#i love this family but i am also. evil. teehee

[the-one-with-spider-brainrot]

uh oh spaghettio looks like watching their brothers execution wasn’t enough

[crispy-kitten-princess]

If i ever were able to list all the things i dislike in Magisterium series, this post would've been endless. Instead, I'd mention smth i love so much that it makes me re-read the series for the fifth time and gives me inspiration for new drawings and playlists

The first one is aesthetic. I don't think I've ever read a YA book with the death and necromancy as the main lore theme. Also, the first book in series is so sweet and innocent compared to the fourth I can't believe it lol. Corpses. So gothic. So edgy. Love it

The second is very similar to the first - chaos magic. We come across elemental magic in all sorts of media, but they don't usually have the 5th element, or if they have it's more likely to be electricity or smth. Not ACTUAL NECROMANCY omfg... I love it. Also Makars being able to manipulate not only chaos (the void itself) but the soul.... Cute

So next. The main character ofc. Callum Hunt. What can I say he is such a cinnamon roll hating himself for what he is not. Screaming, crying, throwing up. I can feel his pain with every fiber of my soul he's so relatable. He is a type of chaotic neutral main character which is rare I guess, and at the same time he doesn't act like a total jerk and piece of shit. Can't name some other like him, idk. He's sweet but also edgy. His self-confidence is below the surface of the earth. He's just like me frfr my poor little meow meow. Also he is disabled and it influences the events of the book. Sometimes. Cool, representative. Not a disabled person myself but can appreciate it

Another reason for me to love the series is the changing of Call's secrets idk how to call this. The structure of his character lore. His secrets and abilities, they're layered.. you know... And every book one by one uncovers these layers: 1 - he uncovers that he is the reincarnation of Constantine. 2 - he gets his powers (which made Constantine evil at the first place). 3 - he learns more about Constantine's family, and the whole world finds out that he "is" the Enemy of Death. 4 - omg how much he uncovers here lol i can't. May be my favourite book thanks to its maaad vibe. Everything he learns here makes him closer and closer to Constantine. 5 - i know that most of the fandom thinks it was stupid to make Constantine himself a reincarnated thousand-years-old evil Makar. And i may agree. But in the moment of reading this it was so impactful for me idk why.... I literally cried idk!!! Lol. Love the moment where Call opens his memory to help his friends to fight wolves or smth, and PASSES OUT. KING. So, the other secret is uncovered here. Everything he learns makes him understand Constantine's/Maugris's motives, but he never ever becomes anything like them nor wishes to follow their path. Pretty symbolic and meaningful

Upd. SOME MOMENTS ARE FREAKING HILARIOUS

So what can I say? Every series has it's weak and strong points. Some of them become classic literature, some are forgotten in the abyss of YA books. I understand why Magisterium's place is with the second type of series, and it's not even saddens me anymore (we're so underground teehee). But i see many posts where the series is shitted over, and not much of posts appreciating the things that we actually love in it. Aren't they the reason you started and finished it sometime? So I'm here spreading positivity! And also because I'm so tired of being a fan of this shit so i tried to acknowledge all that i love, and why am i here in the first place

I think it's all for now, maybe I'll come with more ideas later

Fandom are you alive? Heh am I a Call kinnie to the point that i become necromancer?...

P.S. sometimes i think I'm so cringe to be periodically obsessed with this STUPID POOR-WRITTEN CHILDISH BOOK ABANDONED EVEN BY IT'S OWN CREATORS BUT I CAN'T HELP IT...... AND THE WORST THING IS THAT I DIDN'T EVEN READ IT IN MY EARLY TEENS (except the 1 which i read when i was around 13. Read it twice in one week so maybe that's the moment my brain was damaged) I READ IT WHEN I WAS 16 ALREADY aaarrrhh I'm so cringe. Why obsession why why why why why why i hate this but this is literally the only book which makes me cry and scream and feel every fucking time i re-read it even when i know EVERYTHING THAT'S GONNA HAPPEN LITERALLY EVERYTHING reading it all again for the 6th time FOR GODDESS SAKE WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME

[zeroducks-2]

hi zero. so i'm trying my hand as dickstroke (teehee) fic, but i am slightly. i'm not exactly sure how to write bruce. is it wildly out of character to make him a nitpicky parent? i'm not trying to write him as an evil abuser of children, but i do want it to be clear that he has high expectations of his kids (dick esp) and can be critical when those expectations aren''t met. so.................... please help? thoughts?

I rarely write Bruce as a side character because he's complex in a way that demands the spotlight, and being an absolute drama queen it's hard to keep him in the sidelines.

So far I've written him as a parent once, and I've written him as neglectful of Dick’s emotional needs and slow to understand what he didn't provide to Dick in terms of trust and emotional stability. But I also write him as someone who ultimately loves Dick albeit not unconditionally, and when faced with his own mistakes he does feel genuine regret (albeit having 0 idea how to fix them and most of the time not really even trying to fix anything and preferring to wallow in self pity).

Indeed I think that when you say "he has high expectations of his kids and can be critical when they aren't met" we can translate it with "Bruce's love and approval are conditional to how his kids (especially Dick) react to Bruce's own rules and needs". So if the rules are broken and the expectations aren't met he stops being a parent and becomes a disappointed Batman who will harshly reamind the younger vigilante about their place, their mistakes and how they need to do better and be better.

Which is why it works less on Dick once Dick is grown up, because he has developed his own way to define his personal worth and to judge his mistakes, and has his own expectations to meet. It did leave him with gaps in his emotional development and stability though, and that's something that I normally use to "push" him towards Slade - Slade recognizes the pattern of emotional neglect Dick was subjected to, and worms his way into the gaps (whether this is a good or bad thing depends on the fic - if Slade is a good person he'll be Dick's rock, if he's an opportunistic abuser he'll be able to break him from the inside once Dick lets him in).

So to sum it up, I too don't think Bruce needs to be written as an evil abuser of children to be the cause of his kids' lifelong emotional deficiencies and general issues. He's going to close off emotionally if one of the kids does something wrong and he'll deny paternal affection, but at the same time he will reward the kid who meets said expectations with familial warmth, complicity (which will make the kid feel like "part of the family" and provide them with a sense of belonging) and carefully delivered praise (never too much of that because Batman's never been big on praise anyway).

If I can help you with something more specific please reach out, it really is my pleasure. Good luck with your fic.

[sunsetsmakemesad]

Oshi no Ko chapter 160

Alright.

Teehee

Silly guy

Denial mental illness moment

Or he's just being a liar

Let him talk about his gf, nino

Hm.

So that's the route we're going for

YESSS BEST PANEL

AMAZING

for clarification I am not all that excited about hikaru's character as it is currently, but this panel rules

crazy.

Gorgeous wonderful family I am eating them

Tbh I'm not that surprised with the way he went about it, hikaru acted the role of the innocent boy since he was a young child.

I just don't see where Aka is going with this

Aqua thought he'd get away scott free with saying Kana is easy to manipulate. No fr what was he manipulating her for i forgot

Hm. This is. More in character than I thought it would be? That's a plus at least.

But. Since when was Hikaru's arc about his talent.

Alabama love?

Ok I'm sorry I don't hate ruby that much. She's a sweet girl at heart but Aka really just made an incest plot and then. Carried on and never mention it again. Okay.

It is sweet to see how much Aqua cares about Runy though. He really cares for his sister

Oh it's about Sarina well okay. They never stopped seeing each other as gorou and sarina.

All in all, I do like sarina. She was just a girl hoping to be able to grow up to achieve her dreams. At her core she really just wanted to love and be loved central theme of the series haha

EYES OF LOVE EYES OF LOVE AAHADGHHC

AI IN THE PANEL LOOKIJG AT THEM THE EYES OF LOVE SHES LOOKING AT THEM WITH EYES OF LOVE

Sorry for the glazing but Mengo's art is still very pretty

Ok so. Aqua threatens kamiki with aknife and I suppose they'll either start fighting or Akane will intervene(because of course she will)

Well. That's the end of the chapter. I didn't hate it but I have no idea where Aka is going with Hikaru's character. I suppose everything before was meant to be him deceiving you but I hope not because it's just too late to have him turn out to be someone entirely else.

I just dislike how it was pulled off. The evil villain->actually really sympathethic dude->evil villain

And it's. Okay. I just think it wasn't very well written(i'm not that good of a writer myself so take this with a grain of salt)

I suppose part of me is just upset that my interpretation of him was totally wrong but also this twist just doesnt make sense to me

Why are we questioning who the villain is and the villain's motivation in the final arc

Well, stick around for chapter 161

[seerofmike]

yo. not sure if ure the right person to ask but idk where else to go. i recently came back to apex and am trying to catch up w the lore except im a bit confused. i knew octane hated his dad and was working under him to fuck him over later but now he fell for his dads BS? or am i missing something? and i heard his dad isnt even his dad but his grandpa and im just confused.

also, before i took a break from apex i used to read ur cryptane fics a lot. i found u still into apex and still writing for it as well which is why im asking u. rly like ur fics, tyvm for them :) ty in advance if tumblr doesnt eat this ask.

im glad u like my fics thank you!!!

okay so, not entirely sure when you left or how much you know of the current storyline but quick recap, octane's abusive POS father does some terrorist shit and continuously ridicules him and disowns him in that one season 9 comic, then starts running for Syndicate Head Honcho in season 12 after some fuckery framing maggie for the destruction of olympus.

obviously concerned about his father who is uhhh an evil terrorist (not like maggie, the cool terrorist <3) octane tells lifeline he'll break into his father's safe to gather some info. duardo catches him, but basically like. bribes octane into 'working' for him and octane agrees because he's like teehee!!! i'm gonna screw him over!! che will be sooooooo impressed

then over the course of the quest duardo continuously praises octane and convinces him that he's doing good things by donating to the Frontier Corps. the climax of the quest is lifeline managing to break into duardo's safe while octane finds a video on his computer from a press conference where duardo seems to confess that he loves his family more than anything and that his son is very important to him.

the secret in duardo's safe is his own death certificate. lifeline wants to expose him. octane wants to wait it out and see what happens and might be a little emotionally vulnerable from the whole shebang (as is lifeline tbh cuz she likes to take the whole weight of the outlands on her shoulders), so some petty arguing ensues but it escalates until octane grabs the certificate from her and burns it. they break up as friends officially and both remark that their friendship has been dead for a long long time.

fast forward, octane apparently helps 'duardo' campaign but doesn't question him until the night of the election where he wins, and duardo announces he's taking over lifeline's organization and installing her mother as the new head. octane confronts him after the election, devastated and angry at the idea that duardo had played him. his 'father' insists he hasn't, so when octane demands to know his true identity he tells him: torres silva, his grandfather, and continues to gaslight octane into thinking he's doing it For The Family. in the epilogue, lifeline teams up with maggie to do some terrorist girl shit herself.

so the quest ends with lifeline and octane on opposite sides, and also the reveal that the video that made octane think his father actually cared about him was in fact his grandfather talking about his father LMAAAAAO

how eager / thrilled / willing he is to work with torres seems to fluctuate a little and hasn't really been explored since. on the one hand, he shows moments of anxiety about the whole situation like in this image in the newcastle teasers where the description explicitly says he's nervous about the whole thing;

and in the final chapter he seems genuinely upset and freaked out about the fact that lifeline's mom has taken over the frontier corps, who he thinks is 'not cool' (so true bestie)

he also seems to occasionally be suspicious of torres, right now when you drop in certain areas of the new map (Broken Moon), if he's alone (and notably, *only* if he's alone) he will ask himself what torres wants with the place.

