#just hanging out staring at some TREES out here (playing skyward sword also)

[corpsentry]

when will i see you again?

[jcmorrigan]

Blakeworther headcanons. I don't have a specific theme or anything in mind. Go ham

Go ham, you say?

GO HAM, YOU SAY?

Sorry not sorry but this is about to become mega cringe time. Because I do *have* a specific set of headcanons preloaded but it is not at ALL what you asked for

I love crossovers, and I want to import the Bastard Trio into my current crossover hell fic. So I was kind of playing with their dynamic in my mind, and one of the ways I test out character dynamics is to send them on little imaginary missions to other crossover worlds in my mind. Now, I’m in the midst of watching a playthrough of Skyward Sword, which I have heretofore not experienced. And I’m not exactly finished with it. But for some mental warm-ups, I was thinking, “Okay. SkSw is the other big fandom I’m trying, and it’s as far from the G4 as you can get, so what if you put three sci-fi guys in a high fantasy setting and watched them go? What if they had to take Link’s journey, except their goal is most certainly not to save anything because they’re swaggering murderers? What would happen then?”

This...is that story. But only up through the part where I watched (the first of the Silent Realms). Maybe a part II later if I keep doing this?

-To blend in, our boys have gotten themselves some Loftwings. While Vincent’s and Victor’s look like ordinary giant shoebills...oh. Oh, dear. Albert...how did you manage to turn it into a Dream Eater so fast? Its beak is white, its feathers are black, it has no eyes and people are STARING.

-Albert refuses to discard or fix the Dream Eater Loftwing. It’s going to be his steed for this entire quest. Joy.

-NOBODY played fair when they had to race against Groose. They teamed up to knock him off his bird and it’s a miracle he survived. Especially since he wasn’t supposed to survive that.

-Like I said, I have no idea what their endgame goal is here because they’re certainly not trying to stop Demise. Or are they? Because they befriend Ghirahim right the heck away and it’s entirely possible they’re like “We’re from the future, this guy will shatter you, you deserve better, please leave Demise in the ground and join our team”

-And when I say they befriend Ghirahim right away I mean ESPECIALLY ALBERT

-Victor loves shopping at the bazaar because he can play-flirt with Peatrice and she’ll flirt right back. Meanwhile if the fortune teller attempts to reel in Vincent ONE MORE TIME there will be blood.

-Vincent Edgeworth is forcibly removed from the Skyloft bazaar

-Victor is the only person who remotely likes Fi, probably because she’s quite visibly supposed to be an AI and he is quite visibly part robot.

-They hit the ground and get going!

-Oh no. Kikwis. They hate Kikwis so much.

-The one that’s up in the tree, the three of them debate how to most quickly get down. Vincent: “We don’t bother and just say we did.” Victor: “If we threw a rock at it, it would fall out.” Albert: “I think we should set the whole tree on fire.”

-They get into the first dungeon, and you know that one segment where you have to vine-swing and the motion controls are so unforgiving? Vincent fell off those vines like twelve times and Victor and Albert lost their shit

-They get the beetle and now that thing’s a Dream Eater, too. Albert please stop doing this

-Back at Skyloft, doing sidequests is their least favorite thing. They do not give a SHIT about Gratitude Crystals if they don’t have to do so. The missing girl’s mom comes up to tell her problems and Vincent just goes “This affects me how?”. The brother says his sister went missing and Victor’s just like “We’ll take care of it!” and as soon as he’s out of earshot “Let’s not take care of it.” Cawlin hands them the love letter to deliver to Karane or Phoeni, Albert rips it in half in front of Cawlin, Cawlin starts bawling, Victor just goes “Actually I kinda wanted to do that one and see if we could start romance drama”

-Into Eldin Province and Mogmas are...only slightly less aggravating than Kikwis

-VINCENT ALMOST EXPLODES WHEN HE LEARNS THE KEY TO THE NEXT DUNGEON IS SPLIT IN PIECES AND HE HAS TO DIG IN THE DIRT FOR IT

-So then there’s that one passage in the valley where if you don’t just book it, your clothes will catch on fire. They blaze through it, and Fi determines that they’ve sustained no damage, which is good, because if they’d been exposed a moment longer, then surely one of them would be naked. Victor, hearing this, promptly tosses some personal item of his back into the high-heat area; “Oops. I dropped it. Go get it, Vincent.” Albert: “YES! GO GET IT, VINCENT!”

