#i want to say something coherent but

[voiice-of-the-soul]

It irritates me alot when people say that making medic more compassionate is ''missing the point of his character'' when he is literally shown to be in the comics.... did you miss the part where he showed concern for both sniper and miss pauling's well being in comic 5 and 6.

His actions are a combination of genuine attachment + clinical interest and these things do not cancel out one another. He is always pushing boundaries and going against the grain and i think this is what led to him losing his license in the first place. He felt stifled by the rules imposed on him.

He is shown to be extremely passionate so it makes sense that he would use his endless fascination with medicine as a way to show his affection. He loves his friends so he will find a way to make them borderline indestructible. Malpractice is his love language.

[ewwww-what]

Thinking of you :)

[visenyaism]

Hello! I just wanted to say that I love your posts and deeply vibe with many of your ASOIAF takes! Would you be interested in discussing the parallels you see between Dany and Melisandre, if you haven't already?

yeah!!!! it makes me go kinda crazy i wrote something like a year and a half ago it makes me literally insane to think about how daenerys is literally the prophesied hero melisandre has been looking for all her life and yet mel cannot recognize this because Melisandre has such a complex network of cognitive dissonances that just completely eliminate her ability to conceive of her own life improving or of her own liberation out of the system of slavery. the pain must be borne. she worships a god that is also her enslaver. And she can’t see the prophecy clearly in part because daenerys is a teenage girl raised on the streets trying to end slavery in essos, the system mel still lives under, as opposed to Stannis who she chose as the hero I think because he fits the conventions and trappings of power easier he’s a noble-born man she makes into a king. augh

[roomba-mangga]

thoughts on thistle and yaad's dynamic that i vomited in the tags of another post but will now try to articulate here: they're not actually family, or at least they shouldn't be. not in a conventional sense anyway. framing them as uncle and nephew (even in a non-literal, silly fantasy world way) rides more on technicality than anything concrete.

what i mean by this is yaad calls thistle by name and says he and delgal were raised "like" brothers. he talks about thistle like he's an outsider imposing himself into the melinis' space, and it's clear that thistle was never legitimized as a member of the family. for thistle's part, though we don't know how he would treat yaad pre-demon brainrot, it's safe to assume based on the way he punishes him—turning him into a doll—and how little is shown in the way of any sort of relationship between them that thistle only cares* about yaad as an extension of delgal (otherwise i'd expect something like kabru and milsiril, because it's not like another complicated interspecies family dynamic would be out of place, yet there's next to nothing on them even in bonus content, just their scant interactions in the main story).

in essence, they're strangers to one another. thistle's desperation to preserve the illusion of a family, a model where he doesn't even fit, was the snare they were caught in for the past thousand years of stasis. yaad-as-nephew is a prop to uphold that illusion, and thistle is playing a role he's unfit to play. in the context of post-canon interactions, attempting to reconstruct that facade would only be a reenactment of trauma for them both (in a deeply compelling way i'd love to watch unfold, tbh), as that "uncle and nephew" framing places thistle in an implicit position of power over someone he's already traumatized through misuse of authority in the past, a role which also perpetuates his adultification and yaad's infantilization in turn. it'd mostly be an obstacle to any real connection.

best to burn the melini family bridge, i think, and if there's still anything salvageable left in the rubble, let something different supplant it.

[camellcat]

first xander brought her back with human breath and determination... then willow with supernatural power and love.... smth smth two halves to keep their third in balance from drifting too far into either side and losing herself.....

