#if cc wants to play the offscreen game then so will I

[altocat]

You ever think about the Zack and Sephiroth scene in Junon?

Sephiroth was going to Modeoheim where Angeal died….and was probably going to see Genesis there. But he stopped to check on Zack first. I always wondered if they wanted to talk more about Angeal’s death there, since the subject was brought up by Sephiroth’s mission.

I always thought it was weird that CC never, ever addressed Angeal's death with Sephiroth. Like going by context we KNOW he's depressed about it and that it likely helped contribute to his madness. Opera Omnia even explored this idea and put it front and center. But Crisis Core never once takes the time to show or tell us that. And it especially doesn't feature Seph and Zack grieving together. Which is bullshit.

That said, the Sephzack sunset scene is one of my favorite scenes in the game. Keep in mind that Sephiroth literally stalled his trip just to check in on Zack. You get the sense that they've bonded in the two years of being around each other, even if most of it was offscreen. TOO MUCH is offscreen in CC imo. It's the biggest problem I have with the game.

[theminecraftbox]

There's something interesting about portraying torture in Minecraft. In real life, torture like what c!Q is doing would heavily disable a person for life. But since Minecraft has no mechanics to portray that well, the writers have to imply most of it offscreen. They have to focus on the psychological issues rather than the physical. Hmmm. I hope they do it well.

/rp /dsmp

it IS really interesting! Also <3 <3 syndicate!Dream, I dearly love Dream forced by physical circumstance to put aside his plans for a hot second. compels me.

I would add some caveats: despite the limitations of what’s onscreen, there are some ways to indicate permanent damage in Minecraft. Like skin changes. obviously that’s a bit harder in Dream’s case, since his skin doesn’t even have a face and is much more symbolic than literal (as opposed to say Tommy’s, which does directly reflect the appearance of his character.) And Ponk’s got the missing arm, which they continue to reference. Or it could be entirely down to what characters say, like in the case of Philza’s wings. So if cc!Dream wanted, I’m sure he could indicate some permanent physical damage. Acting, yknow. And I confess I am very much hoping for some obvious effects (even if I might be disappointed on that front.)

But something that interests me so much about torture in these fantasy contexts—ie, torture in a world where insta-healing and impermanent death both exist—is that there absolutely DOES exist a middle ground here, where horrific, physically disabling torture can be committed and mostly undone afterwards. And that ISN’T because of the limitations of what can be shown mechanically in a Minecraft game versus in a live-action genre: it’s because of how the magic system in this world works. It’s because of the story. Quackity can do absolutely brutal things, things that wouldn’t be possible IRL given that he needs to keep Dream alive, and throwing down a health potion or respawning can still restore Dream. We know his main weapons were an axe and a sword and shears. Those aren’t just unsubtle tools, those are tools where it is actively difficult not to cause huge, fatal wounds! In a world without healing magic, they’d be kinda terrible choices of torture weapons: if you sincerely hit someone with an axe a few times, they’re not unlikely to die!

(And I love how everyone has different takes on how, exactly, the mechanics of healing and respawn play into torture. Does conventional respawning hurt or not? It’s a typical mainstay of life on a server, after all. Does it hurt worse when someone else makes you do it? What can regeneration/healing potions fix? Do they make you mint again, or do bad injuries leave scars, or does it depend on how long you wait? Can they reset bones, can they regrow limbs, how much pain remains?)

And there’s HORROR there! Really compelling horror! Especially in combination with what we now know from Bad: that he saw Dream shaking post-torture—and yet, while he was able to kinda infer what had happened given all the other context clues, it wasn’t overpoweringly physically obvious. This gives us situations like Dream confronting Sapnap with his torture and Sapnap assuming Dream is exaggerating. Punz seems concerned, but not alarmed, by Dream’s appearance. The conclusion here is not that whatever happened to him must not have been all that disabling. The conclusion is that whatever happened to him has been well-hidden.

[elfyourmother]

reading a lot of ppl’s thoughts and feelings on making chromatic characters like them in the wake of upcoming WoL of color week is really taking me back to coming up as a Black girl obsessed with sf/f and Final Fantasy games, media where I never, ever saw myself and the damage it did to my self-esteem

just from a relative outsider’s perspective (in the sense that I’m still pretty new to reaching out to fandom—in large part because of what I talk about here—and only started playing the game during Prelude in Violet and don’t RP), it feels like FFXIV as a community is full of poc struggling re: race in the way Bioware fandoms used to be years ago, a lot of suffering in silence and pressure to conform to the prevailing. a lot of drowning in whiteness, of the sort to reinforce internalized self-hatred, because characters like us (canon or OCs) are either invisible or fetishized. and jesus it breaks my heart bc I was there!! Good gods I was there!!!!

