#it’s the slowly dawning realization on dk’s face

[fromcainwithlove]

challenge: explain these pictures without using the words ‘lost gay chicken’

[monkey-network]

A Favorite Moment in Mario 2

WARNING: Heavy Spoilers for Origami King. And here’s part one of this series if you’re interested. Thank you.

I sincerely love Mario, next to Kirby, Spyro, and DK, I can never not enjoy a Mario game. Has his stinker stars, but his library is definitely more good than bad. And really, it’s not just because the games to fun to fuck around with, especially the ones like 64, but there are some moments that honestly stick with me that remind me of why I love the games of this red hatted mustache hunk. As such, we look to 2020 for Paper Mario: The Origami King.

I’m honestly still on the boat that the latter Papa Mario games have been hit or miss compared to the first two games, but Origami King at least broke the middling streak with its charm and presentation, these two factors definitely making up for the easy and simple combat. It looks lovely as usual and again has its charming moments here and there, but there was one part of this game that stuck with me more than the other Paper games. First I’ll see to set the stage. Early in the quest, we meet the Bob-omb, Bobby.

He suffers from amnesia and appears different from other bob-ombs. I think a nice little trick is that you’ll probably notice the differing detail with him but won’t think about it until later on, which I’ll get to later. So we let Bobby tag along and when we get to the path that leads to the desert, we see this flat bastard again.

Olly arrives at the cavern entrance and not only blocks the way, but remorselessly crushes Olivia underneath. Mario and Bobby are unable to move the rock but the latter figures out a way to destroy it. So we head out to sea and after defeating the giant enemy kracken, we get a box and after returning to the rock, we get the backstory of Bobby’s original identity before he says goodbye 

and goes out with a bang

In my first playthrough, I honestly found it surprising that Bobby was without his fuse in spite of seeing plenty bob-ombs with them. To me, the truth was right in my face and the game did a good job keeping that twist out of my head as I was focused on the story. Not to say it wasn’t obvious, but I second guessed myself when it added up. But, this isn’t all there is to the moment. 

After the explosion, we revive Olivia and the realization of what happened slowly dawns on her. She runs off into the cave and is ultimately dejected with haunting music filling the air. We head off deep into the cavern where we meet a encouraging face.

Like he says, we gotta get Olivia out of her pit and so we head back to make her happy with the paper mache masks we got in the previous adventure. Where we get to my favorite moment where Mario cheers her up 

Everything about this made me love Mario a lot more as a character. This scene was very much on par with moments from the Mario & Luigi RPG series where even without dialogue, I got to see the plumber be that ray of sunshine in the midst of a tragic end of a good character. I’d say this is the best part of Origami King upon the other Paper Mario and even mainline Mario games. We get to see a far more expressive side of the otherwise stoic hero where he can be self-condemning but nonetheless keep going against the jaws of defeat. It helps that I got to like Olivia as we went on so being able to help her spirit brightened me up as well. To me, this was up there as a great emotional moment from the Mario games I’ve played. Not the best (that’s for next time), but certainly one that exceeded my expectations for both Paper Mario games and Mario as a whole.

I have my issues with Origami King as a whole, but this moment stood out as a reason why I enjoyed this game. That’s not to say there weren’t good moments before but this part was what stuck with me and I appreciate this game for being able to provide such a impactful and wholesome moment upon everything. 

I Loved It

[bestworstcase]

🎥 and i know you already answered this buuuut just in case u have something else big lying around 💥

ask game

🎥- Favorite Season (1/2/3)?

vbhgfhjdfshjd you know. i rag on it constantly but 3. like, flawed as it is– the essentials of it, the broad strokes of the plot arc and lore and cass breaking away from rapunzel and of course demon hours, that’s... what i wanted out of the show, ultimately. and the poor execution is just an opportunity for me to tear it apart and put it back together again the way i like, which is not... a downside, in my mind, because that’s pretty integral to how i enjoy things. 

that being said 2 gets points for having RATGT in it

💥- A big a opinion you have related to the Tangled movie/series?

i mean u know me i hoard opinions like a dragon hoards treasure but one i don’t think i’ve fully voiced on here before is that i actually like where rapunzel’s characterization goes in s3. the frustration for me is that it doesn’t feel like it was intentional, and that’s a problem of poor writing that creates an annoying tonal dissonance.

