#in case anyone is still interested

[ryllen]

[genericpuff]

every now and then i get folks asking me "puff do you have any opinions on hazbin hotel"

and i know why they're asking because if there's any fandom that puts LO to shame, it's hazbin hotel / helluva boss and surely i must have some Very Strong Opinions(tm) about the show

but i seriously have never watched a single episode of that show and despite all the controversy and drama i've seen come from the discussion of both the show and its creator, the only thing that really bugs me out of the blue when i'm reminded HH exists are those exclusive playbills that people pre-ordered months ago and still haven't arrived

that is it, that is literally the extent of my engagement with the HH fandom, there will be no further questions about what i think regarding HH because i literally have no idea, they are best asked to whoever comes close to being the generic-puff equivalent of the HH fandom

[dawnthefluffyduck]

Warm Coco (speedpaint)

[chirpsythismorning]

What they're saying is s5 is going to have Hawkins High School as one of the locations for the plot. What I'm hearing is jealous Mike opportunities...

[leithanienwnt]

I've been taking requests for operators to draw over on my yt page, ft. Dorty, Blacknight, Vigil, and Angelina

[svtskneecaps]

also in terms of the bolas playlist it's fascinating to me that the songs added by each person have a slight tendency to represent a consistent aspect of bolas

like

the songs added by slime are their chaos

the songs added by philza are their rebellion

the songs added by cellbit are their rage

the songs added by baghera are their anguish

it's so fucking FASCINATING TO ME but i don't know enough music theory to elaborate lmfao this is Vibes Only

(mouse's songs i can't boil down to an easy noun which is why they aren't mentioned lmao anyway they go hard asf)

(also i went on the longest fucking unhinged elaboration in the tags lmfao i almost didn't have enough tags left to tag "long tags" at the end

(i could have even gone on longer in terms of where their characters were at entering purgatory [philza: cage for a cage; cellbit: fed worker murders; baghera: her past as a federation experiment; slime: turning into a code because of the code pretending to be his daughter] but i ran out of space and also time it's 4AM AAAAA)

[coollyinterferes]

The unmistakable sound of footsteps approaching begins to fill the air. Whoever is coming seems to have brought some company along…

They are getting closer… and closer… and closer…

…and closer…

……until..................

"Goooooood evenin'!!" Comes the loud greeting from a certain blond man. A big smile on his face and all.

"We beg your pardon for our prolonged absence. It was completely beyond our control..." Then adds the gentleman standing by his side, apologizing on behalf of both, offering a genuine smile along with the apology.

"...BUT! We're back!" And hopefully for good this time…

[artem1sc0re]

Dropping the reveal of my main operatives through doodles because why not 🗣️🗣️‼️‼️

Here’s their appearances in game as well :>

Close-ups:

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[vigilskept]

really interesting hearing people interpreting solas' statement to rook that it was "good to help [his] people for once" after rescuing the dalish prisoners as being genuine. i wonder if it's a worldstate thing that informs how people read it? because for my playthrough that read as a very calculated way to gain trust from rook

veilguard doesn't have a tarot card that explicitly asks you whether the inquisitor and solas' relationship was a high or low approval one. instead, for an inquisitor who didn't romance him, it seems to map the choices of saving/stopping solas onto high/low approval respectively

if, like me, you imported an inquisitor that chose to stop solas and your rook asks him later in that conversation: "what about the inquisitor? do [they] not count as a friend?" solas will deny that they were friends at all, and tell you that the inquisitor was useful, for a time. it's so callous and dismissive!!!

... and it's very in line with how he speaks to a low approval inquisitor trespasser. if the inquisitor is angry with solas about him using them, he'll dismissively tell them they should be grateful they got a castle and a position out of it! if the inquisitor confronts him about not even seeing the rest of them as people, solas essentially says "yes but thats not your fault, it was my creation of the veil that prevented you from being people"

i think there's definitely a version of solas here that could have grown to see the elves of the present as his people, especially if he was in a relationship with lavellan. solas who was close with an inquisitor of any race will confirm he does see those alive now as people, even if they aren't his people

in both cases, that requires an inquisitor showing compassion to the spirit of wisdom, treating her with the same care that they would have for any other person. this is the only way for solas to be able to see anyone as capable of full personhood other than spirits

if the inquisitor did the opposite... solas does not change his mind on this. he might have a certain level of compassion for them, but he doesn't see any of them as people, let alone his people

