#i didnt find this narrative very present in the game however

[nerdsandqueens]

Fandom is in an uproar about Epler wanting to "punch Solas in the face". But Epler and Busche discuss it no differently than fandom saying they want to punch either an "irredeemable" character in the face, or a character they love to hate. Busche seems to have a softer approach to Solas, but even she seems to view Epler's comments in good fun.

For better or worse, both of them seem to know what fandom is like by being fans themselves. I honestly think they didn't think people would react negatively to it because this is a staple of fandom behavior.

Especially in the context that Solas is supposed to come off as way more villainous than tumblr fandom takes him for.

Solas is supposed to come off as a master manipulator who is irredeemably willing to kill his friends in cold blood, judging from Epler's comments, but I think in their attempts to make him nuanced, they ended up giving him too much tragedy that overshadows his culpability. Making his narrative ultimately confusing in its tone.

[lostacelonnie]

as per Some demand: on polish romantic literature, the depiction of russians, and world serpent of honkai impact 3rd fame. apologies if this is very unorganized but its all just things i was thinking about while distracted in class and not TERRIBLY serious analysis

so before i begin. im very sorry if i get Some details wrong because the main piece i’m using for comparison, dziady (część III) by adam mickiewicz, is something ive read a While ago and in all honesty did not feel like rereading just for this as its just general thoughts. i przy okazji przepraszam że postuję o mickiewiczu ale jest on najlepszym kontekstem do sytuacji mam nadzieję że mi wybaczycie.

anyway. to give non-polish people a bit of context: dziady (część III) was written by mickiewicz during his time in russia, after being exiled from his home country (poland, lithuania, or belarus, depending on who you ask). most of the work is centered around what is means to “fight for independence” (as this was a time when poland was under russian occupation, and didnt technically. Exist. mickiewicz’s nationality is a topic of discussion even today, but thats a whole another topic so i wont get into it), why the nation has to suffer, if this was god’s plan, a fighter vs a poet vs a "traitor" during a country's fall etc etc but that’s not what i’m going to focus on here.

the main thing i want to touch on, as you might’ve guessed by the first paragraph, is the depiction of the russian General Populace- specifically, petersburg’s. there’s a couple of relatively well-known scenes from this work but the one most relevant here is ustęp. i could not find an english translation available online for free and, seeing as even its relevant fragments are Quite Long, did not feel like translating them myself (sorry). but there’s two main ones to look at: petersburg and do przyjaciół moskali.

petersburg shows the vision of russians as very… individualistic. walking among the street are different social classes: the tsar and tsaritsa, a military general showing off his battle-earned awards despite the cold, low ranked soldiers, women in expensive fur coats and colorful hats, wealthy people getting into their carriages; and the poor, freezing and hungry, but still talking about how honored they are to see their “superiors”. they arent bad at heart, but theyre passive, uncaring of how both other nations and even other russians suffer under the tsar’s tyrannical rule, as long as they, themselves, aren’t inconvenienced.

do przyjaciół moskali (to [my] friends muscovites) is less of a narrative part as it is the musings of mickiewicz himself, remembering the cold and unfeeling faces of russians that exiled him, killed and imprisoned his friends and other people, all for the purpose of not having to deal with any problems themselves- no matter if they ruined someone else’s life. however, as he talks with hate about the powers over them, it’s not the people himself he curses out- rather, he wishes that they were free, and brave enough to do something instead of becoming co-perpetrators.

so, tldr: in this work (and many, many others; this sentiment is present throughout a lot of polish literature from romanticism onwards) the russian people are depicted as not inherently evil by themselves, but rather unwilling to fight back against the oppressor that is their own government, oftentimes even reveling in it (the so-called “heroism of captivity”); that, or being just entirely ignorant of their homeland's crimes.

another theme that is integral to this work is messianism of the polish nation- supposedly, the reason why Everything Just Keeps Going Wrong For Us is because god has a plan in which the polish have to suffer, so that nobody else has to, directly paralleling jesus. 

BUT. to get into the part in which i actually start talking about honkai. what i’ve been thinking about is that the way world serpent agents are depicted in the game is actually quite similar?

taking raven herself as an example- first of all, she is Actually Literally Russian but that doesn’t matter here. so before mei joins world serpent, raven is this Mysterious Evil person, working for a Mysterious Evil organisation. she’s cold and ruthless and doesn’t hesitate to carry out her mission if it means getting a paycheck. and then lament of the fallen happens, and mei is in world serpent, and natasha is this. still not a Warm person, yeah? but she’s passionate about being a bartender, and takes care of the roost. simple woman just trying to survive. she’s not a perfect example, of course- she did leave world serpent at a point, only coming back when she realized her other paychecks just simply aren’t enough to sustain both her and the kids- but she’s still a mercenary. she kills people for money. not a bad person, just forced into a terrible situation due to something out of her control- but nowhere near a morally pure one, either. (which i’m very happy about, because that would be boring).

but, if you want to dig deeper, there’s the gray serpents themselves, as well- cold in both the metaphorical AND the literal sense, being machines and all. this one speaks for itself, i think? emotionless and unwilling to compromise, only caring to serve their purpose while continuing the flame chasers', namely mobius’s, legacy. but even the serpents themselves are individuals- they have their own personalities, and interests, even while being mass produced drones. but, like the russians in dziady, theyre mostly focused on themselves- pretty well seen with the serpent present in the beginning of salt snow holy city arc (disconnected from the thing keeping him alive, just because the majority would be better off on their own, with no regard of what would happen to the less fortunate ones).

but, to touch on the previously mentioned messianism- in honkai, that could be attributed to anyone not belonging to ws, especially in arc city and during project stigma- bearing the burden of being, in a smaller or larger degree, sacrificed for some twisted definition of the “greater good”.

additionally, one of the characters who cooperate with world serpent while not being its part is cocolia, who is russian; the person who (albeit accidentally) gets kevin out of the sea of quanta is seele, raised in russia; and misteln, an important part of carrying out project stigma, was not only “created” in siberia, but also approached by the serpents, and recruited, exactly there.

i don’t think i have a good conclusion for this one? as i said, just general thoughts on a topic i found interesting. i’m sure there’s more that could be said here but that’s what comes to mind ^-^

[sabaramonds]

the intimacy of possession: a glimpse into hyde-brand formative yaoi

hello, everyone! i mentioned once or twice here on tumblr and several times over on twitter, but my good friend @tshirt3000​ organized a zine among its friends with the topic being yaoi. specifically, formative or otherwise largely influential yaoi in our lives or what yaoi means to us. a few topics came to mind when this was presented before me. one of those topics was murder or violence as a love language and the overlap between joshneku (twewy) and akeshu (p5). however i would have had to replay both games because its been so long and i didnt have the time; luckily someone else discussed joshneku (which made me super happy to see) so thats another essay for another day. instead i ended up writing about - you guessed it - possession, and not of the material kind. in my entry i discuss how i view it and use several ships that impacted me greatly enough to definitely qualify as ‘formative yaoi’. the following will contain spoilers for: yu gi oh (the manga), kagerou project (the light novels), and season 1 of the kekkai sensen/blood blockade battlefront anime adaption. you can find the full zine, all 81 pages of it!, over here. the digital pdf is free to read, so please enjoy it at your leisure. so, lets talk about possession

there is an unavoidable intimacy in possession. no matter the circumstances, no matter how the characters feel about one another on a personal level, there is an intimacy that simply cannot be denied. no matter how hard you try to maintain a distance between you and the one you share a body with, there is an inevitable overlap, a bleedover of information, of self. who else could ever know you as well as the one who has cradled your soul, your mind, your heart, within their own vessel; who else could ever know you as well as the one who fit themself within your body, within your heart, as if it were their home? CASE ONE: TENDERSHIPPING. in YGO, ryou and his spirit, the thief king, are not often shown together despite acting as narrative foils for yugi and his spirit atem. in fact ryou is scarcely shown at all: he fades into the background like a ghost more often than not and we are very rarely afforded a glimpse into his life outside of his introductory arc, at least in the manga. we know he is socially isolated from both friends and family: he has himself and his dioramas and his ghost. so i think his possession would be a relief for him; instead of having no one, he always has someone, even if that someone is zorc-pilled, prone to violence, and repeatedly puts him in dangerous situations.

unlike yugi, ryou, is for the most part cut off from his spirit. they do not visit each other in their soul rooms; the thief king actively excludes ryou from his plans despite piloting his body to achieve his goals. and yet, towards the end, it is ryou who constructs a diorama at the thief king’s behest as the battleground for his revenge plot against atem. this must have required extensive communication, with the level of detail it had. i imagine ryou glad to grasp the opportunity to know the one who has haunted him all these years, both hurting and protecting him, especially knowing with confidence that yugi and his friends have defeated the king of thieves once before and that they could surely do so again. after all, if he was bothered by the thief king's anything, he wouldnt have stolen the ring back from yugi after it was taken from him in the wake of battle city. the thief king is HIS shitty roommate from hell to evict if he so chooses!! there is also, of course, the thief king: one who hurts more than he helps, one who cannot care for ryou the way he might have if it werent for his zorcpilled grief and thousands of years of a festering grudge to fuel him.

he manages to care anyway; there was no reason for him to trap the soul of a teacher who had harassed ryou in a figurine, or to keep ryou alive during the battle city arc, either, when it risked his working relationship with malik. its hard not to care for the boy whose body you have lived in for years, no matter how zorcpilled you are; a boy who you have been alone together with for a long, long time; a boy who does not forgive you for the way you hurt him but keeps letting you in anyway. we dont get to see any resolution between them, by the way. at the end of it all, when yugi is saying goodbye to the spirit of his puzzle and the millennium items are being taken away for good, there is nothing for ryou and the ghost who has been with him since childhood; the ghost who has been, for the most part, the only company hes kept for many years. i like to think that at the end of it all, de-zorc’d, the thief king might have let ryou in the way ryou has always let him in. just once, just for a moment. an honest goodbye. we dont know, though. i guess thats typical of ryou and his thief king. we never get to see them during such private, pivotal moments. CASE TWO: HARUKA, KONOHA, AND THE SNAKE OF CLEARING EYES. kokonose haruka has known he was going to die for at least six years by the time shintaro, the protagonist, meets him; by the time the story itself begins in volume one, he is already two years gone.

kagerou project, the series he’s from, contains the daze: a world which ‘devours’ pairs of people close to death. to help them survive, its creator began to give some of these people parts of herself and her power, via her snakes. a caveat: the power given has to suit the human. can you guess what harukas most earnest wish might have been? this is how konoha was born. konoha was not a person, not at first; he had been harukas oc for a video game he played with his classmate and friend, takane. he was harukas idealized self: not only healthy but inhumanly strong and capable of being of use to those he cared for. konoha is who and what haruka was meant to be, yet haruka, who rejected this body, was stuck within the daze, in an endless white room and his hospital bed, only able to see the outside world in glimpses of konoha’s eyes.

he resents konoha. konoha is living a life that was meant to be his—although that, too, is a life haruka was not meant to have. hes always been on borrowed time.

konoha, himself instead possessed by a fragment of the daze’s creator’s power in the absence of haruka, is barely aware of haruka beyond his understanding that he resembles someone his friends have lost. 

the snake of clearing eyes is a parasitic entity constantly recreating a series of events that will lead to him being able to possess a physical vessel, however briefly, before one of the other protagonists—mary—forces time itself to loop back several years in a fit of grief over those she has lost. he’s the one who actually created konoha, having secretly been the one to meet haruka instead of the daze’s creator. he finds konoha convenient and ultimately takes him over, having told haruka when he created the body, “i am very glad this was your wish for me [...] if you do not wish for anything, i cannot ‘fulfill’ anything.” it’s only in the act of fulfilling the most ardent wishes of others that he is capable of action, and only then: only when he is doing what others beg of him. so he spends timeloop after timeloop brutally murdering a bunch of teenagers to get the perfect body for himself, even knowing mary will, in her grief, rewind time itself. and then he does it all again.  so much work. years and years of effort expended over and over again in loop after loop—just for a taste. is it worth it? we know after the series ends, haruka is alive. but it begs the question of how he lives. i like to think he took the snake of clearing eyes into his actual flesh and blood body to act as that substitute life. but why do i find that so compelling? because he sees himself in the snake of clearing eyes. kokonose haruka is a boy who has always known he was going to die no matter how desperately he wished otherwise. if he resents konoha for living, it stands to reason that he would empathize with the snake of clearing eyes, so desperate for a life of his own, even if the rest of those around them would not think the same. he can give the snake of clearing eyes a lifetime to live. his own lifetime, shared, and maybe that could be enough to satisfy him. i think the snake of clearing eyes would hate him for this kindness. a shared lifetime that isnt on a timer that leads inevitably to repeating the same several years, again and again: a gift he does not deserve and did not ask for. its a punishment as much as it is a gift, anyway, given that it isnt truly a life that is the snake of clearing eyes alone. i think thats funny as hell. CASE THREE: THE KING OF DESPAIR AND WILLIAM “BLACK” MACBETH. kekkai sensen takes place in the city of hellsalems lot (fka new york city) in a world after an apocalyptic event called “the collapse.” 

now let me talk about william ‘black’ macbeth. black spends his whole life repressing his immense power both because his twin sister mary ‘white’ macbeth was born without it and because hes afraid of it. during the collapse, his parents give up their lives to turn his sister into a piece of the barrier that keeps the effects of the collapse from spreading, and he embraces despair both literally and metaphorically. the king of despair is…well, nobody really knows who or what he is, but where the thief kings motives were rooted in grief and vengeance and the snake of clearing eyes motives laid in a desire to live, the king of despair wants one thing: to die. towards the end of episode 11, he monologues: “...how fragile a thing eternal life is, a fate of endless wandering; without death in mind one cannot be said to be truly alive. and so, forgotten by death, the despair that i am shall at least take my foolishness to bed with me.” he says this very dramatically on a live broadcast to the entirety of hellsalems lot by the way. right as he kickstarts the collapse 2: electric boogaloo! it is uncertain who or what the king of despair is, but we know hes been ‘a silent observer’ since ‘rome’. prior to meeting black, he was a shapeless fracture of blue light, having presumably lost his physical body in one of his many previous suicide attempts. guy really just wants to die. im especially fond of him because despite his behavior, he is actually the sort of guy who cares a whole lot about other people, specifically at the very least, black. during their fight in the season finale, another character says: “as long as you crave the light, you cannot kill him. It is precisely because you desire hope that you sought him out, is it not?” the him, of course, is black.

this enrages despair. despite that, despair does eventually admit—in a breathless, wavering voice—that actually, he had not taken blacks body by force. “you came to rescue him from me, but i didnt take him by force. he welcomed me.” top 10 most haunting lines in all of anime. to me. the tenderness in his expression, in his voice, the raw ache of it: and then, when the protagonist leo arrives with white, the fear and hope. black wants to live, despair wants to die, and even if despair didnt want to kill black alongside himself he was willing to do it. he doesnt, of course. its not the right choice. but despair wants to die and black wants to live, so until despair stops trying to kill them both, hes got to leave.

ive talked a whole lot about these ships now. whats their common denominator? I’d have to say the friction in each relationship. theres something so incredibly gripping to me about two (or, um, three if we count the haruka situation?) fundamentally different people (or entities) sharing a body. the thief king and his millennia of grief and rage, worsened by zorcs proximity. ryou and his passive detachment from himself,  his relief at knowing someone will always, always be with him: he is not as alone as he thought. the snake of clearing eyes and who knows how many centuries or millennia spent desperate for a life of his own, grasping for it no matter what the cost, no matter how repetitive. haruka and a lifetime spent knowing he was living on borrowed time, that he would die young just like his mother—younger even than she had. konoha, caught between them, a vessel of both hope and rejection. the king of despair and his yearning for death. for that final, eternal sleep. caring despite himself, hesitating in the face of the young man who had welcomed despair into himself. black and a lifetime of repressing himself and fearing everything, but mainly his own power—but not despair. not really. so i want to ask everyone who read this a question. do you think its gay to possess someone and be possessed in turn?

