#i could go on for HOURS about this game

[dreaminplates]

I'm in a big TLOU mood, so I drew Abby next to my 2 Sephiroth sketches to fill out my page.

[spotsupstuff]

I'm still working on getting the gardening ending for myself, but I've been collecting some ponderings I'd like to write down. So:

A congregate of thoughts on Watcher lore (as of now):

• I really like that this DLC is right now three kids in a spiritual trenchcoat. None of them is normal. I bet they'd all be friends if they met.

• I really like the color coding of these 3, as for what I've assumed regarding to colors' symbolism in this world: - Black stands for Nirvāṇa, the Void, being outside of the reincarnation cycle - Gold/yellow stands for holiness, ascension - Blue/purple stands for damnation/stagnation - White stands for Saṃsāra, the cycle of reincarnation, the physical world (the Watcher lingers in the physical world, unwilling to leave it)

On the account of blue and yellow being on opposing sides on the color wheel, I'd also gander a guess that the Rot and the Void don't entirely agree with each other/may be on opposing sides.

• Therefore, I don't think the gardening ending was exactly what the Rot Prince wanted to achieve, supported by his last two dialogues with the Watcher:

[Greeting lines]. As with all great deeds, my work is not without great challenge. It has taken eons and the light fades. The paths close and change. I can almost feel... a will... at odds with my own.

[Greeting lines]. Forgive me if I go on! You have done so much for me, I will not burden you with my troubles. Please, rest here as long as you wish. You are always safe here, my dear friend. You, who were there for me.

My guess is that the content that hasn't dropped yet will introduce either a new character/s in a sort of godly roles, or will explain the powers playing behind the wheel flowers and the Cycle.

• A light at the end of the tunnel (or something white/bright with a way to it?) is mentioned by both Spinning Top (at her ending) and the Prince (both as a flowerbud and in that first paragraph I copied up there).

I don't know what to do with this yet, I just found it interesting. Something something the white light within the Void Sea in the original game?

• ,,Outer Rim...?"

The Buddhist cosmology says the world is made out of 9 mountains (Mount Sumeru [the axis mundi], 7 golden mountain ranges and 1 outermost iron mountain range [maybe the withered buildings here are made of rusted iron, buried in stardust]) and 8 seas (7 freshwater and 1 saltwater), with 4 continents within the salt sea who's inhabitants each have a little something extra (except the South I guess, that's where *we* are. well apparently all Buddhas appear here actually, so you know. that's a something).

For an interesting example, the north continent called Uttarakuru is said to house the wealthy, owning no private property, where their food grows by itself and they live in the skies (Iterator cities, nudge nudge).

The name of this region could point to the Buddhist cosmological map being a physical fact for this world. I'd like to think that the dimension hopping aspect to the Watcher's worming through the space-time is at least limited to 4 continents(/realities?).

Also a fan fact: in Chinese mythology it is said the waters flow and stars fall slowly, because a water god with a bad tamper, Gònggōng, broke one of the pillars supporting the sky. Combining this fun nugget with the established lore in a pearl that everything is once eaten away by the Void down below, I'd say it is safe to assume on 89% that the dust mentioned in that pearl comes from the heaven itself and creates a sort of a cycle of the physical matter.

Suppose stardust is what creates everything, powers everything (just as is said in science). Suppose the Starcatchers are superstructures made for conversion of it into desired forms, these ones perhaps in the West of the world specifically, because of their circular shape.

(Meaning Signal Spires are perhaps of the South, while original game- aka Pebbles and Moon- are in the North of this world.)

• I find it fascinating and validating that Spinning Top needed some sort of an Embrace from one of the Five Urges/Hindrances (the third one, companionship) to be able to pass on.

It points to my idea of what the religion is Really supposed to be about: the Five Urges are what they are- urges- and they cannot run rampant. The point isn't to absolutely *eradicate* violence, pleasure, companionship, hunger and desire to live from oneself. The point is to be able to control these things and not cling on to them.

Because if one clings on to something, they stagnate, they cannot progress, they rot and they *fear* losing the something more than they can truly enjoy it or they get far too lost in it to feel it right anymore. To cling on to life means being afraid of taking risks, trying something new and really Living.

But now that doesn't mean going for the opposite is the correct way to go about it- that still creates a desire, a clinging- an urge for death is just as good as urge for life. It binds. It's extremism without careful consideration for what is really the best to do, feel and think in any given situation.

(This goes for love, too, it is GOOD to love, but going too far becomes unhealthy obsession instead of love. Going the other way results in hatred, another utterly useless and harmful thing to harbor. Same as indifference - that is stagnation again, that isn't picking up something, working with it to move forward. Love is a forward motion that is required, but cannot be overdone because as so it would be bastardized into something else, possessive and caging.)

