#it can express itself if it wants to

[carhartt]

let it rain blood and bone

[oopsallmabari]

like related to my last rb i dunno...the reason i (admittedly cynically) kind of hope that DA ends with this or gets a hard reboot is because i love the world and many of the characters in it and i don't want a game in the future that is made worse by trying to stick to lore and story it is no longer interested in engaging with, or a game that's struggling to maintain meaningful continuity given how long the series has been running for. i think that struggle is already there in vg. i think it had a tall task to begin with b/c it still had to end the story set up in inquisition/trespasser almost 10 years after its release, while also introducing you to parts of the world we had only heard abt before.

i am, admittedly, lore-hungry and would like to chew on as much information abt rivain and seheron and kal-sharok and nevarra etc etc etc as i can get. i would want to go back to the south, even, but i think that's hard to do without a hard reboot given that the south is presumably changed significantly after the blight that elgar+ghilly spread.

idk. i'd like to play through the games from start to finish to really get a feel for how they fit together, bc right now, for better or for worse, veilguard feels the most divorced from the other 3 to me and i can't imagine any other theoretical DA installments being more like the original trilogy, esp when prior writers have left.*

in my ideal world there would be more DA games and they would be narrower in scope but deeper in exploration of culture, characters, and politics. give me a game after vg set entirely in rivain. give me a game that is focused almost-exclusively on the thaigs and the deep roads. give me a game set during one of the previous ages! but that's also because i enjoy games and stories that feel like they have world-ending consequences without actually being a story about the world ending.

but i don't think i'm gonna get that from another DA game, and i didn't think i was gonna get that from DA before vg was released. so i'd rather it end while it's still fun, or be given such a major reboot that i'm not comparing it to what i've seen and loved previously.

(*-i don't think it's inherently a bad thing that prior writers have left, and i don't want ppl to take this as a wholesale endorsement of the prior games' writing. i have issues w them too, wish some things were retconned, and don't think that the things i dislike abt DA or vg specifically would be solved by bringing back all the old writers.)

[wickershells]

never fails to frustrate how many people online hold steadfast to the belief that fiction materially affects reality (as opposed to a reflection; media-as-mirror, harm coming from pre-formed factors) yet insist on adding “in fiction�� as a post-requisite to discussing something like the believability of trauma. calling a little life by hanya yanagihara “euthanasia fan fiction”: hidden there is the acknowledgment of a severance between fiction & reality but only, as always, under conditions that allow people to disregard and dismiss victims. swearing that if someone develops or projects a form of their trauma in/onto an incest narrative then they are contributing to rates of incestuous abuse itself (or, here, of suicide, self-harm, etc); immediately dropping the whole compassion-prevention charade to swear there are levels of abuse where a line is crossed and it starts to sound ridiculous, fanciful. trauma hypochondriacs: no way there can be that much suffering in someone. a very real, material perception, that affects quality of treatment, of communal support. and so we deride the book and its author and call it “trauma porn” (a phrase that makes me break out in hives), say its graphicness and excessiveness made us just want the main character to kill themselves already, because hey, we would, and fail to see how disgusting that is to say, because hey, it’s fiction, we would react differently if it was real — because of course fiction affects reality, but our virulent & vitriolic responses to it, that victims everywhere can see, do not

[greasydumbfuck]

thinking about frank and sex (in a sad way)

[akkivee]

we’re getting a movie event on abema later this month!!!!!! most of the cast will be there and they’ll be dropping new info about the movie too!!!!!!

[itspileofgoodthings]

i love my counselor because she refuses to pry. don’t even know if she knows that’s an option, I have so rarely met a person who stays so thoroughly in her lane.

[cathodic-clairvoyant]

There's a lot about discussion of hdwr that baffles me (not all discussion to be clear, because i do think there's a lot of good discussion about hdwr. But equally so are there the ones that make you wonder if you're reading the same story) and I think one that is especially annoying is the constant infantilization of miwa as this passive eternal victim. It drives me up a wall because this is quite literally an issue she's struggled with within the text of the story! She had an arc about how she dislikes how people treat her this way like towards the beginning of the story! And like even ignoring that, this story is about like nuanced and realistic portrayals of being in relationships and learning how to navigate them and so it's like what's the point if you're going to immediately reduce the characters to "the victim" and "the victimizers?" Is that even interesting? Is that a useful lens to look at interpersonal relationships?

[cabeswaterdrowned]

The thing about Blue is that compromising her wants and identity as a concept is antithetical to who she is, like she will do it in some areas because she has to as a girl in this world but it’s very against her nature to do it when there aren’t other external barriers.

[mad-hunts]

i like how barton went from being like... a hippie in terms of how he viewed sex in his early twenties, then kind of abstained from it for a few years / became sexually repressed, which... definitely isn't such a good thing. BUT then he became even more of a freak (and i do mean that in the good way this time LOL) around the time he started residency because WOW is that shit stressful. though that was also unfortunately around the time when he really started to spiral as well 😬 but we don't need to talk about that ahahhh

like the way this man learned how to express his sexuality REALLY came full circle in the end considering he was like 'yeah, back in the early days that i was in college, i was a freak. but now i'm not anymore... though do you want to see me do it again anyway?' like 💀 JSJSJ if he weren't so demented, i'd almost be inclined to say good for him, y'all LMAO feeling comfortable with your sexuality and perhaps even having a bit of fun with it (though maybe too much in barton's case, because he literally weaponizes it in order to lure in his victims. BUT once again, we don't need to talk about that right now psshhh. i actually fully intend on talking about that in the tags NGL) is more often than not a good thing after all

[probably-a-plant-thing]

Holding myself back from making my own eltingville playlist so hard rn...

