac didn't, he showed support in asking; which is also why I think Isaac isnt actually of the belief that gay=gross, I think the way he talks is just the product of the normalized, casual homophobia in the sports field. Anyways, I think Isaac's character growth is gonna have a lot to do with this and its also important to remember that we genuinely have no idea where this is gonna go or how anyone will react but I have pretty high hopes its gonna be good

[minnieposting]

i want to talk about robins trailer again!

following up from this post + a cool thread i saw earlier compiling lots of details i didn't notice in the trailer! (and the morse code post)

mostly really interested in the fact that this whole thing is filmed and directed by sunday

(sc from twt thread)

i said earlier that robin must feel like she doesn't want to let down both sunday and the family, both as his sister and the "pride of the family". but this clearly shows that he's the one pulling the strings, or at least one of them.

(as i type this out, i realize the usage of "pulling the strings" could relate back to the imagery of puppets we've been seeing. they are present in robin's trailer and also seen in the 2.2 penacony trailer)

(and of course, another puppet on strings...)

not sure where i'm going with this because tbh i got side tracked because i had the realization while writing. just some cool consistent puppet imagery, obviously symbolic, just don't feel like thinking about this rn lol

ANYWAY, my original train of thought was going towards sunday being a huge pressure on her, whether intentionally or not, he's clearly got his own shit going on... but i also feel like this gives new meaning to something else i pointed out a bit ago (post)

sunday is always right behind robin! she's always in the spotlight while he looms in the shadows. another thing tho, the same person who posted that twt thread i linked to pointed out that our bird friend is seen in the corner watching robin perform (x)

in the upper right corner!

(though, ive seen speculation that the bird is not sunday's but the dreammaster's! either way, sunday is still the most involved with her in the context of my post...)

now, going back to what i really want to talk about in the first place - director sunday. i do think this is more symbolic than anything, and coming from robin's perspective as this is her trailer.

sunday is a perfectionist obsesed with control and robin's public image may not be spared from that. she may feel that sunday is essentially breathing down her neck, whether or not sunday is aware he's making her feel like this. i've always thought that sunday's perfectionism and his obsessiveness have bled into his love for his sister and their relationship as a whole. again, she clearly does not want to let him down specifically, especially when they're supposedly working towards a childhood dream.

it's just! this whole thing about freedom, or the lack of it. robin is a caged bird and that's become explicit in her trailer. who knows wtf sunday's deal is, but he's also clearly under SO much pressure, he's the head of the oak family and ALSO needs to be nothing less than perfect. dude had a whole speech about it. i also imagine they both don't talk about any negative feelings related to this, maybe even wanting to keep up appearances around each other too.

i feel like i dont have anything else to say. i just mainly wanted to talk about some observations and stuff. i am very much looking forward to 2.2 coming out later, im SO excited to dig into sunday because he is the most intriguing and mysterious to me. their relationship is just so so so interesting, im so excited to see it in all of its glory later.

and mandatory note bc i am an anxious person, i do a lot of talking out of my ass and this is just exactly that.

(uh i scrolled up to read this post over and saw i linked back to a morse code post and didn't talk about that at all. well there's SOS morse code in robins trailer! that's fucked up! what else can i say)

[cdroloisms]

I just came across your post about vagueposting and I think I agree with it, but the situation you most likely wrote it about is hardly a "vagueposting" because you could say who it was about after reading it literally one time and that person got jumped and insulted in the anon ask anyway so discussing it in person could be safer...

I'm reeeally sorry for bring up a past situation, but I don't think it's a good idea to write nasty things about another person and specific details about how they interact with the fandom and their post, say things that will help to easily identify a person and at the same time insult them or say how you think they feel about the characters or the story based on your feelings about their one take that you didn't like and then call it's "vague" because there is no name in the post. I mean, It can lead to bad consequences, it literally did in that situation.

And yes, I do think people have the right to discuss bad takes or takes they don't like, but there's a way to do it without giving away every detail about the post and the person who wrote it so everyone knows who you're talking about, and if you're not good at being vague, just discuss it in a private chat.

this ask is old but i was busy last week, so forgive me for the late response. i was debating answering it at all, but i dont want myself to be misunderstood, so just. to clarify under the cut.

i'll agree with you that the post/situation in question wasn't vagueing. now, i don't know exactly the difference between the number of followers i have and the number of followers that the blogger in question has, and when it comes to the number of active dsmp followers i think both of us have even less of a clue. that being said, both of us frequent much of the same circles, so i think it's fair to say that many of my posts will end up being exposed to a very similar audience to his, and so therefore this response about the situation you're talking about will be just about as clearly traceable to a specific person as the post he made that started the situation in question. just as a general observation.

