#it's actually a serious meta tag but you'd never know it

[freckliedan]

please forgive me for being wildly late to this party but how did we become so sure there will be a hard launch.. at all? all I know is they joked about soft launching the gay before really coming out so I thought the coming out videos were the proper launch. how does that translate to hard launch meaning confirming they're a couple?? 😅thanks

no sorries! i have a few points i'm going to hit in replying to you and i'm going to number them for convenience's sake.

1: imo, use of soft/hard launch to describe both them coming out as individuals and as a couple is just bc it's a common phrase

you're right that they've only ever talked about hard launch/soft launch in terms of their coming out videos! but it's clear that those did not function as a relationship hard launch, because there's still loads of people assuming they're not together. so coming out as a couple would have to be a separate event if it happens, which is why people also discuss it in terms of hard/soft launch .

as far as i know hard and soft launch get used often to describe people announcing they're together—someone might soft launch their partner on social media by including glimpses of them in insta stories for a while before explicitly saying they're with someone. explicitly saying it would be a grid post where the nature of their relationship is mentioned in the caption.

2: not everyone is certain there's going to be a hard launch!

a lot of people think they will maintain their privacy and commitment to the ambiguity bit. and they might! it's clear they're having fun with it, & i forever admire queer people who say "none of your business" & stick with that.

3: i personally do think they will hard launch for a number of reasons, but also just enjoy playing in the space of speculation.

reasons i believe in a hard launch:

they've been engaging in the same pattern of behavior re: escalating openness and queerness as they did in 2018, and a relationship hard launch is the only thing that they could be coming out about jointly. i talk about this at length here. part of the repeating pattern is the build up to tour, but that was guessed separately based on an entirely separate pattern we collectively recognized.

i am mostly serious about thinking they want to get married, though do play in that space sometimes just because it's fun to do so. marriage is public record, so necessitates a hard launch. my engagement theory tag is here, i answered some asks on it earlier this year, but i'm not confident that everything i've said recently about a hard launch/engagement can be found there & i do not think i've comprehensively written about it post dapg return.

i was actually starting to shift into thinking it was less likely before @pseudophan acknowledged it as probable in late april, but nora is never wrong and i don't think they'd be joining marriage hill for fun. this deserves its own bullet point.

i have an insanely good track record of being right about dan and phil. i am often wrong if i try guessing timing or the details of something, but have never been wrong about the big picture. this is big picture. i'm trusting my gut on this.

you can check my jam thoughts & den thoughts tags for more of my theorizing, if you'd like. i am a thorough tagger and also collect things in a number of tags, including meta, analysis, & history.

[inscrutable-shadow]

ok thank you all but i'm not actually finished i am awake now and i have Thoughts

in particular i'm thinking about disability in ieiunusverse and how it works with vampire contracts. i added the bit about your appearance changing to what you think it should look like to reconcile vampiric regeneration with transness and freedom of expression (after a conversation with a friend about whether or not a vampire could get tattoos) and i feel like that also ties up disability in a nice little bow but i don't know if it should

ideally, changing your body to fit what you think is "right" would keep any disability a person is fine with or sees as part of their identity, and i don't think it would touch mental illness or neurodivergence at all, but it would take away anything the person sees as a burden or wishes was different by replacing it with whatever "correct" is for you

and yeah i think that would just propagate any internalized ableism but i don't really see a way around that idk

but also even if every pre-turning disability did go away, that doesn't necessarily prevent post-turning disability

it's never too late to develop a mental illness! (source: real life lol)

also just because vampires are resilient doesn't mean every wound will heal invisibly or quickly, they can regenerate as long as the heart's not destroyed but silver wounds are bad

silver disrupts the contract so that silver burns and injuries inflicted by silver blades and bullets have to heal the slow way and usually with a lot of scarring, so if you pull a new movies Charles Xavier and get a silver bullet in your spine uh... you'll be pulling a Charles Xavier i guess lol

it seems likely that vampire hunters would go for disabling shots, trying to sever tendons and ligaments, destroying joints during a chase so that even if their quarry gets away it'll be easier the next time cause that shit ain't healing

maybe they break your fangs and cap them in silver so they can't grow back, you'd need to retire from hunting at that point (if they don't just throw you out to starve)

also also contracts themselves

like every contract is different of course even though they all have the same baseline stipulations as lord umbra's (trade offer: you give me blood, i give you immortality (with catches) magic (with catches) enhanced abilities (with catch- you get it) and also your soul is irrevocably damaged kthxbai)

