#i'm pretty sure that's how it goes

[bluewolfangel01]

I love the unhinged idea that if Mc is angry or dissapointed with the demons, that they would create a circle of salt around themselves and just stay in it

And no matter the immense combined powers that Diavolo, Barbatos, and the Brothers hold, they ain't getting past the salt circle no matter what they do

Salt is the most powerful thing in the Devildom, confirmed

[another-chaotic-bisexual-vampire]

Red sun at night, sailors' delight

Red sun at morning, sailors get et by Dracula

Today's Re: Dracula got an accidental boost in creepiness when I looked out and saw a red sun in the fog.

[humming-fly]

Happy to report I have finally started listening to Malevolent and to no one's surprise I am already obsessed (I'm almost done with s2 atm please don't send me spoilers yet sdlkfj)

I'll skip over my usual formality of having one normal art post before diving into shitposts let's not waste anyone's time here

[naamahdarling]

.

[yuseirra]

some ships I like (and drew A LOT of fanart for over the years)

[picklesinabottle]

also I much more read penelope's thing with moving the bed as proving to odysseus that he's her husband than proving it to herself

[helielune]

i'll angel in the snow until i'm worthy (snow angel)

[sysig]

Go play pretend on your own (Patreon)

[thewriteone]

High Water

a/n: Sort of a part two to Hell. You don't have to read that to understand this.

Another piece of fanfiction for The Lonely Shore (@thelonelyshore-if). Please go check out the demo if you haven't already, it's amazing. You won't know what's going on in this fic if you don't, since it's. Y'know. Based on that.

This is the point where I move on from speculating about canon events and swerve into the unholy amalgamation of personal headcanon and whatever I make up because I think it makes for a good story. Kind of like an unsteady house of cards built on the table of canon. Or an AU.

Written from Willow's perspective. MC is not named, but is genderqueer (she/he/they pronouns). Who doesn't love a family reunion!

Word count: 1109

cw: cussing

---------------------------

It took an entire month of waiting before Willow could perform the ritual again. They hated it. Every minute, every second they were forced to spend waiting for the full moon to rise again was agony. It was then that they decided any magic that depended on moon phases was stupid, actually, and there should be an easier method to get what they want. …it was still kinda cool, though.

There was only one person in the world that Willow was willing to go through this for, and she was damn lucky for it. Their one and only older sibling, the person they were always reaching toward. The flame to Willow's moth. Oh, and how it burned each time they wondered if he loved them even half as much. They shook those thoughts from their head. Now was not the time.

Clouds rumbled overhead. It was a lucky break that a storm was brewing on the night of the full moon. Just like last time. They couldn't be sure what part of the interrupted ritual had led to their sibling being whisked away, so it was important to match every detail possible. As soon as the clock ticked over, they began.

-------------------------

Willow finally managed to drag themself ashore, dripping with unhappiness and lake water. The only thing keeping their mood from souring completely was the fact that it had worked. This was not their lake. Willow took a moment to wring out their clothing—based on what they knew about this side of the lake, the chances of their sibling disappearing on them was slim to none—before marching in the direction they were sure led to town.

Thankfully, they didn't have to go very far. While the fog obscuring their path wasn't thick, it still would've hindered them. They stopped in their tracks as a truck frantically pulled to a stop nearby, watching as who else but their beloved sibling burst forth from the passenger door. They scooped Willow up in a tight embrace.

"Oh my god, Willow, what are you doing here? How did you get here? Are you alright?" Willow relaxed in their sibling's arms, squeezing her back with the same fervor, and they couldn't help but laugh at her rapid-fire questions. Him worrying over them felt…reassuring.

"I should be asking you that! You've been missing for a month, you know." They pulled away and swatted Willow's shoulder.

"And just whose fault is that? This is the shit that happens when you go around doing wild and crazy magic without telling people!" Willow frowned briefly at her statement before smoothing their expression and shrugging. His tone had been light, but the note of accusation still stung.

