i realize they were likely to some degree basing the casting on oda's SBS answer of what modern countries the straw hats would be from (luffy's actor is mexican which i guess they thought was close enough to brazilian). but it is still weird seeing white characters named nami and sanji
I think a good interpretation of the horror of an endless liminal space like the backrooms wouldnt be putting a monster in it á la the minotaur Or not putting Any monster in and making you wander endlessly in a silent hell, but rather putting the Idea of a monster in and never showing it. you hear noises, from somewhere, maybe even somewhere nearby, but dont see anything. you're not sure if that's a footprint, or a weird stain on the floor. etc.
i very deliberately did not include an "other" or "multiple of these" option. if there's some nuance you want to share, feel free to tell me in the tags.
sorry if this has been done before, but i've never seen it and i was curious.
okay so personally i don’t like the immortal-falls-in-love-with-mortal-even-tho-they-know-they’re-gonna-die trope bc it’s too angsty for me and makes me really sad so whenever im reading a sonadow fanfic or something and it gets mentioned my brain automatically just
Oblivion has the weirdest aesthetic choices going on. Everything is super bright and saturated, the characters look silly and almost bordering on cartoonish, and the voice acting and delivery tends to be pretty silly. The whole things has such a strong classic fantasy vibe compared to the other tes games, but also there's a bunch of realistic gore and rotting corpses and really dark questlines with gross visuals (for the quality of those visuals). it's such a weird game.
merlin trusting arthur with the only weapon that can bring him actual harm is less about trusting him not to hurt him and more about accepting what would happen if arthur did hurt him
he gives him his heart, not because he trusts him not to crush it, but because he’s okay with his heart being crushed if it’s arthur doing it
death is welcome but only if it’s for arthur. be it for arthur or by arthur
every time i watch anything with him in it (admittingly, predominantly from the Dropout app), i am reminded that Lou Wilson is the most handsome man to have ever lived. like, objectively. he just is. i will hear no arguments for any other person to be ranked higher. Lou Wilson: whose face single-handedly shows humanity can go no higher in beauty. he is THE most attractive man in the world. argue with the wall lmao
I know some people may feel a little sad about Normal’s epilogue moment but yknow I thought it was nice. He and the others went through such an intense series of events. He clearly was struggling with self image issues and likely more. And he still is.
Growing up didn’t fix that. And that’s okay. That’s something a lot of people grapple with long into their adulthood. Something about it was kind of refreshing to see that shown. Things aren’t perfect. They likely never will be. But for that night, he allows himself let loose with his friends again.
right now i'm very torn between "taking critique is important as an artist and it's not an attack on me personally" and "people commenting about my same face syndrome under my posts upsets me an unreasonable amount and i wish they would stop doing it"
I'm using you as an excuse to infodump my theory about the Island because I've had no in to do that, and my theory is pure opinion. Anyways:
THE ISLAND IS STUCK IN THE FUCKING FUTURE
(SCARE CHORD)
Hi so you might ask me. What the fuck do you mean by that. Well. Let's start with what we know about the Island, the King, and Wish Craft. (long ass post under cut. sorry)
The Island was redacted from the perception of outside world, via Wish Craft.
Wish Craft has the power to enable Time Craft. We see this primarily through Siffrin's timeloops, but also through the King's powers.
One of the King's powers is to show the saviors a "vision of the future."
...And this same attack is deflected back at the King by Mirabelle in ACT 5, in which the King is able to see the Island before being frozen in time.
...So. The King's "vision of the future." We're never told explicitly what this vision is. All we know is that it's apparently powerful enough to wipe the party in one hit, hearing it from a distance hurts your head, and that whatever Siffrin (and Loop) saw, they don't seem to actually be able to describe it. Even the King himself doesn't know what his vision entails.
We don't know whether the party all sees the same thing when struck by the vision, and Adrienne's answer to the question about it in the Reddit AMA is. vague? It's not a "no," and the specific wording makes me think the answer might be yes. But that's me reading into it.