[pearlfacts]

I need to succinctly gather my thoughts on lisa and carla's whole thing today but my mind is just thick static over a very faint loop of this

[astranauticus]

i don't have the screenshots on hand because this is just a thought i needed to let out after being woken up by my buildings fire alarm at 7am (i am in shambles, thanks for asking) but back at the start of canto 7 i was trying to figure out what in the Fuck hong lu meant by don quixote being 'the most lucid' of the sinners and eventually my read was that she's the one who's most clear on what she wants because hong lu brought up how her eyes are sparkling and the two times dante notes someone's eyes sparkling in that episode (?) were when don talks about saving all the people in la manchaland and when charon says she wants to eat candy at an amusement park, and also this would very nicely mirror the bit in the final sancho fight when dante ruminates about how so far they've been trying to help the sinners out of their issues by figuring out what they want and then promising it to them but with sancho she doesn't want anything because everything she's wanted as don quixote was part of that dream that she's now woken up from (especially with dulcinae talking at length about the difference between sancho and don's eyes)

but like..... there's one other thing about eyes that dante notices in that early episode

so i'm wondering if this is an idea that's gonna come back in canto 8, that dante's old tricks aren't going to work here either because hong lu just doesn't really want anything for himself when he's been living his whole life surrendering (hah) himself to being used by other people for their own goals

[sforzesco]

thoughts on marius and sulla?

there’s something old and and hungry and “same” going on in there, it’s very ‘yesterday's orgy was disgusting. The fight for the throne is about to begin,’ and then it repeats. ‘A hole in any body is a very intimate thing,’ and ‘Who can tell if the body wants to be opened? How is it meant to be cut? A carcass only welcomes the touch of a master,’ and the body is Rome and the Body is a Carcass and probably a Stage and Sulla sort of came out of Marius’ rib cage, so did the hand really change? is any of this different? everyone wants to be the next surgeon that gets his hands on Rome. things are different, things are the same.

[lunarblazes]

i do think about the supreme dynamic between claremont era logan, kurt, and ororo. like they are SO important to me. the ways that they complete each others’ character are fascinating—ororo’s leadership role and logan's support of her in it are two crucial parts of their characters that i think often get lost in translation later on, as well as kurt's absolute lack of leadership ability due to his inability to make good snap judgements, especially ones that will endanger other people, being a flaw that's covered by the other two's strengths. logan is often a steady presence for their more volatile emotional states, especially when storm is depowered; ororo is a great leader and works well under pressure through lots of practice; kurt reminds them of their humanity and helps them relax when things get too heavy. it's just such a fucking DYNAMIC, and also if i ever have to see ororo pleading with a critically injured kurt to hear his laughter again i'm going to sue chris claremont for emotional damages

[paranormaljones]

Carmen Berzatto ranking extremely high on the list of characters that I adore and relate to does not affect the fact that I LOVE every single time Sydney tells him off for literally anything. Yeah girl get his ass.

[pearsfears]

I painted?????? Im so confused by my sudden ability to draw again?????????

[harvestmoth]

okay last one. au where nothing goes wrong at all ever (a lie) and melia venam gay moment

[glitteringdepths]

had some brainworms about transfem furina.... can anyone hear me.

i feel like this would have really interesting implications in her story, much as she loves acting, but struggles with it due to the 500 years she spent being forced to act, would being a woman be the same for her? she doesn't know where the act ends and where her actual identity begins. is she a woman because she wants to be, or just because she had to be one. even if she enjoys it more than the alternative, does she actually enjoy it? or is it just because she was one for so long that she enjoys it?

i can imagine that focalors likely didnt care much about her identity/presentation as archons have been shown to be able to change their forms at will basically, but furina is the human counterpart of focalors. she doesn't have that ability to change herself just like that. i imagine gender identity would be much more important to a human, especially one that must keep up an act at all times, than a god, and thus something that would affect her. something she would think about. a lot.

maybe post-prophecy, she would experiment. figure out if femininity is in fact something she wants. maybe she would try to go back to being "cis" and then realize it wasn't right for her. and i imagine that she would flourish more being able to properly express her femininity rather than doing it just because it was apart of the role.

[itspileofgoodthings]

okay but just thinking about how dark it is that Anthony’s kind of ultimate fantasy isn’t marrying Kate —it’s being married to her sister while lusting after Kate, his honor about to SNAP

[stormyoceans]

LITERALLY FELL ON MY KNEES WAILING NEIL LOVES HIM SO MUCH I NEED TO BE INSTITUTIONALIZED RN

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)