-It is only sheer willpower and Victor’s physical restraint that keeps Vincent from beating Ledd to a pulp.

-They actually kinda like hanging around the sacred springs, though. They’re tranquil places. A good way to just...not have to deal with all that noise. They can sit by the water quietly for a while, just watching it ripple.

-And back to business! They enter Lanayru, discover that the Time Crystals can revert this desert into a technological paradise and...yeah, it was way, WAY better in the past than it is now. They poke around some of the tech, taking notes for later in case they can reverse-engineer any of it.

-Dream Eater Beetle has been replaced by a brand-new shiny Hook Beetle! Albert, please don’t turn this one into a - GOD DAMMIT ALBERT. HOW ARE YOU EVEN DOING THIS WITH INANIMATE OBJECTS.

-They get in such a fight about how to place the generator switches. Victor is trying his best but he’s SURE they don’t arrange the way the other two are trying to tell him they arrange

-Every time they pass Ghirahim they stop to chat with him about how the demon uprising is going, also aren’t heroines just so freaking annoying? Zelda, Vanora, why are they always getting in the way?

-Victor of course tries to put the verbal moves on Impa. At this point Vincent and Albert know he just does this for fun, he’s faithful to the two of them, but still, they gotta do the obligatory eyeroll and groan

-”Yes, Victor. She’s very pretty. We’re gay, not blind”

-Vincent actually enjoys playing the Goddess Harp, surprisingly. He can just zone into the music.

-The Imprisoned gets out and hoo boy, they’re really not supposed to be DEFEATING evil just yet but Albert wants to cut off some TOES (and this ends up yielding them knowledge about the Isle of Songs so it’s all good)

-Scrapper annoys them all and visibly offends Victor.

-Vincent likes to use the bellows from the Eldin dungeon to blow away anyone who tries to rope him into a sidequest. Albert then goes “I’ve just realized the potential we have!” and tries to blow people off the edge of Skyloft.

-They hate the remlits until they find out that the remlits go feral at night and now they love the remlits but only after dark

-Into the Thunderhead for the Isle of Songs. And YET AGAIN WE CANNOT AGREE ON HOW TO SOLVE THE PUZZLE THAT LETS US INSIDE

-Down to Faron’s realm to get to the Silent Realm. Once they’re in there and have learned about the guardians...

-Vincent: “Now we have to be CAREFUL and QUICK or else the guardians will expel us immediately, maybe even kill us.” Victor: “You might want to tell him that.” Vincent: “Wh - ALBERT NO”

-Albert is investigating a dormant guardian close-up and decides “I want to take one of these home.”

-Vincent: “NO, Albert, we can’t...hmmmm. Actually, we could probably weaponize them...” Victor: “CAN WE NOT?”

-And then cue them risking life and limb not to get what they even came here for but to pick up AS MANY DARK RELICS AS THEY CAN CARRY

And that’s as far as I’ve watched in SkSw so far. Not sure whether or not I’ll keep using it as a Blakeworther ground, but there, have the AU you *never* wanted

[megadads]

During the 1930s and 1940s families would gather around the radio to listen to their favorite programs together. They’d listen to shows like Abbott and Costello, Dragnet, and The Shadow. The most infamous of these programs probably being H.G Well’s The War of the Worlds which convinced the country that we were under attack from an alien invasion. Then during the late 40s and into the 50s, television began to take center stage in people’s living rooms. Families once again would come together to enjoy their favorite shows, but this time it was The Ed Sullivan Show, The Honeymooners and Gunsmoke that demanded their attention.

Television remained the centerpiece of most living rooms for decades, when I was growing up in the 80s my brothers and I would plop down on the floor while mom and dad sat on the couch and we’d watch The Dukes of Hazard or Knight Rider. TV shows were something you scheduled your entire evening around, if you missed your favorite show when it was airing live there was a pretty good chance that you’d never see that episode at all. But those days are gone now. With the advent of DVR the need to remember when a show aired disappeared completely, we’d just look at the shows as they collected on the hard drive and choose when and what to watch. And in recent years, the popularity of Netflix and other streaming services meant that you could skip entire seasons of a show and still be able to catch up on what you missed.

