#just some scattered thoughts

[dungeonshrimp]

posting these ideas here so I don't forget

warning for nonsexual intimacy and nudity just in case

.

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but thinking about you and Laios exploring eachothers bodies. not in a sexual way, just curious poking and prodding around and asking a few questions about one another, learning more about eachother

laios sees your stretch marks and before you can say anything or try to hide them or wtv hes pulling his pants off to compare yours and his. "your marks are more diagonal compared to mine!" smth like that (you can't convince me Laios doesn't have a bunch on his legs)

also. he squeezes your chest just bc (silly little curious squeezing. then he squeezes his to see if his is as soft or hard as your chest-)

kinda related but he likes taking baths/ showers with you too. just the intimacy and skin to skin contact, it makes him v happy and relaxed

[taxinealkaloids]

behold hitherto unposted htn doodles! harrow+her terrible mentor, harrow+her terrible roommate

[thetypingpup]

thinking a lot about cowboy!yunho...

how he'd be the type to look you up and down from across the saloon. how he'd be the type to lean back and spread his legs, crooked smirk on his face as if to say "ride me baby". he'd let you ride him as much as you want, let you cum on his cock as much as you want, while he caresses your hips and moans about how good you feel and how pretty you look on top of him. he'd also have a soft spot for watching the way your tits move as you bounce up and down on his cock, indulgently fondling your boobs and leaving kisses and marks all over them.

definitely see cowboy!yunho being all about service and pleasure and letting you basically do what you want to with him. even when he's on top fucking you, he does exactly what you want, going at the pace you want him to, all while moaning in your ear and kissing your neck the way you like. he sees you're worked up? no problem. he'll gently pull you onto his lap, slide his hand up your skirt, and start fingering you to your heart's content. easily can make you cum twice and will keep going if you ask for more

[dukeofthomas]

My understanding of Jason Todd's age;

Jason dies when he's 15, 4 months before his 16th birthday. He is dead for any number of time; it doesn't count towards his age.

He's resurrected; he is in a coma for 1 year, then catatonic for another. He is then put into a Lazarus Pit. (These 2 years are practically useless, as he doesn't remember them and they contribute very little to the story. They could be condensed to 2 months and it would change basically nothing.)

He trains for about a year. You can then give him 1-12 months of prep and planning time before his debut as the Red Hood, and the story of UT(R)H, at which point he would be mentally 16-17, physically 18-19, and it would be (--) years after his birth.

[sunnykeysmash]

Man of words

[squuote]

gross he's leaking

[cannedwyrms]

Spoilers for shadow of the erdtree, but...

I NEED to talk about Marika, okay?

In the base game, I thought she was interesting, don't get me wrong, but the amount of DEPTH SOTE gives her is INCREDIBLE.

The first time I got to the Shaman Village, I instantly knew she was going up on my Good Antagonist List™ immediately.

And, because of that, I wanted to have another ramble about her, as is becoming customary for this blog.

So, let's go over what exactly we learned about Marika and what this informs us about her character.

I think the Shaman Village really takes center stage here. The music, the item descriptions, it all combines to paint a gentler, more human image of Marika. In the base game, she was more like a god (which made sense seeing as she was one), but we see a more human side of her here.

So, the Shaman Village. It's the place where Marika grew up, her home. Unfortunately for her, shaman bodies are apparently quite good for putting into big jars, which was something the Hornsent loved to do. We've all seen it before, right? I mean, we've all seen a zealous religious society commit atrocities against an underclass in fiction, not the jar thing.

And the Hornsent are a zealous religious society. They used the bodies of shamen in jars to make saints. Which sounds like complete nonsense, I know, but that's just elden ring lore babey.

Anyway, it's my personal headcannon, if not outright fact, that the Hornsent's persecution of Marika's people is what led her down the path of becoming a god. Like Miquella, she wanted to make the world a gentler place. Unlike Miquella, though, she only wanted to make it gentler for her people.

In short, it's my belief that Marika became a god in large part to inact revenge on the hornsent.

Okay, pause. I know Elden Ring Lore is like, a big deal and all, and anything I say is basically unfounded on everything except intuition, my own personal interpretations, and because I believe my theories fit thematically within the wider narrative, but just stay with me on this, alright? I think there's a real undertone of misogyny in the fanbase, and sometimes that can color interpretations of certain characters even unintentionally. Marika has gotten this treatment worse than most, I think, because she is a prominent woman who does morally questionable things. Beyond the inherent misogyny, though, I've noticed that a lot of people interpret Marika's actions very uncharitably. Anyways, all that to say, this is my post, and I care more about everything working together thematically than digging deep into the depths of the lore to find out that "oh, actually Scrupulous the Untested mentioned this flower, which represents pure evil, and he was talking about Marika when he did," or whatever. A strawman? Perhaps, but you get my point. Still, I'll try to remain true to my understanding of the lore, but I'm bound to make mistakes. I'm not an expert. Sorry for the long aside, I just felt these were important points that wouldn't fit in elsewhere.