I mean you can’t be an adult of color of A Certain Age growing up on RPGs and sf/f period without being forced to cope with this. I was literally in my fucking 20s before I read a fantasy novel with anyone who looked like me in it, and she was the worst kind of magical negress stereotype. Black women’s role in fantasy was non existent but for mysterious voodoo witches; games were no exception. Dynaheir was the first I can remember who even tried to break a little out of that mold, and she was unceremoniously killed offscreen between the first and second games. As PCs go, all we had were fantasy art portraits because every model was pixels, and lord help you if you wanted a character who didn’t look like the most demeaning kind of caricature because modders were no help. (I lost count of how many had bones-thru-nose portraits I saw). KOTOR was the first game I ever played with a CC that let me roll a Black lady, and it was a revelation...until years later when I had the rug yanked from under me and told my bisexual Black woman heroine was wiped from Canon(tm), an illegitimate pretender, because Revan is a Cishet White Man, Actually.

I think it’s worse with FF, inherently. I’ve talked a lot about the colorism in the franchise and how it affected me growing up but I just need to reiterate how it feels to love a thing with all your heart and never have that love returned. The only Black women we ever had in this franchise were wholesale whitewashed to the point there are players who legitimately don’t realize there were no white Viera for the most part until this game introduced a whole clan of them to give folk the out they needed to not have to roll a Black girl. (Yes i know Rev Wings and Tactics A2, but they were still a distinct minority, and the Ur example of the race—who we even met in this game—is Black).

It absolutely affected me. I know it’s affected other Black and brown women. If you’re bored and crazy enough to go all the way back to the beginning of Gisele’s tag, to see her earliest incarnation way back on PS3 DA:O, she was whiter than wallpaper paste. I justified it by laughably claiming she had albinism, because the vanilla CC was so heinously awful with dark skin, but the truth is all I saw were white women Wardens, the message was quite clear that no one else was welcome, and after the absolute hell I experienced from my abuser with fandom as the primary vehicle for that abuse, I was a certified people pleaser desperate to fit in. Ofc I still didn’t, which made me chuck it in the fuckit bukkit pretty quick and remade her as Black, albeit light skinned (bc MS Paint dark skin). But even Marisol began life on PS3 as a standard issue Sassy White Redhead(tm), and I don’t think it’s an accident that I never connected with her or felt inspired until I picked up DA2 on Mac and was able to mod her (and the Hawke family) properly as Black.

Thing is, i didn’t begin to heal until Mass Effect and Imani. Imani healed so much in me!! Writing her, making graphics with her, even cosplaying her...it healed me and not just from a fannish standpoint, it legitimately helped me work through so much lingering horseshit from my childhood. And judging by the response she got, all the wonderful messages and comments I got about how she inspired folk, it helped a lot of other poc too.

this is such a common trajectory. I don’t say this to put myself forth as superior or uniquely enlightened, like I don’t still struggle with this to some degree, but only to say that it hurts my heart in the worst way that it’s so tragically fucking common, and people are still struggling with feeling Othered and pressured to conform to spaces where Black and Brown folk are not especially valued except as “spice” to flavor whiteness.

I know a lot of you followed me for Imani and Marisol adventures, and sometimes I feel guilty about not really writing about them anymore, but sticking Gisele in Final Fantasy really felt like coming full circle in the best possible way, continuing the journey that started with Skye Cordana the Jedi Consular and culminated in Commander Imani Shepard. We are told in a million subtle and not so subtle ways that Black women, particularly dark skinned Black women, are inherently disqualified from what it means to be beautiful and desirable. We are not the heroes of these stories. I have a burning, almost lizard brain primordial need to push back on this kind of thing, and never so much as with this franchise I loved so dearly, that made me want to write and create in the first place when I was a 12 year old kid doing moogle RP on AOL and writing script fic about Cecil and Rosa, that has never embraced me the way I embraced it. It’s important to me that Gisele—an unapologetic Black woman, this OC that represents every magical girl sword n sorcery wish fulfillment flight of fantasy I’ve had since I was 9 years old and imagining every white boy with a sword that I read about as a Black girl with braids like mine, starting with Taran Wanderer—is the Warrior of Light, in the pantheon I grew up idolizing and writing about, with Cecil and Terra and Cloud et al.