"Technically yours for interrupting the ritual. And telling you wouldn't've helped. It's not like you would've believed me anyway." Their gaze drifted back to the vehicle now parked nearby, noticing their sibling did not arrive alone. A black woman with long braids and a gangly man with rectangular glasses stood next to the vehicle watching the family reunion happening before their eyes. The woman tried not to stare, glancing over at her companion from time to time, but the man scrutinized Willow with a piercing, near-black gaze. Like someone studying a bug under a microscope. They shuddered. Something about this guy was definitely off. They turned their focus back to their sibling.

"How is it my fault when I didn't even know what was going on? You could've at least told me something."

"Oh, yeah, because that would have gone over well! 'Don't worry, I'm just performing a magic ritual I've been researching. I know it will look concerning, but I promise I've got things handled.'"

"It would've been better than what actually happened! I had to watch my little sibling casually go for a stroll on the lake, before popping in for a dip. During a storm! Of course I jumped in!"

"You should've just trusted me! I'm not a helpless child! I knew what I was doing!"

"As entertaining as this has been, I don't think this is the best time or place for this argument," the man from earlier spoke up. His gaze was firmly set on the angry, dark rain clouds gathered overhead.

"Ravi's right. We should head back," the woman added in her two cents. Her voice softened as she spoke again. "I know your emotions are running high considering it's been a month since you last saw one another, but maybe it's best to revisit this conversation at a later time and with a clearer head." Willow glared at her. How dare this stranger act like she knew what was best for the two of them. Their sibling, however, felt differently.

"Jay's right," they started after taking a deep breath, running hand through their hair. "There's no use in arguing about this right now. Let's talk about this later, once we've calmed down." Willow deflated. They might be upset with her right now, but they still trusted her judgement. The two of them would just have to discuss it later. They huffed as their sibling introduced Ravi and Jay, greeting them mechanically. There was something about Ravi they really didn't like, his hand cold as they shook it. Jay seemed fine. Their sibling liked her, at least.

Out of all the things Willow had expected, an argument was not one of them. Feeling frustratingly like a scolded child, they buckled their seat belt and considered how best to reconcile while still getting him to see their perspective. They would fix it. They always have. Willow just had their work cut out for them, that's all.

-----------------------------

Bonus: Alternate Ending

"How is it my fault when I didn't even know what was going on? You could've at least—y'know what, that doesn't matter right now. Willow, you knew about this place, at least more than I did. Why the fuck did you come here?"

"What, I can't be worried about my one and only big sibling?" Willow scoffed, watching as their sibling's expression softened.

"You're as reckless as always." He shook his head at them fondly. "Now we're both stuck here."

"For now." Confidence rolled off of them, almost as semi-tangible as the fog that was present. "And at least we're together."

Their sibling wrapped them in another hug, less frantic but no less loving than the last.

"C'mon," They said, pulling away to lead Willow toward the truck. "Let me introduce you to a few of my friends." Willow politely greeted her friends, and though they definitely didn't trust Ravi, they felt light. Here in this moment, with their sibling by their side, all was right once more.

[uncanny-tranny]

It is okay if you can never forgive somebody who has harmed or abused you. You don't have to forgive them, but you deserve to find peace in other ways. If you can't forgive or forget, then do things for your sake. Find what fulfills you, if to make it easier for yourself. That is okay. Forgiveness isn't forgiveness if it is demanded or expected, and it isn't fair for you

[pardonmydelays]

tøp: mtv unplugged will always be so special to me because it actually shows how fucking talented those guys are

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

Do you ever play Honkai star rail?

in a sense? like i have an account and i go in to farm artifacts and stuff but i'm not doing any events or quests whatsoever. i kinda left the game post tingyun fakeout (?) and hadn't done any events for a while before that? like idk what the aurum alley situation is. after that i waited till they stopped handing out ratios (did they ever actually give him for free? i heard smth like that but idk if it actually happened) n returned to do penacony just to see what all the hype was about, but haven't done any events at all. nor any sidequests or character quests. i did do the first ruan mei one out of obligation, i can't remember whose materials were locked behind that quest.

kinda waiting until they implement a wuwa-styled skip button lmao

[kjzx]

It's funny how I survived being a teenage girl that's interested in feminism in Russia in VK without becoming a radfem just to go on and internalize a bunch of sex negative stuff and other dumb ideas these last one or two years by trying to find a lesbian community I fit into (just to accept that I'm not even a lesbian)

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

Man if Marcy keeps ending up with like child protection services in all these fics over her parents being slightly distant then my parents should be in JAIL

[energeticpoltergeist]

Part 1: Mad King's War

Prologue: Diverged History(pages 11-16)

[loregoddess]

2am Temenos thoughts I'm now typing out in the morning: I like Temenos' English voice acting but it has a very particular tone. Do you think that has any influence on his (mis)characterization?