[yandere-monoma]

WHOOO KYM 2 COMMENTARY while i stall on working on kym 7

lots to discuss about a chapter literally called 'the exposition' hjgkfsg. if you didnt know, the way ao3 multichap updates works is that you dont necessarily have to title a oneshot chapter but the second you update it, you really get shown the option to title your chapters. so it didnt actually occur to me that i needed names for each one until chapter 2. i believe originally i was going to use a similar system as kyd where every chapter title was a command a la homestuck. however, i wasn't really utilizing the commands in the same way, i didn't really end the previous chapter with one and the plan for the next chapter... technically involves a command but not one i wanted to spoil via the chapter title.

the current naming system came into existence probably 3/4s of the way or more into writing this chapter, once i made the realization that the fic was, in fact, going to be at least five chapters. at this point in time, the plan was the following: the introduction, the exposition, the climax, the ending, the epilogue. this changed even more as time went on and more chapter ideas rudely crammed themselves into my brain, though it helped the structure a lot, because giving me time to fill out the space between exposition and climax made my brain happy HJSKFG

so, moving on, the fun part about chap 2 is that it really establishes the 'narration' as its own living function, something that is vaguely independent of the story rather than just a tool to present the story with, that both voices the author's and the character's thoughts depending on who is grabbing for control. this isn't an aspect i planned when outlining the fic but it's definitely influenced by 1) how much fun i had reading the epilogues and subsequent epilogue flavored fics 2) my desire to find some way to one-up the first chapter despite the topic matter not being nearly as extreme 3) the impulse to add in another experimental element to the story, especially now that the more abstract and poetic style of the first chapter was being removed

it's also incredibly fun to play with, because every time i struggled with describing something or wondered how i could transition from one point to the other, i realized - oh! i can just make the narrator state that very thing. don't know how i'm gonna build up from the end of chap 1 to the narrative goal of chap 2 (rose's mkultra moment)??? let's just get that all out in the open, then! problem SOLVED

it ended up being a hugely fun choice that allowed me to inject some humor into what's otherwise just a big ole pile o' unrelenting angst. it also helped me take myself less seriously, which lent me even more creative freedom than usual, like. GOD. it really helped turn this piece into something so rewarding, it overwhelms me. goddamnit homestuck why do you have to be so good

i just rewatched butterfly effect recently, god. back to the future i've never seen though. time references haha get it cuz his aspect is still time-

speaking of time, this chapter was the first attempt to really try and describe a zeta kid's classpect without coming out and stating it. there's a few interpretations of different phenomena's in homestuck that point out the implication of classpect powers being active before reaching god tier, or even before entering the game (though, usually in a way that is incredibly weak, premature and subtle enough to be missed by the user). one of the strongest examples that i based this chapter on was something the epilogues described: the idea that rose's obsessive writing as a child was based on her light powers feeding her vague visions of her future character arcs and plotlines. i really loved that and wanted a similar sort of plight for dave. i'll go off about what his specific title is at the end of this chapter but it's really fun poking at it now and then

the multiple narrators? seriously??? bit was me realizing i had to add a Multiple Narrators tag on ao3 after this. at this point of writing, i had no idea if i would be visiting anyone else's pov besides dave's, though.

attempt at homestuckian humor GO

™️ jokes are so funny to me for no reason

wink wink hint hint this is one of dave's powers at work, actually!! so, dave egbert actually has a perfect memory. like, there is not a single thing he's ever forgotten in his life, if he's experienced it, he can recollect that knowledge. this power also extends to the imaginary, the subconscious, and the supernatural, ie: in the event that dave experiences any visions of the future, he will retain that information. likewise, he has memories of every dream and nightmare he's ever had. which is fun because considering he's a dersite and also a time player and also dave, he has a lot of them HAHA. more on that later

The two of you had hit it off instantly despite this, like you had known each other your entire lives, like any and every other relationship that had come before it had merely been a warm-up for the monumental connection that would spark instantly between you both. ... You’re pretty convinced she’s your soulmate. If not that, you’re at least assured by the fact that you’re absolutely head over heels in love with her.

sentences i had so much fun writing knowing how badly it's going to mess dave up to learn that they're actually related HA HA

Especially at the start, Rose was mysterious and she was hilarious and she was overwhelming, the brightest thing you’ve ever had the fortune of witnessing. 

get it because she's a hero of light get it she's the light of his life because shes a hero of light get it get it she's mysterious because her class mimics its opposite at the beginning of the story so everything about her pre-canon arc clings to void but she!! is bright! like light haha get i- 💥

see, reading sentences like this means i HAVE to at least write enough of their session to let dave both die and kill for his rose, like

also i need to write her killing and dying for him. well. killing for him. well.

killing.

perhaps just killing him. HAHAHA.

it is very fun to think about this because rose honestly just. does not talk about her relationship with dave much outside of mentioning that they're together. her narrative is so focused on the things that she wants the audience to focus on, so this was such a fun chapter to reveal the things she decided isn't important enough to ever let us in on.

like, she is so adamant that bro is the only important person in her life and the only person she loves, but she deeply cares about dave. she feels the same way, that they're connected in this way she can't pinpoint or name. and claiming him is exactly the right way to put it, because i don't think she knows how to acknowledge those emotions in herself, but she knows that she needs him with her always and wants him entrapped in a way where he can't get away from her.

i think rose is just incredibly attracted to what dave represents: safety, normalcy, the mundane, a reprieve from pain, but there are things about him that she just inherently gets. he's an outsider despite how much he attempts to fit in and i think there's something about that she relates to but also wants so badly to destroy and keep for herself.

also, this is a thing that belongs more in hcs than in kym specifically, especially because i imagine this taking place way earlier in their relationship, but bro absolutely knows about her relationship with dave. it isn't a secret. it's a thing that amuses him greatly. i actually imagine she shares a lot of details about him to bro, like allowing him this voyeuristic entertainment because dave isn't a threat to him, not really, and she shares every single one of her belongings with him.

in a perfectly pornographic world the two of them would spitroast the fuck out of him but this is a partially pornographic world that involves a meaningful plotline or whatever 🙄 smh

siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

this part was incredibly hard to write. not because it was difficult or emotionally taxing but because i reached this unfortunate impasse i find myself at every now and then while writing a lot of darkfic where i struggle with... it's not exactly the impulse to project, necessarily, more just.... feeling forced through into inevitability of it? or maybe it's the reluctance to use personal experiences vs the knowledge that doing it can benefit your writing (but also can hamper it).

like, very hard to write about a self-destructive teenager with violent tendencies without being reminded of the time when you were a self-destructive teenager with violent tendencies.

that reluctance is born from a rant i'm definitely not gonna get into unprompted but i'll just say that it definitely complicated things HAHAHA. i've definitely gone through a 'i'm going through a psychotic break and i'm going to ramble out 7835963463 crazy things into this dm window because the person on the other side said i could' phase. i've definitely just. been insane and vomited so many words out and ngl for a second there in the final draft when i was feeling too lazy to get into Stream Of Consciousness mode i was very tempted to dig up an old vent post and copypaste those thoughts in for rose but ultimately i thought that was disingenuous and a betrayal of her character SO

a fun but unexpected surprise was rose sounding far more like herself during her drugged moments of honesty. it's especially fun because even in the future when she doesn't have access to any sort of drugs or contact with bro anymore, i don't think she'll sound this much like rose lalonde either. it's like in her desperate search to find more of her brother, she's really just found a core part of herself that she doesn't have access to in this universe

'Is there a mechanical soul within me?' there is and his name is hal hi hal

it is actually incredibly fun playing with typing quirk punctuation. it's actually a style i utilized a lot in chatroom roleplay groups yeaaaaaaaaaars after homestuck ended, very much inspired by tumblr ventblogging typing styles, crytyping and all that. the idea that someone's mental state can and should be reflected in their typing style, which is something you really only see in canon in a character like gamzee (i cant remember if other trolls drop the quirk in times of duress in canon??? i think karkat drops his as a joke about volume sometimes but that's it). i don't even know if it even really comes across as blatantly as it feels when i write it, but it's so fun to see the consistencies in a way a character types slowly but surely fall apart as they grow unstable

so the way this is designed, it's as if rose had a moment of finally being in touch with the core of herself, with what ultimately makes her rose (complete with proper punctuation), before slowly but surely lapsing back into ro-stri as she loses her punctuation piece by piece, and then ultimately devolving even more as she abandons her capitalization to type in a way that's reminiscent of dave but, more importantly, bro's typing quirk

'I think there are lives inside me/the life inside me is his' is so funny to look at in hindsight. this chapter was halfway finished before the pregnancy plot had even come into being, and this was only ever supposed to be a reference to the identity blurring she's experiencing, and this half-truth, half-delusion about being able to sense everything lil cal has injected into her and her brother. it is so STRANGE to reread it now knowing that it's become foreshadowing to her pregnancy, especially with that next sentiment following it:

'Sometimes I wish it was yours'. again, that idea of being soulmates, being connected with someone permanently. and, again, that idea of codependency, and rose being unable to express or understand love without that need to merge herself with the object of her affection. and again this was befORE the pregnancy plot was a thing so now every time i read this line i sit here hoping people dont interpret it as rose wanting dave's baby HGJFKGSGSG i swear im not into breeding i sWEAR

🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺😭😭😭😭😭😭

DAVE IS SO CUTE I ALWAYS DIE REREADING THAT PART HE'S SO CUUUTE

also i struggle so SO much writing comfort scenes especially dialogue meant to comfort someone but this came out so easily. perhaps because it's a futile attempt and i didn't have to worry about the recipient of that comfort actually feeling soothed...? hmmm!

i have nothing to add to the romantic cannibalism confession besides :3c

i don't actually reread this chapter all that often anymore so finding this paragraph was lovely damn shoutout to this sentence that made me choke on my water as i was reading it cuz i was so distracted by how much i didnt remember writing this that i forgot to swallow and my drink just slid down into my lugnshjskdfg

then it is a series of letters in a language you wonder if she’s made up, that is somehow so cohesive in its chaos that you start to doubt even that. 

more horrorterror references as if the literal last paragraph wasn't enough HAHA

a very fun part of designing and outlining the killswitch au is deciding who gets what plotline. for example, does rose strider get to go grimdark because she's rose? or does jade lalonde get to go grimdark because she's the lalonde with library access to the grimoire? unlike the characterization formula, there isn't an easy answer to this one. i'm mostly just going with what's more fun narratively and what makes a better and more cohesive storyline for the verse.

either way, though, ro-stri still has a connection with the horrorterrors, simply because she's a dersite and because i love a character that is so utterly doomed that every evil force on the face of the planet wants to take a turn on them. what's better than this... getting psychologically gangbanged by every demon in existence...

DID YOU KNOW I AM SO VERY FOND OF DAVE EGBERT AND HIS LOVELY PAPA WHO LOVES HIM SO MUCH

i am also so very fond of a dave egbert who cries alone in front of his computer cuz his girlfriend makes him so very sad every night like poor baby does Not Sleep and its so cute gjkgs

'its just prose' annoys the shit out of me to see because i wrote a similar line in a published piece of writing a couple of years ago so i can't reread this without being reminded of That hgjfkg

i will never write a strider rap i have the highest respect for any author who can but it'll never be me

their dynamic kills me HJKGFGKGS peak toxic romance right here god i wish i could write even more of it... i need to write more daverose so fucking bad....

a fun line because 1) i rly enjoy dave's half-forced half-genuine emotional voyeurism it's just a rly interesting aspect of his personality to write and 2) it's fun to have a moment with dave e's specific brand of humor since it's not as long-winded as a strider's would be

i rly forgot so much of this chapter HGFKGSGS oh dave... i love you... i love writing you so much...

stream-of-consciousness style writing is really fun like you get taken to so many unexpected places in the process. generally when i go SoC style i tend to have a few goals i want to land and this image, dave watching over rose in derse, was one of the big ones

ALSO THE IRONY OF DAVE CALLING HIMSELF HER PRINCE WHEN SHE IS ACTUALLY THE PRINCE OF THE SESSION HEHEHEHEHE

the lil cal staring contest is also another big one. it's just such a fun image to allude to like goddamnit i wish i could draw. it feels like an image that i can't even really describe properly what i want it to mean because it explains itself and there's not much minutia to pry free, it's just. them. rose inexplicably and perpetually being drowned in this cancerous evil at a rate that not even dave strider got to experience.

lmfao shout out to me explaining his memory power earlier forgetting that i explain it in the chapter HJSKFG

oh well NOW I GET TO ACTUALLY DISCUSS HIS CLASSPECT

so dave egbert issssss....

🥁 [drumroll] 🥁

the MAGE OF TIME!!!!

and changing classpects actually did something incredibly interesting to the story. killswitch never would have worked as a simple homestuck rewrite, because i dont think swapping the guardians is something that can ever be simple. so it didnt make sense to keep their classpects exactly the same, because they wouldn't have the same personalities or the same backgrounds to craft those personalities, or the same issues that were born of their uniquely shitty backgrounds. it also didnt feel as easy as making rose a knight of light and dave an heir of time, etc etc. like, while rose is not insecure in the classic way that knights should be (it can be argued that the 'i am my brother' facade can count towards knighthood... but her role in the story and what it will turn into once she joins the game definitely brands her a prince through and through)

through researching for killswitch i ended up coming to this conclusion about sburb and how i approach classpect and hs narratives in general:

and because of that, it was super easy to reassign everyone based on what they've been turned into through the switch in their roles.

it also made for another easy characterization formula: their aspect represents their 'nature' while their class represents their 'nurture'. so all the zeta kids still belong to the same aspect while their class changes rapidly, though how close or how far it is from their original class really depends on their character

anyway, mage of time is an incredibly fun role that actually breaks the rewrite narrative almost more than rose's classpect does. as the mage of time, dave actually steals the cryptic psychic role from jade and john harley (though, i do have thoughts on that matter, because there is still going to be a benefit for them from having access to prospit, and that plotline will still be involved in some capacity... probably).

and it's a very fun, partially accidental discovery within the au that the zeta kids are all... just a tad more prepared to enter sburb than their predecessors. rose is completely aware of the fact that she's training for something specific and dave... dave knows that the game is coming. he doesn't know the specifics, he doesn't know that it's sburb specifically that will bring them all together, but he knows there's an it, he knows the day he'll meet all his friends in person will be a day for the history books, and he knows that rose is in danger and that he'll be able to help her in a way no one else can.

some mage of time thoughts, many of which inspired and/or describe dave egbert's storyline:

source

source

source

the above was probably one of the first interpretations i read and really what solidified him as a mage, my initial thoughts to his classpect and how it interacts with rose's was the following:

and it's just so fun GOD rly hope i get to write in his perspective more in the future

haha yeah if we ever get to it yEAH if i ever get off my ass and actually finish writing this wholeass au which i nEVER WILL CUZ I DONT WANNA WRITE 500K WORDS GODDDD IM NEVER WRITING A HOMESTUCK AU AGAAAAIINNNN

[ignis-avis]

Shadow Work - The Basics

Shadow work is something fantastic and I wish more people did it!

The name ‘shadow work’ is one that I used to find quite mysterious and a little off putting. However, it’s just a lunar metaphor: the light side of the moon is your conscious mind and the dark side of the moon is your unconscious mind in the metaphor. The unconscious or the shadow can hold lots of old wounds, some of which may not have healed.

Shadow work is the process of working through these old wounds and starting to heal them. 

Now some people may be thinking ‘well why do I need to do that?’ And the answer is because our shadow self can sometimes hold us back in ways we don’t realise. You could be self-sabotaging a spell because of something in your shadow. For example, if you had a nasty breakup with an ex and you’re trying to get back out there but are still scared of getting hurt, you could be unconsciously sabotaging your own love attraction spell. Also, shadow work is basically self therapy and I personally think is a fantastic process to help you learn about yourself and grow as a person.

I’ll run through the process below, I will write the process as if you are doing the shadow work alone and are journaling the process, if you are doing it with someone else then ignore the journaling references and discuss it rather than write about it.

Noticing

The first step in this requires some self awareness and mindfulness. We have to notice when an old wound has been triggered. This can often present as having a strong emotional reaction to something and thinking ‘this is a stronger reaction than most people would have’. (An example from me is when I die in a video game in front of my partner I am instantly embarrassed/ashamed and want him to take over but if I am playing alone I have no emotional reaction other than mild irritation, this stems from an ex being very unkind to me when we were gaming together.) A big part of this is also kind noticing, not criticising ourself for over reacting but just noticing and taking note that it’s something to think about later when in a safe space.

Safe Space

There is no right or wrong way to make a safe space for yourself, it could be in your bed and wrapped up in the duvet or it could be at your altar with a protection candle burning and chamomile tea at your side or it could be in a therapy session. But it is essential that the space you are setting up feels safe.

The Trigger

When in your safe space with your journal out, think about what triggered the strong emotional reaction. Write about it, what was happening, when did you start to feel strongly about the situation? Put as much or as little detail as you feel you need to in this section. It may be that you know exactly what has caused the reaction or it may be that you need to describe and think about the whole situation for a while to find out what was the trigger. (In my video game example I didnt want to play games together for a while because I just associated it with not feeling great but after a while realised that I felt fine up until I died in the game.)

Honour Your Feelings

Dont hold back. How did it make you feel? Remember that you are in a safe and kind space, you will not be judged for how you feel here. Your feelings and experiences are valid, you dont need to bottle them up or push them down. Let them out into the safety of your journal. Sometimes something may even be so strong it creates a physical feeling in you like being cold or nauseous, write this down too.

Sometimes we invalidate our feelings because we know we are over-reacting to the situation but your feelings are valid, they come from experiences that made you feel that way and this trigger has reminded you of that.

Find the Cause

Jot down possible causes or feelings or roots, you’ll know when you’re getting close. When you start to find the cause then take a deep breath, making sure that you’re grounded, and then begin to explore the old wound. Dig deep and write down everything you can remember about it, beginning to end. This bit can be really hard and it’s okay to let your feelings out: cry it out, scream (if it wont make your neighbours worry for your safety), whatever method works for you.

Heal

Shadow work is not about wallowing in misery but about healing, this can be as simple as changing the narrative and the way you view the old hurtful event to a more constructive view. This could be seeing it objectively or not blaming yourself for something that isnt your fault. (In my video game example I changed the narrative from “I’m so awful at video games, I die all the time and ex has to take over all the time because he’s helping me out and doing me a favour” to “My ex kept putting me down whenever I died and pressuring me to let them take over. That wasnt okay. Video games are supposed to be fun, not about who’s best. My ex is no longer in my life and I can enjoy games with my partner now without being belittled.”) Do this about the cause and then work back up to the trigger.

[edge-lorde]

hp update: so i did 2 more chapters and am in the middle of the much awaited dating time sensitive event!

