#it’s uh very alienating

[raeathnos]

.

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

Sasha using the title "Lord" in RiAAU after taking over Toad Tower and presumably killing Grime and stealing Barrel's Warhammer from him, and other political and military leaders assuming she's a man because, well, Sasha is a gender neutral name, so they hear Lord Sasha and assume they're talking about an adult male toad warrior. The second most powerful person in the known world and only real threat to the Leviathan reign!

Cue princess Marcy fleeing Newtopia and her father seeking refuge with his worst enemy hoping to offer information and political levarage in exchange for protection, perhaps even offering herself in marriage to transfer eventual inheritances and whatnot, and she finds out that Lord Sasha is not, indeed, a dark and domineering toad warlord, but a beautiful, terrifying girl her age that looks like her and oh god her poor little lesbian heart can barely take it.

[fadetouchedsilk]

im not sure how to parse this exactly (probably since the thought hasn't marianted fully yet) but i wonder if the tone of veilguard's writing is less about appealing to a younger audience and more of a response to falling media literacy rates

kind of thinking out loud here but like.

i'm recalling the girl on booktok who proudly annouced that she only reads the spoken dialogue in her books, not the narration & the people in her comments laughing and agreeing (no wonder they can 'read' so many books per year, they're only reading 25% of the words). or 'starting to think some of you don't like media or characters, just fanfiction tropes.' you can hand someone like that a complex narrative, but what are they going to do with it aside from completely & happily misunderstand things that are very obvious context clues & themes? we can joke about the fandom mischaracterizing our blorbos & trying to be cool about just scrolling past but idk, personally i feel like i've seen an uptick in completely off-base takes in the last few years (probably some fandom bias there but this isn't my first time playing dragon age or narrative driven games in general so i don't think i'm entirely wrong)

it doesn't help that this group also loves to be loud online & the bioware devs (to their ongoing detriment) seem to be unable to distance themselves from fandom. we saw larian's response to this type of outcry, i wonder if bioware is just trying to get ahead of the curve. they make some questionable decisions, but they aren't stupid & i don't think people like that are especially hard to market to from their standpoint.

i don't think that older titles like dao are perfect or anything but i sincerely doubt that large swaths of current audiences would 'get' it. like, there IS a lot of narrative hand-holding in this game & i'm not talking about things like the map markers or accessibility features. 'do the companion quests!' you get told multiple times, more or less outright, & i'm still seeing people confused about getting 'bad' endings despite ignoring this incredibly obvious series of hints. there's a fair amount of information to be found in the codexes, but are people going to read them? we don't know, so we're going to repeat the relevant item name several times over on the off chance you might end up remembering it. like yes this is some people's first foray into rpgs, but you would think that progressing the story would be intuitive (especially given the structure & the journal itself).

the 'the curtains were blue!!!' crowd is unfortunately a very large audience these days, ea is a corporation who wants to make money & they do need that if they intend to keep making games. it might not even be intentional, it truly could just be the result of following market trends.

don't take this as me making excuses for bioware or anything, but there's definitely some sort of reason we ended up the way we did. i see the scaffolding of something interesting here with a lot of potential to be better than what the final product was, a lot of hooks we could have spent more time chasing & that leads to me wondering just what the hell happened.

[joycrispy]

So I was thinking about this line.

At first, I was like, 'heartless'? How does Shadow know that? I'll grant 'aggressive,' and even 'voraciously carnivorous' - these are true and can be easily observed without moral judgment. That's just animal behavior; 'heartless' is a comment you make on a personality. It implies the behavior is not driven by instinct... but cruelty. And this alien doesn't speak, so...

But then I remembered that he literally shares a hivemind with this thing.

So, my headcanon now is that he was standing there staring (and silently freaking out) because this little jerk was just spamming their involuntary group chat with heinous monster thoughts.

It's probably seeing Shadow standing there next to Abe, and it's vaguely but persistently like:

HEY.

HEY.

YOU SHOULD TOTALLY EAT THAT KID.

LMAO.

HE'S LIKE RIGHT THERE.

I WANNA EAT HIM SO BAD.

YOU GOTTA DO IT MAN.

DO IT WHILE HE'S STILL ALIVE.

IT WOULD BE SO FUNNY.

And then projecting confusion and frustration when Shadow...doesn't. I just think that the vibes of that would be pretty rancid.

[rodawgg]

my lil goobies :) Betty and sidd !!! !! theyre aliens and also news reporters who spread misinformation and conspiracy theories betty's a reporter, sidd's the camera man goin for a pinky and the brain take over the world type beat but theyre both idiots </3

[mcybree]

now I'm curious, as someone who has little to no opinion on the matter, what you consider your Beastlife Character's positive traits to be

OTHER BEASTS DO NOT PROCEED !!! CHARACTER METAGAME SPOILERS AHEAD !!! i will CURSE YOU with the DEVILS PLAGUE!!!

this website’s hate mail game is insane

I will answer this if i ever come up with something. I am literally looking up lists of positive traits on the internet. Tom said “unique” and like man i fucking???? guess???????

tbf breature’s self esteem is kind of in the negatives as of s4, so of course ooc im going to have a hard time pinpointing anything, as ooc perceptions do greatly influence a character’s perceptions of themselves.