on the other hand, he seems...Fine with engaging with torres still? and maybe even helps him do shitty things? it's implied in this interview between seer and lisa stone that torres paid her to pin the blame of boreas's turbulance on seer, and the way octane reacts after the interview seems to imply that either a.) he knew what torres was planning and is amused or b.) he didn't know, but regardless, was very amused by what torres did to him.

in a loading screen torres also says this (context: they are filming a PR video apologizing for the giant sea monster attacking the legends)

it's not outright confirmed octane still helps him do his political shit after campaigning with him, but it's likely. he also helped pitch boreas as a new apex map to torres with seer and still seems very engaged with him despite the bombs dropped at the end of s12. given that he helped seer pitch boreas, and questions (alone) on cleo about what torres wants with the moon, he seems to suspect something is up, but he isn't as open about it as others and seems kind of hesitant to say anything.

so. the verdict;

i get what apex was trying to do in the season 12 quest. torres DOES start love-bombing octane all of a sudden, which makes octane give literal pause like Twice because "what?? he called me son???? he's never done that before ??????" (<- transgender btw) and i think they were hoping to give the impression that octane is gaslit and manipulated into siding with torres. the narrative also acknowledges that octane's actions are Extremely selfish here and driven entirely by emotion and wanting to feel loved than any sort of logical reasoning or 'greater good' like he insists.

that being said, it really needed more time in the oven. he goes REALLY quickly from "i'm gonna trick him!! teehee!" to burning one of the very few bridges he has and possibly throwing the entire outlands into turmoil because daddy said he loved him once. then it goes very quickly again from "octane unconditionally supports his (grand)father because he is desperate for his approval" to now "octane may in fact regret this and be very suspicious of him" but the latter thing is kind of up in the air given that octane still actively works for him and seems to do a little bit of villainous shit himself.

right now, i think they are intentionally going with a rather messy narrative because like...abuse is messy. family is messy. being manipulated and gaslit and you yourself manipulating and gaslighting your friends and repeating this cycle of abuse because your abuser suddenly pretends he cares about you because he wants to USE you for political gain is a very messy story and it always would have been.

i don't think octane 100% is onboard with torres or fell entirely for his BS, but i don't think he hates him either or what he's doing. it seems like there *IS* a part of him that cares for people Other than himself, but octane's focus is kind of on Me Me Me and right now what matters to Me Me Me is the fact that HE feels loved and gets what HE wants, outlands be damned, and admitting he was wrong means that torres does not love him, and that che was right. and since he also happens to be very petty he doesn't want to admit she was right since they're fighting rn LMAO

i think the story suffers from the main problem with All of apex's storytelling which is just that there wasn't enough time to sit with what it presents but overall i think this is like. fine. almost good, even. one of the better characters arcs apex has going for it right now.

(sorry for how long this is btw i think i went off topic <////3)

(btw cryptane enjoyer. they have voicelines now. they're shite but by god do they have them)

[lowcallyfruity]

no more favorites this favorites that tell me ur LEAST fav ships and ur least fav characters from each dorm /hj

Ok for ships I know you said least favorite but I actually do not hate any of the twst ships I think a lot of them are nice☹️ they’re more like. At the bottom of the tier list 🥰 (I’m sorry I just wanted to clarify 😔)

The only ships I HATE HATE HATE are the illegal ones- like incest and big age gaps (huge age gaps just make me uncomfortable) (and probably another criteria I can’t remember right now ☹️)

Same with the characters- I love them all so very much they all mean the world to me ☹️

Anyways.

Things under the cut!!!

I might get shot for this, but I’m not the biggest rookvil shipper.

I enjoy their dynamic and I definitely get why people ship them- like they’re definitely zesty- and I also do interact with fanart of them/follow rookvil shippers but it’s just not really my thing ☹️

I also personally see Rook and Vil as cousins so I do not ship it in my own ~twst universe~ - 😭😭 Rook is like Vils really weird gay autistic cousin to me 💔💔

Im also not the biggest Florid fan-

Like with rookvil, I get why people ship it and I do interact with florid stuff sometimes- but it’s just not my favorite-

Idk something about it makes me feel weird and icky 😭 I don’t know why I think this way tbh 😭 it is very cute tho !!

And uhh finally silsebe!

Like the other two, I get it. I understand. I follow silsebe shippers and I interact with silsebe art.

But I see then as brothers/family in my ~twst universe~ So I personally do not ship them. And bc of that they are at the bottom of the ship list 😭😭😭

Umm tbh I think that might be all of my least favorite ships? Unless I forgot one 😭😭😭 but yeah- those r like my big 3 I’m not a fan of 👍

————

Ok least fav characters time!!!

Hearts SLAY bul-

TREY CLOVER 🤬🤬 DIE DIE DIE TREY CLOVER (/j) he’s a good character and all- I just think he’s ugly 😭😭 I hate him for the memes and lolz he’s so stupid 😭😭😭 I HATE HIS RIZZ FACE SO MUCH

I also do not like ace. I mean I do like him. I love him. But he is my annoying stupid son I hate him so much I hate white people and gingers 🤬🤬 (JOKE. I AM NOT SERIOUS. I DO NOT HATE WHITE PEOPLE 😭😭😭)

- my sister calls Ace “Ace the disgrace” and “ Ace who doesn’t ace his grades” 😭😭😭

Savanaclaw 🥶-

I love all of Savanaclaw- they’re all great-

If you asked me this like. Maybe earlier I would’ve said Ruggie because idk he just wasn’t super Interesting

Uhhh right now maybe my least favorite would be uhhhh 😭😭😭 I’m just saying all 3 of them- I love them so so much. But they also do not get a lot of screen time. ☹️ especially Jack. Idk. Sometimes they are kinda boring 😭😭😭😭😭😭 idk I cannot pick they’re all pookies

Octavinelle 😍-

Azul. Azul is my least favorite. I hate him. I dislike him. He is so evil. Like. Morally. But that’s also what makes him so good?!?! He’s my love hate character.

Fun fact- I started shipping azujami because I hated Jamil and Azul so much I was like- “hahaha my two least favorite evil horrendous characters get shipped teehee 🥰🥰🥰”

Scarabia 🥶🥶🥶🥶-

Jamil. I am actually Jamil’s biggest hater 🤬🤬 /j I hate him for book 4. I hate him for everything he did to Kalim. He is so morally fucked up (imo) he pisses me off so much. I also have a hc for him, which makes me dislike him kinda 🥰

But actually, I’ve grown to like him!!! I adore his character so much. And his hometown event was so lovely… like damn…. Okay Jamil… sobs….

Pomefiore 😍-

Rook. He’s just my least favorite. Like. For no particular reason. I just like Vil more tbh 😭😭😭😭 so yeah he’s last

IGNIHYDE 🥶🥶-

Idia by default since I like ortho a bit more 😭

Diasomnia 😭😭😭🥰🥰-

Disliking a Diasomnia character is actually illegal and not allowed 😕😕😕 /j

Umm. I love them all with my heart and my soul. But. Lilia is my least favorite by just a bit. I like the others a bit more than Lilia 😭😭😭

And yeah that’s it 👍👍👍👍👍

Sighs deeply

[training4theapocalypse]

Also, before I forget I love how you wrote/write Una. She is THAT bitch. And like the way Carmichael was talking about how she's "more dangerous" because she's unpredictable, I'm eating that shit up. I love the unpredictable babes who can also be soft (to her lil bro🥺)

How was coming up with an OC for this fic go for you and did you have any inspo or references? Also, is she the same character you were referring to in the drabble you wrote not long ago or was that a completely different character?

Anyway, as always I love your stuff and sorry if I keep bombarding you

Thank you so much 😭 and don’t worry about bombarding me - it literally brings me so much joy that someone is enjoying this fic. And if there’s one thing I love it’s talking about my writing lmaoooooo.

Una was loosely based on the character in the drabble (the Finders Keepers character just sorted into Slytherin) but for A Nest of Vipers I decided to make her a different person with an established canon family.

As far as references go - nobody immediately springs to mind for Una. Sabine and Meredith are basically Regina George and Gretchen Weiners from Mean Girls, respectively. Una is an incredibly perceptive addition to that group who usually does a good job at hiding just how much she knows 👀

I sort of think Una is how I’d like to have acted when I was single and dating. Anyone on here who knows me knows I am very ‘teehee 🥰🤪💖’ unmysterious, heart on my sleeve person but I love writing someone that is like ‘😒🖤🐍’.

I think Una is also secretly insecure but loves that everyone thinks she’s ‘that bitch’. So when Cormac finds out something about her in Ch 3 that makes him realise maybe she isn’t what he originally thought, she’s gonna be really annoyed when he starts treating her differently. 👀

I’m having so much fun writing an OC for the first time in fanfic - I think it gives you a lot more creative freedom than writing a reader character. I’m enjoying making sure she has all those Slytherin traits but showing her reasoning behind everything so she isn’t just plain evil (women’s wrongs activists rise up).

Thank you for the ask!! 🥰🥹

[randomidiocyncrazies]

gwitch ep 3

lmao what the FUCK is going on anymore

the writing for this ep is really. hm. decent concept, questionable execution? they’re too blatant when they should’ve been subtle, and i personally found one of there character’s characterization a little... inconsistent, both from their established background and just their behavior within the episode itself.

i’m willing to see more of it but like. hm. i’m less confident in the writing after this ep

I personally found the climax of Guel’s arc in this ep kind of... confusing? he’s obviously upset that his dad doesn’t trust him enough to let him fight without resorting to underhanded tricks, and the resignation of “you don’t even need my will, do you” was a really poignant character moment...

But like. maybe i’m just being nitpicky, but his previous behavior suggests that he’s cool with using his family’s influence to throw his weight around; hell, the writing makes it soooo blatant that their world and values run on “screw the rules i have money.” I get that piloting is his pride and joy and he’ll care more about using his own skills to win, but he he didn’t seem all that upset about the sprinkler sabotage... making his rebellion against his dad feel hollow.

i mean... i really liked the character beat of him being resigned to having the AI pilot for him, and his “you don’t even need my will” is so sad and bitter (and perfectly illustrates the themes of the narrative). from that, we can extrapolate that Guel and his family are perhaps resigned to obeying his father’s will—he’d have been raised to believe that obeying the will of the strong, reluctantly or otherwise, is the only possible outcome. As such, his rebellion in the middle of the match feels like clumsy writing; it felt like he had that specific reaction at that specific moment because the plot demanded it. i think it flattened a potentially more subtle character arc into “rarrrgh hell yeah rebellion now! stick it to the man!” and comes off as rushed development.

