#i am definitely not biased

[funnyscienceman]

so recently i found this tier list someone made categorizing the source of each champion's powerset — tech, magic, they're a god, etc — and someone in the comments i think started getting specific about *where* magic came from, and came up with three categories: spritual, elemental, and celestial

(though come to think of it idk where rune magic factors into that]

and that got me thinking — where the fuck does TF's magic come from? In lore he can legit read his cards for information, the faces on the cards change, since he was a kid he'd been able to 'cheat' in card games because he just KNEW what the cards were and couldnt even explain how that happened. He has true sight, he can teleport over long distances, he can teleport Graves as long as he has the card, like what the heck is happening here?

Then earlier i was thinking… his three signature cards kinda fit each of the earlier categories, right?

Blue card always has smth to do with mana. In LoR it refills 1 spell mana and draws one, factoring into his lvl2 condition. In League i think it discounts mana? Either way it's something that directly benefits him. This could be spiritual, right?

Red card is direct damage. Idk what it is in League but in LoR it deals 1 to all enemies and the enemy nexus. It's the most physical of the three, it's an AoE, it's literally depicted with fire, so that ought to be elemental

Gold card is a stun. Again, idk what it is in League but in LoR it deals 2 and stuns the strongest enemy. It's associated with chains, and afaik the only other champs associated with chains are Sylas and Morgana. Sylas' chains are just a prison motif, but morgana? She's half-Aspect, and i know both hers' and TF's chain things stun or root the target, so… celestial?

But that still doesn't give any solid answers. I guess he's just a jack of all trades or smth??? But like with magic?????? Idk it just really makes me scratch my head, his powerset and its implications and what that means for how powerful he is, how powerful he could get. The eye motif he's got going on certainly doesn't help, they're kinda spooky…

…anyway all that and he uses it to scam people and commit crimes

[vileforawhile]

Weak willed. I’m here to dissect every being in this game. If that requires being a little mean, so be it.

I don’t think I could 100% the game if I ever tried to play Slay the Princess cause I could never bring myself to be mean to the voices or any of the vessels

Those are my boys and my wifes, and I would literally kms before being mean to any of them

[inkskinned]

the thing is that they're so fascinated by sex, they love sex, they can't imagine a world without sex - they need sex to sell things, they need sex to be part of their personality, they need sex to prove their power - but they hate sex. they are disgusted by it.

sex is the only thing that holds their attention, and it is also the thing that can never be discussed directly.

you can't tell a child the normal names for parts of their body, that's sexual in nature, because the body isn't a body, it's a vessel of sex. it doesn't matter that it's been proven in studies (over and over) that kids need to know the names of their genitals; that they internalize sexual shame at a very young age and know it's 'dirty' to have a body; that it overwhelmingly protects children for them to have the correct words to communicate with. what matters is that they're sexual organs. what matters is that it freaks them out to think about kids having body parts - which only exist in the context of sex.

it's gross to talk about a period or how to check for cancer in a testicle or breast. that is nasty, illicit. there will be no pain meds for harsh medical procedures, just because they feature a cervix.

but they will put out an ad of you scantily-clad. you will sell their cars for them, because you have abs, a body. you will drip sex. you will ooze it, like a goo. like you were put on this planet to secrete wealth into their open palms.

they will hit you with that same palm. it will be disgusting that you like leather or leashes, but they will put their movie characters in leather and latex. it will be wrong of you to want sexual freedom, but they will mark their success in the number of people they bed.

they will crow that it's inappropriate for children so there will be no lessons on how to properly apply a condom, even to teens. it's teaching them the wrong things. no lessons on the diversity of sexual organ growth, none on how to obtain consent properly, none on how to recognize when you feel unsafe in your body. if you are a teenager, you have probably already been sexualized at some point in your life. you will have seen someone also-your-age who is splashed across a tv screen or a magazine or married to someone three times your age. you will watch people pull their hair into pigtails so they look like you. so that they can be sexy because of youth. one of the most common pornography searches involves newly-18 young women. girls. the words "barely legal," a hiss of glass sand over your skin.

barely legal. there are bills in place that will not allow people to feel safe in their own bodies. there are people working so hard to punish any person for having sex in a way that isn't god-fearing and submissive. heteronormative. the sex has to be at their feet, on your knees, your eyes wet. when was the first time you saw another person crying in pornography and thought - okay but for real. she looks super unhappy. later, when you are unhappy, you will close your eyes and ignore the feeling and act the role you have been taught to keep playing. they will punish the sex workers, remove the places they can practice their trade safely. they will then make casual jokes about how they sexually harass their nanny.