1st ill skim the chapters for you... they were still pretty spoiler heavy so i wont say too much. 

so basically ben is broken now... something broke within him and no he fears not god nor man nor death. im sure it will pan out fine. 

i am officially friends with merula now.. still cant do minigames with her but thats gotta be coming.

i noticed that the DADA classroom is locked again. 👀 theres a good chance that that class is just gone now....

also noticed that a new location has been added to the stairs menu! “the black lake” get ready for some fuckin merm adventures boys....

im sure there were some other tidbits but thats what i can remember. now for the main event: teen dating.

in this event the plot is already decided. you DO have a crush and DO write a note to said person that says do you like me y/n and snape does read it out loud in class. this feels strange because in most other instances youve been given the option to not like anyone if asked and here thats been taken away. idk if you could have gone stag to the yule ball because i bit the bullet and went with barnaby to get the full 8th grade dance experience they were trying to provide. 

if you dont remember, ive been both intrigued and torn over this much awaited event type, as i want to experience the full game but also have a hard time with dating sims. when tonks and charlie talk about how they dont care about dating i felt a twinge of somber envy... i want to be like you guys... especially charlie because we know he never marries so hes the only one i can really headcannon as asexual though i know it was probably just done for conveniences sake, given that he has very little screen time in the books and is 1 of 6 siblings with futures to worry about. 

but im still interested in seeing this plan out, so i decide to stick with barnaby as my crush as it seemed to make the most narrative sense/ to keep him away from ismelda. 

however, i didnt get the option to choose my crush until pretty far into it. most of the event so far has been getting advice, talking to people, planning the date and my outfit before i even ask the person out... though it wasnt a huge question of whether or not barnaby would say yes, when he finds out i had a crush his response is “if its me you can tell me. we already went to the ball together.” 

i had a brief scare where i thought after all that planning they were just going to force me to have a crush on bill, but they didnt. i did notice that not all of our friends are date able, and not just the verbally confirmed bachelors of tonks, charlie, ben, and rowan. jae, diego, liz, chiara and badeea are also notably absent from the roster, though at least jae, diego, and chiara have been present in the backgrounds a lot. what year does this take place in? i assumed 5 but maybe not. talbott IS date able, and hed be my 2nd choice. 

unrelated, ive been noticing jae and chiara hanging out in the background a lot. i wonder when that subplot is going to come up....

we will just have to see. just like we will have to see about this date. the reward for this date is facial hair/ make-up options. i think thats all were getting in terms of character model updates, folks..... 

[morceauoleander]

its been almost a year since i wrote a post about what i think about August/raz’s relationship. i worded it more like a defensive stance against people who formed extremely negative views of Augustus, n nowadays im not very happy with how i said that. i understand why people have theorized or assumed much more negative things about Augustus based on what we’ve seen in game but i also hope other people feel free enough to form different views as well- a majority of talk here in the community is... majorly headcanon based or theories off of what we have seen, aka expanding the narrative because we only have so much right now. i respect everyone’s ideas on it as we really have yet to confirm any thing for sure. i do hope we find out what is up in PN2 for real though considering we will likely see Raz’s fam.

im going to properly explain my own ideas of how i think Augustus was with Raz and his family! you do not have to agree with my theories and ffs please dont be mean to me if you disagree, im just taking what i see from canon.

SO

ever since I looked over raz’s first vault again, and some people a while back gave their own commentary, this is how i assume Augustus to have been with his family.... I think Augustus is aware of him and other family members (raz, himself, frazie, maybe more) being psychics. I dont think Augustus was abusive to the point of actively telling his family not to ever practice psychic abilities and that he hated them for it (after all we know raz assumes his dad hates him simply because his dad didnt actively encourage these abilities...even tho raz suspected his dad had the powers too)- i think he just....didnt actively indulge any of his family in it. I think he just never wanted to bring it up in detail (possibly because of fear), his kids knew they had abilities but were never actively encouraged to practice them or use them so they generally didnt- instead they just did their family circus thing. And i think because of their travelling circus life style, they never actively heard or learned about “psychonauts” and whatnot and thus none of this family would ever think more about psychics outside of their little powers- that is until Raz came across it. Of course he was enamored to find that people actually did all this cool stuff with their abilities. 

Now this is where Raz’s first vault comes into play. Raz seems to have left the day he got this pamphlet and his dad tore it up.... it may not seem major but i think looking at his family’s expressions in the background is kinda important and kinda led me to some ideas

with the face’s of his family in the background, it makes me think they didnt expect that??

considering the short time span of these events (getting the article, his dad seeing it and ripping it up, raz leaving) and the reactions in the background, i think this burst of anger from his dad was not long term and was definitely new to everyone

The big problem imo with what we are presented is a lot of what we hear are clearly assumptions Raz has made after running away practically night-of, about his dad. When his dad appears it seems there was some miscommunication, right? His dad certainly didnt seem as mean as in Raz’s mind when he gets to him in real life.... and his dad doesnt seem to hate Raz for his powers, in fact his dad has powers too! So is this correct...? Are they just hiding deeper abuse..? Well, i dont think what the game shows us is wrong exactly, i think we are seeing some rash assumptions Raz is making about his father. I also don’t think Augustus hates Raz the way we are led to believe by Raz for a majority of the game. Honestly, I think it was just some impulsive reactions on Raz and Augustus’s end- Augustus was irrationally angry and tore up Raz’s dreams right in front of him without finding time explaining further, he could’ve talked it out instead and risked less in the end. Raz ran away because he was upset, and he didn’t stop to say anything because his dad failed to take a moment either.... I dont think Augustus was actively that mean before hand though- i dont think there was “abuse” that was long term exactly- i think because Raz never being opened up to anything psychic related made Raz not trust his dad however. His dad did not give enough positive reassurance to Raz that he wouldnt be mad that Raz wanted to be a Psychic. I think a lot of it was left so vague to Raz he didnt think his dad would react that way ever. 

dont take this as me saying “both are in the wrong!” - no no. raz IS a kid, augustus is an adult. it is fully Augustus’s fault for not telling Raz that he didnt actually hate him for his powers- rather he was probably more afraid because of the Galachios and what they did and that putting himself out there as a psychic could get him into a lot of danger. but my conclusion is that Augustus was abusive in a long term sense- rather his family never actively went into their psychic abilities after they were cursed. just never even spoke of it, did everything to not mention psychics in their family- but that led to raz never realizing his dad (or mom) had any fears or issues related to psychics, thus leading Raz and Augustus into that issue when Raz wanted to be a psychonaut.

(we dont know when that happened- i want to assume it happened to them all at a very early point, maybe before the kids were all born or old enough to know about it, so their parents just kept psychic stuff on the down-low ever since)

[asknightqueendany]

The Big Five (Bran, Arya, Jon, Dany, Tyrion) who will survive is only something that George R. R. Martin wrote in a letter about the upcoming series in 199-fucking-3. It was supposed to be a trilogy. There was supposed to be a love triangle between Tyrion, Arya and Jon. Also dany wasn’t supposed to have dragons in that outline so STOP using the big 5 to justify that Sansa isn’t an important character! It’s getting old and transparent.

I’m cracking up. Have you people even READ the original outline? No? I highly suggest you check it out before sending me asks on it again. You can see the original photos and transcribed texts HERE.

But let’s go through it because it’s a glorious Friday afternoon and I feel like taking some people down a notch.

The things I seem most about GRRM’s original outline as reasons why it shouldn’t be taken seriously are: 1) it was supposed to be a trilogy and 2) there was supposed to be a love triangle between Jon, Arya, and Tyrion. I don’t know where you got the whole, “Dany wasn’t supposed to have dragons” thing anon because according to the outline, there be dragons:

.

But let’s take a look at the letter. George states, “There are three major conflicts set in motion in the chapters enclosed. These will form the major plot threads of the trilogy, intertwining each other in what should be a complex but exciting (I hope) narrative tapestry. Each of the conflicts presents a major threat to the peace of my imaginary realm, the Seven Kingdoms, and to the lives of my principal characters.”

The first threat, George says, is the Lannister/Stark conflict.

The second threat is the Dothraki invasion, led by Daenerys in what George thought would be his second novel - A Dance With Dragons.

And the Third and final threat to Westeros would be the Others in his presumed last novel - The Winds of Winter.

Now, right off the bat, George has already used all the book titles, with TWOW in progress. On the show, we’ve already seen the play out and conclusion of the Lannister/Stark war. Daenerys/Dothraki invasion of Westeros has happened in the show. And the Others had begun invading the Seven Kingdoms at the end of Season 7.

So all of what George first said has come to pass, just eight seasons and seven books, not a trilogy.

In AGOT, things George said would happen was that Ned and Cat were doomed (✓), things for the Starks would get worse before they got better (✓), Ned would find out what happened to Jon Arryn (✓), Robert would have an accident and the throne would pass to Joffrey (✓), Ned would be accused of treason (✓), and Ned would help Arya and Catelyn escape to Winterfell (did not happen). HOWEVER - Cat never needed escaping from King’s Landing AND Arya did escape King’s Landing after Ned’s beheading - she just didn’t receive help from him.

George says of Sansa: she will wed Joffrey (no) and bear him a son (no), “and when the crunch comes she will choose her husband and child over her parents and siblings, a choice she will later bitterly rue” (✓ - Sansa DOES choose Joffrey over her family in the Riverlands and then again in King’s Landing by going behind Ned’s back to tell Cersei of his plan to send them back to Winterfell and willingly volunteers to write the letter to Robb so that she can still marry Joffrey (not because Cersei made her write it, she did it for Joffrey). Tyrion befriends Sansa (✓) and Arya (no) and becomes disillusioned with his own family (✓).

I’m just going to quote the whole letter from now on because I’m too lazy to type…

“Young Bran will come out of his coma (✓), after a strange prophetic dream (✓), only to discover that he will never walk again (✓). He will turn to magic, at first in the hope of restoring his legs, but later for its own sake (✓). When his father Eddard Stark is executed, Bran will see the shape of doom descending on all of them, but nothing he can say will stop his brother Robb from calling the banners in rebellion (✓) . All the north will be inflamed by war (✓). Robb will win several splendid victories (✓), and maim Joffrey Baratheon on the battlefield (no), but in the end he will not be able to stand against Jaime and Tyrion Lannister and their allies. Robb Stark will die in battle (no), and Tyrion Lannister will besiege and burn Winterfell (no - kinda).” - Winterfell does get besieged and burned, only not by Tyrion, by Theon and Ramsay. And of course, Robb will die during his war against the Lannisters, just not in battle.

“Jon Snow, the bastard, will remain in the far north (✓). He will mature into a ranger of great daring (✓ - kinda), and ultimately will succeed his uncle as the commander of the Night’s Watch(✓ - kinda). When Winterfell burns, Catelyn Stark will be forced to flee north with her son Bran and her daughter Arya (no - kinda). Wounded by Lannister riders, they will seek refuge at the Wall, but the men of the Night’s Watch give up their families when they take the black, and Jon and Benjen will not be able to help, to Jon’s anguish (no). It will lead to a bitter estrangement between Jon and Bran (no). Arya will be more forgiving … until she realizes, with terror, that she has fallen in love with Jon, who is not only her half-brother but a man of the Night’s Watch, sworn to celibacy (no - kinda). Their passion will continue to torment Jon and Arya throughout the trilogy, until the secret of Jon’s true parentage is finally revealed in the last book (no - kinda).” - though Jon isn’t a ranger, he goes on a ranging and is pretty daring. He does become LC but not succeeding Benjen, succeeding Mormont. Bran does flee to the Wall, but to go beyond it. Arya tries to flee North/to the Wall but doesn’t make it. Jon is tormented by a love because of his NW vows of celibacy - Ygritte - and does develop feelings for his kin - Daenerys.

“Abandoned by the Night’s Watch, Catelyn and her children will find their only hope of safety lies even further north, beyond the Wall (no - kinda), where they fall into the hands of Mance Rayder, the King-beyond-the-Wall, and get a dreadful glimpse of the inhuman others as they attack the wildling encampment (no - kinda). Bran’s magic, Arya’s sword Needle, and the savagery of their direwolves will help them survive, but their mother Catelyn will die at the hands of the others (no - kinda).” - as stated, Bran does go beyond the Wall, Jon is the one who falls into the hands of Mance Rayder, Jon does get a glimpse of an Other attack on a wildling encampment (Hardhome), and Bran’s magic and direwolf do save him from the Others (The Door - Hodor).

“Over across the narrow sea, Daenerys Targaryen will discover that her new husband, the Dothraki Khal Drogo, has little interest in invading the Seven Kingdoms, much to her brother’s frustration(✓). When Viserys presses his claims past the point of tact or wisdom, Khal Drogo will finally grow annoyed and kill him out of hand, eliminating the Targaryen pretender and leaving Daenerys as the last of her line (✓). Danerys [sic] will bide her time, but she will not forget (✓). When the moment is right, she will kill her husband (✓) to avenge her brother (no), and then flee with a trusted friend into the wilderness beyond Vaes Dothrak (✓ - kinda). There, hunted by Dothraki bloodriders (✓) [unclear]  of her life, she stumbles on a cach***e of dragon’***s eggs (✓ - kinda) [unclear] of a young dragon will give Daenerys the power to bend the Dothraki to her will (✓). Then she begins to plan for her invasion of the Seven Kingdoms (✓). - Daenerys does wander the wilderness beyond Vaes Dothrak (after she hatches her dragons) with her Khalasar in the Red Waste. She does get dragons eggs, just given to her at her wedding instead of stumbling upon them (really, that’s just better storytelling on George’s part. If she had just randomly found them, it would feel too coincidental). Dany did kill Drogo but not to avenge Viserys; it was to put him out of his misery. Dany does use her powers to bend the Dothraki to her will (burning the Khals to become TSWMTW).

“Tyrion Lannister will continue to travel, to plot, and to play the game of thrones (✓), finally removing his nephew Joffrey in disgust at the boy king’s brutality (no - kinda). Jaime Lannister will follow Joffrey on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms (no - kinda), by the simple expedient of killing everyone ahead of him in the line of succession and blaming his brother Tyrion for the murders (no - kinda). Exiled (✓), Tyrion will change sides (✓), making common cause with the surviving Starks to bring his brother down (✓ - kinda), and falling helplessly in love with Arya Stark (✓ - kinda) while he’s at it. His passion is, alas, unreciprocated (✓ - kinda), but no less intense for that, and it will lead to a deadly rivalry between Tyrion and Jon Snow (yet to be seen).” - Joffrey is killed and Tyrion is accused though he wasn’t guilty. Cersei follows her son to the throne after Tommen’s death (which was her fault so she essentially killed him), Tyrion joins Daenerys to bring down Cersei, he falls in love with Dany (according to all of Peter’s interviews about his feelings for Daenerys), as Dany is in love with Jon, it seems Tyrion’s affections are reciprocated, and we don’t yet know if Tyrion and Jon will fight to the death. It’s possible.

So anon, I’d say so far as George’s predictions go for the entire series, he’s gotten it closer to his original outline than not. So please, for the last goddamn time, leave me alone with this bullshit that the Original outline doesn’t mean anything so far as Sansa’s character and I should stop referring to it. Almost everything George predicted he’d write, has come to pass. Perhaps not how he originally thought…but largely, it’s all happened. 

Wanna know why Sansa’s a “major character” in the show? Look:

And it’s because of Turner’s strength, Benioff continued, that it made sense to give Sansa a dramatic storyline this season and to use Ramsay’s engagement for that very purpose. In fact, the showrunners first thought about putting Sansa and Ramsay together back when they were writing season 2. “We really wanted Sansa to play a major part this season,” Benioff said. “If we were going to stay absolutely faithful to the book, it was going to be very hard to do that.

D&D wanted it. It’s not George’s story or George’s plan. Dan and Dave like Sophie’s acting and wanted her to play a more major role. So they gave her that. It has absolutely nothing to do with the series as a whole or the endgame. Sansa is not a main character and she will matter very little to the endgame.