(also, the proposal at the end is very. uh okay that happened i guess. i feel like they’re going for a “arrogant jerk but surprisingly pure in romance” angle for him, and i’m wary of it lol. i don’t think Suletta/Guel is really a serious option, except if Guel performs a sacrifice to save her or whatever, but the whole thing feels like they’re trying to absolve Guel for his beastly behavior towards Miorine? i’m just not a fan of “jerk falls for a girl who made him eat humble pie” stories; a lot of those stories try to brush the jerk’s wrongdoing under the carpet in light of their flustered ladykiller-in-love shenanigans, and I’m kinda tired of that.

also:

knowing Guel will be pining over Suletta is gonna get real annoying real fast, not to mention the unknown factor of Elan. it also doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that the creators aren’t queerbaiting, though i still have faith that it’s not just bait.)

on another note, i get that all the blatantly evil adults are very blatantly evil, but it’s annoying to have the same over-the-top “mwahahaha children are just tools of their parents!” conversation multiple times. it doesn’t help that the dialogue is a kinda cringeworthy, especially having come off of Delling “I am a King; I Give the Orders, You Obey” Rembran last week. we get it, these parents are evil.

also, the way everyone was like “teehee it doesn’t matter if Jeturk cheated, the only thing that matters is their sponsor” was also kind clumsy in terms of its execution? bro we get it, we know capitalism is bad. just have Elan say the thing about how the strength of the backer counts towards the pilot’s strength (and have other characters share little smirks or whatever at appropriate moments). it’s disappointing that they virtually repeat the same dialogue at least 3 times across the episode.

honestly, it’s like the writers are scared that the audience wouldn’t pick up on the central themes of the work without having characters SCREAMING in our faces about it; i personally am not a fan of this style of writing and prefer a lighter touch, but part of it is personal taste.

the only thing revealed/reinforced in this ep is that the setting of Gwitch is blatantly sexist. They specifically mention trading women in duels, and obviously Miorine’s situation is steeped in sexism—and unless we get in-universe evidence that people also set up their sons to be won as a prize, it’s safe to say Delling only did that to Miorine because she’s his daughter, not his son.

In a way i think it fleshes out the worldbuilding a bit more: same-sex marriages are apparently common enough that it’s no big deal (though we have no idea if it’s an overall thing, or if such progressiveness only applies to political matches), but it sucks for women and poor people.

[auspex]

luke tell me about mark (knife emoji):

🤥, 👪, 💐, 🌙, 🙈, 🙊, 🙉, 🌌, 📣, 🪤, 👑, 🖍️, 🌠, ☄️, 💔

sorry im sending u a ton bc i want to Know also bc these quesitons make me INSANE and i want to make you have to contemplate them in you head.

HIIIIIII this got relaly long and also i am so so tired so hopefully this coheres also sorry it got out of order cause i had to find ones i answered already! anyway enjoy.

OKAY first the ones i’ve answered before:

Bouquet answered here!: www.tumblr.com/blood-bound/724128649517858816/and-for-porphy-and-for-mark

💐 [BOUQUET] If you could send your OC a bouquet, what flowers would make it up and what is the overall message? “White lilies - mourning, but also purity and rebirth. Blue star - admiring determination and endurance Begonias - thank you Zinnia and forget-me-nots - a reminder never to forget absent friends the message is: STAY STRONG, STAY HUMAN, YOU CAN DO IT + THANKS FOR ROTATING IN MY BRAIN I know nothin abt flowers so i used this link https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/gardening/g2503/surprising-flower-meanings/?slide=85” I still like this answer :) Manages to have a coherent color scheme too. -

Milky way and Megaphone answered here: www.tumblr.com/blood-bound/731196362845241344/megaphone-milky-way-clover

“The first thing I decided was clan - Tremere - and the second thing was that he would be an adjunct professor who was a closeted gay man. he was my first OC and first VTM OC and i was new to EVERYTHING so that is mostly what I had. :) He did Much Expanding from there.”

But I will expand: So after that I used making his character sheet to expand him. His street racing backstory came from me wanting him to have SOMETHING in the physical skills category. Then I wanted his more immediate backstory to be that he saw his bf getting drank from and it made sense for him to be a touchstone, and then I decided that his family and him were distant so I didn’t want any of his touchstones to be family; thus ex boyfriend and faculty advisor. I also picked his predator type of sandman, because I didn’t want him to be evil but I did want him to actually drink blood from humans so sandman made sense to me and it ALSO let me get an auspex dot :D cause I wanted all three disciplines in clan to start. -

Megaphone: “Mark's voice is somewhat on the quiet side. It's solidly masculine but it is higher pitched. It's kind of what you would expect from a nerdy dude. When he is intentionally speaking more quietly it has a bit of a scratchy quality to it. If he was in the year 2023 he'd prob have a gay lisp but he Hid That Shit cause closeted.

I am Desperately seeking a voice claim pleaseee if anyone has ideas send.” -

Shooting star (Make a wish with no consequences)was answered here: https://www.tumblr.com/blood-bound/726830818058797056/train-cloud-shooting-star-for-mark

But due to plot developments his answer changed! Now it would be: That Julius dies :) YAYYYY. I’m not sure if he would actually be able to make himself wish that though : ( if he’s not able to it would be to get out of the Kyle contract still. -

Comet and See-No-Evil answered here: https://www.tumblr.com/blood-bound/731194724679090176/lol

☄️ COMET - what do people assume about them? are they right? “-That he's a nerd: Yes - That he is a neonate: yes in the sense he is independent from his sire, but certainly not in age. He seems older due to his sire making him Politically Safe but he's a baby. -That he has Many Secrets: Yeah but not the type they think for sure -That he has someone powerful protecting him: Yeah <3 There are prob other things that I'm not myself aware of cause im bad at recognizing such things but… those are some!” - 🙈 SEE-NO-EVIL - whats a side of your oc that they don't want to show other people? “Both before and after embrace: His romantic side . Teehee. That's a short answer so lemme expand: He really is romantic and believes in true love and stuff but that goes against his Professor Persona and is not Cool so unless u actually are that person who is romantically into, u aint gonna waterboard this one out of him. After embrace: He doesn't want to show his sympathy for ghouls to most, out of fear they would start questioning him about his own. He's a bit more open about some of his other kindness but NOT that” - Family answered here: https://www.tumblr.com/blood-bound/724397820458778624/for-mark 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 FAMILY — how many people are in your oc's immediate family? how many people are in your oc's extended family? do they have aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc? who in their family are they closest with? are they close with their birth family, or do they have a found family? But I will redo my answer: Just his mom and dad are in the immediate family. I still haven’t really considered extended family - i think when he was younger his grandparents would visit but they died while he was in college. I think his dad had a sister that he’s seen before but Mark didn’t like her so doesn’t care that he doesn’t see her anymore. So he didn’t get close with his cousins either (he had 2). If he HAD to say who he was closest with it’d be his mom but he’s distant with mom and dad. He wants to see them again before he fakes his death but thats about the extent of it. He still has no found family :( - Crown answered here (what does ur OC want to be rememebred for): https://www.tumblr.com/blood-bound/728760375815946240/for-mark “He wants to Not Die and thus not need a legacy because he will Live Forever. But seriously uhmmm lemme think. I think he definitely wants to be thought of as 'one of the good ones' as in he wants to meet final death before he loses his humanity. Beyond that he's kind of having a crisis because he Doesnt Know. He had a goal in life - professor of Roman history, be famous in that field - but now that seems like Not Enough as a kindred. If he wasn't dealing with more immediate crises he would be dealing with an identity crisis for sure… he does want to reexamine all of history and, if it doesnt already exist, write stuff regarding how kine influenced kindred history and vice versa. So we'll see how that goes for him, if it ends up being anything he'd wanna be remembered for that work and for helping kindred appreciate the kine more :D (GOOD FUCKING LUCK W THAT MARK LMFAO)”

- Now the new ones! - 🤥 LYING - are they good liars? do they have tells to show they're lying? Mark has 2 manipulation and 1 subterfuge. So. A dice pool of three, which to me means he is below average but not god-awful. He usually talks around things or refuses to answer.

If you know him well a tell that he has is he will make a point to NOT fidget with his glasses because he feels like that WOULD be a tell but. He always fidgets with his glasses so it is actually notable when he doesn’t for an extended period of time. He also def does the thing where his eyes look up while he is thinking of the lie. -

🌙 MOON - what is your oc's greatest wish? how far are they willing to go for it? Mark wants a lot of things right now. His greatest wish though… hmm. IDK I’m indecisive. Have a bunch: -To be free of Julius -To make Sampson happy - which means he has to let him go. -To be able to let Sampson go - he is kind of worried how he’s gonna react when he actually gets to that point. He’s trying not to think about it. -Someone, just one person, to both know him very deeply and love him deeply. Someone who also believes he is good, and someone he believes is good as well. He does not want to stop caring.

He’s willing to go quite far because they are all interrelated and, the only things he has to lose are the hope for those wishes. So, so long as it won’t ruin one of the above, he would do a lot and risk a lot. He has a lot of resolve and will certainly push himself beyond his limits. -

🙊 SPEAK-NO-EVIL - what is something your oc will refuse to stay quiet about? Uhm. He’s quite willing to stay quiet for his own safety buuuuuuut probably someone wantonly attempting to kill innocent humans he could not stand for, he would HAVE to try to do something to stop it, and also his hatred of Sabbat - he would not accept someone saying the Sabbat aren’t so bad. Which sucks, but that was his experience.

Oh also he cannot accept Julius slander at this time. He will argue about it. Yes he’s trying to kill Julius. Look. Blood bonds make things complicated. -

🙉 HEAR-NO-EVIL - what is the worse thing your oc could hear from someone?

Other than being informed of stuff that would mean he’s fucked (‘Julius knows you want to kill him” for example), it would be someone he cares about and trusts telling him that Sampson was right, he’s just pretending to care and there isn’t hope for him, that he’s not capable of really loving anyone anymore. :( He’s holding on to hope of true love, ok??? -

🪤 MOUSE TRAP - what will always lure them into certain danger? a loved one in danger? a promise of something they are always searching for?

All of the above and more. Mark has become kind of arrogant - his sire makes him close to untouchable politically, and he’s also just arrogant due to his Beast’s influence + Julius’s influence (Julius’s fatal flaw is his arrogance). And he is also desperate. Teehee. -

🖍️ CRAYON - what advice would you give to them?

I think i had actually answered this one before but I can’t be bothered to find it and my answer wasn’t that good… because it’s still not good. I DONT KNOW. Mark’s situation is so tough and I’m doing my best to RP him accurately while making the best decisions for survival. I think I would tell him that he’s gotta keep his hunger managed, dammit, do NOT let yourself get hungry or it’s going to go really bad. I would also give him the advice that he should be really, really careful about the nosferatu on his territory cause while he’s being careful already i OOC know it is even more dangerous than he realizes. Otherwise. IDK. -

💔 BROKEN HEART - what could their partner do that would absolutely break their heart? HEEEEEEEEHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Yeas. this is a funn question. Okay. So Mark is gonna have a lot of baggage that his next boyfriend would have to navigate. Other than something like I wrote above about the worst thing he could hear from someone, which would of course break his heart… a partner saying that he took advantage of Mark opening up would break his heart too - sharing his secrets with someone else for gain. Or really just sharing things about Mark that he keeps private without his consent would really hurt his trust due to what he’s been through. Or his partner beginning to stop caring about humanity/think little of kine, cause then Mark would really struggle with which conviction he should follow…

[incorrectinfinity]

Alright, I'll bite. Dump the oc info

HAHAHA LET'S GO!