but like, if we look at rapunzel’s behavior in s3 and take that at face value... like you said here rapunzel kind of does this weird swerve where despite her refusal to give up on cass she also feels much quicker to anger, quicker to judgment, quicker to making snap decisions. she stops accepting blame for things that aren’t her fault and she also becomes more forceful about trying to get her way (e.g. in KAQOH). she verbalizes care and concern for cass without proactively doing...anything about the situation. she meets the mind trap theft with a shrug, meets zhan tiri’s gloating with a shrug, and appears to only care about varian’s kidnapping because it ruins eugene’s birthday and her planned proposal. 

and like, much as i get the impulse to read that as rapunzel repressing her true feelings and putting on a happy front so solid she even starts to believe it... i don’t think there’s a lot of textual evidence for that reading, in the end, just as there isn’t a lot of textual evidence for the reading that cass is using the gothel thing as an easy focal point for all her other issues with rapunzel; because in both cases, there’s never any narrative payoff for these supposed acts of repression. the deeper truth never comes out, is never mentioned or even hinted out. 

and that doesn’t make them bad readings per se but it does make them... not super interesting to me, because damn it if characters are hardcore repressing their feelings i want that to MATTER and i want to see the CONSEQUENCES for that. 

conversely

even though i know it wasn’t the intention, i like reading rapunzel as genuinely growing into a more selfish, more callous person in response to all the shit that happens in s2. i think that makes sense! and i think it is a really fascinating avenue for her character! and i think it opens up a lot of really interesting and complicated options for further growth–like

1) for eighteen years, rapunzel grows up sheltered and inculcated with terror regarding everything outside her tower. then she learns that her “mother” is actually her kidnapper, goes through a harrowing experience that ends in gothel dying pretty horribly right before her eyes, and then goes straight to her real parents in corona

2) where she is then immediately thrust into a position of enormous authority and responsibility and expected to get up to speed on how to be a competent princess in, like, six months

3) then at the six month mark she gets a whole bunch of magic destiny bullshit dumped in her lap on top of everything else

4) she tries so hard to break herself free of the psychological chains gothel left her with, to see the goodness in the world and trust people and embrace the world outside the tower... and then the QFAD stuff happens, and she’s traumatized, and the fallout of that traumatizes her more so she sort of snaps herself back into Repression Mode and pretending everything is fine, and that leads indirectly to varian, her friend, snapping and assaulting the kingdom and kidnapping her mom and trying to kill her mom and best friend.

5) so she Immediately Leaves corona to deal with the magic destiny bullshit but that’s scary so she treats it more like a vacation than a serious quest but that causes friction between her and her best friend and she’s just coping! not very well but she’s trying her best!

6) but her best isn’t good enough and things with cass keep getting more and more tense and the magic bullshit destiny keeps getting more and more real as they get closer to the DK and more information comes to light... and then the great tree happens, and rapunzel makes a choice that leads directly to cassandra getting horrifically injured

7) and this is not a situation that rapunzel is equipped to handle AT ALL so she dumps whatever guilt and shame she feels onto cass as anger and blame and gets extremely anxious and pushy about trying to make cass apologize/accept this narrative that the injury was cass’s fault and not rapunzel’s, and it even seems to work for a while because cass ends up being the one who apologizes at the end of RDO...

8) ...but at this point like, the whole friendship has broken down, right? cass is so shut down and alienated that after RDO imo it was only a matter of time before cass left altogether, and it’s just rapunzel’s bad luck that zhan tiri stepped in to be that final trigger to make that happen. but like from rapunzel’s perspective, everything was fine after RDO until cass just. suddenly. lashed out at her and stole the moonstone and ran away to do lord knows what. 

9) and to make matters worse the only explanation cass offers is that she’s mad at rapunzel because gothel was cass’s mom and abandoned her, something that obviously is not rapunzel’s fault. and rapunzel at this point has PLENTY of experience being blamed for shit that isn’t her fault, and very little experience dealing with guilt for things that are her fault in a healthy way (in fact RDO ended up rewarding rapunzel for refusing to deal with her guilt in a healthy way) so... she has very little incentive to take cassandra’s betrayal as a reason to introspect on her own behavior, right? she has no reason to stop and think well what did i do to make her feel like she had to do that instead of talking to me about it? 

10) and the rest of the friend group likes raps better than cass so they also don’t have any reason to be like hey, rapunzel, we didn’t treat her very well, did we? 