[kasaneteto]

my thoughts on persona 5

ive had this in my drafts for like a month and i just now finished it so TAKE IT

THIS ISNT SPOILER FREE!!!! so only read this if you’ve finished the game/don’t care about spoilers. im gonna be comparing it a lot to persona 4 (and 2 / 3 to a lesser extent) so if you haven’t played it and dont want spoilers DONT READ THIS!!!!

i went into persona 5 with high expectations. i’ve been a big fan of the entire series for many years, and like everyone else, had been eagerly awaiting the delayed release of the game; and for the most part, i wasn’t let down. there are very few real issues i have with the game, and despite my bias toward persona 4 i can definitely say that this is the best installment in the series so far.

persona 5, much like p4 did with p3, takes the best things from p4 and improves upon them. you can tell that a lot of care went into this game to make it as polished as possible. all of the things that made p4 a great game are present and more. the characters are very fleshed out and diverse, just as in any persona game. the game also does an excellent job in making you feel connected to the characters. when the characters were plagued with anxiety, so was i. when the characters were depressed, so was i. it really made me feel immersed in the world.

the graphics are also obviously an incredible step up from the previous persona games. the game in general is absolutely beautiful. it’s so vibrant in it’s colors and constantly gives the impression of a bustling city environment. not to mention how stylish the UI is. it’s really apparent that the persona team utilized their resources to their full potential in how fluid all the menus are alone. the way loading screens and menu changes transitioned into each other was so stylish that it had me sifting through menus just to watch the animations. over all the art direction for this game has surpassed all other persona games so far. everything is so incredibly polished, from the cutscenes to the normal gameplay. i can only think of two or three occasions in which a texture looked off to me, and that’s mostly me just nitpicking.

i love the concrete theme of the game as well. from the personas to the social links, everything feels as though it ties together under the thief motif. i really loved that every social link fell under the theme of “someone who has been ostracized by society” and how it enforced the idea that the phantom thieves were necessary in this world. the way each social link has a coinciding mementos request made the social aspects of the game feel a lot more connected to the battle aspects, as well as the fact that social links can now grant you special battle abilities. the fact that they added this aspect is one of the best things added to the social link system in my opinion. it gives you more of a reason to try and max a character’s social link if you aren’t particularly interested in the character to begin with. (however, personally, i didn’t find any of the social links in this game to be uninteresting.) the way they incorporate maxed social links into new game+ is incredibly useful as well. it helps make you feel as though you really accomplished something in your previous play, as well as making you feel motivated to finish the things you were unable to last time.

the battle system and the dungeons are LEAGUES better than any previous persona game. the flow of battle is so much more fun; the baton pass ability brings a whole new aspect into battle. that and the ability to easily ambush enemies makes you feel as if youre really in control of your battles and makes it a lot more fun. i also love love love LOVE the battle aspects that they brought back from persona 2. demon negotiation was one of my favorite things about p2 and i was ECSTATIC to learn that they brought it back with p5. not only does it give you the ability to get exactly what you want out of battle, but it makes you really excited to fight new enemies!!! i was always really excited to get into a battle in a new area to see what personas i could recruit. the fact that youre battling the actual personas rather than the same palette-swapped shadows every dungeon is also super cool to me. it made me really excited to see a shadow that i recognized and be all “OH THAT’S SHIKI-OUJI!!!! I NEED THAT GUY!!!!”

dungeon navigation is so much more fun too. i can’t even begin to express how happy i am that they incorporated puzzle elements into the palaces. it made navigating them so much more fun compared to previous games where you just ran around hallways opening doors until you found the stairs. it made every dungeon feel different and unique, and most importantly really fun!! another thing i really appreciated was the ability to switch party members in the middle of a dungeon. it really encouraged you to use every party member rather than just sticking to a select 3 like previous games, in addition to making it a lot easier to keep your teammates balanced and around the same level. i found it really convenient to be able to just switch someone out when they were low on SP compared to having to either leave or use SP recovering items on them. it also made it a lot easier to finish palaces in a single day (if possible).

most of all though, the story telling elements in persona 5 truly live up to the standard set by previous persona games. my god, was the story telling in this game amazing. the foreshadowing was PHENOMENAL. every once in a while i was able to pick up on something small, and then when they pieced all those little things together at the climax HOLY SHIT. i was literally hyperventilating when they flashed back to goro mentioning the pancakes. the part where he first joined the thieves had me second-guessing whether someone else mentioned pancakes in that scene and i was just overthinking it. but when it turned out to be a real thing I WAS SO EXCITED!!!! not to mention the twist of the fucking century with igor being a fake. the entire time the tone of the velvet room felt off compared to the previous games, but it really didn’t become apparent until the true igor returned. once he did, and lavenza became herself again, i seriously almost cried because of how at home i felt in the velvet room. speaking of crying though... this game had me in fuckin tears on so many occasions. the character writing and development is so much. the way it makes you really feel like all the characters are good friends makes me so emotional. it’s such incredible writing, the way it sneaks up on you and before you realize it you’re fighting yaldaboath and you realize how much you love every single character in this game and you don’t want it to end.

now with all that praise out of the way, i do unfortunately have a few qualms with the game as well. 

my firstt issue is how similar the structure of the story is to persona 4. the characters are all quite different, and the environment is drastically different, but the narrative, namely in the latter portion of the game, is strikingly similar to p4. that isn’t necessarily a bad thing per se, p4 is really good and p5 did an excellent job of improving upon something already great, as previously stated. however, due to my familiarity with p4 i was pretty much able to predict how the end of p5 was going to play out, more or less. because of this i actually was convinced that i had to call everyone up again to fight through one more palace on the last day, like with izanami in p4. it’s not the worst thing that they could’ve done, but i guess i just would’ve liked to see them create something a little more different.

now my BIGGEST issue is just a personal thing that im sure not everyone can sympathize with. however, it honestly kind of ruined the end of the game for me. nobody so much as mentions goro after his death. sae brings him up, like, once, and shido talks about him before you fight him, but.. thats it. he wasn’t even in the credits along with everyone else. it honestly broke my fucking heart. it felt like they all forgot about him. goro is my favorite character in the game, so im definitely biased, but still... i would have liked to see them at least bring him up in some of the more climactic moments of the ending, or just had some kind of mention of him other than “he’s missing”. i felt so empty when the game ended. it was a wonderful ending, dont get me wrong. i just... wanted goro to be there. im not saying that he shouldnt have died, (i mean, i would have liked it if he didnt, but it wouldnt have been necessary to make the ending satisfying for me) just that they at least acknowledge him more after his death. idk. maybe im just being nitpicky, but that really dampened the ending for me.

anyways thats it like comment and subscribe thanks

[sfpcschool]

Interview with Computing and Stories Summit presenters

SFPC is hosting the first Computing and Stories Summit on June 1st, 2017. Here's an interview with the organizers and presenters: Amy Wibowo, Jie Qi, Jenna Register, Natalie Freed, Linda Liukas and Taeyoon Choi.

Tell us a little about yourself, how did your interest in computing begin?

Jenna: Little was it known to me that I have been a computer programmer since a very young age. I fell in love with problems like the Towers of Hanoi, Mastermind, and logic puzzles. I found my way into “hacking” my computer games to cheat in some outrageous ways. I even read an entire book on recursion and math… without ever knowing what Computer Science was. When I was required to take my first CS course in college as part of my Brain and Cognitive Sciences degree, I fell in love. I switched everything that I was doing just so I could code. Just so I could finally feel understood by myself. For me, programming is the source of my spirituality. I understand myself through my code!

Taeyoon: As a kid, I was fascinated by computers. I think the first computer I encountered was Macintosh Plus. It had a chatbot that I could interact with. The conversation itself was limited but I liked the idea that I could engage with a computer intimately. I was really into the Internet community as a youth, connecting people over distance. I learned to use digital production tools (mostly photo and video editing) in an art school. I often felt limited by the commercial production tools, I felt like my expression was constrained in the filters and features of the tools. In the mid 2000s, I learned about hackers and new media artists working with software and hardware in playful ways. During my residency at Eyebeam in 2008, I met many friends (Zach Lieberman who I continue to work with on SFPC, the openFrameworks community, Hannah Perner-Wilson, Dan Torop, Geraldine Juárez and more) and their practice demonstrated that I can take liberty to use computers and electronics for creative expression.

Shift Register by Taeyoon Choi, photo courtesy of the artist

Linda: My dad brought home a computer in early 90s and told us there’s nothing we can do with the computer that can’t be reversed. As a result, me and my siblings had a very curious and fearless attitude towards computers and computing - and probably also managed to remove the operating system and dad’s important work files a few times.. I never thought my career would be in technology, but now in hindsight working with education & computing connect all the dots for me.

Natalie: When I was a kid my dad brought home a couple of old Macintoshes for us to play with. My siblings and I spent hours upon hours drawing in Kid Pix. I still love that program, and its great origin story! I also used my computer to make maps and write short stories. I had no clue what computer programming was until my dad, a programmer himself, encouraged me to take a C++ class in high school. I was very unhappy in that class - it was mostly boys and as a shy kid who liked to blend in, I felt out of place. I also wasn’t super interested in the class project of making a computer game. Fortunately I gave programming another shot in college and fell in love, ending up majoring in computer science. It’s magical that you can create things with words and with the logic of language! And the kinds of abstraction you can play with make my brain really happy. Now I teach programming, and also use it as a creative tool to explore concepts and to build tools for making other things.

Stab Bound Books, by Natalie Freed. Photo courtesy of the artist

Amy: As a kid, I loved drawing in MS paint, creating 3D worlds in Corel 3D, making games in Visual Basic, and making Sailor Moon fan websites in HTML in Notepad. I loved making stuff outside of the computer as well (painting, cross stitch, embroidery), so computers and programming to me seemed like just another way to express my creativity.

Jie: I took my first programming course in high school (AP computer science) and did so poorly I ended up dropping the course halfway and thought that programming is *definitely* not for me (other people in the course seemed to glide through and were winning state competitions!). However, in college, I did an internship with Ayah Bdeir and got into electronics and another internship with Leah Buechley and discovered that code could be combined with arts and crafts to bring artworks to life. That’s when I finally “got it” and fell in love with the magical things I could make with programming and electronics.

Picture from Jie Qi’s project “Electronic Popables”, photo courtesy of Jie Qi

What are the creative challenges you are currently encountering in your practice?

Taeyoon: I find it important to connect my work with the history of art, and technology often gets in the way. I find it a challenge to make art that’s timeless as well as current and relevant. There’s often lots of excitement about what is ‘new’ in technology. For example, recently there’s a lot of excitement about A.I. and VR. A few years ago, there was a lot of excitement about 3D printing. And some time ago, there was a lot of excitement about interactivity. But there’s a sense of futility in these short-lived excitement. When I see people wearing VR headsets, I often think of Kasier Panorama. Kaiser panorama is a mechanical contraption where you look into the viewfinder to see a moving diorama, a miniature of Paris or Berlin. It was popular around the turn of the 19th century, lost popularity over the years and then came back to popularity for a brief period right before silent film became mainstream. In a sense, the ‘new’ technologies tend to repeat the excitement and exhaustion, like Kasier Panorama. For me, technology is both the medium and subject of my art.

Jenna: In order to be creative in my research field, I need to have the hard skills. I can dream up Turing Complete systems for monkeys to use, or functional programming languages that model the human mind… but I need to be able to successfully (and mathematically) write my models. Additionally, I am finding it harder and harder to communicate the work that I do to outside ears. I love sharing the basics of my work, but when it comes to explaining my current interests in a concise way, it requires A LOT of creativity to explain the abstraction.

Data Structures: STACKS, video by Jenna Register

Linda: I think kids are the most efficient learners of all times and it requires a lot of honesty to write and illustrate for them. I don’t want to make things cartoonish or use narratives that they will feel dishonest later in life. At the same time I think it’s important to shield a bit of the complexities to make subjects approachable.

Natalie: I’ve always admired and enjoyed spending time around artists, but didn’t think of myself as one. I’ve recently been realizing that for some of my projects, it would be incredibly useful to learn more about how artists evaluate their own work and think about their process. It feels like there are lenses through which to look at making that are not in my current toolkit. This is actually an exciting realization because I like that feeling of disorientation when you’re learning about something really new to you. One example is that I’m used to a prototyping process that is *relatively* linear and predictable, not one that involves throwing out 90% of what I try! And as a teacher and maker I value process a lot, but I’m not used to thinking that it’s allowed to be integral to the final piece.

Video of “Telescrapbook”, by Jie Qi and Natalie Freed

Jie: The most challenging for me is simply finding the time to explore far far outside of my domain. Lately I’ve been working a lot on toolkits and teaching and explaining-- which is fun and satisfying. But I’m also excited to explore and push my own technical and creative boundaries as well, and miss this different kind of joy. So perhaps giving myself permission and time to really play is my biggest creative challenge right now.

Amy: It's a fun and exciting creative challenge to explain concepts like machine learning, compilers, and operating systems in a way that middle schoolers will find interesting and accessible, in a way that's not condescending or dumbed down. Also, how to build a company that does social good and is ethical, in a monetarily sustainable way.

Why is it important to make computer science and engineering a more welcoming and diverse field?

Taeyoon: The mainstream culture of computer science and engineering is exclusionary. There’s a stereotypes of (typically white men) leaders in the field. In fact, it’s not true. Traditionally, women and queer engineers have pioneered many important aspects of computing and technology. Also, the real workforce and academics who are developing computing, are not homogenous. I think a lot about ways of revealing the complexities of the cultural bias around technology. If we can create counter-narrative to the mainstream image (of white or male – artists / engineers / entrepreneurs) , we can help shape a culture around technology that’s less biased and unfair, ultimately more inclusive for people who are not represented as leaders in the field.

Jenna: I recently returned from a conference where there were 300 women out of 8000 attendees. That is 3.75% female (unsure about Trans individuals). The conference was for GPUs, so very close to hardware (less women the closer to the hardware you get!). But it was a shocking experience. But besides an obvious inequality like this, here is my answer: Problem Solving is Empowering. I find that learning to think logically, and gaining the independent thinking that comes along with programming is empowering. And I want to help those who feel disempowered to find their strengths through STEM.

Excerpt from “How Do Calculators Even” by Amy Wibowo

Linda: I’m writing the book series thinking of what would have made me excited about computing as a kid. A lot of the materials out there today lack this empathy - and that’s why it’s important to have more diversity in the educational field, also going forward.

Natalie: Based on my own experience, my students’ experiences, and my research, I am convinced that many people who would really enjoy computer science miss out on the chance to learn about it. They might get initially turned off by an unwelcoming experience, only get exposure to a narrow application of it that doesn’t match their interests, or leave because of a toxic learning or work environment. I’ve found so much joy and empowerment in this field, and I deeply believe others should have that opportunity as well. Also, technological change has an enormous impact on society. We need all kinds of people deciding what direction that takes.

Art and Algorithms exercise from Linda Liukas’ “Hello Ruby”, photo courtesy of the artist

Jie: Computer science and engineering are such powerful levers to impact and (hopefully!) improve the world. However, change is rarely about just the technology but rather needs a whole community around it to make sure that the technology itself makes sense and is accessible. Unless we bring more diverse perspectives into the field, people who feel welcome and empathize with problems and see solutions that actually work for *their* community -- ones that the current tech community does not sense-- we cannot see the full extent of how much positive change we can create.

Who are your role model? Tell us about people you look up and feel constantly inspired by?

Linda: I love Sophia Coppola, Tove Jansson and Björk, artists with a strong inner world that they’ve projected consistently, but creatively throughout the years.

Taeyoon: I look up to people who take their work seriously and take on a very long term projects. Recently, I invited Barbara London, who was a curator at MoMA for decades, bringing new media art, video art and sound art, into the museum. Her persistence was admirable. I also think about artists and activists who embed themselves in communities and institutions. There are many, I can’t think of one person right now.

Barbara London, photo courtesy of the Grolsch ArtBoom Festival

Jie: There are so many. But for the most part, I really admire who are both amazing through what they do and maintain a kindness, humility and generosity that invites everyone in. To name a few, Ayah Bdeir (founder and CEO of littleBits) is my entrepreneur role model-- for growing something from bits in a shoebox to an entire movement, fueled by her unique faith and energy. Leah Buechley and Edith Ackermann are my research role models and taught me how to contribute academic research without getting caught up in the machinery. Andrew “bunnie” Huang who has taught me so much about navigating freedom. Finally Sally Rosenthal who has a magical knack for making things happen with firmness, warmth and empathy.

Natalie: So many it’s hard to begin, but Edith Ackermann comes strongly to mind. She was incredibly rigorous about studying play without ever losing her own sense of humor, play, and mischief. She could see the “soul” of your project and would tell you about it, bluntly but somehow in the most warm and inspiring way imaginable. Also, my mom read us Claude Ponti books growing up and his surreal, detailed worlds full of imagined creatures have stuck with me.

“Imagination” from Linda Liukas’ “Hello Ruby”

Jenna: Quite frankly (nobody make fun of me!): All of you! I am so thrilled to get to meet you all. I have not yet come across others who want to inspire through art, technology, fun, and childlike wonder. I couldn’t be happier.

Amy: Simone Giertz is my hero for bringing a sense of fun and play to technology, and for emphasizing that it's ok to build things that are useless. Also, just like Jenna said, all of you! I’m honored to be with so many people whose work I admire!

Data Structures: Hash Tables, video by Jenna Register

What was the last project (art, comic, technology or whatever) you saw that blew your mind?

Taeyoon: I went to the Frieze Art Fair in NYC and saw some great things. I really liked slow moving sculptures by Robert Breer and Andreas Angelidakis’s video art ‘Domesticated Mountain’. I also read a story by a South Korean novelist Han Kang, which I thought was very moving. I’ve been reading Beasts of Burden by Sunaura Taylor, which is an incredible book about disability and animal rights.

Jie: There’s a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called “The Artist of the Beautiful” about a young watchmaker that makes magical machines in his workshop. The (very emotional) creative process really resonated with me.

Natalie: At the last Autodesk Pier 9 showcase, I ran across Neil Mendoza’s “Fish Hammer Actuation Device.” A camera over a fish tank tracked a goldfish’s movements, which were then transmitted to a hammer moving on a circular track. When the goldfish stayed in the same place for long enough, the hammer would come down and, depending on its position, might smash a tiny piece of furniture placed in its path. I was so delighted by this piece. Something about how completely oblivious the fish was to the destruction it was causing!

Linda: I’m reading Robert Irwin’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and it's helped me understand and navigate a good part of this year.

“Hello Ruby” Skidit Festarit, photo by Otso Kaijaluoto

Jenna: My very best friend is working on a comic to help herself and others overcome their PTSD. The comic is a superhero world, where your “inner demons” manifest in the outside world. We illustrate people as superheroes fighting off demons like Insecurity, Depression, etc. We hope to make illustrations for people who are working through healing, to remind Survivors that they are, in fact, Warriors.

Amy: When the SFMOMA reopened recently, I was blown away by a wall mural designed by Sol Lewitt. As a conceptual artist, he didn’t paint the mural but instead, contributed instructions for how to paint it, which were written in a way that reminded me of Logo Turtle programming. Algorithms as art!

Electrocutie Hardware Kit by Amy Wibowo

* We are thankful to our sponsors including SFPC, Hello Ruby, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Paul Ford and Processing Foundation. We are actively looking for sponsors. Please contact taeyoon@sfpc.io if you are interested in supporting this event. 