I want to continue learning and honing gpose. I’m starving for images of romance, of tenderness, of sensuality, with Black women. It’s important to me that Gisele has a constellation of lovers and comrades who cherish her as much as she cherishes them. That she is respected and cared for, as much as she does for others, and her suffering and toil isn’t for naught. In short, that she is seen and her humanity is not up for debate the way it was in her home canon. If y’all aren’t down with that, it’s fine. But I need all of this in the worst way and so I’ll continue to do it, shouting into the void if I have to, because I’m starving and I need nourishment.

[tippitv]

SPN 15.02 “Raising Hell” - TippiTV Recap

Welcome to the recap of episode 2 of the final season! As with the first episode, I will be providing descriptions of graphics I would have made if I didn't have a shitty pain-wracked upper body. I tried making graphics with my feet, which feel great, but it was... too artistic...

I didn't want to set such a high bar for myself.

Okay in the intro bit Belphejack describes his warding spell on the town as a mile-wide circle where "ghosts can't get in or out." Now I'm confused because the cemetery from which all the ghosts/demons erupted like a Dr. Pimple Popper compilation video is outside of this circle. Isn’t it? All the evacuees are also outside this circle. What's keeping all the people at the shelter from getting possessed by ghosts that didn't happen to be in the town? Wouldn't it have made more sense to get everyone into the shelter and then make the circle around that? All they've done is created a Venn diagram where the warded circle doesn't touch either the cemetery or the shelter.

[Graphic: just a terrible drawing of the above to illustrate my point.]

Actually screw it I need to make this graphic.

Or wait... Are they saying this bustling town AND the cemetery fill up a space of only 1 mile and are warded together?

And that somehow the majority of ghosts are in this area for some reason and that they hadn't managed to go much further than that after they were freed?

OH MY GOD WHY AM I THINKING SO HARD ABOUT THIS?

Anyway we now move to the present day, which seems to be soon after the evacuation. I'm actually slightly pleasantly surprised that they picked up here instead of moving on to the other three billion ghosts that need dealing with.

A woman sneaks around the supposedly deserted town, covering her nose and mouth with a scarf. Ah right... the "benzene." I actually did live through a few benzene leaks and you can smell it. The CDC describes it has smelling something like gasoline but to me it smells like... a certain kind of bandaging. Medcinal and rubbery. It seems unlikely that nobody in this town would know this and point out that there's zero benzene smell in the air. The woman runs into her neighbor, who's acting like a stone cold weirdo. She's wary but keeps chatting right up until the moment he stabs her a bunch of times.

A ghost pops out of him. He somewhat resembles the prophet who lost his soul so I was mildly confused for a moment. Also throughout this whole episode it's like he can't decide what his accent is and it's very annoying. Hell, he goes through like three accents just spelling the word "disembowel" here.  Because the neighbor lady had been chatting about spelling bees.

At the high school, Castiel tells Sam about the neighbor lady going missing. For some reason, Sam has trouble getting everyone's attention. Did this town only have forty people in it? The cafeteria isn't  remotely full. Sam reminds everyone to stay out of the quarantine zone. "Any questions?" Everyone raises their hands.

Sam's face makes a bunch of faces that can be summed up as "uh oh spaghettios."

Dean and Belph are in town bonding (not really) over being good soldiers who just wanna do their jobs. The mixed-accent ghost tries to make an escape through the warding whe Dean blasts him with rock salt. Belph points out they're not dealing with regular ghosts. "That was Francis Tumblety." Oh no the inventor of Tumblr!

[Graphic: Dashcon as Hell]

Turns out Francis is more famously known as Jack the Ripper. When Belph explains this Dean is like, "Cool," which seems like a weird reaction for him to have. Also wouldn't the soul of someone as bad as Jack the Ripper have become demonic by now?

High school shelter. They picked a really weird building for their exterior shots. It looks like a cross between an Alpine chalet and a city hall. Some of the antsy townsfolk with strong Canadian accents decide to escape back to their Kansan homes.

One of the homes is currently being used as a meeting hall by the ghosts. I cannot overstate how much I hate seeing ghosts in full daylight. The makeup looks straight out of a school play. Like Sam earlier, Francis has some difficulty getting everyone's attention. What kind of parallel is this supposed to be? He gets the other ghosts to agree to mount an attack against the hunters and then they can put on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest and Dead.

Two of the townsfolk sneak back home only to encounter two of the ghosts. They look terrified even though the ghosts look absolutely comical.