11) and then she returns to an environment where she is effectively the acting queen, and her friend group has this narrative that rapunzel is a kind and compassionate person almost to a fault (because she is) so she is constantly having this idea that she didn’t do anything wrong, this was all cass reinforced. [remember how in DC eugene implicitly agrees with rapunzel’s sentiment that cass, not rapunzel, is to blame for cass’s injury? “that’s how cass hurt her hand”] 

12) and frankly all this seems to me like a PERFECT storm for some of the behaviors rapunzel observed/inherited from gothel to float to the surface. she has always been a little pushy, a little prone to not accepting culpability, a little inclined toward black-and-white thinking. right? so for those things to, in the wake of this traumatic betrayal by her best friend, coagulate together into rapunzel being more forceful, more confident, more focused on her own happiness rather than trying to please other people, all while still giving lip service to being compassionate and refusing to ever give up on anyone and missing cassandra... like, that makes sense as a character development for her to undergo, i think. 

and i LIKE that. the only problem is that it goes unremarked upon and it’s clearly not intended for rapunzel to be this way, which means that the narrative ends up sort of presenting all this as ~positive~ character development when it’s... really... not. and that creates that tonal dissonance that i mentioned.

but like, character development does not always need to be positive and it does not always need to be linear. people can get better then worse then better again and that’s fine, and i think there’s just... so much mileage to be gotten, in fanworks, out of taking this negative character development in s3 at face value and then running with it to the logical consequences thereof: i want to see rapunzel’s friends slowly realizing that she has changed in the aftermath of s3, once they don’t literally have a demon waging war on the kingdom to deal with; i want to see rapunzel getting called out, i want to see her struggle as she learns how to deal with guilt and accept blame for her actual mistakes; i want to see rapunzel wrestle with the personality traits she learned from gothel and figuring out who she is and who she wants to be; i want to see her slowly-dawning horror as she realizes how she’s overcorrected from “people-pleaser” and become callous to other people’s feelings, and the work she does to pull herself back onto a healthy middle ground instead. 

like!! i get, i totally get, the impulse in fanworks to just kinda put all this down to poor writing (because that’s what it is) and take the obvious intentions of s3 (that rapunzel has come into her own and found a good, healthy place for herself and does truly care for cass and want to help her etc etc) and roll with that. that’s a totally valid way to read the text esp for the purpose of creating fanworks

but i just think it’s neat and fun to take it at face value and then try to like, work through the consequences of that. let rapunzel have serious flaws 2k20

[winkonium]

Two Worlds Collide [preview]

→  You are a trainee, he is an idol. You both are after your dreams and meeting each other and being attached wasn’t part of your agendas.. But you did. So, what happens? 

→  fluff, angst

« masterlist »

​“I’m assuming that everyone of us will have a harmonious class. Be friends with everyone. That’s a good start and having people beside you during your trainee days will help you a lot.” The professor said. “Also, let us treat everyone equally and fairly, especially that we have five idols here.

"Five what..” You muttered to yourself.

“Five idols.” The guy on your left interrupted your train of thoughts then you realized you may have muttered it louder than you ought it to be.

You could have known who the idols were inside the room if you weren’t so busy finding a good seat. “Who are they e — “

”You. The one at the front. The lady between two guys.“

Your heart pounded when the professor pointed at you. You don’t know why it did but it really did. You were a trainee and you were supposed to be confident upon being called in front, upon being the center of attraction, because that’s what your future is. All eyes will be on you once the company decides to make you debut and an idol.

You shrugged off your thoughts and decided to stand up and go to the front. You looked at the professor innocently with a questioning look.

"Look around and point out five people who you think are nice.” He said. You found it absurd and unfair. Absurd because it doesn’t even have anything to do with grammar—you were in language class for a reason and you were sure finding five nice people isn’t one. It was unfair maybe not for you, but for the people who will think that you thought they weren’t nice.

“Fuck it." You muttered under your breath, making sure you were the only one to hear it.

You lifted your hands and started pointing out to your two roommates who smiled at you.

Three more.

"Him.” You pointed to the guy to your left, the one who told you that there were five idols inside the room.

As you scanned the room, you realized he was right. The realization that the five idols were the five out of thirteen members from Seventeen who debuted just two years ago. You froze when you saw Jun, Seungkwan, Jeonghan, Chan, and Seokmin sitting together in one row and you were sure it was evident. Your eyes darted to Seokmin and his eyes landed on yours too. He must have noticed that you were nervous because he flashed a smile on you and it made you even more nervous.

“H-him.” You said, pointing to Seokmin which made him flash a bigger smile. “And him.” You pointed to Seungkwan who seemed shock. He looked at the four other boys to confirm if it was really him and he mouthed a thank you to you. You wanted to smile at him but you were really shaking in your position.

“Alright, that’s good to hear.” You looked at your professor and he smiled at you. You nodded and took a seat when he told you to.