[werewolfcolumnist]

@miliege

an open note to a bottom feeder

i feel the first point i should bring up is the fact that you are in possesion of a 'drama' blog, which, i could only assume from your past accusations and actions, is due to the fact that you are the personification of a ill-infested mosquito that thirsts for a warped idea of 'justice.' you desperately patrol and essentially stalk a certain individual because you have a personal vendetta and the only way to satiate such bloodlust is to patrol and conduct tumblr-esque 'police brutality,' in order to quench your unjustified contempt. 

so lets dive into your latest pink slip post and analyze the claims that were made against Casper. you start off by stating, "welcome back to my drama blog casper. hows it feel to be a freak?" which is already problematic to begin with, because for one, a personal attack such as that essentially discredits any "neutrality" that you may have, which ultimately reduces the validity of your so-called arguement, and two, because name-calling someone who states they need a coping blog to begin with is basically dismissing the fact that they likely have a mental illness, which is pretty abhorrent. you then go on to state the list of subjects that are contained within Casper's blog and provide examples. for one example, based on the character ren hana, you state, "according to his wiki page hes 19 in the first game and 21 in the second. to me he looks nothing like a 19 or 21 year old. he looks more like a 15 year old." this garbage example is essentially invalid, as you throw in the factual evidence that the character canonically does not fit the criteria of being an underage character, yet you throw in your useless commentary of the character, "looking" underage in order to skew your flimsy arguement, ultimately invalidating this entire point on the specified character. you also state, "this is so fucking funny. not only reblogging dream daddy but DREAM DADDY GORE. thats so fucking funny to me," when talking about...dream daddy gore? which is only a point made on your elementary level detention slip of a call-out post because of your personal dislike of it, and not due to any other criteria. you may argue that its morally wrong due to the nature of the posts, however, that is YOUR sole idea of morality, which isnt the status quo. if it disturbs you, then do not engage in viewing such content. subjects that fall in this category will not cease to exist, and you only exacerbate the problem by blowing it out of proportion because it "rubs you the wrong way." you then go off to list lolicon that is apparently indicated as lolicon due to the fact that the character depicted in the work of art is wearing a school uniform, and that they are engaged in the act of gore. this is also, unsurprisingly, invalid, mainly because lolicon is defined as "fascination with cartoons of very young-looking girls engaged in varying degrees of erotic behavior." none of the evidence you provided showcased an illustration of a young child engaging in lewd and sexual acts. rather, they were showcased in situations which involved subcategories of 'pastel gore,' and mild gore, which was not coupled with ANY sexual acts. therefore, none of the evidence is actual 'lolicon.' you may percieve it as such because of your perception of what is right or wrong, however, your overall perception is not at all relevant when the act you state is present isnt truly present. you only state it as such because it 'freaks you out.' the case of your own personal and moral beliefs comes into play again when you make a point about reblogging irl blood, stating, "reblogging irl blood is very weird and off to me because some of the time theyre actual crime scenes where people have died and me and various others find it disrespectful to reblog content like this." which, first of all, warrants questioning due to the fact that it is only an assumption that these are taken from crime scenes. no evidence is provided that the specific images are pulled from them. even then, there isnt anything inherently wrong with reblogging the images (besides from your own personal moral standings). the images are merely images that depict a certain scene, they simply do not promote any disrespect or malice of anyone or anything. just because the nature of a subject is "freaky," doesn't automatically mean its seeking out to promote violence/etc. also on the subject of the cannibalistic textposts, you already said it yourself: "once again not really important i guess..." its not, thanks for making this specific point more concise for me. 

ok so the screenshots. you state, "at first he tried to act like he didnt know he had reblogged loli and rape and all that other nasty ass shit to his blog." which is actually contradictory to the actual screenshots, since Casper states he "genuinely had no idea," which, yes, is actually true. based on your warped perception, you may percieve his words as false. however, by twisting the actual situation in alignment to your obvious bias and underlying hatred towards Casper, you thrust a false narrative towards readers of your malignant 'detention slip,' and thereby create a mob mentality via the use of aggressive slander. Casper's genuine emotion is clearly seen with his tone and actions, taking steps to delete problematic posts without issue and apologizing. however, you go on to state, "he said reblogging that kind of stuff was for 'coping'. thats a really unhealthy way to cope by the way casper." this is severely problematic, as it not only undermines possibly the only way an individual could cope with mental illness (which, "reblogging" content of such a nature is purely vanilla to begin with), but it also insults and demeans an individual who is clearly struggling mentally, which you 'cleverly' try to justify by pure slander and loose arguements. as the last course of this letter, i'll make one last point. you state, "he claims a lot of it was 'old' but in reality the oldest post was from 2 months ago which isnt really that old." this exact phrase unwinds your entire arguement. in the beginning of your keemstar-esque callout bonanza, you provide evidence that, "as of today (7/18/18) casper currently lists himself as an adult on his blog with his hover saying ‘im currently 18′. proof of this." however, as of 7/1/18, Casper only just became an adult (http://tanakas.co.vu/post/175430436650/me-today-is-my-birthday-and-i-wanna-love-my) therefore, by stating that his oldest post was 2 months ago, you're basically stating, "this is pedophilia, even though casper was also a minor during the surfacing of these posts." (even though the posts you refer to aren't pedophilia. not a single young character is sexually being taken advantage of in any evidence). 

to end this open letter, i'll say this: go fuck yourself. you attempt to be a self-proclaimed cruisader when in reality you enforce severe brutality, and attempt to skew the perception of others by outlandish and downright false claims. i would not be at all surprised if you held extreme insecurity, and project it onto Casper in order to make your pitiful self feel better. that's the case for essentially all bullies, anyway. and you fit right into the cookie cutter of what a bully is. 

also, anyone who mindlessly read and followed what this dumpster fire of a callout stated, and flip-flopped on Casper, fuck you too. you're just as bad. 

original: http://web.archive.org/web/20180719200027/http://web.archive.org/web/20180719200027/https://miliege.tumblr.com/post/176040089851/callout-for-twiliightzones

-🐝

[mllemaenad]

Personally... I feel that WEaWH tries to remove itself from TME because it realizes that TME is fucking irredeemable garbage, and tries to make its WLW representation less appalling. So I'm entirely willing to overlook continuity errors for the sake of one relationship between women in the entire series that can go well.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that. I’m not going to argue with you on the merits of The Masked Empire, as you’re entitled to like or dislike any media you choose, but I don’t think Bioware is trying to distance itself from the novel. I also don’t think their motive is positive representation, or that they’re seriously suggesting a happy ending. However, even if they were I would call the choice to reunite Celene and Briala without any serious examination of the issues that drove them apart … disquieting.

1) On distancing themselves from the novel.

To begin with the obvious, several of the Dragon Age novels provide not only context for the quests in Inquisition, but also promotional material maintaining audience interest between games.

It’s hardly an accident that Asunder is a prequel to In Hushed Whispers/Champions of the Just, The Masked Empire is a prequel to Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts (as well as giving you a roundabout introduction to Solas) and Last Flight provides you with some context on why Weisshaupt is just no help at all during Here Lies the Abyss.

They do kind of want you to buy all their stuff. And if you started with Inquisition and liked what you saw, they want you to run back and buy all the earlier stuff for context. Video game tie-in novels aren’t generally considered high art, so they’d need serious reasons to want to reject the novel as part of their canon. Just in case, I checked The Masked Empire’s Amazon page, and it’s currently got 4.4 stars – so it doesn’t look like something they’d be particularly desperate to ignore. They’d rather you bought it and gave them money.

To move more to the specific, the game references the novel constantly. In addition to devoting a whole main quest to resolving its plot, it also includes cameos from Mihris, Michel and Imshael, which really serve no other purpose than to provide a bit of closure to the people who read the novel and wondered what became of them. This is actually more than it provides for, say, the characters of Asunder: Rhys and Evangeline appear only in a war table mission, Adrian doesn’t appear at all – and who knows where Shale has wandered off to.

It also references the murder of Briala’s parents directly:

Cole: She’s still behind the curtains in the reading room, watching the blood pool on the floor.

Briala pulled the red velvet curtain aside. Her hands shook as she did. There was a pool of red on the floor of the reading room, staining the rich Nevarran carpet. It had spread almost to the curtain.

At the other end of the pool were Briala’s parents.

– The Masked Empire

If they really wanted to distance themselves from The Masked Empire, they wouldn’t put that in there. If they wanted to say that that this didn’t happen, they’d have retconned the story – or at the very least not mentioned it.

In fact, the choice of words is particularly distressing. Cole senses pain. When he says Briala is ‘still behind the curtains’ he’s emphasising that the trauma and anguish are still very much with her, making a reconciliation, particularly a reconciliation that utterly fails to address a thing that they have confirmed happened, even stranger.

 I would say that one motive for their choice to reconcile the two characters is simplicity. I like parts of Inquisition, but honestly it’s over ambitious. They set up a series of continent-wide catastrophes, each one intensely political: the mage rebellion, the Orlesian civil war, the collapse of the Chantry.

Each one probably requires its own game for a satisfactory solution. I realise they were probably going for something similar to the galaxy-wide political collapse in Mass Effect 3, but the Dragon Age games are at a serious disadvantage because they lack continuity of characters.

Mass Effect 3 had its own problems, of course, but for example – I think most people have fun curing the genophage for the krogan. But what they remember is Mordin Solus and ‘There’s a reaper in my way, Wrex!’ When it worked it was able to build on characters who were present across the series.

Inquisition is faced with trying to find resolutions for groups of people that have no direct connection to each other, and whom the protagonist has never seen before (even if they player has). This is hardly the only time their attempt to fix everything in a single quest ends up making no sense.

2) On positive representation

I’m afraid I don’t think what we get in Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts is especially positive. I think it’s … kind of infantilising, really, and has a whiff of sexism about it. I mean – again, I’m not asking you to like The Masked Empire. But this:

“It would have been a locked suite in the palace for a few years, nothing more!” Celene kept her voice low, aware that Michel and Felassan had stopped planning and were looking their way. “It would have changed nothing for us.”

“Your hair still stinks of the smoke from the people you burned,” Briala said. “That is a change.”

The dead leaves crackled under Celene’s feet as she stepped forward. “How many wars can our empire survive in such a short time? I wanted my legacy to be the university, the beauty and culture that made us the envy of the world. Instead I may be known as the empress under whom Orlais fell. You have the luxury of mourning Halamshiral’s elves and holding my heart hostage. Sitting on my throne, I see every city in the empire. If I must burn one to save the rest, I will weep, but I will light the torch.”

Briala swallowed. “You’re not weeping, as far as I can tell. Nor are you sitting on your throne. She stepped away, her movements fast and jerky. “With your permission, Your Radiance, I shall go indulge myself in my luxury.”

– The Masked Empire

… is at least an argument between adults, with the details of what they believe laid out. Celene honestly believes that the empire and her legacy are worth 'a few thousand elven lives’: she believes that maintaining the strength of Orlais is worth thousands of lives in sacrifice, as is the vision she has for the country’s future. Briala is facing up to the fact that this is the bargain she’s made: stay with Celene and she might see an elven scholar graduate from the university – but she’ll likely also see elves burn every time there’s a crisis, because elves are the most expendable people in the empire.

Briala wavers throughout the novel, obviously, because there is genuine feeling between herself and Celene. But the discovery that this has all happened before, that this is not the first time Celene has shed elven blood to impress her rivals and gain power, and that her own parents were among the victims, brings her to a decision.

You don’t have to like it, but these women are serious about what they want and believe.

But in Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts we get stuff like this:

Sera: Elves-elves-elves, but it’s really a pissing match with an old lover. Don’t know the rest but that explains a lot.

It’s hardly coincidental that they chose Sera to say this. Sera the commoner, who despises the nobility. Sera the Red Jenny, with contacts in every corner of Thedas. True, Sera’s background has led her to reject a lot of elven culture, but her biggest objection is usually to ‘moping’ about the past. This:

Briala thought for a moment. “Celene and Gaspard saw an army, but that would be fighting their fight. With the paths, I could get food to alienages where elves would otherwise starve. They would let me move ahead of an oncoming army and warn the target, or move behind them and attack their supply lines.”

– The Masked Empire

… sounds more like the practical stuff she favours: she’s said getting revenge would be a preferable option, and this is getting food to the poor, terrorising the nobility and giving little people a shot at being part of something bigger. But now we can’t take it seriously, because Sera has reduced it to a lovers’ tiff.

That isn’t meant as a criticism of Sera, to be clear. They do this when they want a mouthpiece. This is the equivalent of having Cole approve of Cullen.

And as for it going well, this is their epilogue slide:

Where once war raged, there is now a shaky peace. Orlais is resurgent, the empress a patron of arts and culture.

Many attribute this recovery to her lady love, though others wonder how long their reunion will truly last.

– Epilogue (Inquisition)

I mean – maybe they’ll forget about this. They have been known to forget their epilogue slides. But it doesn’t read as though the intent was to write a strong and loving partnership. Rather it looks as though they are selling the relationship as tempestuous.

That’s one place where I am very uncomfortable. This is the revolt of an oppressed people, and the politics an empire. And there’s a sense that they’re saying ‘Oh, those women and their emotions! Today they love each other; tomorrow they’ll hate each other; the day after they’ll probably love each other again. You never know, with women.’

I appreciate that Bioware is fairly progressive, for a game company: the character choices, the romance options, the NPCs – they are trying to represent a variety of races, genders and sexualities. But it doesn’t mean they never fuck up. I mean, there’s a bit in Mark of the Assassin where Isabela tells Hawke that Gamlen has been sexually harassing her and two responses blame her (You find something inappropriate?/Break him. And wear pants.).

Given that they are already struggling to resolve a massive plotline in a ridiculous amount of time, I’m not surprised they fell back on this. It’s narrative shorthand, and that can be handy for desperate situations. But it’s still sexist shorthand, and I very much wish they hadn’t done it.

3) Removing The Masked Empire from the equation doesn’t solve the problem

I mean, it makes some of the bigger issues like Briala’s dead parents a little easier to miss, sure, but it doesn’t make the problems go away.

I appreciate that representation is important. I do. But romantic relationships between women are not the only representation issue at stake, here. There’s no single source for the elven people, of course, but it’s easy enough to see that Bioware has borrowed from the experiences of Jewish, Romani and aboriginal peoples living under empires and/or colonialism.

And have we ever established that it is shit to be an elf. The city elf origin story in Origins is an abduction/rape/murder combo. The Dalish clans in Origins and DA2 can be slaughtered. It’s terrifyingly easy to kill off clan Lavellan in war table missions, and even though this is the protagonist’s family the game doesn’t make a thing of it. There’s a whole side quest in DA2 about a serial killer who targets elves, and who keeps getting away with it because no one gives a shit. We are up to our eyeballs in codex entries on the treatment of elves.

And here we have Briala, the leader of a rebellion in Orlais – one of the nations best known for oppressing the fuck out of the elves and trying to destroy their culture.

Even without The Masked Empire this is:

a) providing only the most minimal description of the nature of her rebellion and what she hopes to achieve.

b)allowing her to be dismissed as primarily involved in a lovers’ tiff.

c) pairing her with a woman the game actually says massacred the Halamshiral elves.

d) using the massacre as evidence against her because she was sleeping with Celene, rather than as evidence against the woman who actually committed it.

That’s … all pretty shitty, even at the simplest level. The game doesn’t address any of this. It doesn’t even force the characters to discuss what happened before throwing them back together. It spends as much time tsking at Briala for destabilising Orlais as it does Celene and Gaspard. It loves the idea that they’re all as bad as each other – which allows the player to justify just about any ending.

And this is a thing they do repeatedly: they tsk at the mage rebellion as well. They seem to be very good at describing the sufferings of the elves, the mages, the casteless dwarves … but don’t approve of them actually doing anything about their oppression. At least not anything more forceful than writing a stern letter of complaint (for those lucky literate characters!) to the local lord or revered mother.

And so minimising the problems of Celene and Briala’s relationship, and waving a locket around (which, even out of context, does not seem like a forceful enough declaration of love to startle Briala) does … not strike me as very respectful of peoples who have suffered under empires, and who have had to fight tooth and nail for every sliver of justice.

It’s not that I want to exclude a healthy, positive romance between two women in order to have Awesome Revolutionary Briala. I just don’t understand why we couldn’t have both.

Couldn’t Briala show up with a new girlfriend? Do it properly: give her a codex entry and make her active and important in the quest. Show the two of them both being affectionate and working together for the cause. Make sure that at least some of the possible quest endings leave them alive, together and continuing to better the lot of the elves.

I can understand that you may not like The Masked Empire and may want to exclude it from your personal headcanon. That’s absolutely fine, obviously. But I do not believe that was Bioware’s intent in writing the the Briala-and-Celene reconciliation, and I still have serious issues with it.

[vidoxi]

just finished mystic messenger and i just wanna write down my thoughts. major spoiler warning + i-might-talk-shit-about-your-fav warning. if you want to discuss with me any of the points i bring up here, go for it.