though there are bloodlines that are known to give stronger or weaker contracts, house tenebrae is very magically capable while house nocta is known to give essentially no or borderline useless abilities

so it's kind of like "would not having wings be a disability in a winged society" like vampire society kind of expects you to have some kind of shadow magic to hunt with and if you don't then you get shuffled off to a council estate and fed on blood farms and synthetic blood

which is why house nocta is pretty much entirely devoted to vampire biology research (development of synthetic blood and hunger suppressors, vampire medicine, that kind of stuff) cause it's mostly their people on those estates (and the other houses prefer to have weaker contracts transfer out and into house nocta so that they can keep their population rolls cleaner due to the restrictions)

but you could also have a contract that comes with a toll on your body (tighter soulstitching often comes with chronic pain, and chronokinesis and clairvoyance are known to cause serious mental and physical stress)

all this to say thinking about disabled vampires lmao

this got so long omg tagging @albatris @robinbugbanned and @painful-pooch i guess have vampire meta y'all like that right

thinking about disabled vampires

[elizabethrobertajones]

I haven't been keeping up with the season, but obvi I've seen gifsets galore & I wanted to know your take on how human Cas is behaving. I know he's had a soul since Metatron (& I assume he didn't lose it just bc he got his grace back), but I feel like since returning from the empty he's been wearing his emotions & thoughts on his face & in his movements more clearly. Do you think this was a conscious choice after facing the empty or a less tangible change that occurred within him as a result?

I think something less tangible that’s been happening for a long time, because back in season 10, even, we were talking about this. And I know in season 9 there was also at least some commentary on the way Cas was operating, when he had some grace again. Though I missed most of those conversations… My first Cas episode with fandom was 9x21 and I remember people talking about him leaning on the desk in his office and how it was a human mannerism. And that was all before we discovered he’d sewn his coat in 9x18 and we only got it in deleted scenes. 10x09 as well, I remember commentary on his mannerisms, as I think there were some especially noteworthy moments where he was behaving much less stiff than usual. 

All of early season 10 for Cas was pointing out how he’d rather be on earth, rather be with the Winchesters, and in general suggesting that he might one day be better suited for a human endgame than even he realises, especially played off against Hannah, who copes so poorly with being on Earth compared to how Cas has grown so comfortable there. 

And I don’t think Cas has ever really got more stiff and formal after any of this, just that the writing moved away from directly challenging Cas about who and what he was for a while and started asking him different questions and framing him in other lights. He picks up a lot of trauma towards the end of season 10, once he gets his own grace back, and he’s out of the zone where he would die without it and therefore challenged in the story to think about this himself. The writers don’t really wanna spend all their time telling the same thing over and over and if it’s a few season renewals before this can be relevant again, all I know is that Cas never answered the major questions he was posed, and this was never satisfactory resolved in any way when it comes to the themes of that time, just that we moved onto his depression arc. 

But I think in that time we saw a lot of stuff where Cas supposedly, at least with his original grace and often times without any magic effects on him, was still in a really terrible place, being depressed and traumatised, saying yes to Lucifer, and all the punishment season 12 put him through, including some very emotional moments like in 12x09 where he kills Billie on their behalf. 

This season his return from the Empty has made him seem more confident in some ways, but at the same time he’s still lost about his purpose, still struggling with being sure he’s completely accepted by Dean and dealing with low key self worth issues which of course affect him, because he can’t come out squeaky clean. But he had at least to fight off some of the worst things he believed about himself in order to defeat the Empty and on the other side of that he’s been standing taller and more confidently, which is great. But I think his mannerisms have been slowly creeping in and evolving for a long time, especially since being human, and while playing Cas since then always as a lower powered version of Cas, I think the change has been a long, slow process, but at this point we’re getting to where it’s extremely obvious how he’s so different from how he used to be.

My favourite example this season is in 13x19 where he’s bored waiting in Heaven, and he isn’t waiting like Cas would do in the old days, where if he was impatient he’d still stand still and radiate annoyance, or maybe pace back and forth if he was REALLY agitated. But we get a whole montage where he flops all over the furniture, pokes and prods things, and moves around the room bored and curious and very very much in a human way where it’s not even being disrespectful or whatever, it’s that he genuinely is bored and is distracting himself from a long wait in a really human way. I don’t think it’s really surprising with where is NOW or particularly weird for him. It’s not a red flag that anything is short term weird with him. Based on how the last like 4 years at least have gone for him, it’s not super strange for him to be behaving like this in season 13. But if he was doing it 5 or 6 years ago and longer it would have been much stranger, maybe even a red flag that something was wrong with him, and would have had way more purpose than just being to make us laugh at how bored Cas is, but to make some really profound point about him which would be new and revealing instead of expected and just a way of reminding us how different Cas is these days. I don’t think it’s revealing now in the sort of way of saying “wow! how human Cas is!” except maybe for people who REALLY weren’t paying attention, compared to if stiff and proper Cas had been revealed to act like this away from the Winchesters’ eyes in like… season 4 :P 

