#like&lik3

[socksandbuttons]

Bloodmoonn gdi man

[lion-buddy]

ngl i forgot how genuinely important it is for me to have something to look forward too

[fictional-worlds-are-exquisite]

kind of embarrassing that I'm out here struggling to pull my suitcase and then when I let go of it, the wind is like do you mind if I take this? then proceeds to start blowing it away.

[euclydya]

ohhhhh i see. nods nods. okay

[yatgb]

tell us about your splatoon 4 idea plez

IM GLAD YOU ASKED

Okay so heres the gist: a soldier in the octarian army wants to get revenge on dj octavio for "turning soft and siding with the enemy" and also in her eyes abandoning them when they all got nabbed by Mr Grizz so she starts stealing power sources (mini zapfish and power eggs mainly, as taking the Great Zapfish would get too much attention) from the surface to power The Big Doomsday Weapon Of The Month (cone on guys this is the 4th time someone has stolen the city's power source to fuel a doomsday weapon can we like Not)

The leader of the New Octarian Army is Marina-levels of Way Too Stupid Smart For Her Own Good, on top of having good relations with Salmonid clans so they have a steady supply of power even without stealing from the surface. Shes hellbent on destroying DJ Octavio and the Squidbeak Splatoon, no matter the cost. Meanwhile The Captain is just like "aw shit here we go again. God dammit. Fuck. Shit god damn" [slams hat on leg]

So DJ Octavio, thinking "gya ha ha whatever i know how ky own army works. I can Stop This and prove to that stupid old coot Cuttlefish that im nice now by solving it all by myself" and so, without consulting literally anyone else, he recruits an Agent 5 into the Squidbeak Splatoon and plans on just dping thos with nobody but Agent 5. But he has the sublety of a car crash and The Captain and other Agents find out pretty quick. The maIn reaction is "sorry Agent 5 we dont hate that youre here we value your cooperation but we literally have like 3 other people on standby for this exact thing. We didnt need another" And Octavio is all "WELL HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT" "WELL MAYBE IF YOU ASKED US FIRST–"

Thats all i have so far but the vibe is very Noir Spy James Bond type shit. Shaken not stirred. Walking into elaborate casinos in a disguise. Imagine if the first phase of the rocket battle and escaping the NILS statue was an entire campaign thats the vibe here. Also i think rewarding a player in the campaign for knowing how to play salmon run would be fun (having to fight boss salmonids at points. Maybe a king salmonid as a boss battle)

[th1s-1s-your-f1nal-dest1nat1on]

I should make someone rewatch scream with me ON my birthday but not FULLY on my birthday like try to plan it where when they do the reveal it's like midnight you know? Cause my birthday can't be the 28th and I NOT do SOMETHING scream related (or I get someone to play scream with me 😜😜)

[dullahandyke]

Pettest of the peeves also but when a post goes around like 'misogyny in fandom is so frustrating, do xyz to prove you dont hate women' and people in the tags are like. Doing it. I'm like . You know you could let people know you dont hate women by posting abt them. You dont need to list 5 of your female #faves to earn your feminism badge.

[mabaris]

man i can’t wait to see the cc for veilguard a year from now in monster factory

[125storejuice]

.

[lunar-fey]

oh i think i forgot to post this last night but had a realization. summer sads girlies. it is our time to shine

[kiseiakhun]

God gave me migraines because otherwise I would be Too annoying. The posts I would be making right now if my brain was not liquified into soup and incapable of forming thoughts into words. Indescribable. Literally. Because I can't make them ):

[barbatoskisser]

Angel kurapika,,,,

Guardian esque angel kurapika,,,

Foaming at yhe mouth so prstty

I git this off a yt compilation

Um

Sjebeoebo2 r hES SO P R E T T Y BR O

[dullahandyke]

One thing about me is I love offering to do shit. Say One thing about your hair and I'm desperate to show you my (lack of) lesbian barber skills and (more importantly) my possession of hair clippers. I will watch anything with anyone for company. My entire plan for ever having sex with someone is to find a queer person who says something like 'I want to have sex with someone' and then offer with such autistic sincerity that they subsequently cut contact and I dont actually end up getting any. And yeah that's how the fantasy ends. I can be a realist sometim3s

[abyssaldyke]

Something id very much like to be better at is not living in absolute terror of somebody leaving at any job even when my work won't be impacted bc of potential stress changes to The Vibe which is something I cannot control and wish I was not so beholden to

[rofax]

enabaling ur unnormalacy; elaborate on self destruction vs destruction of the self?