Jaehee “No Homo” Kang

so when i first heard that her route was just a friendship route i was hella disappointed and thought that sounded like a total bullshit cop out, but after playing it i feel a little differently. i think it makes sense for jaehee’s character and narrative that she would value a friend over a relationship at that point in her life, but also its pretty clearly said that she does have romantic feelings for you but she needs time to process them, which is especially understandable since you can infer that before she met you she thought she was straight and also she’s catholic. her after ending was the perfect time for her to confess or for there to be the implication that you two are in a relationship, but instead it’s the only after ending where we DONT get to see interaction between you and your partner, which is a bullshit cop out. i do like that in the christmas DLC things got a little more romantic but i’m still wanting more. jaehee and the fans deserve what the male characters get, a CG of a kiss on the lips and a confession of romantic love. i hope that if more DLC gets released, cheritz will push the envelope a little a lot more. but i have heard that korea is still really conservative and for all i know making it more explicit could be illegal so i might be being unnecessarily harsh there lol;;

about her actual route though... it was good. nothing really exciting happened. it was definitely the chillest route i thought, but it was really sweet and she’s absolutely adorable and it warmed me to her a lot. her bad ending 1 (the one where you end up with zen) is so depressing, fucking hell. it feels like you betray her. it’s so ugly. ;_; i never want to do that ending and i’m glad there isnt a unique CG to tempt me into it either. her bad ending 2 (where you push her to work so hard that she ends up in the hospital) is pretty terrible too. after ending was hella cute though, i love the thought of mc and jaehee having their little coffee shop together and jaehee getting to actually work on something she’s interested in and being with her “best friend” all the time. oh and yoosung becoming jumin’s new assistant was interesting and i need me some fics, u feel?

something i also feel a little robbed about is that jaehee never blew up at jumin. she drags yoosung like theres no tomorrow and you just know she could say some venomous shit about jumin so i was hoping there’d be a big confrontation between them where she gets a dramatic The Reason You Suck-type speech but there wasnt really a moment like that.

however, seeing jumin all bitter about it at the end was a little gratifying (sorry jumin)

i love their emojis and you cant stop me from using them

also on this route where 707 has yoosung hunting for the LOLOL expansion pack (how is this boy so naive? im worried) and he finds a buried picture of rika’s dog sally instead, i at first thought that he had dug up sally’s corpse and i was like “wtf the fuck seven”

also wtf @ v saying he has terminal cancer. this is presumably a lie, right? before reading the secret endings i thought he was going to commit suicide but now im thinking that (seriously if you havent played the whole game you need to stop reading this rn) maybe he knew that rika was going to dispose of him soon and he didnt want jumin to investigate his disappearance? iirc yoosung’s good ending is the only one that he’s present in, so is it meant to be assumed that he’s killed off camera in every route possibly?

everyone else under the cut

Zen

the worst tbh. i dont like saying it but there it is. possibly this depends on who you are as a person but to me it didnt really feel like MC and zen had much chemistry except during that scene where youre on his roof together. most of your interactions are just you praising him and fellating his already huge ego. and jaehee was exceptionally annoying with all her “muh zens reputation” shit and feeling like i was taking zen from her was really awkward and unpleasant because it does seem like she has repressed feelings for him. fuck and the whole story with echo girl was super predictable and generic and feels like something i’ve seen 100 times before and probably have. my overall feeling about this route can be summed up by this emoji.

i feel like it could have been improved by either removing the echo girl stuff or at least putting an interesting spin on it. i think they should have made zens’ childhood abuse and family problems and maybe his past as a gang member as well an actual conflict instead of it just being a thing of happenstance. it’s an interesting backstory that as far as i can recall didnt end up having an impact on the current day situation. it would have been interesting if he had some sort of emotional issue you had to help him through like jumin, like secret crippling insecurities due to his family telling him for years that he’s ugly and inadequate, and thats why he tries so hard to be perfect so that people will give him the love his parents didnt. also his elementary school teacher was implied to be a pedophile(??? i dont remember what was actually said in the conversation i just remember the pedo-vibes) so they could have made him a CSA survivor but maybe thats too dark even for mysme lol.

also his bad ending 1 confuses me. the first time i saw it it felt really rapey but rewatching it now, MC does seem to consent but its after being cold and refuting his advances so it seems really weird. MC seemed genuinely disinterested, but i guess she was just playing games, testing him to see what he’d do? since theyre in a relationship a year later. and his bad ending 3 (the one where youre both kidnapped by saeran) is pretty bizarre lol.

so yeah this is the weakest route imo. maybe its different for people who are zen fangirls but i personally felt like i was being super fake the whole route, which was especially jarring coming off of yoosung’s route where the dialogue choices felt very organic to me. also his responses to mean things arent even interesting lol so thats frustrating too. and this route felt weirdly short. all the others felt like 11 days but this one felt more like 5? and when i missed chats on this route i just let it go most of the time instead of spending hourglasses. i wasnt feeling it, mr krabs. by far the best part of his route for me was the relationship development between zen and jumin.

now that ive spent 4 paragraphs just complaining you probably think that i dont like zen but actually i think he’s is a fantastic supporting character and i do like him a lot. that picture of him sneezing was my phone wallpaper for quite a while lol.

Jumin

me at the beginning: i fucking hate jumin han. fuck him. fuck his cat. i hate this type of asshole love interest.

me after zens route: i guess he has some hidden depths... i’m curious...

me after jumins route: *loves jumin han so much i cant breathe*

this guy... this cat man...... where to start? i’ve had a while to think about this route and i’m still not totally sure how i feel. “i feel complicated” is a term i’m going to start using because its just too handy for situations like this.

i guess i dont like that to get the good end you had to be passive and compliant and act like you were walking on eggshells. your relationship with him is undeniably a little scary and abusive. i think jumin needs more in his life than just you. but mysme is an otome game so of course youre the one that “fixes” him but thinking about it more realistically its worrying and jumin should be in therapy cuz the dude undeniably has some issues.

winning his heart by being understanding and with gradual, slow-growing trust was pretty touching. something i really appreciate was him opening up and his true self actually being hard to accept sometimes, instead of whats expected which is “oh youre secretly a perfect, beautiful soul”.

i do really wish they would have opened him up further though. there isnt ever a point where he completely loses control of his emotions. not to be gross but i’d do anything to see him crying, honestly.

i hope people are joking when they say that his bad end (you know the one i mean) is a good end. just because its hot doesnt mean that its good lol. its actually really tragic and shows the deterioration of his mental state and how he’s just accepted that he’s a fucked up/defective person.

“I was worried that the loneliness inside me would pile up and explode some day.” FUCK. dont do this to me jumin. ;_; this line is heart breaking.

something thats kind of interesting and worth noting maybe is that even though the other rfa members arent privy to the VNMs and you can give them little indication that he’s acting so worryingly theyre all still alarmed and concerned and thinks that jumin is going to hold you hostage/abuse you, which makes me wonder if youre meant to infer from that that theyve noticed red flags in his personality that he’s potentially kinda crazy.

and man, zen is always complaining about how jumin seems to have no emotions, but jumin finally opens up about his feelings and zen calls you laughing hysterically about how pathetic he is for being emotional. i was kinda hurt on jumin’s behalf during that call lol. he is so supportive to zen on zen’s route. just... shut the fuck up you albino freak. dont make me whip out yoosung’s “hyung, what’s wrong with you?” emoji. i wont hesitate, bitch.

there. you asked for it. feel those judging purple oblongs pierce your soul.

man, just reading the dialogue options that treat him like a psycho make me cringe. usually i’m tempted by mean dialogue options but not this time. i want to protect jumin han. ;_; i want to untangle his threads. i dont want him to feel like a mutant ever again. i want to love and accept him. i am now the president of the jumin han protection squad. jumin han did nothing wrong. shameless jumin apologist. that’s me. no but seriously he did a lot wrong and is pretty morally grey but thats one of the reasons that i love him. if you love jumin for pure reasons (that arent just “daddy~”) then youre automatically my friend and i love and appreciate you.

just to love on him for a minute: he is so damn funny, for real. he’s such a sass master, its great. him being terrible with technology is funny. his social awkwardness is funny. his shitty jokes are funny because theyre not funny. he should be the poster child for gap moe cuz goddamn. he’s such a ham. an absolute goofball dressed as a billionaire CEO, and i dont think he even knows it.

also every time elizabeth meows i fucking lol. its literally just a woman saying “meow”. every time jumin says “elizabeth is just a cat, she’s not human” i’m like “ARE YOU SURE?”

Yoosung

this is the first route i got and i assumed that i had already peaked at the beginning and no one was ever going to top yoosung for me, and that assumption was correct. i love this boy. do you hear me? i love him. “perfect” has seven letters in it. “yoosung” has seven letters in it. coincidence? i dont think so. i have feeeeeeelings over this character. he is so darling. i just adore him. i’ve opened the app many times just to look at his album. his voice is like a choir of angels. i have so many screenshots of conversations with him on my phone. he is so selfless and caring and adorable and kinky and pure and i want him to be real so i can marry him irl.

i’m not even sure how to give a critique on his route because i feel so emotionally close to the situation lol. i was very, very invested. ah. gosh. this boy. his good ending is absolutely beautiful. you know youre playing a weird otome game when the good ending has your boyfriend tortured and disfigured. he really earned his happy ending, not quite as much as seven but its up there.

i really love how for better or worse, this boy is like putty in your hands to be molded and what you say to him effects him so deeply in a way that doesnt quite get as extreme as with the other characters. obviously your words majorly influence the other characters but i feel never to the extent where theyre hanging on to every little thing youre saying like yoosung does. which makes sense because he’s young and impressionable and doesnt know what to do with himself and he says he wants to be controlled lol.

MAN, speaking of that, i love his bad ending 3 so much. it’s so twisted that he’s technically getting what he wants in a lot of ways. he’s a masochist that loves the idea of being kept as a pet and controlled, and he gets all that and more with saeran. that ending is so fucking hot, slkdfljsf. i might write a fic. i have a couple ideas.

oh shit, using that seven gif just reminded me. there’s a chat thats on the first few days of common route that ive always participated in before, but when you dont participate in it and yoosung has time to ramble, it gets really kinky. he says “i wonder what it would feel like to be locked up? just a bit.... curious lolol” which i think is what he says when youre in the chat too BUT THEN HE STARTS GETTING OFF ON THE IDEA OF SEVEN BEING LOCKED UP TOO. “Imagine the super smart Seven all flustered. and not knowing what to do.” AND I’M JUST LIKE BOIIII;;; HOW YOU GONNA JUST TALK ABOUT THAT IN FRONT OF ZEN AND JAEHEE LIKE ITS NOTHING? if he would take the obvious hints that seven hits on him he’d probably be willing to roleplay that scenario. 707 strikes me as a fetish friendly person lolol.

ummm... well, to get back back on track, ahem.... him confusing you with rika was creepy and interesting and they didnt take it far enough. even on the yandere bad ending he’s still fully aware that you arent rika. it seemed like it was building towards him having some kind of psychosis where if you feed into his desire for you to be rika he’ll really think youre rika but that doesnt happen so theres no real pay off, and he doesnt have time to do anything yandere-y to you before the bomb goes off so i found that ending to be pretty disappointing and unsatisfying. it felt like someone waving a delicious cake in front of my face but only giving me a crumb of it in the end, do you know what i mean? aaa. maybe i can find a fic that runs with the ideas set up here. when youre desperate, turn to fanfiction lol.

speaking of disappointments, i’m not over the last line of his good ending being “youre not rika, are you?” like... at this point we’re past this arent we omg stoppp. this line is a blight on my happiness. fuck rika and fuck whoever thought that was a good last line.

i noticed that yoosung is the only rfa member including v and rika that doesnt have childhood trauma. his trauma all happened recently. i think that lends to him being the most fragile and child-like character. the other rfa members are so strong because their pasts molded them that way, but yoosung has no such constitution and rika’s death is undoubtedly the worst thing thats ever happened to him.

something thats been on my mind concerning bad ending 3: does rika know that saeran is torturing yoosung? saeran must know that yoosung is his savior’s cousin because he’s hacked the chat and presumably has read messages where yoosung mentions being her cousin, correct? therefor wouldnt that make him hesitant to harm him? i think rika must have consented to yoosung being tortured then. maybe his ultimate fate at the end of bad end 3 is that he’ll be brainwashed and become part of mint eye.

man he’s such a bad judge of character lol. he hero worships rika, loves echo girl, thinks that jumin isnt potentially dangerous, and even you can fall into this category if you choose to play it that way. the one person he really dislikes is v, and v has nothing but the rfa’s best interests at heart lol.

something i love about him is how quick he is to call everyone out on their shit. like, his finger is always on the “whats wrong with you? :>” emoji, just waiting for someone to say something he doesnt approve of lolol. he’s so empathetic and naive but he still has such a strong sense of right and wrong and isnt afraid of standing up to his older friends and i think thats great.

ahh. this boy. he might be ranked #2 on LOLOL but he’s ranked #1 in my heart.

707

before playing his route i thought seven was an obnoxious tryhard and that jumin was way funnier, and after playing his route i still think that he’s an obnoxious tryhard and that jumin is way funnier.

HOWEVER.

however. i can definitely see why he’s the most popular character. that hot and cold drama, i-cant-be-with-you-because-it’d-put-you-in-danger, dark childhood backstory, sad clown type shit is a recipe for a lot of fans to be in love with you. he personally doesnt make my kokoro go doki doki like i kind of expected because of the fan response but i do really like him as a character.

he’s similar to zen in the beginning in that you have to constantly stroke his ego and i was like uuuuggghhghghghghg nooooo. “god seven” kill me lol. at least that only lasts for the first few days though.

i liked his bad end 2 where youre really sexually forward with him and he keeps snubbing you until you just snap and push him down lol. (“why arent you pushing me away?” “...i dont know. the floor is comfy.”) seeing him finally just give in and be hedonistic and decide to run away with you was nice. god i want fanfics based on like every bad end, theyre just so interesting

the chat where he tells yoosung that their friendship doesnt matter was paaaainful. also that part on day 10 when youre leaving mint eye and he says horrible shit to v. what was it, “if this is what youre really like i can see why rika blinded you”? like... goddamn, dude. i would never want seven mad at me lol.

one of the moments on this route that got me the most was in the flashback when saeran is being brainwashed and is speaking of or thinking about seven and says something like “please come back. we dont even have to be happy. just as long as we’re together i can endure anything” and then he’s crying about how he misses him and.... augh... *clutches at chest like the heart attack guy meme* i want to give saeran 52 hugs and a box of cupcakes and a puppy. i want to adopt him even though he’s older than me and be his mom. saeran.... saeran...... ;_;

THE ZEN AND YOOSUNG DRUNK PHONE CALL AT THE END OF DAY 10 IS THE BEST FUCKING PHONE CALL IN THE GAME. i called yoosung again after they hang up and he answers and its so great too. i need fanfiction R I G H T N O W about that night. nsfw or sfw, i just need more drunk yoosung antics and zen trying to handle him. oh and if you also call seven at this time he picks up and its really sweet and i think it should have been an incoming call so more people would hear it. the fact that the first time he tells you he loves you is in an optional phone call kinda sucks.

oh fuck his fucking after ending. at first where mc and saeyoung are in bed and talking about going to rescue saeran i was like “GDI CHERTIZ” thinking they were going to leave it open ended, and then in the chat where saeran joins in i fucking s c re a med i was so happy and relieved omfg. seeing the rfa being so inclusive and nice to him warmed my fucking heart. and when they asked him if he has the same taste as saeyoung and he says “ive never been interested in women” and zen is like “oh? where is jumin lololol” i fucking died. i can see now why ive been seeing yoosung/saeran shipping stuff and its romantic and not the abusive stuff based off of yoosung’s bad end 3 like i was expecting. but of course it turns out to be a fucking dream and ruins everything. the second that creepy music box music started playing i was like “fuck you cheritz”.