So, I believe Marika sought godhood partly to punish the Hornsent, although I won't pretend to understand her full motivations.

I believe this is what Ymir was referring to when he said "I fear that you have borne witness to the whole of it. The conceits - the hypocrisy - of the world built upon the Erdtree. The follies of man. Their bitter suffering. Is there no hope for redemption? The answer, sadly, is clear. There never was any hope. They were each of them defective. Unhinged, from the start. Marika herself. And the fingers that guided her. And this is what troubles me. No matter our efforts, if the roots are rotten, then we have little recourse."

My interpretation of this is that Marika's intentions for godhood were impure. She wasn't seeking to improve things, just punish the ones who wronged her people. Thus, her reign was doomed from the start.

Now, let's get into what really sold me on Marika as a character.

There are, to my knowledge, two items you can find in the Shaman Village.

The Minor Erdtree incantation, and the Golden Braid talisman. Let's take a look at the flavortext for these two items and see what we can glean, starting with the Minor Erdtree.

"Marika bathed the village of her home in gold, knowing full well that there was no one to heal."

So, by the time she returned to her village, everyone was already dead. How devastated must Marika have felt, to return from claiming godhood and revenge, only to find that there was no one left to avenge. She was alone.

Here's the text we get from the golden braid:

"A braid of golden hair, cut loose. Queen Marika's offering to the Grandmother. Boosts holy damage negation by the utmost. What was her prayer? Her wish, her confession? There is no one left to answer, and Marika never returned home again."

Man, reading that, with the shaman village music in the background, just thinking about a young Marika resolving herself to become a god, to save her village and people from the Hornsent, the anger she must have felt, the fear and solemn resignation of her goal, only to return again to find herself alone. What was her wish? What did she leave behind in her village? We'll never know, because Marika is alone. Her people are gone. In the end, she couldn't save them.

Is it really any wonder that she eventually began to doubt the very order she had founded?

But now let's talk about some other aspects of Marika's character that the dlc reveals.

Namely, her Omen sons.

Imagine how Marika must have felt, looking down at her newborns to see the very horns that had destroyed her people upon them. It's just so DAMN good, character wise. There must have been so many mixed feelings surrounding them. I wonder if she even felt any love for them at all when she saw those horns. Like, I don't know, obviously, but I imagine she felt conflicted. She didn't outright kill them, which is good, but she did leave them chained in a sewer for most of their lives, so yeah not great.

But that's what I love about her character. Elden ring, in a lot of ways, is about how victims can become victimizers. How, in pursuit of noble goals, or revenge, you can lose yourself and become just as bad or worse than the people you set out to punish. That's Marika's character. That's why she's part of the List™.

Because Marika started out as someone angry at the systems that oppressed her and sought to change them. She was the hero of the story, in the beginning. But, in pursuit of her goal, she lost herself and became a bit of a monster.

SOTE, to me, revealed that Elden Ring's story is one of complete moral grey. Everyone is working towards a cause that they believe in, including you. The ends justify the means for you, even if it means striking down a mostly innocent grieving woman, hunting your fellow tarnished, or turning on the ones who trusted you and called you a compatriot. Ranni, Miquella, Radahn, Fia, D, Godrick, Malenia, Leda, Ansbach, Thiollier, Gideon, this applies to everyone.

The same goes for Marika. In trying to punish the hornsent and build a better future for herself and her people, she lost her people and eventually succombed to her worst tendencies.

That's why St. Trina pleads with you to stop Miquella. Because to become a god is to sacrifice everything that makes you human.

Marika took that sacrife willingly, in order to punish the ones who hurt her, and in the end, that's what broke her.

I think she recognized this, and that's why she set the stage for you to become Lord. In the chance that someone might do better than her, make the world a gentler place, not for a god, not for ambition or power, not in revenge or anger, but im compassion. Whether or not that's how you choose to rule is, of course, up to you, but I like to imagine that Marika, after everything, found something to hope for again.

Okay, that's the end of my thoughts. Was any of that true to the lore? Who cares. It's how I like to interpret what we were given about Marika. If I'm wrong, then whatever. I'll still be right in my heart.

Alright, bye. Go play shadow of the erdtree, or watch someone else play it at the very least. Next time, I might talk about Miquella, or maybe Leda and her allies.