[Graphic: Photoshop these two ghosts into a Scooby Doo scene]

Sam and Castiel argue about what and when to tell the evacuees. Rowena walks in on them and acts like she just got a Samstiel idea for Whumptober.

After some exposition about God and his sister and the soul-bomb that Rowena made back then, Sam says he needs her to make something similar that will trap the ghosts. She says it will be very difficult and will take her until nearly the end of the episode.

Then Sam gets called away to join the other plot line. The two people who slipped out of the shelter are now possessed and oozing some CGI out of their eyes. Man, daylight really is unkind to everything except like Jensen Ackles's complexion.

Francis Tumbledore materializes and demands they erase the warding or the ghosts will start killing people. To make his point, the two recently possessed people get their innards turned into Hamburger Helper by the ghosts inside them. Someone offscreen shoots them with a confetti gun!

Ugh. It's that wanker Ketch, which I believe is his full name, and the confetti is actually a bunch of "iron flakes." The flakes just gently tickle the skin instead of penetrating and thus damaging it, which doesn't seem like it would harm ghosts. I mean, we have iron in our blood and that doesn't seem like a deterrent to ghosts but whatever. Even Ketch's dumb pocket square is annoying me. I don't remember why he annoys me but I feel it deep in my soul.

Everyone reconvenes at the school for a stand-n-chat. Rowena and Ketch reminisce and flirt. Oh, Rowena. You can do so much better. Ketch gets around to being surprised to learn that Jack's corpse is now being possessed by the demon Belphegor, even though he's currently on a mission to kill Belphegor. He had to be momentarily ignorant so we could get some clunky exposition. Blah blah blah a demon named Ardat was the one who ordered the hit but neglected to mention what Ketch would be looking for.

Cut to Reno where Amara is in her well-appointed hotel suite getting a temple massage from a masseuse named Kimiko. Kimiko's hands disappear to be replaced by slightly more masculine hands.

Amara sits up, startled and displeased to discover her brother. I don't care if y'all are billions of years old it's gross to show up in your sister's room when she's only wearing a sheet. Also it's rude to smite a masseuse in the middle of an appointment.

"Sooo how about that Game of Thrones ending?" Chuck small-talks. "Pretty great, right?"

[Graphic: Screenshot of my post about Supernatural's showrunner comparing the show's finale to GoT that inexplicably has 35,000 notes]

Amara, naturally, is suspicious of her brother's sudden appearance and wants to know why he's there.

You know, it's too bad Castiel doesn't have that power where he could touch someone on the forehead and make them sleep. Instead of dealing with all these angry evacuees he could just tap them all into a short coma.

Rowena wants Dean to tell her more about Ketch like he's the village matchmaker instead of a guy with three billion evil souls to deal with. He's nice enough to warn her away from him, but it just seems to make her more intrigued.

Time for Dean and Castiel to hash out their feelings. I mean the feelings where Dean is mad at Castiel for not telling everyone about Jack losing his soul, not the feelings where they keep staring at each other like "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel is playing in the background but they can never act on it because they live in a very heteronormative universe. Generally speaking, Dean is also just mad at this whole thing where free will is an illusion and they've been playing God's games. "Nothing about our lives is real."

[Graphic: Screencap of the Scoobynatural episode]

Dean dramatically stalks out of the room while Cas, his back turned like they're in a soap opera, calls out to him. They face each other. "You asked what about all of this was real... we are." Dean doesn't say anything to that and leaves the room heterosexually.

He goes out on patrol with Ketch and gives him an iron necklace to keep from getting possessed. Ketch wants to know more about Rowena.

[Graphic: I mean... can I do something with Dean as Bea Arthur in Fiddler on the Roof?]

Luckily he gets word about trouble down at the ol' abandoned meat-packing plant. Two hunters have gone missing. Ketch gets thrown into a concrete wall in such a way that would kill him or, at the very least, leave him with a spine made of oatmeal. Lizzie Borden aims to kill them, but a new, unseen ghost shouts at her to leave.

Aw, it's Kevin Tran. I like how he moves the plastic doorway strips with his hands instead of just blinking his way into the room. Turns out God sent him to Hell instead of Heaven, but at least it's given him sort of a badass reputation among the other ghosts so that they do what he says. Ohh I bet that gets pissed away pretty soon.