707′s voice actor in the free talk part is great. saying all these cheesy romantic lines makes him want to “rub sandpaper all over my skin” lmao. and he hopes that it becomes a series with new titles like “Strange Messenger and Thankful Messenger”? fuck yes mate, fuck yes.

does seven not actually open a toy store? :c i kind of want this to be an actual thing. its a good fit for him. maybe the fact that he dreamt about it means that it’s something he’d been thinking about.

oh and BI THE WAY, SEVEN IS BISEXUAL. this makes me so happy. bi visibility is so important to me and the fact that he’s the face of the game, the fan favorite, the canon route, etc, is so delicious. thank you cheritz.

on the subject of the secret endings.... man. i knew it was going to be crazy but i still wasnt prepared. these were a trip and a half and genuinely had me feeling shook up emotionally. if there’s ever a time in my life when i’m too happy i’ll just think about v. definitely the most tragic character in the story. he’s not an angel and he’s pretty much culpable for his own suffering but he did not deserve that.

something of note is that jumin was in love with rika but after learning what she did to v, he has such a grudge against her that he wants her arrested even when she’s completely lost her mind and he even thinks about chasing her down to alaska. he loves v so, so much, augh. it hurts. i’m in pain.

it’s pretty fucked up that jumin (and yoosung and zen and the rest of the world) are still being lied to about v’s “suicide”. jumin spent a lot of money and went to a lot of trouble to get help for saeran, who is his best friend’s murderer and he just doesnt know it.

the fact that yoosung in particular never knows the truth about the cult and drugs and brainwashing and everything is a good thing though. just seeing his hero come back from the dead and be reduced to someone so mentally ill that she cant communicate and needs 24/7 care would be extremely distressing and i imagine would worsen his depression. knowing the truth would be too much i think.

i think this game fucked up v and rika’s VA’s too because both of their free talks quickly derail into too-serious territory. v is like “i once hurt my wife so badly and the guilt was unbearable” and rika is like “im going to die some day and i have no idea when...” and im sitting there like “i need a fucking hug, oh my god”

it’s amazing how quickly the secret endings shot saeran up to being one of my favorite characters. he’s so good. ;_;

okay but what was mint eye’s plan? i know they wanted to end the world’s suffering but like, how exactly? through brainwashing + drugs? rika could clearly see that saeran was miserable though, couldnt she? also some of the things saeran said made me feel like they were going to do some sort of ritual group suicide or something. maybe thats how everyone is going to be happy. and the doctor says that saeran was on peyote, shrooms, AND meth? god damn, what a cocktail lmao rika doesnt fuck around.

i love rika. she’s thoroughly disturbing and a sickening person and i can see why she’s so hated now in the fandom but even she is deserving of sympathy (abused adopted child with severe mental illness) and also has good qualities (high emotional and social intelligence, genuinely sweet, and extremely empathetic). one of my favorite villains from anything in recent memory. she’s terrifying and i absolutely love her.

we never learn her real name, which i thought was intriguing. i get the feeling that she’s meant to be mysterious and unknowable, even with all her power stripped from her as it is at the end.

im so happy that the game ended on a hopeful note, with saeran seeming like he's starting to recover and he's either grown out his hair or dyed it back. he still has literal mint eyes though, which makes me wonder if theyre not contacts like i was thinking and are actually some permanent body mod he had done. he got a tattoo of the mint eye logo, so i wouldnt be surprised if that was the case.

stray thoughts (this part is super disjointed and im just saying things as i think of them)

with the exception of 707 (if you count the secret endings as being part of his route), sometimes i get the feeling of these characters being like big fish in a small pond. mysme is already head and shoulders above what i thought a mobile game could ever be, but that doesnt change that i still feel hungry for something more. i want to see this cast in more situations, under different circumstances. they all feel like fleshed out characters full of potential that are just waiting for something more and bigger to do, like maybe something thats not restricted by being a mobile otome game. but maybe thats one for the fic writers, i dont know. maybe cheritz could work them into another project somehow since mysme got so popular.

i love that the characters have actual flaws. all of them have unattractive qualities that really make them seem human. and all of their relationships with each other are entertaining too. they are all multi-faceted and interesting and i really do adore this cast.

so 707 is the canon route but i hate the thought of any of them being canon because that means the others arent canon. all of them needed you. i want a harem route. give me all of them at the same time.

i feel a spiritual connection with vanderwood. he just constantly looks so done. his gender confused the hell out of me at first. i thought maybe he was a trans woman at first because of the hair and name but then he responds to seven referring to him as a woman with things like “i’m going to taze you”, so i was like “okay, he’s just a dude with a girls name and haircut for some reason” but then seven tripped me up again with the fact that even when the scene is really serious and seven isnt in a joking around mood, he still refers to him with female pronouns. but i guess this could be explained as this is just what seven’s used to. @aouba brought up a really good headcanon that i believe actually is canon because it makes too much sense which is that “mary vanderwood” is just the identity that he’s assuming at the moment, like saeyoung being “707″. its even noted by one of the other RFA members (yoosung?) that the name is weird and sounds fake.

i’m never more thankful to be a pale girl with long brown hair and bangs than when i’m playing this game lol

also i love this game because it feeds into my pathological need to help people without me actually having to do anything lolol

is it just me or do the full portraits of the characters look weird? like when you look at them on the wiki and you can see their legs. i cant tell if it looks bizarre because you just never see their legs in the game or if their legs are drawn weird or both lol.

i love the character designs. 707 in particular is very nicely put together and distinctive. and i love how angelic rika looks. that one taylor swift song thats like “darling i’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” is totally her theme song.

... okay now that im listening to that song it really does fit rika a lot.

oh and Take Me To Church is def v’s song for rika.

the two guests i was unable to get throughout all the routes is @god and @star. star’s is just so counter-intuitive and god’s seemed like such a crapshoot that with two chances for both i made the same mistake on their first email both times lol.

it surprises me that religion is mentioned so frequently and openly. maybe its not as big of a deal in korea or something? i’m thinking thats the case since two of the VAs mention their religion in their free talk (i forget who but one said they were an atheist and another said they were christian). it just seems like an oddly serious and potentially alienating topic to bring up in a dating sim. also jumin and yoosung are so inconsistent with what they believe. jumin says that he’s christian on one route and then firmly says that there’s no god on another. yoosung says he doesnt believe in god multiple times and that he has no interest in having any religion but he also talks about praying and refers to rika as being “up there” and watching over the rfa. i think zen is actually the only character that doesnt ever say where he aligns.

was anyone else suspecting that rika was the one that blinded the dog, sally? i’m glad that turned out to not be the case.

i love the voice acting so much. i think quality of voice acting is sometimes harder to discern when its not a language you speak, but the quality of the voice acting here shines even to my english-only ears. yoosung’s voice is straight up one of my favorite sounds, 707 has an impressive range and is overall just always entertaining to listen to, i love the way zen’s VA delivers his lines when zen is surprised and his howls lol (which were apparently ad-libbed by his VA), jaehee’s voice sounds so sweet and lovely, and jumin is so very... jumin-y and nice and relaxing to listen to.

zen and the twins were so fucking cute in the flashbacks i want to scream. i know we get to see yoosung as a teenager but im not satisfied and i want to see jumin and jaehee as little children so bad too, augh.

rika and yoosung are the only two characters that get the creepy ass yandere eyes where their eyes get all dull and flat when theyre being crazy.

i never cried but i got pretty close on yoosung’s good end and during the secret endings. i still feel shook from the secret endings lol.

why are there still bad end relationship endings for 707 and zen and jumin that no one has found? its almost february of 2017. its surprising considering the games popularity and how long its been out. is datamining not a thing with mobile games? or does the fandom not have anyone who knows how to datamine, or what?

ships im particularly interested in: jumin/v, jumin/zen, jumin/yoosung, yoosung/seven, yoosung/jaehee, yoosung/zen, yoosung/saeran, seven/saeran because i have no shame, mc/everyone, like literally just every ship tbh because i love every character hnnng

i had no idea that buying the christmas DLC gets you another free talk with the VAs. yoosung’s VA is so cute. “please get your flu shots if you havent already”.

not sure what to do now. i definitely want to replay yoosung. and i want to hunt for all the CGs and phone calls too, but i dont want to spend $20 on the calling cards lol. would buying them even be a better deal than just spending the same money on hourglasses? $26 gets you 1000 hourglasses which is more than you’d ever need, right? it seems like the better deal, unless youre not using a phone call guide for some reason and want to try to just discover them all on your own.

i’m super excited for more DLC. i definitely think there will be more because when you open the DLC folder, the christmas DLC is shoved off to the left, making room for at least one more. also just the nature of it being a DLC folder and not a direct button to the christmas DLC.

... i guess thats all i have to say lol;;; bless cheritz. this game is fantastic and has consumed my life and ruined my sleep for the past almost three months and i had so much fun and i hope they get even more ambitious with their future projects.

[icharchivist]

so this is half fandom rambling and half personal rambling about (a quite  positive one actually) introspection over myself those past few monthes so *shrug* keep reading at your own risk

The thing about FP specifically, and i think i’ve already said it, that really talks to me now, is that they remain messed up people, with burdens, with heavy pasts for all we know, and some coping mechanisms that aren’t to say the best.

But instead of being focused on recovery like MTR can be, instead of being all focused on getting, on being better, they are focusing in enjoying the present regardless of what is weighing them down - not really thinking too hard about the future except for the fact that they are ready to stumble eventually.

Their focus isn’t as much on recovery as much as to be comfortable with the people they have become due to diverse sort of trauma - and taking this comfort and trying to extend it as they could.

They don’t ask to work on your trauma, they don’t ask to make steps toward recovery, they don’t ask you to fix the person you became. They just ask “take your time, take your breath, enjoy the sunset for a moment”

And the magic of this behavior as well is that, they /are/ getting better. They are opening up in ways they hadn’t before, there is room to grow. While it was never their focus, their choices of enjoying life as it comes step by step is paying off as at least /making step forwards/, even if they’re unsure where, even if they’re not completely healed from their past.

I think about it a lot, actually.

As someone with major depression/form of trauma/anxiety and all there is, i’ve always gravitated toward characters who were handling their trauma in some ways, more or less well. I’ve often gravitated toward characters who coped the ways i’ve done all those years. I also gravitate towards characters who feel a large amount of guilt over things they may or may not have reasons to feel guilty about, and how they’re trying to figure out how this guilt and this trauma left them and how to walk forward from here.

When i got into HPM, hearing from it at first, I thought i was going to gravitate toward MTR for those reasons. Because they are people who are traumatized in some way and are actively trying to improve their coping mechanisms. The motif of guilt can also be easily found with Doppo “all is my fault”, but especially Jakurai, whho after being an assassin decided to spend his life helping people, and still wondering why people struggle in finding their place between life and death.

I don’t really know how much just alligned perfectly in place as it did, i think it was a question of timing.

All my life i’ve been obsessing about finding ways to recover and always would fall furthermore feeling like i’m failing to recover completely. And the guilt is a funny thing because it keeps wavering between “it wasn’t your fault” and “it was and i need to atone in some way” with no in between.

But lately... I’ve started to take more distance with my family in general and not care for their problems. I’m not trying to do their damage control anymore. Thanks to my wonderful friends, i’ve currently managed to get back to school for next year and find a new flat away from my family along with the funds to live there.  I’ve moved away a couple of days ago and finish it tomorrow, as a matter of fact. Of course i cannot be sure it’ll be okay once i’ll get there, but it’s a huge step forward in at least trying.

It had been a long process to arrive there and the thing is that...

I don’t think i’m healed, of course, i don’t think i’ve recovered all that much, or at least i didn’t make the step toward recovery. I just ended up accepting “this isn’t the life i want to live” and accepted to find way to move away from this life.

Those past few months (before i really got into hpm but i think it helped) i’ve been neglecting “recovery” in the more basic sense of the term as i didn’t exactly try to fix my behavior, my coping mechanisms, whatever. I’ve just kinda decided “screw my environment that is pushing me to those stuff to start with” and did more self indulgent things, without real care about whenever or not it was something helpful for my health or no.

And there was something incredibly freeing about it.

self introspection is all well and done but it was bringing me nowhere. To acknowledge my  pain, the reasons of my pain, and to work against it, was a lot of work and was suffocating more than anything.

There is something extremely freeing about suddenly not really caring about whenever you, as a person, is recovering.

I don’t know.. i guess i make a difference between recovery and moving forward. And a lot of time we push people to recover to move forward but i also think that sometimes recovery will not budge if you don’t move forward first.

And moving forward means sometimes just accepting that Stuff had been bad, but i just want to enjoy this moment. Not work on being better on the long term, just on enjoying the little bit of life that makes me happy.

Even if it just means listening to music on repeat and dancing in my room all day without doing anything that would be great for my future per se. (and that in itself ended up very ironic since on the long run, just indulging completely in this “little thing” had me start to study Japanese more in depth and after years of trying to pick up the language i’ve only now, thanks to that, been able to make a lot of progress and starting to get somewhere there. Indulging in stupid little things even when it’s not exactly reasonable made me reach for something more concreete in the end)

Recovery is weird, it is very nuanced and there are different steps to take. A lot of time we focus on the most drastic ones. Sometimes people need to take those steps first. But sometimes they don’t, i think.

When I discovered FP more in depth I think this is what eventually rang with me. None of them are looking for recovery, they’ve all accepted they were lost causes. But they just want to enjoy the day as it goes. And without realizing it, they’re on the path to get better. And even if not, they are enjoying themselves. They are enjoying those present moments.

Trauma can skew with your way to perceive yourself. In my experience there was always a case of all those troubles arriving because of /me/, even if i know it comes from external fault. It’s easier to put the blame on something you have control over. Something you can more easily punish, especially when you feel guilt easily, and this person can turn out to be yourself. And no amount of repeating “it wasn’t actually your fault” can change that. No amount of people reassuring you about that can change that. And you can end up overcompensating, over doing things to atone for a thing you didnt do, and that creates more and more burdens.

However there is something freeing about just... shrugging it off. Like. Yeah. It’s a part of me, whatever, why should i be thinking about it now?

In a lot of ways I feel like FP is about regaining the control on their lives. Dice is all about living exactly the way he wants to, outside of society rules, refusing to be controled in any way. Gentaro makes up his life, he has entiere control on what part of himself he allows people to see, even more noteworthy when we know the gov is still keeping a close eye on him for some reasons. And while Ramuda is supposed to be the gov’s dog, he’s been carefully taking decisions for his own agenda to oppose to the gov’, regaining a bit of control on his life.

They may not handle exactly how their past had affected them, they may be wounded people and they may not be trying to heal, but they are reclaiming the control over this life. Not letting it be dictated by others elements. And we could say, so do MTR, but MTR do it on a much more personal level - on how the control on their lives they’re trying to regain is a personal, mental one. Hifumi tries to overcome his trauma, Doppo tries to overcome his anxiety, Jakurai tries to overcome his past (most likely at least). But FP tries to overcome the external part of their lives that had affected them, the environment that had shaped them.

I guess i was just lucky to get into hpm the moment i did, since it was the moment i started to stray away from my mother for good and all. In a way it gave me a comfort that there is way to get better by taking a non traditional route. That self recovery is all well and done but when it’s your environment that creates most of the problems, there are ways to first focus on this control of this environment before thinking about how you can improve yourself.

and finding little things to enjoy on the path to get better.

Now ofc it’s not only that that attracts me toward FP, and it’s not just things i relate to moreso as just narrative tropes i really like ahah

but i’ve been poundering about it a lot, since FP’s way to deal with their problems is very different from the characters i usually gravitate toward and MTR is right here, so i kept asking myself why it became this easy.

Why also for exemple while i adore discussing Gentaro and can much more relate to his anxiety about other people, his erg “past”, or even how he coped by creating fictions because “reality is often much more disappointing”, I end up finding so much comfort with seeing Dice having completely rejected any sort of control people could have on him. Ofc while still being reasonable because man all of FP are full of terrible decisions and Dice is the most unreasonable of them all (or at least his bad decisions stand out, I guess Ramuda is still in the game for “most unreasonable” but-) but in principle, there is something so reassuring about his type of character. Of he might be a fuckup but he  has 100% control over how much of a fuckup he can be alright.

I wonder to myself and i think, would have i been into the story a year ago, I wouldn’t have stanned the Posse. Or well at least i might have stanned Gentaro because liars who hide their true feelings is My Type, but i don’t think i would have gone as hard about them as i did. And well. Truth be told Stella cemented a lot the way i view the band so i guess one year ago even with my current mindset i may have not felt that from the Posse - that said, one year ago!me with current!content hpm may not have taken those messages out of it.

*shurgs*

Fiction is always funny because you can take out anything from it. There’s multiple layers that will talk to you in different ways.

I’m just kinda impressed this is what I took out of FP. Perhaps it’s just what i projected because they had a sort of freedom i was working onto getting, and it gave me fuel into achieving at least that.

Perhaps it’s also just the heigh of summer (since I generally get more depressed during colder seasons so warm seasons are not exactly a good measure of whenever i’m mentally stable or not), or the distance i took from my family, but i feel like i have a huge weigh off my shoulder, like i’m not getting anxious over nothing all over again.

I feel like i can just pause and breath and take a look out and enjoy the little things.

That it’s not about how things may get better in the future. Perhaps there are just good things to see as of now if you take the time to pause and breath. Enjoying the path as you walk it, not because you know it will bring you somewhere, but because you took those steps. If you feel better about enjoying the path, perhaps you’ll end up feeling better about where it’s leading and take the correct choices toward a possible recovery, without it being exactly a chore. Even if you stumble along the way. That you may not be at peace with the person you became, but that you’ll see how you’ll evolve as time goes instead of trying to fix yourself restlessly. Eventually you’ll fix some bits of yourself without even realizing.

This is a mindset i don’t think i would be able to have a year ago - and while i think i was starting to feel it, i don’t think i would be able to articulate it would have i not just end up thinking overpassionated and overfocused on FP and trying to overjustify to myself why i was gravitating toward them.

*shurgs* i say that with every media i get into, what sort of important step forwards it make me take. Tbh it makes me think about back when i was into d/a before the fandom made me too anxious to even want to talk about it again a h ah, but back then i was feeling “this is at least the one thing i have control over that doesn’t make me anxious” - to be able to make choices that can bring to good outcome, which was more choices than i was allowed back then. And now i’m thinking about how those past few months had been about reclaiming all sort of controle i had over my life - not just the one i managed to allow myself to have, all of it.

I can justify every pieces of fictions i’ve ever been REALLY into in regards of how i was dealing with my environment and my trauma in term of how it had shapped me for the better, all of them being steps along the way to recognize and accept my own self. I guess this is just a natural progression as it goes.

Perhaps it is what recovery is, and i’m just finding words around because I have a specific view on self recovery in my mind and i beat myself up too hard for not following it specifically, so i need to find ways to justify how this is different.

But i’m feeling like i’m breathing again. Like i’ll be okay taking a few more steps in the dark now.

Perhaps that will make the world more interesting.

[tuthillscopes-blog]

Henry Greens Party Going: an eccentric portrait of the idle rich

check it out @ https://tuthillscopes.com/henry-greens-party-going-an-eccentric-portrait-of-the-idle-rich/

Henry Greens Party Going: an eccentric portrait of the idle rich

Amit Chaudhuri revisits a masterful tale of revellers stranded in a hotel, which recalls Joyce and Woolf but resembles neither

In the late 1980s, after i would be a graduate student in Oxford, I purchased a amount of three novels by a writer I hadnt heard about, Henry Eco-friendly. The Eco-friendly everyone was speaking about then had an e in the finish of his surname, and the name was Graham. He was almost a precise contemporary of Henrys: born in 1904, annually before Eco-friendly, he resided considerably longer. Both belonged to well-to-do families, but Eco-friendly was particularly affluent. His father was an industrialist. Id attempted studying Graham Greene, but had not made much headway. Then Henry Eco-friendly arrived, and Graham quickly grew to become, for me personally, another Greene, after which not really that. About Henry Eco-friendly, however, theres an irreducible, longstanding excitement one of the couple of who’ve read him.