So I'm just gonna explain them all badly with one sentence or less in groups so hehe

🌻 Flower Family

Sunflower Seed Cookie (she/her)

I am no longer evil I want to be loved

Peanut Cookie (she/her)

Convenience store employees are the backbone of society

Lavender Cookie (they/she)

Sleepy bitches should get paid 100000 dollars an hour for existing in society

Olive Cookie (he/him)

Only straight oc

Queen Anne's Lace Cookie (she/her)

[Insert world's best mom mug here]

⏳ Tk Variants

Clockmaker Cookie (she/they)

The ONLY healthy one

Clockbreaker (she/they)

Sicko mode

Timebreaker (also ancient swap) (she/they)

Hates their job

Bread Crescent (also ancient swap) (she/they)

Scrunglo

Timelord (she/they)

L+ratio

Clocktaker (she/they)

An actual murderer. No exaggeration. They have murdered billions of people. With the dumbest name ever. Slay.

General (she/they)

Evil. Awful. Terrible.

Beta TK (she/they)

Relationships are hard

Unstoppable Protector (she/they)

Thinks they're better than everyone (they're right but they didn't have to say it)

⚡ Ancient Swap

Vanilla Extract Cookie (he/him)

MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA

Wilted Lily Cookie (she/her)

Sometimes you just gotta walk into the woods and never walk out

Mistletoe Dart Cookie (she/her)

Hates her friends

Sickly Sweet Cacao Cookie (he/him)

:)

Shredded Cheese Cookie (she/it)

:(

Light Sorceress Cookie (she/her)

Bad at her job but god she's trying

Ocean Nymph Cookie (she/her)

Honestly just wants to be left alone

Moonglow Cookie (she/her)

Kind of a stalker

Frozen Yogurt Cookie (she/they)

Hey maybe let's not give children overbearing expectations they can never live up to maybe

Twizzler Cookie (she/they/he)

Stares at the ceiling fan for hours

Cherry Rope Cookie (they/he)

Makes bad decisions

Spun Sugar Cookie (she/her)

Match Breaker

🌑 The Mysterious Case of Lemon Tea

Blueberry Lemonade (they/them)

A small

Strawberry Milk (he/him)

One of the only ocs that makes good decisions 👏👏👏👏

Lemon Tea (they/he/it)

WOOPS! Teehee *twirls*

Banana Smoothie (she/her)

She's just like me fr

Apple Juice (she/her)

"Lol" (was never heard from again)

Honey Mocha (he/they)

Ngl this is just a persona for my friend but I still use em as a character sometimes (I have permission and they help me write with him!)

Silkweaver (they/he/it)

WIG SNATCHED

✨ Other

Butter Cream Cookie (he/she/they)

Me

Waffle Cone Cookie (she/her)

Actual criminal

Starburst Cookie (all pronouns)

Pretty...

Ghostberry Cookie (she/it)

Idk what to do with it but she's cute so I'm keeping her

Powered Up Pup (male)

Gold Leaf Cookie (he/she)

Actual criminal 2 except he got arrested lol

Activated Charcoal Cookie (she/it)

"If I weren't so small it'd be over for you hoes"

Crumpet Cookie (she/her)

Grandma!!!

Updated Mar 29 2023

[vangoghmusings]

a/n: hello! i’ve been wanting to do this for a while now since im a huge astrology nerd (so i know what im talking about teehee)  so this is male match-ups according to sign and compatibility. this isn’t my usual kind of writing so i hope you guys like it!! <3 if you don’t know your sign check here  

this took me so long oh my god i hope you guys like it 

taglist: @mixfi @lilacskyura @katsuhoee ​ @moonlightinsanity​ @anime-waifuuu @iiminibattlehero @leeeah-loooser​ @bby-chloe1999​ @verymuchbabey @h0wab0utw3d0ntd0that@unknownweeabo @cookednoodlez @helloshoutohere @star-mum​ @izuku-sakura​ @thegalxe

UA STUDENTS

Katsuki Bakugou- April 20; Taurus

the absolute SHOCK in my face to learn he wasn’t an aries

it would be expected that katsuki is a fire sign, like cmon look at his quirk

but taurus is actually an earth sign 

taurus are typically seen as quite calm, but,, 

katsuki does seem like a true taurus in many ways

they can be stubborn and unwilling to compromise 

they are very realistic 

HATE FEELING INSECURE

they are often great at cooking and love to shop 

i feel like katsuki isn’t a self indulgent shopper but would buy anything for his s/o 

taurus are really good at working with their hands ;) 

theyre soft romantic bbs and as much as katsuki hates being vulnerable he’d definetly be a softie with his s/o 

id match katsuki with a calm pisces

Izuku Midoria- July 15; Cancer

i am not shocked at ALL to see that the lil broccoli boy is a cancer

like cmon he’s so sensitive 

he is a cancer to the T

he’s loyal, emotional, imaginative 

he also carries the negative traits of many cancers

such as feeling insecure and having difficulty taking criticism 

i mean the kid breaks his bones to prove others wrong 

cancers love being with their friends and family 

and they love helping others

the career of a hero would be natural for cancers

cancers are such sweet babies and izuku fits right into that category 

i would match izuku with a chill taurus 

Tenya Iida- August 22; Leo 

i didn’t expect tenya to be a leo but im also not surprised 

leos are often seen as flashy and arrogant 

but they’re more than their stereotype

leos are passionate and natural born leaders

like cmon class rep! 

tenya being a leo makes a lot of sense 

he’s generous and kind and always strives for the best 

they tend to be a bit dramatic, and tenya can be too 

being that leos are a fire sign they gravitate to self growth

this can be seen in tenya wanting to improve and challenging himself 

leos struggle facing harsh realities, similarly to tenya when he learned about what happened to tensei 

leos are known for their bravery and tenya fits right in

i would match tenya with a kind aquarius 

Shoto Todoroki- January 11; Capricorn 

i practically screamed when i realized shoto was a capricorn 

it just makes way too much sense 

they’re responsible, well-mannered, respectful !!!!

HOW IS HE SO HOT AND RESPECTFUL

capricorns i just,, i love them, truly 

shoto is no exception 

they love family, things of quality, traditions 

and their dislikes vary from day to day

why?

cause they’re iconic thats why 

however, capricorns aren’t always the nicest 

they tend to be condescending and can often come off as rude 

they’re incredibly unforgiving *ahem endeavor ahem* 

but, its because they just have naturally high standards 

it makes sense that he is an earth sign because he’s super grounded 

because saturn rules capricorn, the tend to seem cold and distant at times

but they are incredibly loyal friends and always strive for the best 

i would match shoto with a down to earth cancer

Mashiro Ojiro- May 28; Gemini 

i must admit, i was surprised to learn ojiro is a gemini

but if you really look at his character it makes a lot of sense 

gemini’s have a bad rep of being too faced

they’re actually one of my favorite signs!!

gemini’s are are gentle and affectionate 

and sweet bb ojiro is exactly that 

however they also tend to be quite anxious, another thing ojiro happens to be at times as well 

they’re very adaptable people

this can be seen throughout ojiro’s training and how much he learns and is willing to continue striving for 

gemini’s are very sociable and will talk to almost anyone 

like, he doesn’t see hagakure but they’re still good friends 

this is why i think ojiro would do great with a fire sign 

i would match ojiro with a cheerful sagittarius 

Denki Kaminari- June 29; Cancer 

alright cancer number two!! 

to be honest, denki doesn’t really give cancer vibes 

but, his personality traits align to much of what a cancer is 

tenacious and loyal 

and denki is definitely that 

however, cancers can be suspicious of others and their actions

and denki feels like the kind of guy to snoop on somebody 

but we gotta give denki some credit 

cancers strive to be there for their friends no matter what

denki shows this in the usj attack when he protects momo and jiro 

cancers tend to avoid conflict but even so, they search for conflict in those who pose bigger threats to them

similarly to when denki makes fun of bakugou even though he could totally blow him up 

denki is a chatty and flirty baby 

and cancers tend to be most compatible with earth signs 

buuut i think denki would be better suited with a fire sign 

i’d match denki with an outgoing aries 

Hanta Sero- July 28; Leo 

at first i was like hmmm no 

but then i used my brain and i was like actually yes 

leos are prideful and while sero doesn’t seem like the boastful kind, he does have a lot of pride in himself 

leos are very committed to their goals and sero’s actions show his dedication to becoming a hero 

leos are also so funny?? and sero is literally one of the funniest guys of 1A 

sero is one of the most sociable in the class and a total class clown 

leos are almost always seen with their friends and sero is no different 

sero’s vibes are just immaculate in my opinions 

so his s/o needs to match the energy 

i would match sero with a funny gemini 

Eijiro Kirishima- October 16; Libra

GOD IT JUST MAKES SO MUCH SENSE 

I CANT EVEN EXPRESS

THE ACCURACY

ok ok but seriously, of course kiri is a libra 

libras are diplomatic, fair, and strive for justice 

aka being MANLY is in the stars for bb kiri 

however, libras aren’t the most confident people 

they’re quite insecure and pity themselves a’lot 

which makes sense that its canon that it took kiri so long to accept his quirk 

have you ever wondered why kiri is so hot and cute and perfect?

ITS BECAUSE HES A LIBRA

im not even kidding

libras are known for being physically attractive 

i mean libra is literally ruled by venus

who else is venus?

APHRODITE AKA THE GODDESS OF LOVE

long story short, kiri is the god of love 

libras hate being alone

why do you think he puts up with bakugou constantly calling him shitty hair and pushing him around? 

i considered putting kiri with a water sign but they’re kinda babies (no offense i love my water signs) 

but i don’t think he could handle a person who is constantly emotional like many water signs are 

i would match kiri with a kind-hearted sagittarius 

Hitoshi Shinso- July 1; Cancer 

jesus christ ANOTHER CANCER?? 

i cant even be upset cause it makes sense 

while i would’ve thought shinso was a calm scorpio or a relaxde picses 

he fits much better as a cancer 

as mentioned previously with deku and denki, cancers really do have a heart of gold and just want to help people 

cancers are also very manipulative people 

i mean, look at this mans quirk 

cancers are also moody and pessimistic 

characteristics that shinsou has but are seen more as stoic and quiet

but cancers are also sympathetic 

and bb shinsou is a softie i just know it 

cancers are guided by emotion

like deku, he is seen as passionate for his desire to be a hero, even though his quirk is seen to be one of evil 

shinsou needs to be with someone who’s willing to listen when he opens up (which cancers hate doing)

i would match shinsou with an understanding taurus

Tamaki Amajiki- March 1; Aries

HUH

HUUUUH???

youre telling me this man is an aries and bakugou isnt?? 