Oh hmm, y'know I hadn't considered that but you might be on to something, because voice line delivery does affect how people perceive a character, although I think part of it may be localization choices and direction of the voice acting as well. (I had way more thoughts on this question than I was expecting to, hence the cut bc of length).

Like, I've seen discussions about writing quality vs. quality of voice acting ("whether the character writing is good, or whether the voice acting carries the character" is a debate I've seen several times), and also I've seen people talk about how differences in the voice acting performances across different localizations affect how the character comes across differently (i.e. there's a series of videos that were popular after BotW came out where every cutscene was compared in all the languages the game had been dubbed in, with a lot of people talking about how Zelda's breakdown in the "Memory 16: Despair" cutscene seemed way more emotional in some languages than others). So like, the vocal performance does factor into audience perception, no argument there.

I went ahead and looked up compilations of Temenos's voice lines in both English and Japanese, and while I'm very much not fluent in Japanese at all, and therefore can't pick up too much on tonal shifts, I will note that a lot of the anger Temenos spends so much time masking seems to come through a bit more clearly in his JP voice lines (his JP unique battle line against Kaldena is sounds especially furious, and while the ENG delivery of the same line is definitely angrier sounding than most of his other ENG battle lines, there's something that feels a bit rawer about the JP delivery, at least to my ears).

This is no shade at his ENG VA, since I think the voice acting was pretty strong overall (although the recording quality of some of the lines is another matter, but again not the VA's fault), and I don't think the JP is better or worse than the ENG voice performance, since (recording quality aside) they're both solid performances, but they do have slightly different feels to them.

I personally felt the ENG delivery of the story dialogue lines often gave Temenos a sort of slightly playful but aloof tone, but either by choice of the voice direction or simply due to how the VA's voice naturally is, the anger (while it's definitely there) doesn't come across as noticeably angry or aggressively as I've seen with some other VA performances. Which isn't a bad thing per se, bc even in real life no two people show anger or even sound angry in the same way, and I think Temenos's ENG voice still works for his characterization.

And that's of course just looking at one emotion. I'd have to do a lot more digging (or replay the game w/ the JP voices turned on) to see how the voice line delivery sounds for scenes like Jorg's death or the ruins of the Kal.

Unfortunately, since I can't translate like, 90% of what's being said in the JP lines by ear, I can't compare them against the ENG localization to see if the word choice of the localization shifts the tone or implied meaning any (although for what I can translate by ear, the localization seems to be a fairly close 1:1 for the battle lines at least, and typically I don't have a lot of beef w/ localization when I can get my hands on fan translations of original JP text to compare/contrast). I do think the word choice for localizations affects how a character is interpreted, even with good localizations--except, again how said word choice is interpreted usually reveals maybe more about the audience than the author.

For example, I know a lot of people read Temenos calling Crick "Little Lamb" as flirtatious, and I guess I kinda get why that interpretation exists, but to me the nickname always seemed...not condescending per se, and not intentionally mean, but almost as if Temenos is teasing Crick for his unquestioning faith and calling him childish for it. As a result, my reading "Little Lamb" as "your unquestioning faith is childish, I'm going to tease you a bit about that until you've matured" makes it seem like Temenos is putting a lot more distance between himself and Crick than reading "Little Lamb" as a cute, flirtatious nickname does. Now, I rarely read romantic undertones to a lot of dialogue, and shipping is the least important thing to me when I'm engaging with a story, so my interpretation of that line probably says more about me than it does about the intention of the writers.