if i'm understanding your ask correctly, while vagueing a take is fine, the vague shouldn't be clearly identifiable if you're going to speak badly about it or disagree heavily. to which i have to ask what, specifically, is defined as clearly identifiable? i think most takes in this fandom can be pretty easily traced to a person, even if that person is not the only person that believes in that take--just as an example, c!tommy as a butterfly pinned behind glass was a take in response to the c!sam and c!dream stream after techno escaped, and grew to be a pretty prominent theme to the point of a zine being modeled after it, but i can also trace it to a pretty specific tumblr post with a name attached. i also think that that same statement probably isn't true for many fans who maybe joined later on in the fandom. i mean, i'm aware that i'm being pedantic here, i'm aware that the situation in question created conflict specifically due to it being within dreblr and in a space where multiple people would've seen both posts and felt ensuing awkwardness bc they know both people either on a personal or acquaintance level, but i mean the same applied ages ago whenever strategist-interpretation and trauma-interpretation c!dream apologists felt like going at it again on the dash.

in this scenario specifically, what made the situation clearly identifiable was the nature of the take that was being discussed. the main identifying detail was the take that the asker was asked about, imo, and i mean ... yeah i mean. most takes that haven't blown up pretty heavily do end up being tied to one or two people? i mean, staged finale is a take that can be tied to three people who argued in favor of it the most before the rest of dreblr got on board only in late 2021. i simply don't think that a take that maybe only one person has argued for (which, i dont remember the statistics of the take in this situation, so i dont remember how many notes it had or how many people in total may have expressed public agreement towards it, honestly) is exempt from discussion when it is posted in a meta or analysis space as an analytical piece, which i do think applies to this take from what i remember about it and how it was tagged.

and back to the discussion of what's acceptable as far as directly responding versus vagueing, i mean, a lot of the discussion i've had on my blog (abt discourse etiquette in General in meta spaces on dreblr moreso than this specific situation, largely bc i did want to avoid commenting on a situation that 1) i really had no business in and 2) i have reason to be biased about. the main reason why i'm talking abt it now is bc hopefully enough time has passed for feelings to be less fraught and bc i want to make certain thoughts of mine clear, in case they weren't clear enough in my original posts abt dreblr and whatever) revolves around both direct responses and vagueing having their reasons as well as pros and cons, and both will likely continue to exist in analysis spaces and generally i don't think it's productive to really comment on what people can or can't do on their own blogs. in this scenario, i don't think "vagueing about one specific person in a way that may be clearly identifiable to parts of their audience" is uniquely unacceptable? a direct response very clearly would make the person in question identifiable -- outside of how it's kind of impossible to make a post vagueing someone in a way where No One has Any Idea who you might be talking about without making the post like, incoherent inherently, if vagueing (not identifiable) is okay and directly responding (identifiable) is okay, then why is vagueing (identifiable) not okay?

now, i understand that any situation where the person in question might be identifiable, some people may take the open disagreement as permission to harass them. and obviously, harassment sucks. part of the whole point of opening up this conversation on my blog was bc i worry, with the way that a single conflict between dsmp opinions has kind of rippled through dreblr recently and the responses to this "situation," that an environment is being created with too much of a forced global consensus that punishes people for stepping out of the status quo in both opinions and behavior, which is obviously bad for the whole community, and was looking to voice some of that and have a conversation on solutions. and i understand that in this situation, a lot of your problem with the blogger has to do with his general attitude in discussing the take and his statements on the person who made it. now, i think you have every right to find his statements offensive and disagreeable and to unfollow and/or block him. that being said, i am not exactly a PR agent, and i want to reiterate that what people do on their own blogs isn't my business and i don't think it should be my business. or uh, anyone's business, for that matter. i don't think that everyone "in dreblr" is beholden to keeping to a certain person's standard for "acceptable" disagreement and "acceptable" sharing of their own opinions on their own blog as long as they're not inciting harassment, which entails, like, actively encouraging harm to happen yk. i mean, you can think that the blogger was being rude or an asshole and prefer to never see him again, that's fine. that's your prerogative. but i mean, i'm not gonna tell the guy how to interact with the fandom on his own blog, haha.