i need to collect my thoughts 

OK so tamaki is an aries 

and honestly its pretty accurate

most times aries are seen as passionate in a reckless and angry manner

but tamaki’s passion is displayed in his dedication to being a hero 

i mean he’s literally in the big 3 

aries tend to be moody, which is seen in tamaki’s shy actions 

but they’re also enthusiastic and courageous 

tamaki’s courage is shown in the mission to rescue eri 

aries are seen as intimidating and tamaki’s dark features are exactly that 

and while he is very shy, he needs someone to help bring him out of his shell delicately 

id match tamaki with a gentle libra 

Mirio Togata- July 15; Cancer 

whats up with mirio and deku sharing the same bday doe 

this is way too many cancers 

BUT mirio is such a cancer lets be real 

we’ve covered the basics of cancers

sensitive 

loyal 

will do anything for others 

and most importantly brave

the sign of a cancer is a crab 

the crab symbolizes someone who doesn’t realize their great strength  

mirio is the personification of the strength of the crab 

and poor baby has gone through so much and deserves the world 

he’s so cheerful but he needs someone to be there for him when he’s at his most emotional moments 

i would match mirio with a tender capricorn 

PRO-HEROES

Shota Aizawa- November 8; Scorpio 

i mean cmon 

ofc dadzawa is a scorpio 

he’s the image of a stereotypical scorpio 

dark features, dark clothing, serious and kinda rude 

but scorpios get a bad rep for being meanies (we should be watching out for virgos tho) (jk jk i love my virgos <3) 

but scorpios have some of the best characteristics 

their loyalty is beyond words 

they would literally lay down their life for a friend or the good of others 

scorpios are passionate and assertive, and this side of aizawa definitely comes out 

aizawa is so stoic he needs somebody to soften him up 

i would match aizawa with a cheery cancer 

Hizashi Yamada- July 7; Cancer

another f*cking cancer

AND IT MAKES SENSE 

not just because aizawa and him are married and he’s a cancer and it totally makes sense 

but hizashi is such a cancer oh my god 

he’s sensitive, and caring, and brave, and a literal pro hero 

which is a cancer living the dream 

cancers often have difficult childhoods and struggle immensely to find outlets 

this fits with the theory that as a child, hizashi was put up for adoption and/or muzzled as a child because of his powerful quirk 

cancers are ruled by the moon, which would make sense to why they are so emotional 

because the moon goes through phases, so do they

hizashi needs someone that would help him be strong outside of his hero work and for his own mentality 

i would match hizashi with (aizawa or) a charismatic virgo 

Toshinori Yagi- June 10; Gemini 

ofc all might is a gemini 

he literally has 2 forms

and geminis are literally two faced

it makes so much sense that the symbol of peace is a gemini 

he’s adaptable and a quick learner 

geminis are affectionate and you cant tell me toshi isn’t the biggest cuddler and softie in the world 

geminis are people pleasers and just want to make others happy 

and all might’s literal thing is smiling to comfort those in fear

toshi needs someone who is understanding of what he had gone through as a retired hero and the bearer of one for all 

i would match toshi with an inquisitive aquarius 

Keigo Takami- December 28; Capricorn 

DADDY

ok but he is such a capricorn its not even funny 

he’s a cocky know-it-all kind of capricorn 

but he’s also a responsible and well mannered capricorn

capricorns are people who are willing to take on immense responsibilities 

and hawks is literally the no. 2 hero so of course he’s got a lot of responsibilities 

because he’s an earth sign, we wants to get the most out of what the world has to offer him 

including fame and money 

but hawk’s head strong and professional attitude is what comforts people and makes him such a great hero 

he needs someone who would match his energy well 

i would match keigo with a level-headed scorpio

VILLAINS 

Dabi- January 18; Aquarius 

FINALLY AN AQUARIUS

i have a deep love for this sign 

dabi is an aquarius and it is so accurate 

aquarius love to fight for a cause

in dabi’s eyes, the league of villains is the best cause he can support

and he’s at the front lines

they’re considered humanitarians,,and dabi is in his own “special way” 

aquarius love a good conspiracy and mystery 

and dabi is a total mystery 

aquarius constantly have to be stimulated and doing something

otherwise their boredom can lead to reckless actions 

they are also anti all emotions 

this is why they seem so aloof, they don’t know how to confront their own feelings 

i’d pair dabi up with someone who is willing to listen to him and hopefully allow him to open up 

i would match dabi with a charming sagittarius 

Tomura Shigaraki- April 4; Aries

now this is a stereotypical aries 

aries is ruled by mars, which was named after aries 

AKA THE GOD OF WAR??

like his literal goal is to destroy society,, 

aries love to be in leadership roles

they’re also short-tempered 

impulsive

and aggressive 

how ever, his more “positive” traits such as determination and passion are also evident in his characteristics 

they’re competitive people and tomura definitely is one 

tomura would need to be with someone who is calm  

i would match tomura with a patient leo 

Kai Chisaki- Birthdate Unknown;NA 

so kai’s sign is unknown 

BUT

he still deserves a match up 

besides his stance in villainy

kai as actually very well mannered and polite 

but he doesn’t value human life and sees his as more important and pure than those who are “sick” 

a lot of his characteristics would lead me to believe he is an unevolved sociopathic capricorn 

outside of being a villain i would match kai with someone who was understanding and a good listener 

i would match kai with a sympathetic pisces 

[ulisaypo]

night roads informal spoiler free review

bias disclaimer: I just finished the game so some of these opinions might change in the following days as I have more time to marinate on what I saw. I played as a brujah that wanted to side with the camarilla for stability and job security but was hesitant to compromise and tried to reason with all sides (until the very end, where I changed my attitude a bit). This is also my first CoG game, although I don’t think this is entirely relevant since I know each game is written by a different person, and criticism like plot and pacing only apply to the specific writer of this story.

strong points:

incorporation of a v5 sheet as the stats page: plain “you love to see it” moment. I think the v5 character building system is really concise and approachable and there’s no reason not to use it. Plus, if you ever feel like playing your night roads character in a ttrpg session, you can easily transpose them to another setting, or vice versa

how ingrained your character is in the world, who their sire is, when they were embraced, etc: look mates, in all honestly, i’m getting kinda tired of computer rpgs just being vague about every facet of your character. If I wanted to build everything from the ground up I’d just go play the ttrpg version, I like when games mention important things about my character like friends and family

all the cars: I like cars, and in a game about driving, I like that specific models were mentioned and not just vague descriptions

gangrel prince: i’m so tired of ventrue, and lettow was a really charming character.

how disciplines were handled: i still got a sour taste in my mouth over how coteries handled disciplines, and I think night road’s system was pretty solid. I always had a way to do things without disciplines, just relying on my raw stats (for example, throwing something far away vs throwing something far way with potence) and the hunger and masquerade violation mechanics carried over from the v5 system insured I couldn’t abuse them without consequence

banu haqim and gangrel in the character select, plus tremere and caitiff free dlc: i am BEGGING for vtm games to include less explored clans like the lasombra, hecata and ministry. Miss me with that “oh the games need recognizable clans” bs, vtm has been around since the 90s, we can afford to take risks

good relationship with your sire (on the brujah route): Pattermuster ily <3 i hate vtm’s tendencies for evil or absent sires, i really enjoyed reading the small flashbacks between my character and his sire and what they did before the events of the game

The constant reminder of time, the sunrise and where to sleep: It might seem like a little detail but I appreciate how much focus the game puts into where you character sleeps and how to find sleeping arrangements. Long roadtrips when you’re a vampire are tough!

weak points:

constant mentions to other vtm games: we get it, we’ve all played BL1 and we’re all excited to play BL2. Stop reminding me vtmb exists, it just makes this entire product look weak and like the author isn’t confident enough in the merits of his own writing. Stop looking directly at me and going “haha get it?? get it??? remember this game???”

how many times the game gives me an opportunity to side with julian: oh my god how many times do i have to say noooooooooooooooooooo i’m so tired of all the games being so heavily biased towards one side of the conflict, don’t give me options if you’re gonna spend the entire game going “but wouldn’t you rather be an anarch tho 🤪🤪🤪”

weird descriptions of fat female characters: idk how to feel about dove and donati because on one hand this game as fat women and the art makes them really attractive and they're never treated as jokes by their peers but on the other hand the author keeps referring to them as "heavy" and "big”. Dude just call them fat, it isn’t a slur.

how the text keeps telling you you’re just a random independent courier but then everyone asks you for favors: either my character is important or they’re not. Enough with the “teehee remember you’re not camarilla and never will be and we can get any other courier we want BUT ALSO please run these hyper specific and sensitive missions for us <3”

plot points taken out of the ass: love how everything’s always super vague until you get some deus ex machina crap right at the end. And the game just be like “girl wym you haven’t heard of the bozo exploits developed in the clown car by the circus clan”

weak romances: if you can even call them that

weak characters: i think the interactive novel is THE medium to explore character relationships and I’m so sad the game never takes that opportunity to have some proper roleplaying sessions with the npcs. I KNOW programming dialogue trees is hard but I wish I’d know more about these characters besides getting to the end of the game where it says Dove respects me but the only interaction I’ve had with her was a brief chat right at the beginning of the game.

muddy plot: haha what if we have three main conflicts but none of them get the weight they deserve <3 haha just kidding... unless??

TLDR: i think the game is just trying to be bloodlines 1 and not giving itself a chance to be itself. 5/10, i don’t regret buying it, i did enjoy some parts of it and i do plan to reply it to at least see all the clan origins but i wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone besides hardcore vtm fans who’d like to check it out.

[selfish-swine]

Let’s Talk About Star Fox and Character For a Moment - Part 2: OOC is Serious Business

Continued from here. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, then go do that first! You need context! Anyway, this is a long one.

So that whole big rant I wrote up was really just a preamble to get to something I REALLY wanted to rant about but found myself basically writing two rants to get my point across and needed to split stuff up to establish a reference point for what I’m talking about.

Let’s Talk about the fandom’s universally disliked unfavorite, Star Fox Command on the typical topic of how badly it characterized everyone and derailed things and all that hullabaloo.

Now let’s get somethings clear here. First off, I do NOT think Command is a good game by any stretch, mechanically or narratively. It does screw a lot of shit up. Second of all, I am not saying Command doesn’t derail characters senselessly and deserve pretty much all the ire it’s earned from the fandom.

BUT. Big but here.

It is important to not dismiss all of Command for these mistakes. To start with, for as much Command gets flat out WRONG, it also gets a lot RIGHT. Falco and Fox’s bromance is especially strong in Command, and characters like Slippy (who basically never gets written poorly) are still solid. Pigma also gets some actual emotion to his unceremonious death in Assault as a spooky space ghost, to say nothing of the small implications it gives to Andross’ motivations. Then there are things that were just the result of Command having an honestly shoddy translation job all things considered, which especially pertains to Star Wolf. Panther’s third person self-narrations are a misunderstanding of him speaking in an arrogant manner in the original Japanese, and Leon’s infamous liking of rainbows was meant to be sarcastic - but these are things that can not be conveyed in text in ENGLISH (but can in Japanese). Then there is Wolf, which brings me to the real point I want to get at with this post.

I said before it is important not to dismiss all of Command for these mistakes, but really what I should say is it isn’t fair to dismiss Command for the same mistakes other games did before it, specifically Assault. The big offenders of Command, Fox and Krystal, are just as derailed in Assault (if not moreso in the case of Fox), along with Wolf and to a lesser extent, Peppy, yet no one bats an eye because it suits the fandom’s tastes at large (or at least the English speaking fandom), and that bothers me. Out Of Character writing should not be accepted just because you like the direction it takes, because that is disingenuous to the characters.