Spinning Top could move on only when she knew that the flipside of the Third Urge- a sickening loneliness- wasn't something to fear anymore.

• Yeah, I don't think we can count on backgrounds too much when it comes to size calculating on the basis that they are probably shaped around gameplay. Specifically thinking about how the spinning top toy changes sizes between it's in-game model and the art. When it comes to Ancients, I'd say the best one can do is do what feels right.

• The Rot Prince is some sort of a boosted up Preta, I swear to heavens. Hungry guy. Maybe the Rot as a whole is a Preta stand in, just way more physical.

• Can't believe my ,,Respawning is real" headcanon has been officially given the thumbs down... The *Strand* Theory is real. (Even though DP is separate from the Watcher, this at least explains why Artificer didn't just go back to the last shelter she slept in when her cubs were still with her. They went to a different strand, where a different Artificer managed the situation better and we are stuck in this reality without them.) (We see them in her Void ending either because they are the one thing her heart wishes for [the Void gives comfort to those who are passing, as far as I am concerned], or because the Void is where all the reality strands and times coincide into one another.)

• On that note, no Fucking wonder the Ancients wanna bail - we don't really know to what extend they were aware of reality's unwounding nature, but assuming it is Pretty Thorough, I too wouldn't wanna live with the knowledge that in one reality I might've died on my loved ones, leaving them broken, while in the other everything is just fine and dandy.

The endless wondering of ,,Did I die in a different reality at any point in my life? Did I leave these people I love behind to hurt, alone, and I can't do anything to help them? I can never know, I'm not allowed to comprehend..." would slowly kill anyone with a heart, I think.

• I wonder if the Prince is a puppet/the Rot made itself a puppet, - because the Starcatchers were Iterator-esque biomechanications with a different directive than iterating on the Big Problem and this is a consumed Starcatcher (something about its budding dialogue feels to me like there was a sense of a Self beforehand that was drowned out by the Rot and then was pulled forward again with additions) - because the Rot is at the edge of the universe (humming a tune) where a messed up slugcat decided to start ripping holes in the reality, therefore connecting different strands including to places where the Rot already existed as a plague upon Some Iterator, which gave spark to sapience and inspiration to a new mind

• The new karma set is definitely a droplet and the ripples it leaves behind. Makes sense, too, there's more ,,movement" within it the more Spinning Top yanks the Watcher around in time-space (accidentally, I'd guess. or the ,,blame" is more on Watcher *somehow*), messing up their physical existence more and more.

Maybe the karma symbols or the imagery itself have something to do with a combination of an axis mundi and the strand form of existence.

Something about there being a main timeline in which each action and decision creates a new ripple, a new strand.

• I wonder if the Watcher could've come across Spinning Top and effectively latch on/follow her, - because they were already dead/echoed (the dream sequence upon reaching the final karma level could mean they did go to the Void Sea and swam pretty deep but turned back and that resulted in Echo-ification? then again why can a lizard bite me. Spinny's laughing at me for it. Goddammit.) - because of their nature as someone who's so damn hesitant about things, who hangs in the backlines, only observes and learns. Very Echo-esque personality - because of their desire to have someone there

• Just realized that we have a canonical design for Spinning Top's mask, hot damn. ,,How do children's masks look like?" answered.

I don't know why, that kind of creeps me out.

• The portals existing outside of us are made by Spinning Top, I'm pretty sure. She's always over them.

Is it normal for Echoes to leave tears like that? I think if the Rot Prince met her and knew she's the one who started this whole journey that resulted in him coming to exist as a consciousness and to bloom, he'd see her as a friend the same way he sees the Watcher.

• I wonder if his approach to the Rot Triple Affirmitive is ,,it's going to get worse before it gets better". He has suffered, too- while he normally speaks gently, calmly, orderly, when he is a flowerbud he seems frantic to me. Like someone breathing through death before getting better.

• Is the concept of the Rot Prince created for the first time in all existences' or is he a repeating pattern, too? The Rot in the least seems to be a pattern, because of what Spinning Top says when we meet her in one of the original regions, eaten through by the Rot.

,,You shouldn't have come here. It's too far." Does that refer to this strand's/ripple's distance from the axis mundi/the water drop creating all these realities? The further out the little wave carries out, growing smaller and weaker, the more rotten through it is? Is it because still water is stagnation, just as the Rot is?