The era of the whole family gathering around the television (or radio) for the evenings entertainment seems to be quickly becoming a relic of the past. We still have family movie nights at our house on a fairly regular basis, but on your run of the mill weeknight after dinner it’s not uncommon to see everyone watching a different show on separate devices in different rooms. It seems kind of cold as I write it, but modern electronics have made it easy for everyone to enjoy their own entertainment without arguing over which show to watch. With how segmented our evenings had become, I was surprised recently when something started drawing us all together again onto that couch to enjoy something as a family.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch is undoubtedly a game that most of you have already read or heard plenty about if you follow the games industry with any regularity. It’s one of the best games to come out in recent years and will probably go down as possibly the best Zelda title ever released. It takes the familiar characters and themes from past games in the series and places them in a beautiful, Miyazaki-esque open world where you are given an impressive amount of freedom to explore and progress at your own pace. When I first played the game I knew it would be a classic, what I didn’t know was how engrossed the rest of my family would become with it.

I’ve been telling my daughter Zelda bedtime stories since she was a toddler, so she’s been familiar with the characters for awhile, but the last major Zelda title to come out was 2011’s Skyward Sword, so she really doesn’t have any memories of the games themselves. The evening of the midnight release of the Switch she looked up at me as she was getting ready for bed and asked “You’re not going to play Zelda tomorrow without me, are you?”  … well, I WAS. But how in the hell am I supposed to do that now?? So like a good dad I waited until the next day when everybody was home and we had eaten dinner, then we all went downstairs to the family room and started the game. I played for an hour or so while everybody looked on, and while everyone was interested in those first few hours, it wasn’t until the game opened up and the enormity of the world became apparent that it really sunk it’s claws into us.

Over the course of that weekend we spent several hours with the game. The kids would keep an eye out for shrines in the distance or something in the environment that would hint at a nearby Korok seed, and my wife would help me figure out any puzzles that had me stumped. While I was usually the one holding the controller, we were definitely playing the game together. Once Monday came,  everyone went back to school and work and went about our usual busy routines. Later that evening though it became apparent that the game had really stuck with us all throughout the day.  When the girls came skipping off of the bus that afternoon, Chloe jumped through the front door and exclaimed “I figured it out!”. After I stared at her confused for a moment she clarified “I figured out the puzzle with the trees on top of the mountain!“. Yes it turns out that not only had my daughter spent the day trying to figure out puzzles from the game, she even recruited her teacher to help her solve the riddles.

At dinner my wife threw me an even bigger curveball when she told the kids that if they ate good, did their homework, and put on their pajamas, their might be time to play some more Zelda before bed. I sat there staring at my family as if I was suddenly in an episode of The Twilight Zone. This game had come into our home and not only taken over my brain (as expected), but my entire family as well. The girls shoveled down their brussel sprouts, cruised through their math problems, and jumped into their pajamas in record time. We retired again downstairs to what has become an almost nightly ritual of 30-60 minutes of Breath of the Wild at the end of the night.

For the first time in what seems like forever, we were spending our evenings doing something together! And it’s not just all four of us staring in silence while I play. We figure things out together, the kids yell at the Bokoblins and shout out when they see something I missed. My wife or I would read the text out loud so that our youngest could follow only withe story. The kids would draw pictures of the characters as they watched, play with their World of Nintendo Link and Zelda figures, and sculpt little Triforces out of Play Doh. Playing The Legend of Zelda had transformed from something I always used to do alone into our version of family time, just like when I was a kid and we were all huddled around the TV for Magnum P.I..

As my kids get older I really cherish these times when we can bond together over a shared love of something, I know that there are a finite number of those instances and one day I’ll look back wishing that I could have just a few more. I also know that spring is almost here and the nice weather will make it harder to justify hanging out in the basement during the evenings, so for now I’ll enjoy every moment of our time together in Hyrule. And the great thing about the Nintendo Switch is that when it is sunny and 80 degrees outside I can just take The Legend of Zelda with us to the park! (kidding….. maybe)

Reimagining Family Time with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild During the 1930s and 1940s families would gather around the radio to listen to their favorite programs together.