Let’s start with Fox. Fox’s archetype (to see why archetypes are important read part 1 you weenie) is that of the charismatic heroic leader. There are some subtle differences between his Western and Japanese depictions, namely his confidence (Japanese Fox is in 64 at least more son-in-his-father’s-shadow than Western Fox, but is no less cheeky or cocksure for it), but the general idea stays the same. This is consistent with Fox in the SNES comic, 64, and Adventures (as well as the Farewell Beloved Falco comic). He meets every challenge head on with confidence he can over come it and his sense of justice is strong, and this is reinforced mechanically as Fox being the player avatar, puts us in direct control of confronting these challenges with confidence and bravado.

Assault Fox lacks any of this. He is bland, boring, robbed of any character he once had. He stammers like a teenager more than he ever did as an actual teenager over the simplest of things, constantly walks into traps and danger in spite of knowing danger is ahead and waiting, routinely makes bad leadership choices by no virtue other than the plot necessitating it, and then at the end of the game acts absolutely unemotional to the supposed death of his mentor figure only to later reveal he knew all along his mentor wasn’t actually dead and was just hiding this from his team. Honestly, I might just need to make another rant dedicated  JUST to WHY and HOW these ideas are detrimental to Fox’s character, but for now I’m going to leave this simple and possibly revisit the topic in greater depth. Either way, Assault Fox is uninteresting and vapid, underreacting to everything despite being previously established as a smart ass quippy hot blooded hero, and that’s terrible. Yet, noone notices or cares, because at least he didn’t break up with Krystal.

Let’s talk about Krystal next. To say she was treated OOC in Assault is honestly to suggest she had a character to begin with, but in all fairness she does have elements of it from Dinosaur Planet and Star Fox Adventures, if broken and disjointed due to her loss of protagonist status. Going back to what I wrote about archetypes, Krystal was, in DP64, completely set up to be an aspiring hero, but when DP64 became SFAd, she lost that narrative importance and was reduced to a Damsel in Distress crossed with a Macguffin Girl, which totally undermined what she had, but as I said there was traces of something still there. She is bold, brash, heroic and full of justice (much like Fox), but also more contemplative and insightful as well. She’s the wise hero to Fox’s action hero, or should have been at any rate.

So what did Assault do? Absolutely rob her of all that and just ram in hard the Love Interest nonsense. Everything about Krystal in Assault revolves around FOX - she has NO agency onto herself anymore, something she even had in Adventures at least at first until she got captured for 90% of the game. Not Assault Krystal, though. Her whole character is defined by her fawning over Fox, worrying over his idiot well being and wanting him to be safe, stammering affectionately like two high school kids who haven’t had their first kiss yet. Yes, she does have some moments free from this nonsense, but those moments are not her DOMINANT portrayal. Even when discussing things with bad boy romantic rival Panther, she focuses on -Fox-. Krystal’s entire character in Assault is dominated by the existence of her love interest.

That is the worst case of “love interest centric” writing you can commit, because when you take the stuff away that doesn’t bear on Fox, you have so little left. I’d honestly consider Command Krystal BETTER than Assault, because her rude angry bitchy self was at least her OWN character and not joined at the hip to Fox. Notice how the cutscene with Fox and Krystal with Tricky, Krystal barely says anything worthwhile to the conversation? It’s all Fox being flustered liked a stupid teenager while Krystal coyishly “teehees” in the background while Tricky hammers in the fact they are romantic interests. No. Agency. But again, no one cares, because its fuel for their ships, amirite?

Now we get to who is in my opinion the worst offender of Assault’s derailing character writing, Wolf. Fox might’ve gone from heroic leader to bland cardboard, but at least he’s still the protagonist. Krystal might’ve been reduced to a vapid love interest, but at least she didn’t have much left to lose to start with. Wolf, though, not only oversteps his boundaries as an archetype, but he PUSHES OUT other characters from their meta narrative roles as well. Wolf is the black hole of Assault’s writing, and he absolutely got away with it because he’s “cool” and “badass”. He is the pinnacle of my point in this rant.

Let’s talk about archetypes again. Wolf’s is that of the eternal rival, the black recolor, the evil counterpart to the hero. His mission is to see Fox undone for the sake of his own ego. In Japan, a little more supplemental information is known, namely that Wolf has a rivalry with the McCloud family name as a whole starting with James, and Fox’s reaction to Wolf’s persistent pursuit is treated more humorously than in the west (namely Fox is subtly dissing Wolf rather than being intimidated by him), but these subtleties do not change the core base that Wolf is an impulsive, rivalry motivated antagonist.

So of course Assault saw fit to.... shift him into a mentor role. This only compounds for the worse when you consider the fact that Wolf only even formed Star Wolf because Pigma manipulated and goaded him into doing it (another Japanese lore tidbit), further cementing that Wolf does not make good wise decisions. He is violent and aggressive and obsessed with his rivalry. Why the HECK is he suddenly giving advice to FOX? Wolf is the WORST person to give advice or take advice from, he is literally Mr. Bad Decisions, but Assault’s writers saw fit to absolutely change his entire persona from an aggressive archrival to a quasi-antihero cool guy big brother-esque mentor... and Fox doesn’t even remark on it! (Another mark for Fox being OOC I suppose).

Worst of all though isn’t the damage this does to Wolf, but rather, to Peppy! Wolf becoming the mentor effectively butts him into Peppy’s meta narrative role, and he essentially replaces him for it. This isn’t to say Star Fox characters can’t develop and shift around and change, but Wolf doesn’t DEVELOP into a mentor, nor does Peppy develop BEYOND it. Wolf just usurps it from Peppy and proceeds as usual. Good character writing is finding how to fit a character into a story - that is, finding a role they fit into and working from there. This is why so many fan OCs fail - they don’t fit into a role, they usurp from canon characters. One need only look at all the Star Wolf OCs that exist purely to replace “uncool” characters like Pigma or Andrew and see the flaws. When you write to replace another character, you aren’t writing true to that character, you are shackling and chaining them down to the one they are replacing. This is what Wolf does in Assault: he is sloppily mischaracterized, and then because of that, he butts into another character’s writing space.

And once more, the fandom at large did not notice or care, because Wolf is “cool”, “badass”, et cetera. This is my beef. This is my issue. So I leave you with what I said at the start of this rant: do NOT just accept changes to a character because it placates you superficially. THINK about what roles it is a character serves and why, and respect that. Don’t just blindly complain about character derailment just when it suits you because you don’t like the change personally, or because it fucks with your ships. Press yourself to be better than that.

[sylvieusedhyperbeam]

annnd hacking away in my own little corner

just.  casually hammering away on my own Villainous AU don’t mind me folks.

AU isn’t really titled yet so for now i’m’a just call it ‘Virtuous’.  idk i’ll think of something better.  if there’s an AU out there called Virtuous already then i’ll work faster to think of something better and change it.  for now i’ll... just have to ask you to be patient.  :I;;

White Hat

Not much different from other White Hats of various other AUs, though the backstory/origin is different.  As a youngling incarnation, he was an embodiment of good that went about the multiverse to keep things in balance against the Chaos, which his fuckhead ‘bro’ Black Hat embodies, respectively. 

Used to be a lot more erratic and somewhat violent in this purpose, since in those first few early millions/billions of years, he operated a lot more around instinct than reason or logic.  He was a force that didn’t really have a chance to... think about what he was doing.  In other words, yeah, in those early ages of the multiverse he saw things in very black-and-white terms and he and Black Hat caused some shit for some worlds.

Of course, he does know better now and has developed a much more refined, intelligent response to evil and malevolence.  And nowadays, rather than a mansion of splendor and indulgence, he lives in what some might describe as a white and turquoise airship that comes down to base to settle every now and then, lending it the appearance of a mansion. 

He runs a business similar to Black Hat’s, where he gives heroes that serve the Light shields, cures, elixirs, all the stuff they need to help balance the multiverse and drive back the Chaos.  He doesn’t do it for money, of course, though heroes ARE inclined to give him some generous donations because ‘eeeey, airships that sail the multiverse don’t keep themselves in repair, not without White Hat seriously taxing his reserves, anyway.

These days he’s very polite, as well as far kinder, more compassionate than he was in his early days.  He’s also a huge dork with a soft spot for antiques who loves learning about the cultures and shit of other worlds, since even as old as he is, new worlds emerge in the multiverse all the time and so he feels very humbled by it all and seeks to always learn more!  Loves gardening, loves cooking, loves art, loves anything involving the act of creation or bringing harmony, really.  Also really loves singing, and his singing voice is very soothing, pleasant, with the inherent ability to help ease away sadness or anxiety. 

Standard design for him might be like any standard White Hat, though I’m contemplating teal on him instead of blue.  :|a  HMMM.

Doctor Trug

To answer potential questions, roughly translated, trug can mean a lot of things.  One of which includes ‘deception, swindle, elusiveness’, meaning yeah, Trug was basically a conman alchemist who worked his way up to a professional thief of many talents.  Being well versed in both dark magic and evil sciences as well as being manipulative as shit, he served the Chaos and sought to undermine the Light as a more direct agent.  How he managed to get the direct attention of the eviler Embodiments, well slap my ass and call me Betty, that’s anyone’s guess.

Buuuut a mission gone wrong with an attempt on the life of an early Embodiment kinda found him facing some hard-ass time in a multiversal prison.  Which... yeah, a questionably normal human facing time in THIS particular prison, it was bound to be a preeeeetty bad time.  Because you don’t wanna end up at in a multiversal prison.  You really don’t.

Until of course White Hat intervened and opted to ‘rehabilitate’ him, and seeing a chance out of serving time at Holy Shit Eldritch Horror Sing-Sing, Trug of course ‘jumped’ on the chance and played it up all ‘OH THANK YOU SIR WOW SIR SUCH MERCY SIR’ thinking ‘wow what a fucking sucker’.  He assumed that working for White Hat would be simple enough if he just played on White Hat’s kindness but... yeah, it’s a hell of a lot more taxing than he originally thought it would be.  TEEHEE.

Anyway, Trug is rude as shit and looks out for number one.  He’s an ambitious motherfucker though, with a really solid work ethic based mostly around prideful standards he holds himself to whenever he’s researching a cure or a counteraction to a villain’s bullshit.  He thinks nothing of experimenting on human beings or using dark magic for his own means, but White Hat forbids it on all counts, and well... talented as he might be, Trug isn’t stupid and knows better than to try going toe to toe with an Embodiment. 

He can also be very manipulative when he wants to be, and often is for either something he wants or just for the hell of it.  He’s the kind of asshole who will literally argue that the sky is green just for the sake of arguing, if he’s bored enough.  He hates people, for the most part, though he does enjoy people-watching to an extent and making up bullshit backstories about them (if you’ve ever seen Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you get my meaning here). 

Don’t really have a design in mind for him yet.  LMAO i act is if though i’ll actually draw them, or that i actually CAN draw for that matter.

Gemencia    

A very peppy young girl with a few magical abilities, in lieu of the more physical/likely genetically mutated abilities of her respective counterpart.  Gemencia is a girl who can utilize telekinesis, as well as low-grade stasis fields that can freeze people or objects in place for a short time, about ten or fifteen seconds or so.  How she does this, well, she can’t say even she knows.  She doesn’t really remember much about her own backstory, just that she kinda-sorta raised herself in the more nature/magic based world she came from before she decided to become a treasure hunter.