to be clear, im not telling you what you can or can't do on your own blog either. if you wanna make a post about how his posts contain harmful rhetoric, how he's an idiot, or how he's rude bc you disagree with his public posts on this situation or on the dsmp as a whole, i mean, i'm not gonna handwring over it and tell you that you're not allowed to do that. it's none of my business, and i like to think i'm not that hypocritical. and honestly, i think that in a space where we're talking about analysis, commenting on harmful rhetoric happens often and should happen often when it happens -- literally anyone can make an analysis post that has harmful rhetoric, and sure it's fiction and no one has to answer to the analysis police for making a bad analysis post, but i've also been in this space and seen enough truly mind-boggling amounts of parroting takes about torture that make people sound like CIA psyops to go "well saying that someone's analysis post contains harmful rhetoric is really rude" pfft. again, i'm not saying i'm immune to hypocrisy, but i've certainly malded enough times in public about the shit people have said in this fandom to take issue with that. now, getting a little less into the strictly-analysis side of things, i understand that insults like calling someone an idiot may not sit right with everyone, to which i say. block to your heart's content. but c'mon man i've called people idiots before i'm no saint 😭😅

anyway. i hope this clarified some things, anon. take issue with whatever and whoever you like, honestly, whether that's me, the person that i just not-vagued for the last however many words, etc etc -- again, your prerogative. and i agree, it's a shame the situation devolved into stuff like insults in both bloggers' inboxes when it really didn't have to be like that like. at all.

[age-of-moonknight]

“Tigra,” Vengeance of the Moon Knight (Vol. 2/2024), #2.

Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Alessandro Cappuccio; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit

[blushingbuddie]

thinking about august and how when he finally got everything he wanted he realized it wasn't what he wanted or needed at all and that the reality of being royalty is a very lonely isolated thing where people you thought of as friends aren't even hiding the fact that your priviliged position works in favour for them and that it's more to do with convenience than anything else and that by gaining the one thing you've always wished for you most likely will lose everything and everyone you dreamt of

[mantisgodsdomain]

3,4,15 for any member of team snakemouth!

...how about all three?

(for this ask game)

3. Obscure headcanon

For Kabbu, though we may have noted this before, we think that the North is quite firmly considered a patch of Deadland - and its inhabitants, as a result, tend to be very, very strange from the perspective of the rest of the world. For Kabbu, specifically, this means a variety of things, both biologically and culturally - though Northern beetles are a lot more common in Bugaria, deadlands in general come with a very high rate of mutation and a very high rate of death, and that means a high rate of superstition both in things that actively impact survival and in things that do not - as well as the simple fact that a constantly-changing set of genetics means that what a northern beetle is like is often very, very open to change.

Kabbu is an example of a burrower - a subspecies of sorts primarily identified by claws designed, very specifically, for digging. His claws grow into a sort of broad shovel shape and tend to be much sturdier than an equivalent beetle's - getting underground in moments in soft ground isn't really an exaggeration! Though he can dig through harder ground, it takes time and effort, and he can't go at it with the sheer speed of softer soil - technically, he could burrow through solid rock given enough time, but it would be both hard and extremely painful. It's a trait that's heavily prized in the North for its ability to create shelter and safety - beetles dominate the North's underground, and there's nothing that can really pose a threat to them. Tunnels are safety, and it really surprises and disorients him when things underground attack him, because back home that just kind of doesn't happen unless it's Another Beetle specifically targeting you.

In terms of more social things, he has a lot of trouble getting used to the concept of mimics. This is mostly due to the fact that mimics as a whole don't really... exist in the north, at least not in the means of gaining benefit from mimicking anything else. If you can talk to them as any other awakened bug, they're usually exactly what they say they are, and species mimicking normal geological features and plants haven't found any success, unless you're willing to get extremely generous with describing the snow-bank camouflage of a Northern Silk Moth's topcoat.

Though sand wasps or "white bees" still exist, the thing they're mimicking no longer exists in the same area. Any Hive that once was in the North is long dead, overly-large groups of bugs tend to die out quickly thanks to the handful of large predators that may decide the benefits outweigh the consequences when enough tasty beetles gather in the same place, and when the enemy you're dealing with is both too heavily armoured to be really deterred by most weaponry and capable and intelligent enough to stalk your group through the snow until the cost outweighs the benefit of eating you... well, the sort of small groups generally sent to start a new colony of social bugs really don't stand a chance.

It is, occasionally, very hard to get used to the fact that southern silk moths only grow a few heads taller than him. He's used to them presenting a lot more of a threat.

For Leif... we think he's completely, 100% blind. His eyes are frozen over due to quirk of his biology - the thing about his integration that makes him a failure, specifically. With any of the Snakemouth cordyceps, they do not naturally transfer the immunity to their own magic that any other variety of mage would have, and so need to alter their hosts in order to get the appropriate biology across. With Leif, that protection is not sufficient to protect the host, much less to preserve valuable organs - eyes, especially, are fragile, after all. The cold he naturally generates exceeds the host adaptations he provides, resulting in, even beyond the blindness, unusually brittle chitin, extremely stiff and easy-to-damage tissue, organic food processing efficiency appropriate for a bug currently freezing to death...