and they love sex but they hate that you're having sex. you need to have their ornamental, perfunctory, dispassionate sex. so you can't kiss your girlfriend in the bible belt because it is gross to have sex with someone of the same gender. so you can't get your tubes tied in new england because you might change your mind. so you can't admit you were sexually assaulted because real men don't get hurt, you should be grateful. you cannot handle your own body, you cannot handle the risks involved, let other people decide that for you. you aren't ready yet.

but they need you to have sex because you need to have kids. at 15, you are old enough to parent. you are not old enough to hear the word fuck too many times on television.

they are horrified by sex and they never stop talking about it, thinking about it, making everything unnecessarily preverted. the saying - a thief thinks everyone steals. they stand up at their podiums and they look out at the crowd and they sign a bill into place that makes sexwork even more unsafe and they stand up and smile and sign a bill that makes gender-affirming care illegal and they get up and they shrug their shoulders and write don't say gay and they get up, and they make the world about sex, but this horrible, plastic vision of it that they have. this wretched, emotionless thing that holds so much weight it's staggering. they put their whole spine behind it and they push and they say it's normal!

this horrible world they live in. disgusted and also obsessed.

[clefadrylcorner]

Obsessed with lovers and piners calling the object of their affections their best friend. Like yessss blur the lines between platonic and romantic love. show how important they are to you in a multifaceted way. Cover up your feelings with another kind of love that is just as true. One type of love does not negate the other and but tragedy can rip both out from under you single handedly, and it will hurt so much more that way. Losing a friend and a lover. Gaining both and not needing any labels for what they are. Using labels but having it be so much more than a title. Were they friends before they were lovers? Or were they lovers whose friendship grew inside of their love? Unclear! Who cares!

[cryptidmickle]

hough save me gay yaoi

[l1-b1]

Nya, the elemental master of water

[tracfone]

Just idk I think other toxic yuris wish they had what chelldos has. What's more romantic and terrifying and fucked up than a computer mainframe and, really the whole building being so obsessed and in love with you and wanting to keep you within its embrace as long as possible and even offers to revive your corpse after you die so you can stay forever and ever and ever and it lets you go in the end but never forgets you and can't stop thinking about you even after the fact

[dedtoot]

one silly trivia regarding marlin's design from the recent igusa matsuyama interview thing from the ranch story blog killed me dead, so

frames from evil dead but with awl characters (quality of the redraws varies drastically)

bonus

[lostreverb]

kudos to evan for giving almost every one of his characters an accent (even if it's subtle) like he definitely could've gotten away with just using his regular voice for warren or peter but he doesn't! even jay has a certain cadence of speech that's not a part of the typical canadian accent. i really appreciate it bc i'm big on immersion in media and little stuff like this helps separate the character from the actor playing them (and makes the character feel more authentic too). so when you're watching it makes it a bit easier to not think "oh that's just evan peters in a silver wig" like no that's peter maximoff.

[lostyesterday]

[ai-the-broccoli]

I wanna say that if you're a Light Yagami fan who is really into his character arc, themes and stuff then I strongly recommend The Picture of Dorian Gray to you (if you haven't already read it).

I can't guarantee that all of you will like it of course, but I think there's enough overlap between it and Light Yagami's this and that for it to be worth a try imo

[rimeiii]

I return to WHB Tumblr to see how the game us doing and I see the fandom in shambles, damn. And after scrolling through the tag for a bit, I have...questions.

Yo how big is WHB now even? I stopped playing shortly after they introduced the paywalled Gabriel and that's one of the things I've seen several people complain about...

Like I understand the rest of the complaints - it's mostly the same complaints I've been having about the game prior to me quitting. Multiple decisions that seem to reinforce the idea that this game is heading down the P2W path, very anti-F2P practices in general, outrageous prices for the paid Nightmare Pass, no pity system on launch, the disaster that was the implementation of the Solomon's Seals gacha, the many bugs on launch especially, the small amount of farmable premium currency, and the list goes on...the pancake shop rework not only seems to be in line with the trajectory PB seems to be taking in terms of game decisions, but is also the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of players.

But, uh, storage? Wasn't it like 2 GB tops on launch? That was reasonable I think, because Arknights was around that size on launch and back then, there was so little additional content. Only JP dubbing, no L2D E2 art or skins (the only L2D we had back then was Closure, the SHOPKEEP), 5 story chapters (which translated to 92 stages, in which around half have a Challenge Mode variant and with a large majority being unique maps), and no additional game modes.