[perilegs]

i'm in part charge of recruiting people for my department at work, and for our hiring offer we were about to write "minimum of [x years] of experience required," but i remembered how people with audacity will apply regardless of what it says, but that wording will push away potential employees, especially women, who are considerate and value the time of both others and themselves, and think they can't apply if they have, let's say a few months less experience than what we required, so i asked it to be switched to "around [x years] of experience required." and it's such a small change but it makes a big difference. and man idk what my point is but often it's good when you listen to people and their problems, so you might come up with low/no effort ways of helping even if it's just a little bit, instead of going "well that shouldnt be a problem, you should just act/do/etc. different"

[solradguy]

I'm so grateful that the only GG fans that care about the light novels are the ones that can be normal about things because Lightning the Argent goes from the rawest scenes of carnage imaginable to Ky Kiske doing something mildly religious like offering a short, silent, prayer for someone that got mangled to death by WMD dragons, and I just know that, in the wrong hands, those brief religious moments would generate the most annoying goddamn memes you could ever imagine

[cerbreus]

if 2026 rolls around and i've not figured out a set course for dealing with my career woes (taking community college classes, making plans to continue education, switching jobs, literally ANYTHING...) please beat 🔨me 🔨with 🔨hammers........🔨🔨🔨

[moe-broey]

Kafka here rising from the dead to say I feel you so much on all your Bravefonse stuff. I am so disappointed too!! And it kinda gives me an icky feeling, this almost retconning of Gustav who was clearly so crappy to Alfonse and Sharena as a straight up good dad, no complexity what so ever. This is just more fuel for me to eventually write my Domi dunks on Gustav and helps Alfonse sort out his feelings™️ fic

YEAH.... YEAH............ I have been SO all over the place about it (as you can. Fucking See LMFAOO). On one hand, it Does give you a lot of material to work with, from a writing standpoint. But dear god. Like I cannot get Book 3 Gustav out of my mind. Every fucking line he says to Alfonse legit gobsmacked me and set off my panic response 🧍 Like Jesus Christ......

But again! It is a really interesting creative exercise to try and figure out how to approach Alfonse's feelings with the appropriate amount of care, consideration, restraint, while Gently. So so gently. Trying to open his eyes to it. Trying to tell him that the way his father, who he loves very much, who he sees as this idealized role model to strive for, who he so desperately just wants to feel loved by, too. To do right by him. Trying to tell Alfonse, hey. The way your father spoke to you is Not Normal. That's not what love is supposed to look like.

But trying to communicate something like that, even as I write it here, feels like an oversimplification of the situation... that only serves to paint Gustav as a Bad Person (which. Regardless let's stay focused here), implies that there's a "correct" and "incorrect" way to love, and that people who have abusive behaviors Can't have any real or genuine love and care for whoever is on the receiving end of the mistreatment, and ultimately it invalidates the first person's real and genuine feelings for the other (so in this case, Alfonse's feelings about Gustav).

Another thing I'm always examining is Fear. It is abundantly clear to me that Gustav acts the way he does to Alfonse, because he's scared. Idk idk there's a Million things you can fucking say about it, but it does come back to that "Do as I Say, Not As I Do". And that same sex parent projecting themselves to their child. "My experiences will be Your experiences, because we're The Same". And if the experiences were Bad, there's the Fear. "I don't want you to go through what I've been through. I'm Protecting You".

Gustav... just has an extremely upsetting outright abusive way of going about it. As though, if he can Overpower the problem, it will be Solved.

Sorry in too deep, Gustav Jumpscare (also due to image limits, I'll write down this line I think is important)

Gustav: "If you had miscalculated even slightly, you'd be dead now. Dead, Alfonse."

And. Focal point here

Like this is exactly what I'm talking about, and why I included all of Alfonse's responses (even the small ones. Especially the small ones).

Alfonse made a risky decision that did pay off. But it scared Gustav. It reminded Gustav of himself, of his father, and also genuinely, he does love his son (stay with me. I know. It's the hardest part for me, too). He doesn't want Alfonse to die. As his heir, of course, but as his son, too.

So, how does he express this...? He tries to take full control of the situation. To Overpower the situation. He's King, after all. To do this, he needs to overpower Alfonse. By any means necessary, he needs to beat this out of Alfonse. He needs to eliminate the threat. That way, Alfonse is Safe. That way, Gustav has successfully Protected Alfonse.

It's just... such a terrible thing to watch unfold. Especially in how Alfonse caves in. I mean. What else can you do in that situation. There's nothing else you can do.

Idk idk I'm just always examining it. Reaching out my hand, let's all start a Summoner led Alfonse support group together (Sharena too, because my god she did not get out unscathed either)

[here-there-were-dragons]

i'm seeing three times as many people bitching in the tag about the very idea that someone might not like this breed than i see people actually expressing unambiguous dislike for this breed

[absolutelyzoned]

i wish i had a dick so someone could hold it for me while i piss