Well, you get the idea. Functionally, if alive, a host body would be in a state of perpetual hypothermia, prone to breaking down over time and needing persistent repair that his strain of cordyceps cannot provide, as any repair he could offer that's not within his host's natural healing capabilities requires manually breaking down and reconstructing any parts, which... is inconvenient at best. As he is, he gets around most of these issues by simply replacing his host body's soft tissue with cordyceps, but that has its own issues, mainly in making him look and move incredibly uncanny. Injuries take a very long time to repair, relatively, though the less tissue damage is done the easier it is to fix - being cleanly sliced in two, for example, might be easier to handle than any sort of crushing damage. As far as his eyes go... eyes of any sort are delicate, and the slightest damage can permanently blind someone. Any of Snakemouth Den's cordyceps tend to go blind anyways as the fungus burrows into ocular nerves - if anything, this is better for hiding, since the frost over his eyeballs conceals any mycelium in the eyes themselves. In theory, it can be repaired... in practice, it would be far too much of a pain for work that will be undone the moment he overtaxes his ice magic again.

...also, he doesn't really care. Sight is not the most important sense a moth has and his scent and ability to sense pheromones is fine, along with a general sensitivity to things like vibrations in the air. More than fine, even, since he's now kind of hybridized with both Ant and Bee and the number of pheromones he's sensitive enough to sense has shot through the roof. This on top of the "magic sense" he has means he has absolutely no trouble getting around, though reading books requires more or less sticking an antenna or fungal tendril over them and parsing out where the ink is by scent and texture. He full-on didn't notice he was blind until after the cordyceps reveal.

For Vi, while this might be one we've mentioned before, we headcanon that she's got a bit of minor mutation throwing her antenna... maybe 2% more towards a non-social relative, which gears her just slightly more towards being able to detect "foreign" scents - predators, prey, and any pollen or nectar in the area. Unfortunately, this slight shift in what scents she's made to pick up comes with a reduced sensitivity to pheromones and pheromone communication within the hive, along with loss of the general innate understanding that an average bee would have of how she's meant to "fit in" to a structure that utterly cripples her communication and social life in the hive.

It's minor enough of a mutation that she's never been flagged - she's a mutation of a social bee, not a normal variant of a solitary - but she smells weird, and she doesn't pick up on pheromones quite enough, and the variation in signals she puts off means that she both fails the communication to get across what she might need and fumbles the communication conveyed back to her about what she should do. Subtle things build up over time, and within the Hive, the negatives far outweigh the benefits - the Hive is only built with bees that fit to a standard in mind, and even minor deviations can get you dragged far, far behind.

This is getting very long so, uhh. Here's a cut. Everything else is below it. We enjoy getting very long-winded. There's a lot in here.

15. Worst thing they’ve ever done

Well, this one will depend on if it's "in general" or "by their standards". Putting any sort of objective moral judgement on just about anything is ridiculously difficult, especially with how values vary by culture or individual.

There is no such thing as objective worst, and we absolutely don't guarantee these would line up with your idea of worse, and so we'll offer two options here - what we believe they would think of first if posed with the question, and an alternative answer that would likely crop up.

For Kabbu, his own response would be easy - abandoning his teammates to The Beast. It haunts him to this day - really, what sort of beetle abandons their swarm to a fate like that? If he was a little faster, a little braver, a little less of a coward - but no. He abandoned those he was meant to care most for, and they died because of it.

For the other...

There are some things that are necessary, to survive somewhere as harsh as the Deadlands. Not everyone can be saved. Not everything can be helped. Not everyone can be taken in. Tradition and law is the heart and soul of the North - rules that everyone must comply to, if not for the sake of themselves, than for the sake of those they may interact with. To break a law, for any reason, is to be shunned by the community, most likely to your eventual death.

She broke a law. It could have been for understandable reasons, or not - it doesn't matter. She put the community at risk, and for that, she couldn't stay. She was put out in the cold, despite her pleading to the contrary. She was allowed to beg and plead and bang on the door, and yet, it meant nothing. The beast she would have lead to them caught up, eventually. He would still believe it was justified.

For Leif, his first response would be... exactly what you expect of him, really. The body he took without a care. The life he stole. He might vary on whether it's the action of stealing it or the lies he's told with that body, but the answer would be the same.