But, yeah, idk, Cas goes through so much and he’s been gradually changing for a long time, and in season 9 and 10 especially there was so much focus on who and what Cas was, and things like Claire calling out how much he changed and stuff, that it was a time of a lot of growth and shaping of Cas while season 8 had very deliberately been a sort of soft reset where it turned out Naomi was responsible, but it’s a last hurrah for Cas being remotely like he was in his most angelly times. They really rebuilt who and what Cas was in that time and since then we’ve been exploring deeper the new version of Cas.

I suppose no one really reads my episode notes but if you see me joking about party!Cas a lot, it’s because of this from 13x19: 

elizabethrobertajonesListen, at some point Cas transitioned from the stoic Cas we once all knew to a new and better Caswe’ve been talking about this a long timesince season 10 at leastbut I think finally I can say for certainthe season 10 - present Cas is…party!Cas

mittensmorgulPARTY CAS

elizabethrobertajonesand will refer to him as such meaning this period of his life indefinitely until it changes again :Pwe can keep it to season 13 if that makes more senselike his newfound purpose since the Emptybut I was harping on Riverboat Gambling!Cas earlierso I think this is actually something that’s been going on a whileand Party!Cas is just a more dominant trait this season than ever beforebut the arc to  becoming party!Cas has long been in motion

mittensmorgulthat reminds me of some of the early s12 meta talking about ‘growing up’ and how the characters were getting to experience adolescence for the first time… and Cas is kinda going through growing pains too. guess this is late adolescence for him now :P

elizabethrobertajonesawwwwwteenage party CasI love himso much

(I ended up typing this all to Mittens while first watching Cas messing around in 13x19 in the heaven waiting room. Though at the start of that episode, Rowena complains they don’t go to enough parties, and when she hangs up on them, Cas is like, “she’s right, you never go to parties.” I figure he’s waiting for someone to throw him a birthday party while Sam and Dean are too awkward to ask when it is after all this time.) 

But yeah, the traits I identify with party!Cas are all the ones where he seems less angelly and more human, more a truer version of himself and especially when it’s because he’s confident and owning being more than anything he ever thought he was “only”.

[ideahat-universe]

This is what peak performance looks like.

So the next chapter of Poppy's Playtime came out and it looks good. Well, good for the genre. We have yet to get a serious fnaf style horror that is a full fledged game, most if not all of them are just puzzle games with stealth or resource management elements which is fine!

Most of us aren't playing those games so why bother doing more than the minimum?

I am aware of the controversies surrounding it which is a shame although it's apparently a standard and not an exception.

Fnaf has it's controversies, we all know what they are so lets not get into it, Hello Neighbor was a massive disappointment (I remember when their kickstarter failed, I actually asked them if they were throwing in the towel and they replied saying that they weren't going to give up so good on them regardless), Bendy and the Ink Machine is an ironic disaster, Yandere Sim is so bad that even fan games about Yandere Sim turn into a mess.

What I'm saying is, scope seems to do something to these Indie Horror projects. The bigger the project the more drama there will be. Stay in your lane with either a simple game or a no game at all and you can avoid controversy.

Branch out for that and you're asking for it and boy did Poppy Playtime ask for it but here's the thing.

Poppy's Playtime is peak meta.

It is the most Fnaf inspired game to exist. It doesn't just capture the feel of Fnaf (as well as Bendy) in terms of gameplay, theme, and presentation, but also captures the meta elements of Fnaf and Bendy like the commercialization that goes on when these products become successful.

The whole game is set in a toy store so every character that appears is instantly marketable and can be easily turned into a product and they did this specifically because Fnaf makes most of its money from merch. Additionally, this is why the gameplay is relatively straight forward and simple, most people aren't going to play the game, they'll watch it so you just need set pieces to make watching it entertaining and puzzles that are easy enough that the average caveman can do it.

Don't forget to scatter clues throughout the game so the cluefinders will buy it just to comb over the game data and files.

This game is not just streamer bait it's puzzle solver bait as well. After all, if Poppy was just a faux game like Petscop where everything that happens is of someone else playing it you'd have the same end result but you'd make less money because you weren't selling the game.