Now. What do we know about the Island's redaction? The Island was affected by the wish recently, as in "like a decade ago" recently. We know that nobody in Vaugarde or the rest of the world is capable of thinking about the Island, anything closely tied to the Island's culture, or people on the Island for very long. When they do recall these things, they slip right out of reach. Particularly, the consequence for trying to think about the Island (or, more specifically, break the wish that forces the Island out of perception) is significant pain, localized in the head.
And that said pain is enough to become lethal, if pressed hard enough.
From here forward I'm running with the assumption that the King's "vision of the future" is not personalized to any individual, and is unchanging throughout the course of the whole story. Now. Remember the end of ACT 5, where the King gets hit with the deflected "vision of the future", and instead of dying, he recalls the Island and gets frozen in time? Very odd, yeah? Why wouldn't the King just die like everyone else does? He even does take 9999 damage when trying to say its name, like Siffrin does, and like the party does when they're hit by the attack.
Well. We know that he has a "true wish" that the ability to freeze Vaugarde in time grants. I don't think it's at all a stretch to guess that the King's "true wish" is to be able to remember the Island. My personal guess is that the King (and Siffrin) brought this "true wish" into effect via the "SAY ITS NAME" sequence- he even tries three times, a significant number in wishing.
The King (and Siffrin's) wish breaks, because it can't be fulfilled in this moment without breaking the wish to prevent the Island from being thought about. However. Consider the conditions at the end of ACT 5- the King sees the vision of the future reflected back to him, and what he sees is the Island. He remembers the Island, fulfilling his own wish, and is frozen in time. I consider this a compromise between his wish and the one binding the Island- the King gets to remember the Island, but nobody alive is able to think about it, because he's frozen in time; it's like the Universe is correcting itself (I WILL GET BACK TO THIS). The wish of all of Vaugarde to defeat the King is fulfilled, since he is no longer a threat, and Siffrin's wish wraps itself up soon after.
MY POINT BEING. The King's attack is a vision of the future. This "future" is of the Island, in some uncorrupted state. The saviors see it when he attacks them, and he sees it when it is deflected back to him.
The logical next question is "okay, so the Island exists in the future, but how do you know time shenanigans are even related to the Island?"
Recall a very odd series of interactions throughout the game, in which you try to interact with a piece of equipment that you already own.
The game rewinds slightly, before the item disappears, as the Universe corrects itself.
This is awfully similar to two particular events: looping back without seeing the death screen, and talking to the Daydreaming One about her sister. The latter is more interesting to me for the purposes of this theory.
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In both instances, something is misaligned within the Universe (an item existing in two places, someone remembering something they're not supposed to) and it is corrected through some sort of rewind. Also compare the dialogue above to when you try to give Mirabelle the Stylish Bow when you already own it.
The world glitches, but Siffrin defuses the situation before the Universe has to intervene. Omitted from the screenshot is the fact that Mirabelle's portraits switch to happy from "catastrophically anxious" with no transition after Siffrin shows her where the bow is. Important to note is that when Mirabelle tries to recall receiving the bow, her head hurts, much like how trying to break the Island wish causes a headache.
The Universe leads you away from perception, and you can only follow.
My theory that I keep circling around is that through Wish Craft, the Island has been displaced temporally. The denizens of the Island, as well as the Island itself, still exist, but they are in the future. The Island is still loaded into the world, like how equipment is before you try to interact with it, and the Island cannot leave this quantum state, because it never actually went anywhere. The magnitude of the redaction event is so severe with the Island, because it is so much larger as an entity than a sword or a bow. There are of course things I don't really have pieced together, like why somebody would wish the Island into the future, how far into the future it is, or why equipment behaves this way. But it's the only Island theory I've seen that I have some level of confidence in, so I might as well lay out my cards for it.