There is, at the very least, a charisma. People will follow me around and hear me out to their own detriment. I often end up leading groups on accident, likely because I’m always going from one clear-cut goal to the next and other people will naturally want to tag along… I guess “driven” is a trait? I don’t think I’ve used this for one good thing so far though LMAO

tbh i think ME, irl bree, highly values a handful of traits and breature has sort of become an opponent of all of them.

i think, before the s3 alien conspiracy bullshit, there was a lot there. That was a well rounded individual. She had flaws but she wasn’t all flaws. But, at her lowest, she became the worst version of herself, and thennnn bc of the isolationist nature of the second season, almost all of her first impressions on other people happened when she was her worst version. So now it’s like she’s defined by this two dimensional parody. Everyone sees her as her worst version + she only knows how to interact with people as that worst version + most of her time alive in these games was as her worst version so she identifies with it = i am somewhat locked in to being horrible forevwr. despite being past what caused that spiral in the first place

like she has got to be one of the most hated ppl on beastlife I’ll be real LMAOOOOO in the two full seasons ive played ive been mourned Once. and it was by the guy i purposefully ruined the life of bc she has an unhealthy attachment towards me that i took advantage of at least three times. If that gives you any idea just how much I piss people off (and this is a server where most deaths are commemorated in one way or another, like it’s fairly culturally important)

sorry for the rant I’d say “i just love my fucking animal” but i really dont. bro is hated by her creator can you believe it… i do love doodling her badly in mspaint though ☝️

[batsplat]

Sepang 2006: After an exhausting race, Valentino Rossi brings a chair to the podium and sits down. Loris Capirossi joins him to sit on his lap.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: THE SCOURGE BETWEEN STARS by Ness Brown.

Devoured this in one intense sitting last night! It gets right into the "fucked up shit happens in space" (as I was promised it would!), and I liked that you could see the author's astrophysics background peeking through without derailing the tension.

(And, for real: Don't Open The FUCKING Door, holy shit.)

[bumblingbabooshka]

Live Fast & Prosper

[lucabyte]

Pittsburgh Cincinnati Goes North

[simptasia]

sometimes in trek: spock, data, julian, odo, seven or t'pol will say something and like, other characters will react in certain ways (annoyance or amusement) and the moments will be presented by the show as like "oh lookit this social blunder haha" and i'll be like

"i see what the show wants me to feel but literally what are they doing wrong here"

[halfdeadwallfly]

me when the group conversation is triggering a bunch of instrusive thoughts and he notices that i'm uncomfortable so he keeps trying to redirect the topic without drawing everyone's attention to me 💪🥳😭🥀💌🌬️☄️🪐⛈️👾🐛🙏💌

[mixmangosmangoverse]

(Vague post)

Popular analog horror has gone down the antisemetism rabbit hole so I no longer feel bad about using a vaguely similar idea. I think we need a Jewish analog horror ARG in fact

[flowercrowngods]

Eddie slots himself neatly beside Steve, who in turn has wedged himself awkwardly, deliberately so, against the wall so that the bed is sprawling in comparison to his body.

"Heard I'm not a house fire, Harrington," Eddie says easily. "Heard I'm just a boy."

Steve holds his breath, knowing Eddie can tell.

"That lighter - Wayne thinks he lost it, y'know? Big, chunky old thing. Doesn't know that I have, well, light fingers when I want to. He trusts me. I break that trust. I think he pretends I don't. Hurts less that way. Or just different. Different kind of hurt." Eddie huffs out a laugh.

"Why are you telling me this?" Steve asks, not wanting to blame Robin for telling, but desperately wanting to blame someone, somehow.

"What do you think the first thing a kid with a lighter does?" Eddie asks, and runs a finger over the shell of Steve's ear, making him shiver for all the wrong reasons. Steve wants to ask. Can already smell the smoke. "Yeah, you got it."

"Firebug," Steve says, remembering for the first time the unexplained fires from a few years back. Back when he didn't have to care. "They never caught you."

"I freaked myself out, got too close to the flame," Eddie says, and presses a finger right against Steve's cheek, making it to hollow. "Look what I did again."

"I'm not a flame," Steve says as Eddie pulls his finger away and traces Steve's jawline.

"Sure would like to watch you burn though," Eddie says.

"Did Robin make you do this?" Steve asks and Eddie shakes his head.

"Would that be easier? You could turn me away with my virtue intact? Instead, here I am, the worst version of myself still loving the worst version of yourself, and what are you supposed to do with that."

"You know how to get away with it," Steve says, really realising. "You - love me."

"Both true," Eddie says. "Whatever that means to you, I'll take it."

"You deserve better," Steve says.

"That's for me to decide, isn't it?" Eddie asks. "You fascinate me, Harrington. In the way of rare things. Or deadly things, perhaps."

Steve moves then, so he can line their mouths up.

"The way you talk about me - like you actually see me - "

"I'm just a boy," Eddie says.

"No, I don't think so," Steve says, breathing in the air Eddie's breathing out. "No, not at all."

And then Eddie kisses him, and it's like suffocating, but the best kind, and Steve doesn't fight to inhale, getting lost in it instead, and maybe Eddie is a deadly thing too, because Steve is light headed and gasping when they part.

"Okay, he says. Okay.

Eddie is not just a boy. He's a bolt of lightning that shoots into a tree and burns it from the inside in a beautiful display of nature's forces. He's a house-fire. He's the sun.

Steve is the tree. He is the house. He is the flower turning toward the sun to stay alive. He's the boy who forgot how to breathe air that doesn't smell of gasoline or smoke.

But it's okay. It's okay.

[shizukahaiji]

About to say something controversial but I think some of the Blue Lock fandom is getting way too comfortable with being homophobic

[pissfaggit]

enough to drive a man insane if I'm being honest with you guys