Your heart was still beating so fast. You can’t believe you’re in the same room as Seventeen, one of the groups you looked up to the most. Also, you just interacted with two of them. With Seungkwan and Seokmin. You never thought the day would come when you’d actually interact with an idol. You weren’t prepared. You kept thinking you looked like a fool for not smiling back at them —  rude, even, but you were just too nervous.

The class was finished and you hurried to your dorm to prepare everything you need for tonight’s talent show —a pink tank top dress that went with a denim jacket and sneakers to make yourself comfortable since you had no idea if you were going to stand the whole time or whatever. You put your phone inside your purse. Your phone was ready with the instrumental of the song you will be singing for tonight.

“Ready?” Kristy asked you. She was standing near the door alongside Joo Eun. Both of them seemed ready and you were just a so-so.

“She is.” Joo Eun answered for you. She pulled your hand to force you to start walking with them and so you did, until you reached the building’s pavilion. There were already so much people gathered and you were just in time because the MC went up the stage to start the program. You were the sixth to perform with Joo Eun and Kristy. You have practiced the song for only 6 hours but you were confident that you will go well.

The performers performed in a blink of an eye —or so you thought, because the next thing you knew, you were up on stage with all eyes on you, Kristy and Joo Eun. With your signal, Habit played with you taking up Seokmin and Seungkwan’s vocals, Kristy taking up Jihoon’s and Joo Eun taking up Jisoo and Jeonghan’s. For a trio, you three did well. The people were applauding and you were satisfied with it. The harmonies went well and the performance flowed smoothly.

After you performed, you immediately went for drinks. And by drinks, they were really just juice. You and your roommates talked about your performance and how contented you three were.

“I think I need to go to the bathroom. The stage fright is still in me.” Kristy said, putting her drink down.

“I’ll come!” Joo Eun copied Kristy. “You’re not coming?”

You shook your head. “I think I’ll have to reserve this table for us.” You smiled at them and then they were off, leaving you alone there, watching the rest of the performances.

You started to wonder. With all the trainees who are better than you, will you get a chance to debut? It’s been your dream since you were a kid to be a performer and now that you were one step closer, you started to doubt yourself. You took a deep breath and decided to just scroll through your phone. But the thing is, your phone wasn’t with you.

“Jesus..” You bolted up from your seat and ran towards the control booth where you last saw your phone. The personnel were busy so you rummaged through the stuff on your own, carefully and slowly, careful not to unplug stuff and be the cause of your early departure before you could even make your debut.

You looked for it for minutes, searching through the same desks over and over but you couldn’t see it. You paused and silently whined to yourself. “Nice. Day two in Pledis and you’ve already lost your phone. Can’t wait until you get to debut aka the day you get to have your next new phone!” You told yourself, palming your face.

“I believe this is yours?” Someone from behind you spoke and you quickly turned around. Your eyes almost went wide but good thing you managed to think straight.

“Y-yes.” You stood straight, mentally debating yourself whether you should stretch out your hand to grab your phone from Seokmin or not.

“Here.” He stretched his hand and you politely took it, giving him a small bow.

“Thank you.” You smiled despite the intense nervousness.

“You sang it beautifully.” He remarked and you almost choked. It dawned on you that he was there the whole time, since the program started, since you sang on that stage, singing his group’s song and his solos.

You wanted the ground to eat you up from the embarrassment you were feeling but at the same time you wanted to be confident for all the right reasons.

“Uh, thanks.” You said.

“Also, thank you for pointing I’m nice. Seungkwan and I can’t believe it.” He said with a chuckle and you nodded awkwardly. You looked around and noticed you were behind the thin walls that secluded the control booth from the crowd. You, a trainee, can’t get caught talking to Seokmin, an idol.

“I shouldn’t be talking to — “

“I know.” He nervously chuckled as he rubbed the back of his necks. “But we’re classmates, right?” You nodded and the temporary nervousness from him faded away. “I’m Seokmin, by the way, Nice to meet you.” He handed out his hand for you to shake.

“DK. Yeah, I know. I’m Y/N.” You said and shook his hand and wow were they soft.

“Nice to meet you.” He repeated but this time with a wink. “Your voice is beautiful. We should do a cover together.”

You had to give him a second look. He can’t be saying that. You were just a trainee who just landed here not even a week ago and there he was, giving you collab innuendos.

“I’m saying too much, am I?” He cocked a brow and it made you smile that he realized. He was making you nervous and thank god he somehow figured it out.

“Hyung!” To finally end your conversation with him, Chan appeared, calling him out. Thank goodness it was dark where you were standing and he can barely see you.

“Sorry if I made you nervous.” He looked at you apologetically. “I’ll see you in class. Can’t wait!” He said and then he ran off just like that.