So the Cycle is change and movement, life and love, that exists in a hurtful matter not out of its design, but because it has to contend with absolute stillness/stagnation/the Rot? Or it's all part of the same system, truly designed like this?

Could a Mass Ascension be seen as an escape plan from a ripple growing old? Man...

• A quick attempt at illustrating the previous thought:

Some Pepe Silvia level nonsense going on here.

[egophiliac]

I DID IT I GOT MY PINK HAYATE now I am never doing that again!

(at least until they give me, like, a frilly unicorn Kamui or something)

[an-internet-introvert]

Countdown to October 19th (19/19)

Happy 15 Years of Dan and Phil 🩵🩵🩵

[grmpgm]

[razables]

corpius ss redraw

[pixlatedvampire]

You gave those wounds to your god, Enki. Did you think they would heal so easily?

(Uh Oh! Someone gave the priest catholic guilt!)

[triglycercule]

so the dust smokes headcanon is really popular!!! i have an addition to it :33 cigarette smoke CLINGS to your body for a loooong loooong time,,,,, i don't know if monster dust has a smell but if it does maybe the cigarette smoke from his cigarettes could be used to cover up that smell so he doesn't have to deal with the scent of death all the time and yk,,,, feel the guilt :33

[gentle-hero-blog]

adam's plan was just... generally stupid on all possible fronts? Like oh gee, run headfirst into the dangerous sector filled with unfreezable metroids like that wouldn't just fail the instant one of them grabs him because he can't morph ball and drop bombs, and then die in the explosion when the sector detaches. Metroids don't have eyes which means thry use other means to detect prey which means stealth is less than worthless.

Samus has fought countless metroids and knows how to dodge the fuckers. Samus has a comical amount of experience in the very specific field of compromising a location and escaping said location as it is actively collapsing before she gets caught in its blaze of glory. Samus does not instantly die if grabbed by a metroid. but no gotta go in yourself knowing full well you'll die regardless of what you do because ???

I KNOWWWWW RIGHT like genuinely what even was his thinking there. that and The Scene We Do Not Speak Of are like the culmination of bad writing in OM to me. like not only is the plan HORRIBLE but oh my god the SETUP for this scene gets me so bad it's like. la di da i'm adam and i'm going to stop samus (aka the famous metroid slayer) from entering sector zero where there's metroids ^.^ but uh oh!!! there's a metroid approaching her!! do i:

a) get her attention to warn her

b) shoot the metroid (WHICH HE LITERALLY DOES AFTERWARDS...??)

c) grab her and leave to figure something out

nope!! ^.^ I think i will choose option d) shoot samus. which will incapacitate her completely even so far as deactivating her suit (<WHAT KIND OF GUN IS HE CARRYING....???) and render her fully unconscious!!! leaving the metroid free to just!!!!! attack her!!! i guess!!!

AND YEAH. LIKE YOU SAID. THE PLAN ITSELF BROTHER WHAT. it actually makes me so dead how both OM and Fusion set up Adam as this unrivaled military mastermind that samus respects Deeply and then like ALL of his decisions in OM are incomprehensibly stupid like this. Adam my sweetest sugarplum why are you unauthorizing all of samus' extremely useful abilities. I can understand prohibiting power bombs but the gravity feature??? The grapple beam?? The VARIA SUIT???????

[sunbloomdew]

the way to the moon is about holding on (to the promise you don't even remember making, to the person you loved, to the life you never got to live but refuse to give up). it's johnny choosing to be with river time and time again, it's johnny holding on to all the paper rabbits river made even if he didn't know their significance, it's river keep trying to remind johnny of their shared past, it's river giving up her treatment so a place that means the world to her is protected, it's eva and neil trying their hardest to send johnny to the moon, it's eva taking the risk in hopes of making it

the way finding paradise is about letting go (of your mistakes, of the unrealistically perfect life you never lived, of the person who helped you through your darkest times but who now keeps you stuck in the past). it's colin letting go of faye despite being afraid, it's colin keep replacing pages in his book with new ones, it's faye knowing that colin never needed sigmund's help, it's faye telling colin he has to let go of her if he wants to live fully, it's neil and eva trusting faye despite what it means for them, it's neil taking the risk in hopes of making it

[eeriethacus]

Combining my current obssession with my past obsession? That's a half-lie, never got over Hadestown.