And BOY HOWDY does she love treasure hunting.  Like, the girl is GOOD GOD unafraid of anything on so many levels, so she often tends to do crazy parkour shit on the face of rocky mountains, pick fights with people ten times her size, annnnd maybe do a whole mess of shit without really thinking.  She tries to do RIGHT by people, don’t get me wrong, but if the rules look like they need bending or broken?  She’ll bend ‘em a little.  Or a break ‘em.  A lot.  And not give any shits.

Her impulsive love for adventure and helping people in her own crazy way eventually led her to hear tales of the Embodiments, super eldritch beings that maintained the balance of a neat nifty thing called the multiverse, and instantly became determined to see it all for herself.  Loving to do things for people and help people, of course she wanted to seek out the Light Embodiments and become the most awesome treasure-hunting hero the multiverse had ever seen.

SO!  Seeking out White Hat to be her teacher seemed as logical an action as any!

With the help of some magic users who showed her how to travel to other worlds, she kinda world-hopped and bummed around for a while in search of White Hat until she finally found him, when his airship settled in the same world she was in by pure chance. 

She just... kinda started following him around.  And when he got back to his airship one day he just sorta found her there, where she was all ‘HEY ‘SUP I’M STAYING HERE NOW LOOK I BROUGHT CHIPS :D’ and White Hat just kinda... sighed and rolled with it.

Gemencia loves, loves, LOVES spontaneity.  She’s a wanderer at heart, and loves seeing what entire worlds have to offer.  She loves a good brawl every now and then, cartoons, hard hitting punk rock music, collecting artifacts and treasures, and has a refined interest in mythology and lore that might surprise people who don’t know her very well.  As a treasure hunter, she’s been inside old temples, ruins, torn palaces, catacombs, all things that have exciting stories of old war and battles and ancient evils falling at the hands of ‘super TOTALLY badass’ heroes, and it’s from these legends that she became inspired to strike out on her own and become ‘THE MOST SUPER BADASS HERO’ that ever hero’d. 

Not above swearing, indulging (be it huge meals or drinking), or pulling dangerous/impulsive stunts though when White Hat doesn’t keep her in line.  If you befriend her, you have a fiercely loyal buddy for life who will fuck others UP if they try to mess with you, but be warned that you’ll be getting dragged along for a few... adventures when the mood strikes her.   

Her design includes light blue hair, and rather than a lizard hat, she has a big-ass fox hat with long fox-styled hair.  :U  I chose this because foxes are natural foragers, known for leaping to literally pounce into the ground to find their prey.  Gemencia is about the same as a treasure hunter, known to leap right into things in search of the various rare jewels and treasures and ‘OOOH NEAT’ artifacts that she kinda hoards away even if she doesn’t know WTF they even do.  Also tends to wear orange and black stripes, in lieu of Dementia’s magenta.  :T 

EDIT you all thought i forgot 505′s counterpart didn’t you?  ....well you’re half right.  i half-forgot, half-okay-what-the-hell-am-i-doing.  but anyway, here we go!

404

404 was originally an animatronic for a family restaurant - no not THAT one this ain’t a FNAF crossover get that shit outta here.  He was a regular animatronic up until Trug decided it would be super funny and edgelordy to reprogram it to not only frighten kids, but hell, rob the restaurant’s safe during closing hours and bring him the loot.  The restaurant owners kinda pitched him, Trug took him, and installed a few more fun TRICKS on him while he was at it to make him a better partner-in-crime.  Because why not, it would be a waste of perfectly good machinery otherwise.

Of course, it began smoothly enough at first... until 404′s AI kiiinda-sorta gained sentience.  After that point, he became lazy, grouchy, and at times outright refused to obey Trug’s orders on the grounds of ‘I don’t feel like it fuck you’. 

Trug deactivated him and decided to use him for spare parts, but kinda never got around to disassembling him.  When White Hat took on commuting Trug’s sentence, the two traveled to Trug’s hideout so that Trug could pack in order to feel as comfortable as possible while out traveling the multiverse with White Hat.  White Hat took notice of the big cuddly looking bear and whoops reactivated him, and then promptly forbade Trug from deactivating him again because LOOK AT HIM ALL HE NEEDS IS LOVE.

Trug wishes 404 would rip White Hat’s leg off and beat the shit out of him with it.

404 won’t do it out of pure spite.

Anyway, 404 contrasts 505 by way of being pessimistic, coldly logical, seeing no point in frivolities and only wishing to lie around all day and eat.  Thanks to Trug’s alterations, he does have nifty things like heat sensors, night vision, and even a vehicular mode where he can turn into a small car for quick escapes, but good luck getting him to actually use a single one of these things without bribing him with honey. 

He also contrasts 505 by being... well, mechanical, instead of organic. 

404′s design consists of purple fur, and atop his head is a little satellite dish instead of a flower.  His eyes are big red iris shutters, the kind you see on camera app logos, with a yellow center.

[tinyboxofshame]

20 16 15 13 7 3 answer all!!!! Teehee! -Jayjay

20. Do you love someone?

I love my family and friends :) But if you mean romantically.. no :)

16. Hair color?

Imma evil ginger >:3

15. Eye color?

It’s funny but I am not quite sure :D Many people say they are grey, but many also say they are green or blue.. 

13. Height?

I’m 162 cm or 5,3 

7. Best friends?

I do have a couple :)

3. Crush? 

Already answered this one but I can say it again :) I’m single as fuck and I like it that way :)

If anyone have any more questions I’ll be happy to answer :3

[thisisevenharderthannamingablog]

6.21/22 The Final Battle

Well, here we are. I can’t title this “the final write-up” because I still have to go back and finish six episodes in S2, but we’re certainly getting close.

My feelings about this show are large and complicated. My feelings about this finale are of overwhelming disappointment. Read on for large quantities of salt, like we’re talking “Visitors Guide to Hallstatt” here, maybe put on a helmet.

In the Enchanted Forest: Some but not all of the Storybrooke residents are returned to the Enchanted Forest castle, while others remain in the LWM. (???) They can watch events in Storybrooke through a mirror. Zelena arrives from Oz via magic hat (???) to let them know that there is another problem: the realms are disappearing. Additional refugees arrive, including Aladdin and Jasmine.

Regina is determined to find a magical solution, and poofs everyone to her own castle. Hook is just as determined not to wait on her efforts, and sneaks off on his own. Charming follows him to the beanstalk, which he plans to climb in order to look for a magic bean to get back to Emma. They essay the quest together, find a bean, and exit pursued by a random dragon (???).

Meanwhile, the other Regina shows up back at the castle, having abandoned the Wish World with Robin due to her being wanted for regicide there, and joins the effort.

In the other world, Emma burns the book. As the Enchanted Forest comes apart, the beanstalk sways. Hook falls off, and Charming rides the falling stalk down to the ground. Snow realizes that her husband is missing. She and Jasmine go to find him. They find Hook (unhurt somehow), and Snow stays to look for Charming while the other two take the bean back to the castle. She finds him, thinks he’s dead, and kisses him, which wakes him up somehow IDK.

The bean has already begun to wither, and Regina’s magic is insufficiently speedy to revive it in time to use it (??). Her evil half buys them time (??), sacrificing herself to hold back the oncoming destruction. Everyone else takes cover in the castle.

The erosion of the realms stops when there is only a small patch of Enchanted Forest remaining.

In the LWM:: Henry wakes up on the rooftop alone, and quickly finds that Storybrooke has been re-cursed. Fiona is his mother (???) , and Emma has been in an asylum for the past two years, ever since Henry ate that apple tart and poisoned himself in an effort to prove that magic was real. Neither the storybook nor the symbols that he wrote while in an Author trance are convincing. Fiona shows up to reinforce the fake reality in which they dwell and attempt to convince Emma to destroy the storybook as a final act of healing. 

Fiona pays a visit to the pawnshop to visit Gold and Gideon and make sure their new story is in place -- that Belle ran off and abandoned them, and Fiona looks after them as best she can.

Meanwhile, Henry breaks Emma out, hoping to jog her memories with a trip to the site of her recent wedding. She does have flashes, but considers this part of her ongoing problem with reality. Henry determines to steal Emma’s car keys so they can leave town, but Fiona catches him and pushes down some stairs, breaking his arm. She uses this incident to convince Emma that the storybook needs to go, for Henry’s sake.

The worlds’ disintegration accelerates as the book burns.

Rumple asks Fiona to “reopen the investigation into Belle’s disappearance.” She offers him some hilariously bad Photoshops of Belle off seeing the world, blissfully alone.

Emma leaves for Boston (where, in the single least likely occurrence of the entire episode, her apartment is still there -- it’s not even dusty). She finds a version of the storybook that Henry made for her (when did he do that?).

Henry goes to Gold, who admits that he still has his memories because he did not entirely trust his mother, but also that he has no interest in being helpful; he just wants to find Belle. Henry borrows a mirror and a sword and goes down to the beach. He announces to anyone who might be watching via mirror that he’s going to fight the Black Fairy himself. 

He’s all ready to do so when Emma shows up -- she came back! Even though she doesn’t remember anything, she read his story and she believes him.

Rumple concocts a potion and locates Belle, only to find that she’s agoraphobic in her new, cursed life. Fiona comes to the shop looking for her wand and reminds us that she has Gideon’s heart and can command him, because that will be important later. She uses the wand to translate the symbols Henry wrote in his trance, which are about the Final Battle. Rumple returns and confronts his mother, who promises to lift the curse from Belle and Gideon just a soon as she’s done with this fight.

Oh, and she’ll also have ultimate power by then, could even bring people back to life, if that was a thing he was interested in. He could have everything! But, no deal. He takes the wand. Fiona has one last trick, however; it’s still Gideon who’s going to kill Emma, carrying out Fiona’s final command to his heart, because “Darkness can’t snuff out the Light… only light can snuff out light.”

(What the everloving fuck? This plus that final line in the storybook is why it took my poor li’l English major ass a solid month to get around to rewatching this thematic dumpster fire.)

Anyway, Rumple goes ahead and kills her, with 20 minutes left to go in the episode.

(Wait, I thought killing people -- even bad people! -- was supposed to be BAD. Wasn’t that like half of S4.)

But this time it’s okay, I guess, because the curse breaks, and everyone gets their memories back. (So Snow and Charming could have just killed Regina’s no-magic ass in their flashback a few episodes ago and broken the curse themselves instead of letting Emma go through hell to save them. Good to know.) Everyone comes back from the Enchanted Forest as the sun sets. Gideon finds his sword, and Emma.

Belle finds Rumple, and on Henry’s direction, the two of them head to the mines in search of Gideon’s heart while Emma locks Gideon in the mayor’s office. Belle - and I can’t believe I am going to fucking type these words, give me a second - TWISTS HER ANKLE AND CAN’T GO ON because it’s not like her husband is the FUCKING DARK ONE AND COULD HEAL HER IN LESS TIME THAN IT TOOK TO TELL HIM TO GO ON WITHOUT HER.