For additional context, currently Arknights is ~6-7 GB on a fresh account with all language dubbing, and it gets bloated if you don't delete unused event data (it's ~9.7 GB for me and I have Arknights on my current phone ever since Near Light first hit Global, so just over 2 years now). Keep in mind Arknights is close to 4.5 years old in Global, and CN just celebrated their 5th anniversary a few months back.

Talking about storage, I don't think comparing WHB to older games and non-tower defense is fair either, since:

Older games in general are much easier on your device in terms of storage to content ratio and performance, mostly due to device limitations of the past requiring less sophisticated game mechanics and the devs sticking to these simpler mechanics even as time passes and technology gets more advanced. Gentle reminder that FGO is ~7 years old in NA, ~9 years old in JP, and ALSO doesn't download everything initially - afaik there's an option for that in the settings menu which bumps the total size up significantly (the wiki lists it as around 9-10 GB total).

Different genres and graphics mean different storage requirements. Anything 3D or open world will almost always have higher storage requirements compared to anything else. Path to Nowhere is around the same size as Arknights despite being younger due to the former using 3D models for their battle sprites, compared to the 2D chibis Arknights uses. Love and Deepspace, a ~5 months game, is huge because of how they do the cutscenes AND the stage-based action gameplay, but Wuthering Waves is closing the gap on size quickly despite being only ~1.5 months because it's an open world action RPG.

What I will say, though, is that WHB is not optimized well. Now I may be very unfair by comparing WHB to Punishing: Gray Raven, a game by the optimization gods known as Kurogames (people ran the PC PGR client on 2GB RAM laptops and my 4GB RAM laptop can run WuWa despite it using UE4 - an engine notorious for chugging on low end devices - albeit with lag spikes in the open world map), but when a 2D tower defense game fails to run as smoothly as a 3D action game with stylish and fast-paced combat, then we have a problem. For context, my 4GB RAM phone only has minor lag when I use a skill that has a lot of visual effects like Lee Hyperreal's Hypermatrix, but back when I played WHB I still experienced lag spikes when deploying units.

Again this all boils down to PB just not being used to the game format. Which is all well and good, Arknights was a huge departure from Girls Frontline too - a good portion of Arknights' devs worked on Girls Frontline before splitting off to work on Arknights. But what made Arknights succeed is how accessible and F2P friendly the game was, with smooth and solid gameplay as well as an engaging plot that discusses themes such as racism, discrimination, and the fragility of hope.

Of course you can argue that Arknights is a tower defense first, visual novel second. Unlike WHB, which is an otome game first, tower defense second. And I would agree, but only to a certain extent. Once you step into the realm of having Actual Combat Gameplay Elements then I believe it's your duty to make progression as reasonable as possible. Including a power gate is fine, but nothing too excessive - and certainly do not hold any significantly strong unit behind a paywall.

Because fun fact - in Arknights' entire runtime, there were only a handful of completely paywalled content:

Player icons from promotional packs for large events, particularly the Ambience Synesthesia concerts

Character skins from promotional packs, like the Exusiai and Guard Ch'en skins during the anime release

Purestream, a B4 Therapist Medic who was released as a WWF collab, where all sales from her $1 pack were donated to the WWF. Even then, she eventually became available for everyone, as she was later added to the Recruitment pool (use a resource obtained from Dailies for a chance to get units, some unique to the pool like Purestream). She was a decent healer, and her Module made her a good budget medic. Even then you're more likely using the Medics you've already built by then - for B4 budget options, Perfumer is usually better for multi-target healing and a party HP regen passive, while Sussurro is your go-to for strong single-target healing.

And guess what? None of these had any direct impact on gameplay during their paywalled period. Purestream wasn't even a B5 or B6 unit, yo. There are many better options for healers. I STILL USE THE B3 ANSEL AND HIBISCUS IN INTEGRATED STRATEGIES.

I'm just...PB's choices baffle me, and I do wish they can improve not just on the game performance standpoint, but in how they treat their playerbase in terms of in-game purchases. I hope I made that abundantly clear...

[twisting-in-wonderland]

Huh-? Why's my sax's mouthpiece all messed up?

...

... Ah.

(wip progress + 'lineart' under read-more--)

portfest outfits are so cool looking,,,

[tinyangrynerd]

Their Ultimate Showdown

@the-grumpoff

[synthshenanigans]

simple soup strawberry for the soul

Mayhaps will become a full art later.

Heart & Mind ones mayhaps later as well.

[startagainaprologue]

shipnames where the names are just combined < shipnames where its a phrase or word that suits the characters