A lil old wip for now because I've been busy and will be busy for the next couple of weeks... but hopefully I'll be back with an aftg piece that's in the works<33

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

i have seen a lot of posts about lucanis & illario lately, that specifically call out that some of the things Lucanis says about him are kinda mean. usually in context of 'yes what illario did was fucked up but they BOTH went thru the fucked up training and lucanis says shit to him too' etc etc. and i'll be honest as someone who does have a contentious/estranged/very-low-contact sibling relationship. everything lucanis said came off as super mild to me and they should both be WAY nastier to each other actually. yes even when you include their dynamic in wigmaker job which was both more lighthearted And heartfelt. but like if you want realism they should be going from that to 1 minute later annoyed enough to break out the super cutting remarks dragging up the worst things the other has ever done/said, specifically becuause they know it will hurt the other most. then i would believe it more tbh.

[murdockbuckley]

thinking about andrew minyard, a criminal justice student, sitting in some of his lectures as if he can't perfectly recall all the worst times of his life

[beestards]

I finished playing in stars and time a couple days ago and I'm. Still reeling. My brain chemistry is forever changed.

[thanatika]

people on that child support post are talking as if patho classic daniil is great with kids and it's pathologic 2 daniil that people are getting this negative idea of him from, which got me thinking...

daniil's main characterization of how he treats kids in patho 2 comes from artemy's POV of him, which is biased against daniil due to daniil making a really dickish first impression, and is also based off of unreliable narrator accounts:

first by some kids outside of rubin's house who lead artemy to believe that daniil refused to treat poisoned children when it was actually just dying dogs, which can be followed by artemy confronting daniil himself where he continues to misunderstand the situation and assumes daniil is calling children animals, until he finally visits the kids' warehouse and learns it was just the soul-and-a-halves' pets. which, obviously it would be a nice thing to save pets from dying, but he really ISN'T a veterinarian and there's a deadly plague starting. he's doing triage.

and then another early incident with the kid in the warehouse dying of sand pest, where notkin passes along a message telling artemy not to bother trying to save him that makes him sound very dismissive ("Don't waste your time on Patches, it's over for him"). reading between the lines though, it's pretty clear that he came to that conclusion not because he doesn't want to save people from the sand pest, but because this is a seemingly incurable disease with no medical cure, and at that point he probably hasn't had the chance to test the schmowders on himself so would have no reason to believe in their effectiveness, and assesses that loading patches up with drugs will just kill him. which, he's literally correct! whether you treat him with tinctures, pills, or a whole schmowder, patches dies that night. obviously trying to treat him or at least ease his suffering is a morally good dead, but you can also see the implied basis of daniil's actions, that every second is precious in the early stages of trying to prevent a widespread outbreak, so you shouldn't waste time on a patient who ultimately can't be saved. (which fits in really well not only with his arc in both games where he comes to the conclusion that the whole town is unsalvageable, but with the bigger emphasis on time management and manipulation that his remake has been described as having. hell, maybe from daniil's POV he knows for certain that patches will die due to whatever time manipulation that's going on with him, and that spending the time on that patient allows for a larger disaster to happen elsewhere). so, the situation is framed by notkin (understandably, because he's just a kid and that's his friend dying) and artemy (because he's honestly pretty petty about daniil) as just "the bachelor is an asshole and abandoned these kids" when it's more of a genuine ethical quandary.

he's also pretty rude and dismissive in how he talks about grace to artemy later on, but again, it's pretty clear that he's not just being a hater to a 15 year old for no reason, the point he's making is that she shouldn't be left in charge of a graveyard filled with potentially bio-hazardous corpses.

all that to say, the main canon info about how he treats children in patho 2 basically comes from the fact that a lot of kids end up disliking him, because he's extremely pragmatic to the point of being heartless, but still ultimately pretty understandable in what he's trying to do (stop a plague).

meanwhile when we do get to see his POV in the marble nest, i would say the way he treats children is pretty much consistent with how he talks to them in pathologic classic -- if anything, he's a bit nicer to them? he has some fed-up, yelling sort of dialogue options to the kids, but pretty much all of those are based on being upset that they're out breaking quarantine and putting themselves at risk of death. meanwhile other dialogue options make him come off very much willing to humor them and talk to them on their level. and when another adult is much harsher about the kids being irresponsible, he defends them, with no dialogue option to agree with corporal punishment:

meanwhile in pathologic classic, i do think that on the whole daniil is pretty nice to kids and willing to go out of his way to protect or help them (to the point of risking death, such as the late game sidequest where he can agree to go take on several soldiers to keep the father of two children from being wrongly executed). but he does also have some really unkind and spiteful dialogue options, like some of what he says to clara both in his own route and hers, and on the topic of corporal punishment...

[bisexualchaosdemon]

The Foxhole Court is Neil desperately trying to avoid letting people see how much of him is a lie.

The Sunshine Court is Jean desperately trying to avoid letting people see how much of him is broken.