Someday I'll be brave enough to talk about Agent Black. Someday. But that would maybe turn into a full ten page essay about why Iconoclasts is so very good and I'm not sure the two people who care about what I say here are ready for that.

Okay bye.

A brief adendum to this post:

Because I was analyzing Marika from a literary perspective, focusing on the sympathetic angle SOTE added to her character, I realize I forgot something important, so let me say it now:

Marika's persecution does in no way justify her genocide of the hornsent.

That idea kind of got lost in the shuffle, but it's definitely an important aspect of her character. She's an antagonistic force in the world who has done some very awful things to further her goals, more so than any other antagonist in Elden Ring. Her tragic past only adds dimension to her character, not an excuse for the atrocities she comits.

Okay, bye again.

[sleepyyghostt]

any time i remember that trump supporters are in any way associated with christianity i feel fcking insane

[thesillyexpresser]

Redrew that one Fire Punch panel with Murderbot because I just got the Fujimoto vibes

OG panel (+bonus doodle because why not) below

Bonus doodle ^

[neuxue]

“知道害怕是好事，因为美好的东西就像瓷器一样，[...] 对它们来说，最危险的往往不是在房间里乱跑的猫，” [...]费渡注视着女孩的眼睛，轻轻地说 “是瓷器自己没有意识到自己易碎。” // "It's good to know fear, because beautiful things are like porcelain. [...] For such things, the greatest danger usually isn't a cat running around in the house." [...] Fei Du held the girl's eyes with his own and said quietly, "It's that porcelain does not itself realise how easily it can be shattered."

ch36

怀着对老猫爬高能力的侥幸之心。显然，侥幸就是侥幸。碎瓷片“星罗棋布”，从餐厅一路蔓延到了客厅 // [Luo Wenzhou had been] trusting to luck in terms of the cat's climbing ability. Clearly, luck only went so far. Shattered porcelain fragments were strewn across the floor from the dining room to the living room

ch58

I See What You Did There

[frankiebirds]

why does reid know siouxsie and the banshees. who taught him that.

[optiwashere]

I wrote like 1k words of romantic sparring for Blades in the Night and realized that it made absolutely no sense at that point in the story. I should really put that in something else...

[buryam-soul]

I hope picking the Male Rover from Wuthering Waves is the reason I sort out my gender situation bcs that would be a pretty funny way for that to happen

[grandvoyant]

Hookah Haze is a short, cute little game about serving different shisha blends to three different anime girls. But, its also a game about the importance of sharing burdens. Toru, our protagonist, only has fourteen days to run the shop of their dreams, granted by a sort of make-a-wish foundation for hospitalized people who need to recover the will to live. That is a silly-sounding premise in some ways, but I think the game manages to do a lot with it. Toru is someone who knows they are going to die, and everything is just a bit of fun until then: they’ve never had family or close friends, they’ve never related to anyone in the hospital they’ve been stuck in for most of their life. They do take running the place seriously though, and feel duty-bound to do good work for their customers. Fortunately or unfortunately, they can't seem to draw a line between themself and the customers, and ends up helping all of the customers relax in ways that are unrelated to the shop. Allowing a sleep-deprived girl to rest, protecting another from stalkers, and taking the time to understand a girl who annoys everyone else. They have so few "spoons", to spend, and yet they spend them all because they have no self-worth, no self-preservation: they know they will pass on, so why not spend all of their effort?

I think this is where the game works best. Everyone has something troubling them: Amu's "love" for her customers gets her into trouble constantly, Kokoro has no family and can barely manage work, Kurumi barely clings on to any relationship despite her immense talent at what she can focus on. All of the customers lack love, and seek comfort in the atmosphere of smoke. Toru is like smoke, breezy, comforting, and ephemeral. A momentary relaxation that has a profound effect on the people who need it. They cannot persist in their lives except as a memory lingering in the air.

I found Toru's side of the story to be the most gut-wrenching. Their desire for love to be only one-sided as they keep their own troubles hidden away is impossible not to relate to, not to feel in my bones. It is a bit hard to talk about the stories without spoiling things, as they are so short, but even if things are compressed due to the day limit, I think it does an admirable job of what longer stories often fail to grab: that living for yourself often starts with living to help another, and having it invert. You can't shoulder someone's every trouble and still die alone. Bonds are formed when burdens are shared in both directions, and living is impossible without bonds.

[batfossil-fr]

Thuja - one of my bestest boys, a self hatch, and has one of my favorite bios I've written. You don't need to know a whole lot about the background story of my lore/the tab he's in (partially because most of it still only lives in my brain), other than there's an angry sun god (or two...) causing problems in my lair. ;)

[lale-txt]

for every “there is not enough content of x” i grow an additional middle finger