For the one he wouldn't think of... He could have spoken up. He didn't. He met their eye, slated for execution on crimes that he could parlay them on if he implicated himself, and he said nothing.

The look on their face still haunts him sometimes. It hurts more now that he's two, rather than one. It's what was needed to protect his family.

For Vi... a fault in a machine. The instructions were boring, and confusing, and hard to read. She tried to do whatever she thought might work, instead of following the manual. There was an injury. Then another one. It was her fault, really, for rigging it wrong, but she was tired and angry and she argued instead of just sucking it up and fixing it when confronted on it, and it went unfixed for days more. A minor fault can very well lead to deaths, and though this one didn't, it came close - one more inch, a slightly looser bolt, and it would have cracked a bug's shell clean open. It's a miracle it turned out as well as it did. It's a miracle that no one connected it to her enough, even when it was fixed. Someone else was punished, and she was old enough to know not to step forward - she's not stupid, after all.

The guilt still haunts her. The "what-if". The possibility of it. If someone died of her own stupid negligence, if she made someone else take the fall - she would let them, really, her sense of self-preservation isn't that bad, but she's not sure she could live with it after.

With the one she wouldn't think of personally... considering the background she's got, the journey to the Ant Kingdom, and the fact that it's already stated she took jobs before canon? We think there's a fairly good chance that Vi's off jobs got... shady. It's not like she has much in the way of morals when it comes to money, and "will do just about anything for enough cash" is a decent market. If you're willing to forsake your morals, you can get more money than your heart desires - at the cost of just a bit of risk, at that!

She doesn't think about it, really. It wasn't something she needed to think about. They were threatening her, they were a risk to her team, they were the price she had to pay to eat, the specifics of what happened don't matter much at this point. Put in the position again, would she choose their life, or hers? It doesn't matter. They're dead, anyways. She should know. She was the one to take the payment for it.

4. Favorite line?

We're copy-pasting these straight from the game! These Direct Quotes are all sourced from @aquilamage's Bug Fables Transcript project, which we highly recommend checking out! It's an excellent resource for double-checking dialogue without having to replay the game first, and a repository for just about all the dialogue in the game (provided it wasn't taken out by previous patches, of course).

We will be honest: there's a lot of dialogue in this game. This might not be our absolute favorites, as a result of a general poor memory as well as Too Much Game. Also, we have blatant favoritism towards Vi in all ways. Most of these are favorite interactions, rather than anything else, so...

For Leif:

Kabbu: Leif. If you need to take a break, let us know. Vi will carry you. Vi: That is not happening. Leif: Oh, the fatigue, it kicks in... Vi: I said it's not happening!

...and for Vi, we're fond of this dialogue, specifically because the first time we encountered it we misread "exploring" as "exploding".

Leif: Science looks like a lot of hard work. Vi: It's like uh...the thinking version of exploring!

But of course, our favorite Vi Dialogue as well as our personal favorite dialogue in the game in general would be the Bee Guard overworld spy.

Leif: Vi, you're the only Bee explorer, right? Vi: Huh? Uh, yeah! That I know of... Leif: We've been thinking it's a bit weird, to see so many Bee guards, but only one explorer... Vi: Look, they're not guards because they want to or anything, okay? Vi: They were born to be guards, so they guard. That's it. Kabbu: That's a bit somber... Vi: ...That's just how the Hive is sometimes.

"I'm allergic to bouncers" is a close second, of course. In terms of story implications, we pull on her Jaune interactions and especially the point just after getting kicked out of the studio for the first time during Jaune's request, but that's... it's less we "like" it, per se, and more that the implications are fun to toy with. In terms of the actual dialogue, it just... makes us feel sad. Sad, [], and maybe a bit angry on her behalf. We've been there more than we care to admit, after all.

We... wouldn't wish something similar on anyone. And no matter how good the good gets with Jaune, it still can't really outweigh the fact that the bad starts ticking boxes about emotional abuse in a way that makes relationships like Mothiva & Zasp that more people are willing to try and call out pale in comparison. We probably need to finish that essay some time...

Anyways, we like it when Kabbu gets mad enough to yell at people.

Kabbu: This is ridiculous! You realize you could be dooming us all!? Kabbu: What if the Termite King loses trust in the Queen!? Kabbu: What if you lose to the Wasp King without our help!? Kabbu: Have you gone completely, utterly insane!? Have you lost all intelligence! Mothiva: Yikes. You're overthinking this WAY too much. Mothiva: The Ant Kingdom's way better in our hands than with you LOSERS. Kabbu: We have SAVED YOUR LIFE BEFORE, you WITCH!

[methcheese]

oh man now im thinking about aegon??? what the fuck??