[reel-fear]

Honestly, every single time the whole 'poppy playtime is a bendy rip-off' stuff ever shows up I find it all extremely unconvincing and silly.

For one thing, rip-off usually is meant to imply that it's a cheap lazy copy of a better more polished thing, and uh. Sorry but even from chapter 1? Poppy Playtime is a better game than Bendy, it has a simple but understandable story, the game manages to be thrilling, creepy, and very intense at times... I mean that Huggy chase in the vents ALONE puts it way above Batim for me.

I mean BATDR had the most slow stupid chase I've ever seen [and every other encounter with the ink demon is text telling u he's there and then a timer goes down and u get jumpscared] and batim's chases were either silly or just not nearly as theatric or terrifying as that.

When making the vent sequence I mean not only is it absolutely horrifying to realize how fast Huggy is in there but also it's so theatric and cool? The fact that you round a corner after thinking you escaped only to see a terrifying animation of that thing crawling toward you is awesome! I wish Bendy had stuff like that!

And all the stuff it shares with Bendy are generic things Bendy ripped from other horror games/media anyways. I'm not saying Poppy Playtime isn't inspired by Bendy I for sure think it is but Bendy is such a generic story that somehow fails to do tropes 100 other horror games have done any comparison only makes Poppy Playtime look better.

"It has employees being sacrificed for their company" That is not a concept Bendy invented, literally look at any of the sci-fi horror series Bendy is very inspired by. This is literally a twist in the original Alien.

"It has a scary woman forcing you to do tasks for her" Once again, not a concept Bendy invented, a scary mysterious person forcing you to do fetch-quests is a concept found in tons of horror media. And at least Poppy Playtime gave you a chase with her and let you defeat her, look at poor malice. She's barely on screen for more than 10 minutes before she gets stabbed.

"It has a cult worshipping the monster" This is something tons of horror games and media have done too. I mean In The Tall Grass has a guy who worships a giant magical rock in the middle of a grass maze, Bioshock [which Bendy has only been taking more and more direct inspiration from while failing to grab any of the compelling parts] also had a lot of themes of religion and cult-ish behavior, almost every horror media franchise has at one point done a cult thing.

Bendy couldn't even come up with a reason Sammy worships the ink demon, the best motivation we've ever gotten is just that 'he's crazzyyyy the ink made him insaneeee'. Who is the cheap rip-off here?

At least Poppy Playtime gave their cultist a motive for worshipping the monster + a proper boss fight that feels intense and looks awesome! Bendy didn't even let you kill Malice [she got stabbed in front of you and then just collapsed on the floor how thrilling] meanwhile you get to kill three of the villains in Poppy Playtime and the gameplay and action in those scenes have only gotten better as the game went on.

I mean Sammy walks into a room and goes "AAA SCARY I'M BEING MURDERED" then later shows up and for NO REASON sees a normal human man and assumes it's the ink demon before once again someone else kills him for you. In Poppy Playtime you defeat Catnap as he floods the world with this horrible nightmare-inducing gas that intensifies the color palette and his design. Fight off versions of him that are illusions that you need your flare gun for, then watch in a wonderful animation as he mistakes the monster for his savior before getting killed by it, in a brutal way I might add, which game are we accusing of being cheap, lazy garbage again?

I just find this argument to be people who Really Really need to find a reason to hate Poppy Playtime which I think is silly. The devs being weird, shady people is already enough reason to dislike the game, you don't need to invent reasons why secretly every part of the game is malicious or bad. But esp when I see Bendy fans saying they don't support Poppy Playtime or dislike it bc of its devs or even saying its cringe ummmm.

I have bad news about the fact Bendy's devs are worse and it took not one, but TWO over an hour long videos to cover it all. Plus the Bendy games are just the worse games in every aspect, if I could sell my batim copy for a copy of Poppy Playtime I wouldn't hesitate at all.

Saying this as a bendy fan, we have no right to be super judgy towards Poppy Playtime. If Poppy Playtime is embarrassing cringe, Bendy is too and is way more embarrassing of an interest. We shouldn't spread misinformation just because we all want to hate Poppy Playtime, you can dislike Poppy Playtime without making up a bunch of nonsense to justify it.

Honestly seeing people just blatantly be unfairly mean to Poppy Playtime only makes its critics look worse and makes it hard to take any backlash to the games seriously. Because surprise surprise if you spread misinformation to make a point people will quickly stop listening to Anything you have to say bc they won't trust you're telling the truth anymore.

[vehemourn]

nausea forever

[mauv-the-bluest-cat-ever]

i have my benefits of not being out as trans (which is. only one really but it is not being harassed because i dont attract attention) but it fucks with my sense of self

[bonemeal12]

i wish there were more fruits to peel with a knife. Like- all the fruit I peel with a knife you can technically eat the skin off and that’s not fair. I’m so good at peeling round fruits so that their skin comes off in a long spiral. You should let me cut you some fruit. To prove that I care.

[yaoianimeremade]

Soon im rly gonna do it

[karinyosa]

okay the website of my local church w the pride flags out front actually really slaps they have like 5000000 choirs and a page on their specific beliefs that is pretty slay actually, unfortunately for the part of my brain that thinks choosing to do this is insane for me