I have to have purchased the 3-novel amount of Loving, Living, Party Going because John Updike had, in the summary of the amount, not just given Eco-friendly centrality like a precursor, but known as him a saint from the mundane. The religious example was excessive, what had helped me admire Updike to begin with was the means by which hed deliberately made room for that mundane, for that banality that fills our way of life and means they are truly interesting. But I discovered Eco-friendly to become a different of author, with almost no chroniclers impulse that every so often directed Updikes decade-lengthy projects, with no abiding curiosity about realism, despite his remarkable eye and ear and the gift for recording character. Replying to some question offer him by Terry Southern for that Paris Review in 1958 Youve described your novels as nonrepresentational. I question if youd mind defining that term? Eco-friendly stated:

Nonrepresentational was designed to represent an image that was not really a photograph, nor a painting on the photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For example, the deaf, like me, hear probably the most astounding things over-all them that have not actually been stated. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a brand new degree of communication is arrived at. My figures do not understand one another greater than people do in tangible existence, yet they are doing so under I. Thus, when writing, I represent very carefully things i see (and I am not seeing very well now) and just what I hear (that is little) however i express it is nonrepresentational since it is not always what others hear and see.

Eco-friendly actually stands approximately James Joyce, in the inclination to become intolerant of ordinary British syntax and punctuation, and Virginia Woolf, in the feeling of how narrative could be formed by things outdoors of event. But, out of the box obvious from his remarks to Southern, Eco-friendly further conflates his aesthetic with disability and eccentricity. (Right at the beginning of the job interview, he will not field an inconvenient question for the reason he cant hear the interviewer, although it rapidly becomes apparent the deafness is opportunistic.) Greater than Joyce and Woolf or other author I’m able to consider, Vegetables contribution towards the modern novel may be the imprimatur of the unapologetic eccentricity and, through it, a reconfiguring of the thought of singularity.

IMG 2 TT

Communicated joy and delight Henry Yorke AKA Henry Green

I have seen that Picador omnibus edition in the hands of readers and teachers, creased, carried with a degree of protectiveness. But, by all accounts, it didnt do well and soon went out of print. Since then, Greens nine novels have had spasmodic resurrections, come and gone and come back again. What will it take for Green to penetrate the general consciousness? His writing went out of view after he died in 1973 (and he hadnt written a book for 20 years before that), though more recently a handful of influential literary champions made him something of a cause. But maybe its to do with what Ezra Pound known as age. Most likely the recent decades havent been receptive to some novelist whose sole purpose appears to become to fashion a language that to speak pleasure. Woolf was shockingly neglected her present status owes less to literary critics regarding feminism. Jean Rhys was absolutely forgotten until her last work, Wide Sargasso Sea, permitted her to become annexed later by postcolonialists. Joyces mythic scaffold and verbal play identified him to academia to be essential both to modernism and also to the work of hermeneutics. I mention these authors not just due to their ability to transform and delight but additionally because some facet of their writing continues to be converted advantageously into some terms which are vital that you particular literary historic moments. With Eco-friendly, were given one type of artist who, such as the poets of ancient India and A holiday in greece, is not to provide us but delight. We dont get sound advice with your a author.

I hesitate to Party Going a modernist work because its sui generis, stands by itself, and it has not given itself to the modernism industry. However it has something that is similar to standard modernist texts, through which I am talking about not just what Frank Kermode known as its mythic structure, or its mythic punctuation of dead pigeons and bathing women, or its purgatorial fogbound atmosphere, or even the periodic abnormality of their syntax, but the truth that its thinking about and not the journey however the waiting, and not the event however the interruption. Dense fog working in london causes all trains to become cancelled. Traffic on the highway reaches a dead stop some people enroute towards the station need to abandon their cars and walk a minute of both liberation from, and lack of, class privilege. Among throngs of frustrated but jubilant commuters several wealthy people has convened they expect to go to the south of France as visitors from the qualified Max Adey. Two women especially are in search of Max: Julia Wray and Amabel. Max continues to be intending to escape Amabel, but she tracks him lower. Meanwhile, the entire group continues to be gone to live in the station hotel and given rooms with baths the shutters towards the station happen to be introduced lower. Amabel in some way finds her way inside, and Max reaches once ashamed, trapped, and temporarily disarmed by her immense beauty. It appears to Julia, whom Max have been courting inside a room not lengthy ago, that her putative romantic holiday with Max isn’t to become.

The simultaneity from the narrative causes it to be less just like a text supervised by an omniscient narrator than the usual particular type of cinema, a cinema less invested in one protagonist as with whats happening at the same time in a number of rooms and also the spaces around them. The fabric continues to be organised by an auteur akin, in the method, to some film editor, like a montage of quickly intercut scenes that produces a fantasy of unity and continuity. The restricted but unique locale and also the limited time period of the experience stimulate Jean Renoirs The Rules of the Game, which depicting several upper-class individuals with conflicting love interests who end up stranded with their servants inside a manor house on the country estate throughout the weekend too constitutes a narrative from nothing. Released, like Party Going, in 1939, the show isnt about either belonging somewhere or just being in exile it’s about inhabiting a transient, busy condition of unfinishedness. The aesthetic of these two works is remarkably congruent. Both also appear before the destruction from the worlds contained within them, and both possess a strange indestructibility. Renoirs film was trashed by the best and also the left because of its pointless portrayal from the inefficient wealthy, simply to be recognised in later decades like a landmark of cinema.

Self-absorbed upper classes Satyajit Sun rays Kanchenjungha.

Kanchenjungha (1962) by Renoirs most gifted student, Satyajit Ray is known as following the mountain peak the films upper-class holidaymakers are advised of because they mill round the hill station of Darjeeling. They’re completely self-absorbed, as the Kanchenjungha provides an opening right into a world beyond that will not present itself. Are you able to believe this area was only a Lepcha village prior to the British switched it into the town? states the insufferable patriarch Mister Indranath for the finish from the film. Empire! It had been insubstantial by 1962, such as the mist. Its becoming intangible in Party Going too, but not really much. Its there, within the global allusions, the truly amazing railways.

Sun rays film is instantly. The expertise of studying Party Going approximates this a feeling of getting joined, through the sentence, a particular continuum and time period. The 4 or 5 hrs it requires to complete the novel can also be the time where the fog rolls in after which begins to lift. The spell lifts too, so we understand weve joined a global we cant possess. This conflation from the figures time using the readers suggests the authors preoccupation with and mastery of form, that is a different type of reality towards the one the novel is depicting the result of his abstract nonrepresentational method.

Party Going isnt a singular within the usual feeling of the word. It provides us a superbly comic account of their figures, but it’s also an assemblage of moments, as well as different types of awareness around the globe as well as of writing. Eco-friendly is certainly not otherwise mindful of his literary context: when Julia walks towards the station and registers the procession of headlights at nighttime, the narrator points to the novels antecedents: These lights will come like ideas in darkness, inside a stream There are the epic similes, signalling to all of us that Eco-friendly resided currently once the British authors inheritance went beyond European modernism. Here the narrator describes a couple in Maxs party browsing the station to place their host:

Like two lilies inside a pond, romantically some of it but infinitely remote, encircled, supported, floating inside it for a moment, but forecasted when you are different onto another plane, even though there am much water you can avoid seeing these flowers or were prone to miss them, was Miss Crevy and her youthful man, apparently peaceful, envied for his or her clearly easy conditions and Angela coveted on her looks by all individuals water beetles if you want, by individuals people standing round.

Eco-friendly makes them vivid, semi-ironical comparisons frequently. Here, the simile concerns the station masters look at crowds of smokers, every third person smoking it could have the ability to looked to Mr Roberts, ensconced in the office away above, like November sun striking through mist rising off water. As Max and Amabel talk on the telephone before he heads off and away to the station (he’s laying to her about his intentions), her observation that here i am like a few old washerwomen slanging away at one another sounds more striking of computer should, as though Amabel were unwittingly situating the storyline inside a world good reputation for the epic. Two pages on, as Alex proceeds with the fog inside a taxi, it appears the [s]treets he experienced were wet as if that fog 20 feet up had deposited water, and glare which lights slapped within the roadways recommended to him he may well be a Zulu, within the Zulus hell of ice, sitting down in the taxi in negligence Umslopogaas together with his axe, skin beating within the hole in the temple …. And Robert Hignam, because he presses with the crowd within the station, remembers:

When small he’d found patches of bamboo in the parents garden also it was his romance in those days to pressure through them they increased so thick you can avoid seeing what temple might lie in ruins just beyond. It had been now, these physiques so thick they may have been an outlet of tailors dummies, water heated. These were so stiff they may as well happen to be soft, inflamed bamboos in groves only while he had once pressed with these, moist and warm.

The shutters are soon likely to come lower within the station, keeping new commuters out Maxs group will probably be at the same time nervously and luxuriously ensconced within the station hotel. Regardless of the feeling of enclosure and jail time (we’re simply inside a condition of siege you realize), the narrative has ramified and been placed on the planet: Party Going is both a comedy along with a cosmology. It is not about being hemmed in or trapped, or about being British. It enacts a fluidity of perception where it is also about being Zulu, about people being when compared with branches, to household servants inside a princes service, where Amabel is famous not just in London however in northern England and Hyderabad, in which the a large number of Smiths, a large number of Alberts, countless Marys seen collected below from the hotel window appear woven tight just like any office carpet or, more stylishly made, the holy Kaaba soon to create out for Mecca. Party Going is partially art-house movie, having a unique soundtrack, and partially certainly one of individuals remarkable British texts, like Basil Buntings Briggflatts, by which locality, eccentricity as well as class flow interior and exterior other cultures. Its this flow that’s envisaged here with regards to the noise, the murmurs, the silences, the laughter and also the courtships that occur as the trains have stopped, to ensure that any time things might open within an unlikely way.

A brand new edition of Henry Vegetables Party Going is printed by NYRB Classics.

Find out more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/18/henry-green-party-going-amit-chaudhuri

[viralhottopics]

Snapchat’s ride to the IPO comes with a history of confusion

Image: mashable composite

Snap Inc. is the shiniest thing on Wall Street right now. But it wasn’t always like that.

As recently as a year ago, Snapchat was a roll-your-eyes startup. To the biggest names in tech, advertising, and media, Snapchat was “too confusing”just a “sexting” app and simply “overhyped.”

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Chris Sacca, an early stage investor in Uber, Twitter, Instagram and Kickstarter, had been approached by the company in its younger days, but passed: I was like, The dick pics? he told CNNMoney last year. That probably cost me like a billion dollars.

Ashton Kutcher passed on investingtwiceciting the design: I looked at Snapchats product and I hated the product, Kutcher told Recode last year. I just thought it was like, a little crickety and a little rickety. It just wasnt beautiful or elegant.”

The dick pics haven’t disappeared, but Snapchat, led by CEO and cofounder Evan Spiegel, has been able to change the tune of some, including Sacca and Kutcher. The doubt, however, is very real, as the company exposes itself to more scrutiny with an initial public offering.

“Since the data has come out, I sense a stronger objective argument that Snap is not what people thought. That it isn’t a slam-dunk monster,” said Ophir Gottlieb, CEO of Capital Market Laboratories. “Evan needs to turn into a public company CEO. Zuckerberg did a great pivot from a snot to a leader, and Evan needs the same if the image is to improve.”

The skepticism, as the company’s all too familiar with, could be okay for Snap and Spiegel. It’s apparent throughout Snapchat’s history that it creates lovers and haters supported by a mix of secrecy and frankness from within.

Everything is ‘terrible’

Snap has had a long history of haters. The app got its first somewhat public criticism when Spiegel presented it in his class at Stanford.

Everyone said, That is a terrible idea.'”

Everyone said, That is a terrible idea,'” Spiegel told Forbes in November 2012, about a year after that presentation. Not only is nobody going to use it, they said, but the only people who do, will use it for sexting.

Yet, by that conversation with Forbes, Snapchat had millions of usersand they weren’t just sexting. As New York magazine wrote in October 2012, high school “students who use it know that its true purpose lies in a different clunky neologism: taking self-portraits, called selfies. More specifically, really ugly selfies.”

Spiegel himself was surprised by the sheer numbers: “I think the popularity of the service has been a surprise to everyone. We’ve found that once you try it with a couple friends it’s immediately clear why it’s fun to use,” he wrote to a question on Quora.

Someincluding this reporterjust weren’t willing to try. Others, like Kutcher, were turned off by the design.

Amid the scrutiny, Snapchat kept building. Functions on the app were streamlined while new products were launched. In 2013, Snapchat released Stories, but some of the most active users and app experts weren’t convinced. Gary Vaynerchuk, an early investor in Twitter and Tumblr, said:

“Not this bullshit update product they have that’s called Stories that’s such shit.”

“Not this bullshit update product they have that’s called Stories that’s such shit. The single reason I thought Snapchat should at least consider to sell their company for $3 billion was cause of how shitty their update was, the last time around, makes me question if there are any real product people there.”

Vaynerchuk, through the Vayner/RSE fund, invested in Snapchat a year later.

Snapchat highlighted that change in its own filing:

“We continued to invest in improving Stories even when it wasnt clear that it would be successful. Over time, Stories has grown into one of our most popular products.”

So came more updates and so came more hate. In 2014, there was Snapcash, a payment service that inspired disgust on Twitter:

Snapchat is trying too hard, like snapcash was stupid and this discover stuff is too. Forward isn’t always better.

Quade Joseph (@QuadeJoseph) January 27, 2015

Snap cash is bound to fail

Jared Fleming (@flimflam15) November 21, 2014

The haters weren’t wrong. Snapchat wrote in the filing that it has “not recognized revenue” and it is subject to many risks. Still, it caused some hate that perhaps moved the narrative in the right direction; Snapchat could build, and the idea made product managers, engineers and marketers at other tech companies quiver.

“Snapchat was trying all types of innovative things, such as Snapcash. It didnt really turn into a success, but I remember thinking, ‘Why wasn’t there a Vine integration with Square?'” said a former Twitter employee who worked with Vine.

Image: snap inc.

For employees at Facebook, building a lot, especially products people don’t like, is an all too familiar story.

Comparing Snap to Facebook is a question of the opportunity ahead. People are being too quick to call it game over for Facebook / Instagram

Josh Elman (@joshelman) February 3, 2017

The endorsers

The narrative started to shift in 2015, when Spiegel landed the cover of Adweek ahead of Cannes, the industry’s largest advertising festival. In 2016, Snapchat, via DJ Khaled, graced the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek in a story titled, “How Snapchat Built A Business By Confusing the Olds.”

“It’s all about connecting with his fans on a level who could never before and being able to inspire them in real time,” one of DJ Khaled’s reps saidabout his continued daily use of the app.

they don’t want you to know @djkhaled is on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek http://pic.twitter.com/CPvlKWYGp8

ShamW0W (@TheShamW0W) March 21, 2016

Why is Snapchat going public now? It’s shiny. What was hate has flipped into love. The major key, as Khaled would say, has been moving fast and finding strong, rich advocates.

“Right now, the only thing I give a fuck about in the world is Snapchat. I only care about it because I haven’t seen this attention,” Vaynerchuk said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year. “Literally six months ago, it wasn’t. It was still too peer-to-peer. It was still too young. Right now, it’s time.”

Some brands, for now those with a lot of money, just get it. “I think you have to be as they thrive on being different and taking risks. Theres an urge to compare Snapchat to other ‘social media channels’ yet they position themselves as a camera company,” said Ryan Rimsnider, senior manager of digital and social strategy at Taco Bell.

“They offer a really fun and engaging experience amongst your closest friends and fans, are further democratizing awe-inspiring content creation and, most importantly, they gave us the ability to turn ourselves into tacos,” he continued.

“Most importantly, they gave us the ability to turn ourselves into tacos.”

The media may love or hate Evan Spiegel, but this isn’t just the Spiegel show.

“The fascination with the founder is unprecedented other than with Zuck,” Gottlieb said. “I mean personal life, quirks, and age, and dating habits.”

Importance lies with advocates. That’s why early on Spiegel brought Sony CEO Michael Lynton, MTV co-founder and iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman and former Daily Mail executive Jon Steinberg into his court.

But some of the earliest consumers are getting a little weary. Snapchat, they say, could go the way of Vine if they don’t prioritize creators. Shaun McBride, better known as “Shonduras” from his Snapchat fame, has spoken out about the lack of reception and appreciation from the executive team.

Justin Rezvani, CEO of TheAmplify, once had frequent meetings with Snapchat about working with influencers. But no longer.

One competitor not mentioned in Snapchat’s risks is Musical.ly, which creators and millennials are gravitating toward.

“Influencers and creators build platforms and sustain audience,” said Justin Rezvani, CEO of TheAmplify. “I would just like to see more of that from Snapchat.”

These users provide attention. They also provided the value.

The sentiment around Snap’s IPO release averaged out to being neutral, as judged by tweets sent between 11 a.m. Thursday to 10 a.m. Friday.

Image: crimson hexagon

“If Evan shows Wall Street the money, hey, now the image is great,” Gottlieb said. “But if this tumbles or struggles financially, it will be a hate fest.”

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Read more: http://on.mash.to/2jKI3YU

from Snapchat’s ride to the IPO comes with a history of confusion