But oh no, they had to give Rumple a tete a tete with his Enchanted Forest self telling him to just give it up, let the Final Battle go on, take all the power for himself teehee! This could have been a neat moment if it had been, oh, I dunno, built up in any way at all in the entire preceding season instead of just flung at us out of nowhere. Rumple decides to do the Right Thing, but his attempt to command Gideon to stop has no effect, because of… something the Black Fairy did, apparently.

Meanwhile up above, Gideon finds them again (natch). Regina gives a Hope Speech™. Emma fights Gideon but refuses to kill him, so he stabs her. There’s a lot of light. Emma appears to be dead until Henry kisses her.

For reasons I don’t understand at all, Gideon becomes an infant again. The storybook is finished. The Enchanted Forest is back where it was - Evil Queen included, and it looks like she and Robin are expecting. Snow and Charming get a farmhouse and a dog. Emma and Hook drive off in the bug to fight crime together. Regina gets to be queen of Storybrooke. Everyone gathers at Granny’s for a weird-ass homage to Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

(I have blocked every gifset that includes that scene that crosses my dash, because what the actual fuck.)

In sum, happy beginnings all around.

Also: In some wrapper scenes after an unspecified time jump, we meet a plucky young girl named Lucy and her fairy godmother, Tiger Lily. Lucy has a storybook and a sword and says she’s Henry’s daughter. Henry (now an adult and living in Seattle in our fade-out) has no memory of her. A grave new threat has overcome the Enchanted Forest and their family.

I didn’t pay much attention to these, as I am not planning to watch the season.

Parallels: This episode consisted of (depressingly) little else but direct callbacks to other episodes -- which is not nearly as effective as parallelism, unfortunately.

Fiona = Regina, obviously

The now-magicless Zelena travels by magic hat (1.17); apparently in his years off-screen, Jefferson made a new one

Emma’s pullup scene is a reference to Terminator 2 (another sequel, see earlier this season)

Operation Cuckoo’s Nest is a twofer, as the entire “operation” business is now several layers deep in self-reference. Unfortunately.

Killian and Charming climb the beanstalk from 2.06

Her Handsome Hero makes an appearance in 6.21 and then again in 6.22, when Rumple uses it to find Belle.

Fiona giving Belle an agoraphobic personality is reasonably close to Regina having locked her up

Snow kissing Charming awake was a callback to, well, rather a lot of their scenes since the S6 curse.

Fiona’s final plan as she explained it to Rumple - no more laws of magic, bringing people back to life, making them love - was lifted wholly from the OUaTiW spinoff, where it made a hell of a lot more sense.

We got one last reference to the price of magic, although it’s hard to see any rhyme or reason to how that’s applied these days.

Henry kissing Emma reverses the S1 finale.

Six seasons’ worth of material, magic items, and emotion to draw from, and this random grab-bag is what they came up with.

On a cheerier note, Lucy means “light” which I feel is appropriate for Snow White’s great-granddaughter and the granddaughter of a Savior.

Wardrobe Department:

There was nothing new or interesting here.

In Hindsight: The villains on this show have gone steadily downhill in capability for the past few years. Regina enjoyed most of a decade as the tyrant of the Enchanted Forest, and 28 more years with Storybrooke in her iron grip before Emma broke the curse for which Regina had murdered her own father.

Rumple was the Dark One, holder of unmatched power, for centuries, came thisclose to living forever in a world specially designed for his happiness (S4).

Pan had absolute power in Neverland for centuries. Cora held sway in Wonderland for years, and got the better of Rumplestiltskin once (very nearly twice). Zelena ruled Oz for something like forty years, if my timeline is anywhere near correct.

Fiona lost her wand ten seconds after turning evil, and was defeated by a fairy who regularly gets herself nearly-dead and doesn’t even show up in the town’s magical ranking these days. She was imprisoned for centuries, sulking and plotting in the Dark Realm, before she made it to Storybrooke, where she spent a week romping around, finally cast her curse, her great work of villainy -- and it got broken and she got killed THE NEXT DAY.

What a loser.

I did a rare thing for me and asked Adam on Twitter what was up with this episode, given that most of it was clearly written for Regina, not the Black Fairy. I did not get an answer, and I suppose we’ll never know what caused this change in direction -- maybe it was as simple as the fact that JMo was leaving and Lana was staying next season, and they didn’t want to end the show. It seems inarguable to me, however, that this change was made, because absolutely nothing about Fiona’s actions makes sense in light of her character.

Fiona’s Dark Curse was (retconned to have been) intended to protect her son (Rumple) by taking all of the Enchanted Forest children to the Land Without Magic. Her later actions were fixated on Gideon as substitute for Rumple. The Dark Curse as enacted in the finale didn’t appear to have anything in particular to do with Rumple or with Gideon. They were both supposed to be cursed and oblivious, so how would that have been a happy ending for Fiona? Was she going to spend eternity watching their family from outside? Storybrooke under her curse had plenty of magic, too, ignoring what was supposed to have been the entire original point.

The new Dark Curse did end up having a lot to do with Emma, with whom Fiona had no relationship at all beyond the inescapably lame “you’re a Savior so I have to kill you” thing. It separated her from her family and drove a new wedge between her and Henry. Fiona had no reason at all to be interested in Henry -- but in this new world she adopted him? -- or in any of Emma’s family for their own sake -- but she made sure to send specifically them away, and no one else? She has literally never interacted with any of these characters, and it makes no sense that she would care about their whereabouts.

(And why for the love of Pete was Henry immune to the curse? I don’t think they ever addressed that. He wasn’t under the first one because he was brought to town later on, but there’s no obvious reason why he should have kept his real memories this time around.)

(While I’m at it, how in hell did she still have Gideon’s heart? She and Rumple were supposed to have been allies as of a couple episodes ago; there’s no way he would have made any deal without securing that.)

None of what Fiona did makes sense for the Black Fairy, but it would have been very much in keeping with Regina’s past actions. (Yes, even down to harming Henry. This is a woman who killed the thing she loved the most.) Even Fiona’s costuming was identical to Regina’s look in S1.

I’m too irritated by it to even really discuss Regina and Rumple’s ending for this season. Suffice to say that they got everything they ever wanted -- twice over in Regina’s case -- and I will never stop being bitter about it. What was even going on with Rumple here? Is being the Dark One irrelevant now? Because if he’s been 100% able to make good decisions this entire time, curse or no curse, and just couldn’t be arsed until this very moment, that blows up another enormous piece of show mythology.

Moving on before my blood pressure kills me.

In my opinion, most of this finale’s mess comes from chickening out with Regina. The rest of it falls out as a consequence of that decision. Having slotted the Black Fairy in for her at the last moment, having decided to make this a metaphorical battle and not a literal one, they had the problem of what do with all of the other characters. I suspect the decision went like “leaving them in Storybrooke would mean re-establishing their cursed identities for viewers who haven’t seen them in five seasons, and it would mean creating all new curse identities for some of them, so let’s just send them off to the EF and, um, they can do absolutely nothing useful there.” The Captain Charming scene was cute as far as it went, but it was also useless, and that dialog was flat-out terrible.

That entire half of the finale was pointless. Literally nothing was accomplished there that had any effect. In order to make all that nothing look like a very urgent something, the writers came up with this “Emma’s lack of belief will destroy all the lands” hack at what was obviously the last possible moment, and I say that because it is in DIRECT CONTRADICTION of the ENTIRE PREMISE OF THE SHOW.

We literally spent all of S1 and onward having it explained that what we think of as stories have objective existence in other worlds, that these people and these realms are real, with their own long and complicated history independent of our own; we only know of them because of the storybooks. Now all of the sudden they only exist if one particular person believes in them? What about the first 28 years of Emma’s life, when she didn’t believe in anything? What about the worlds she’s never been to, never interacted with? Stuff that happened before she was born? The history of the Authors, Mr Disney included? All of those other storybooks from the last hack job of a season finale?

The idea that the final battle is an internal one is fine in itself, but then what makes it final? Why was the Black Fairy involved at all? Why has it been six years and we’re still talking about whether Emma Swan believes in magic? Shouldn’t the “final” battle revolve around everything that has happened to her SINCE that moment, not take us back to just before it happened? What narrative purpose does isolating her from everyone except Henry - again! - serve?

It wasn’t even really a battle; the curse didn’t capitalize on any weakness in Emma’s character.  We just rewound the tape to the S1 finale so she could make the exact same decision she made then -- to leave -- and then convince herself to come back sans apple tart-induced trauma? Was that supposed to be the big pivotal thing, that she came back on her own? Because that was pretty fucking drastically underplayed, and also pretty far from definitive. Emma could get her memories wiped tomorrow (and given this show, probably will), and we’d do the same thing all over again. The fact that they didn’t even feel a need to show her moment of deciding to act on screen says everything, I think.

And then we have the concluding fight, which defies explanation. One thing this show has generally done a good job with is parallelism, but here of all places it fell flat. Everything about the “climax” felt perfunctory at best. They introduced the vision of the fight with Gideon in 6.01, therefore they had to revisit it in the finale, even if it made no particular sense to do so (nothing about Gideon has made sense). This fight happened because a dead character who had no established reason for doing anything she did gave a pointless character an order that didn’t make any sense in the first place; Emma had to “die” purely because the writers said she would six months ago. As an action and as a scene, it accomplished nothing.

Having previously established that the sword was a real sword that would cut people, they hand-waved that and gave it a magical effect instead, allowing Emma to be struck down and then wakened by TLK. The TLK with Henry at the end of S1 was one of the most hard-fought-for scenes I have personally ever seen in any medium, with an entire season of loving development leading up to it; this one felt like a distant echo through a mile of aluminum ducting. Henry has barely even been in this season, hasn’t had a good episode for his character since 6.08. His relationship with Emma in particular has been on the back burner since “The Other Shoe.” The two of them didn’t even get a good spotlight in this episode what with all of the side action in the Enchanted Forest and with Rumple and so on. That kiss didn’t bring anything new to the story.

And so here we are, if not at the end of the story, at least at the end of a significant chapter.

Adam and Eddy wrote some of my all-time favorite episodes of this show, back in the day. At this point, I have to say that while they might make solid staff writers, they have no business running a show. They don’t care about consistency from one season or sometimes even one episode to the next, their creative toolbox appears limited in scope, their writing is self-indulgent, and they’re apparently not willing to follow through -- of their own accord -- on events that should have significant in-character consequences. The result is a finale that very nearly systematically trashes every piece of moral and magical world-building that was still standing after six seasons -- and which I feel comfortably certain will be ignored when the show goes into S7. 

All of that said, I do want to end this on a positive note. I have over the past few years very much enjoyed the story of Emma Swan, the ugly duckling who thought she would never have a family, the lost princess who gave up on love, the hardass with her box of sentimental treasures -- the mother, daughter, sheriff, swordswoman, sorceress, leader, lover, and all of the other jackets she’s worn across the years, leather and otherwise, in the end a fully realized woman with a whole heart and a happy future ahead of her. That’s a story I will never get tired of, and for that I offer my gratitude.

To all of you reading this, I would like to say thank you as well, for the many hours of diverting conversation, for the moving and hilarious commentary, and for the friendships that have grown up from this unexpected ground. May your supplies of fic never run dry.