However! The vocal delivery of the voice line doesn't really give us any insight either, bc while I didn't hear it as sounding flirtatious, lots of other people apparently did. Now, it's not like I know what goes on with the direction during the recording sections, how much information about the characters and scene and story the VAs are given, and how that information, or lack thereof, affects how they voice act, so again no shade on the VA or even the voice direction as a whole, but as you noted, choices were made in the direction that made it so Temenos has a very particular tone.

Now again, it's hard to say how much this does or doesn't affect a person's interpretation bc, well, vocal and tonal interpretation isn't like, a science or anything. Depending on regional dialects/cultures, two people from different areas can interpret the same voice delivery in two entirely different ways (i.e. the "are city people, esp. people from NY, really rude or are they just from the city" discussions I've seen floating around about whether it's rude or not to walk into a deli and order your food w/out any small talk, and how it's more about where a person grew up that will usually inform their initial reaction to that question).

If I had to guess, I think the mischaracterization I come across for Temenos seems to stem from the fact that he puts of a façade 99% of the time, and rarely lets it slip. Unlike say, Therion, who goes through an entire arc and speech about how he's actually okay with wanting to care about and trust other people, Temenos rarely shows any vulnerability because his character arc wasn't about accepting vulnerability like Therion's was. Instead Temenos's façade plays into aspects of how he interacts with other characters, but isn't treated as an obstacle to overcome per se, which also means that the audience may miss that it's even there in the first place, mistaking the façade for the actual core characterization.

We get some indication of the "slipping façade" in the vocal deliveries, i.e. the angry "Kaldena!" battle line, or (if I'm remembering correctly) the voice lines leading up to the Arcanette boss fight, but the thing about Octopath is that it's only partly voice acted. Some of the parts where I read Temenos as letting his mask slip a bit, or otherwise him showing more emotion or vulnerability than usual, were in travel banters, which are entirely silent so we don't get to hear how the VA would have tried to navigate those scenes. Would the banters being voiced have changed interpretations and prevented popular fanon mischaracterization? Maybe, maybe not.

Possibly more importantly, Temenos's façade is notably friendly, or at least nicer than the "edgy loner who uses snark and sass to keep people at bay" façade that's on the opposite end of the "characters with trust and intimacy issues" spectrum, and most characters I've come across who seem to try to keep people from getting too close to them by being friendly tend to get mischaracterized by fans bc the "friendly mask" is so convincing and not as noticeably phony as like, being an edgy loner who's actively pushing people away despite craving friendship/love/etc. is. So this could just be a fandom thing in general, and not unique to Temenos or directly affected by vocal performances (i.e. Klavier Gavin from Ace Attorney is another character I read as masking a lot of trust issues and using friendliness as a means of keeping people away, and that is not a common reading of his characterization, at least not when I used to haunt the fandom, and AA has almost 0 voice acting so this isn't due to voice performance).

There is, of course, also the school of thought that "correct" interpretations don't exist bc everyone has their own experiences that are true to them and their interpretation of media is reflective of that, so I'll be the first to say that it's not that my interpretations of Temenos's characterization are more or less correct as compared to someone else's. And honestly like, it's a piece of fiction, so I'm not going to get upset about what the popular fanon characterization is, even if I personally think it's mischaracterization, bc I can also just ignore it.

Although, there is also a sort of fanonization that's become more frequent in fandom spaces where even characters with less complex writing get mischaracterized (simplified, smoothed over, etc.) in favor of popular fandom trends. Again, not the devil per se, but it definitely an unusual trend that I've seen an uptick in. It's almost like a commercialization of fandom, except maybe not as malicious...yet.

Anyhow, I've gotten a bit off topic, and this will be an endless set of tangents soon if I'm not careful.

So uh, yeah! The shortest answer to your questions is, yes I do believe the vocal delivery of a character's lines will affect how that character's characterization is perceived and interpreted, although there's other things that affect interpretation as well (word choice for the writing, audience's personal tastes/experiences, trends in fandom, etc.), and that a mix of these things will weave into whatever the popular interpretation and fanon characterization for that character becomes. But also everyone will still come up with their own unique interpretations of characterizations, so non-fanon interpretations will always exist as well.