Reno. God is watching something on TV where the CC says "a sexy pastiche of fragrant tripe" which is often the tagline of Buckleming episodes. Amara is trying to get her yoga on but he wants to talk about taking a vacation together. She figures out he needs her for something. She zeroes in on his shoulder wound that mirrors Sam's. "You're not complete," she says. "You're not at full strength."

And this, my friends, is where I began to get this tingling discomfort that made me wonder if Sam is going to become the new God by the finale.

The switch from night to day to night to day is so weird in this episode. Or maybe it always is and for some reason I'm noticing it more. Anyway while Kevin is off doing recon on the other ghosts, Sam and Dean fret about the warding starting to fade. "We're gonna need you to charge it back up," Dean says to Belph. "Sorry guys it was a one-time thing," Belph says. And nobody asks any followup questions like "WHY?"

Belph also says, in regards to Kevin, that the default setting on Heaven is souls can't get in once they've been to Hell. God made exceptions for John and Bobby but he doesn't exactly like the Winchesters anymore. I feel like y'all really ought to talk to Billie about this. Also, doesn't that mean Sam and Dean would never get to go to Heaven? This just lends further credence to a Samgod hypothesis.

Ghost meeting. One of the ghosts logically points out that all they have to do is wait for the warding to fail completely and then just stroll out. Random ghost would be excellent at snarky recapping. But Francis Tumbledry is the Veruca Salt of serial killing ghosts.

[Graphic: Screencap from Willy Wonka where Veruca is saying she wants and Oompa Loompa right now except it's Francis and he wants to break through the warding]

Kevin pops up and tries to act tough but immediately gets found out as a spy.

Rowena and Ketch flirt and make rather strained sexual innuendos for a scene while working on the ghost vacuum. You can't make me transcribe any of it! Luckily she gets called away before anybody's pants come off.

And then she apparently goes, on foot, from the high school to the warded town some five miles away. Either that or she needlessly parks really far away from her destination. Either way, it gives Francis Tumbleforya a chance to intercept her and tell her the ghosts have Kevin. Oh and Ketch gets his ass ambushed.

She meets the Winchesters in the middle of the street to deliver the news. I mean, Kevin is in the same room with the ghosts but how do they "have" him? He could blip away. This was a dorky plan from the start but I guess I relate. I, too, took a lot of AP classes in high school and I can't plan for crap.

The Winchesters meet with Francis. He sticks his hand through Kevin and turns on his heart light. 

They let this go on for a weirdly long time instead of pretending to negotiate until Rowena runs into the room. She brandishes a Himalayan salt lamp at the ghosts and shouts, "Capare!" A couple get sucked in but the rest blip away. Only Kevin remains.

Everyone runs off to where the ghosts are planning to attack the warding in a mostly invisible, budget-friendly manner. Ketch shows up, too, but everyone's too busy dreading the imminent breach to notice he's not wearing his iron necklace anymore.

[Graphic: A catalog ad from GOOP dot com selling the iron necklace as a belt to keep your nethers from getting overrun with evil spirits]

He lets Rowena vacuum up a few ghosts before knocking her out. He reveals himself to be Francis Tumbleweed and says he's going to use the crystal as a bomb to knock out the warding because bad guys always talk too much about their plans. Indeed, Dean quickly shoots him in the arm and the crystal goes flying.

Dean catches it and hands it back to Rowena so she can finish Dirt-Deviling the ghosts.

Denouement. Castiel tries to heal Ketch but can't for some reason. Did he get some kind of cooties from trying to heal the godly bullet wound in Sam's shoulder? Is he just tired? Does he just hate Ketch as much as I do? Time will tell.

The Winchesters say their goodbyes to Kevin, who's decided to wander the earth like some kind of phantom Dr. Banner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33izVlIOgnQ

"I love you guys," Kevin says. They smile at him. Like dang, say you love him too! I mean just give a guy a moment of happiness before he leaves to gradually lose his sense of self and his soul fades to nothing. Also maybe hug him. He's solid-ish.

Man, what a bummer.

In Reno, Amara is saying her goodbyes, too, but in a much sassier and satisfying away. She gets to tell her brother off and wear magenta lip stick. She mentions that he's lost so much power that he can't even leave this world without her help. Oh honey just punt him into Apocalypse World, then. Leave his ass to flounder.

We end with a bunch of ghosts (red glowing nuggets of light) trying to break into the town from the top. But like... why? They have the whole rest of the world. Why are they bothering with this mile-wide circle of real estate? The Winchesters and associates fret about how they're going to stop all the ghosts.

It's a shorter season, so they better hurry...

***

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