That's also why they put a price tag on the chapters, because anyone who makes channels centered around this content will buy a copy of this game because they can very easily make their money back with a sponsor or from ads and patron users supporting the release of the video.

Only normal people will be ripped off but normal fans of the franchise will more likely buy the merch and never buy the game (or buy it in solidarity in which case the price doesn't matter).

And as far as the NFTs are concerned. Putting aside the questionable value of a collectible non fungible token that has no utility, If you're making an environmental argument against NFTs, stop, please stop. Don't tell me how wasteful pictures on a computer ledger are when you have a youtube channel. Do you think youtube is powered by windmills or is it in fact the most wasteful resource hog to ever exist in the history of entertainment?

We need to be discerning about how we spend the finite resources on the planet so let me record a youtube video where I talk about horror games because my contribution to a fandom in a niche genre is worth adding to the fossil fuel demand that a mega corporate website uses.

No, the only objectively bad thing Mob games has actually done is bully that one animator who didn't play ball with them. I don't know why they obsessed punching that kid but they sure loved punching him.

I understood what they were doing with the NFTs. Again, it's to generate more sales and as absurd as the idea of pitching a movie this early on is (and it is bat shit crazy) all you really need for the movie to be made is a good outline.

Mediums being what they are mean that whatever happens in the game can't be completely replicated in the film so they would be different and they wouldn't be burdened with coming up with game play mechanics and sequences and the whole thing would just be characterization and set pieces which they've already shown off is something they know how to do.

You can make a film if you already know what the plot is going to be and you have people dedicated to that project work on it while you develop your episodic game of mostly puzzles and set pieces that will only need to be re-arranged for a watch only format.

You can do all that. You're just awfully cocky letting people know off the bat what your plan is long term.

It's not like they have experience writing and developing a watch only product. Their entire channel consists of evidence of what they are capable of doing.

The people at Mob Games don't seem like good people. They want all the money and they want it now. And they're probably going to get what they want because of two reasons.

The bar for excellence is low: It's very easy to make a lot of money in this genre because your target demographic will eat up anything that looks slightly creepy and if it has a cast of creepy yet colorful characters you double what you would have made from game sales alone because teens, and tweens, and little kids (or adults who can't kick their toy collecting habit) will buy your merch.

They've done their homework: Most projects don't fail because someone decided to boycott or stir up drama because you were doing something you weren't supposed to do. Most projects fail because the people who only like your product for what it is didn't like what you made. And right now Poppy's Playtime ticks all the boxes to an almost methodical and sinister degree.

They would have to mess up one of the chapters to ruin the franchise and they are 2/2 right now.

Personally, I want to see where the ride goes. Episodic projects always peter out in the end but Poppy's Playtime is the real deal we could see the Apex of the genre. People will have to do more than fix the mistakes of Fnaf to make a good indie horror. They would have to top Poppy's Playtime.

That's the end game for the creator by the way. To place Huggy Wuggy ontop the indie horror throne and to knock Freddy Fazbear off.

Can Huggy Wuggy be King? Now there's a story that I want to watch.

[ca-suffit]

How are you gonna put this in the tags but not even just say this is (so weirdly) about Dre? Why are you half assing this? Trying to frame some nothing bs as actual abuse sure is a fucking choice and you can't even do it with your whole chest lol. Wow. Why am I not surprised tho. Also how are you gonna talk about "never ending meta," "call out posts" and things being "patronising" when the whole fandom knows the only people being obnoxious about any of that are people like Virginia, Nalyra, Fangs, and Keybearer. It's rly funny how a tiny not-even-that-serious line in a post that's just "(don't read them [the books])" upset you so much. Do you rly think no black fans have ever read the books? Do you think that's the problem fr? Most black fans have read AND can talk about the books more than white fandom is capable of. The gatekeeping just locks you out of ever noticing that, loser. You don't even give a fuck if people HAVE read the books. We've had other fans here who had age and book knowledge and they weren't good enough either if they actually included black fans into the conversation. You keep moving the goal post and we see you doing it, dummies. Maybe you'd be smarter if you read other books besides VC.

It so disturbing when a very famous and vocal blog in the IWTV won't stop writing VERY long posts of never ending meta and making call out posts against other famous blogs and artists only to finish them all advicing their (mostly Black/ Black-declared following base) no to read the original books. Like maybe you should act what your preach and encourage your followers to actually know the source material so that they can be critical about it. Or maybe you don't want them to exactly because of that. It's all patronising and it's starting to sound a lot like "master teaches us about th VC but only enough for us not to know more than master"