YEEAAHHH ENABLE ME BEING TOTALLY NORMAL ABOUT ANNIHILATION

So quick preface: I'm not like... great at putting my thoughts about this kind of stuff into smart people words, so this might sound a little goofy but I still mean it all very earnestly and am expressing it to the best of my ability.

Also this is hella long, my apologies.

So in the movie there is this IMHO very straightforward theme of self-destruction. The movie opens with Lena talking about cells being programmed to die with old age (and how when that part of a cell goes haywire it becomes undying as cancer). Cassie says that she thinks Josie was trying to feel alive in her self-harming. And Ventress has the line, "Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives."

There's this common thread of self destruction as something very fundamentally human. We have these impulses to self destruct things in our life, our cells arguably have destruction coded into them, something about choosing to self destruct reminds us that we are human and alive and DOING this. It's not just something that happens to us, it is something we can do that reaffirms our being alive and having meaning.

All the characters have some element of self destruction in their lives, from Lena and her affair to Anya and her addiction to Josie and her history of self harm, and we also get to see different ways self destruction manifests while in Area X. Anya loses her shit and ties up her team, her break from reality (although idk if that's fair in Area X) is what leads her right into the bear. Josie chooses to surrender peacefully to her destructive impulses and become part of Area X. Ventress tries to face it and is broken down in something totally unrecognizable and remade. Lena fights it and introduces self destruction to Area X.

I think Area X isn't really destroying everything like the interrogation team describes, but changing it like Lena said. It creates new lifeforms that shouldn't be able to exist, it assimilates memories and places from the people who visit it, it just creates and creates and creates. And it's incredibly unstable. It's only once Lena puts the grenade in her doppelganger's hand that Area X/the Shimmer is given the ability to self destruct. I firmly believe that after everything we saw that alien and Area X do, it could have just NOT immolated itself. But it did anyway. And in doing so, it took this thing that was so unlike us and only created and made it something LIKE us. It gave it this human quality of self destruction. And the Shimmer subsequently collapsed.

MEANWHILE, IN THE BOOK...

The protagonists are stripped of parts of their identity VERY early on. They literally do not have names when they go into Area X and are only known by their professions. Hypnosis is used to guide them across the border and is later revealed to be used extensively to compel them to do other things as well. They are stripped of their identities and their free will. They are not afforded their sense of self while in Area X. (Interestingly, it is Area X itself that returns some of the agency to the biologist by innoculating her against hypnosis with the spores!)

The biologist notes several things throughout the novel that she speculates or are implied to be like... facets or elements of previous expedition members or features of the wilderness. The dolphin with an eye that's too human, the moaning creature in the reeds that she realizes was once another expedition member, even the Crawler flashes briefly to her as the lighthouse keeper. Even the accounts and journals of previous expeditions have literally lost their distinction from one another as the giant pile they lay in decomposes. The surveyor is released gently into the water after she dies to become part of Area X and hopefully know peace. Even the Crawler's skin is made of the same cells as human brain because it is not an individual thing, but a collection of so many other things. The people in the abandoned village made of plants that the biologist gets an uneasy feeling about. These individual people are consumed by Area X and distributed into something new as part of a larger whole, the lines between one person and another and the landscape all blurring.

Previous expeditions have people who come back wrong. They come back unlike how they were before. The people who come back aren't the same people who went in (literally, the doppelgangers happen to everyone) but they still have pieces of who they were. They just also have pieces of Area X and the people they were with. There's a lot of metaphors about being colonized by the desolation and Area X and the biologist often wonders if she's making her own choices or if the spores from the tower are influencing her.

When the biologist finds the psychologist dying, the psychologist notes, "You've changed" and the biologist later wonders if she meant like... changed sides. Like she wasn't allied with humans and who she was before anymore. She's part of Area X instead of a single person who is a world in and of themselves.

Towards the end of the book, the Crawler seemingly chooses NOT to kill the biologist, even though it earlier killed the anthropologist. She wonders if she didn't seem foreign to the Crawler anymore. If she was so enmeshed in Area X that it didn't consider her a threat. It's hard to say WHAT the reason was because the Crawler is beyond comprehension, but it's important to note that the biologist isn't the individual she was at the start and is also much more than herself at this point. Area X is functioning within her through "the brightness". She is part of Area X, Area X is part of her, and something similar happened to everyone who came before her.

Part of this unknowable cosmic horror of Area X is the dissolution of what makes you you, and being remade into something different. Area X keeps changing the things that come into contact with it and making new things out of them, so while the doppelgangers are definitely not the same physical bodies that went in, they still contain parts of them. But the individuals who went in do not exist anymore. Their destruction of self starts before they step foot over the border with the names and hypnosis. Anything to do with Area X breaks a person down into something else and shares that breaking down across everyone.