#link goes to deviant art stash

[whispered-pear]

Home Sweet Home

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Full Image

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Kelly

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By 'official armour' I mean the stuff on his cards design. Otherwise Kelly likes to make his own things, his budgets low and so is his current crafting skills. But he goes bugs Ryou and they have arts and crafts nights together. Ryou joins him in LARPing sometimes and he plays RPG's with Ryou, they have fun.

[mythia]

♊︎ 9 Great Gemini Characters in Anime ♊︎

Gemini characters in anime/manga are RARE, and Gemini characters that aren’t deluded, deviant, unhinged, or warped are even rarer (think Hisoka from Hunter x Hunter). Therefore, I compiled this list to bring some light to characters that are doing the Gemini name proud! None of these characters are without their own personal demons and struggles, but all of them, in my opinion, are redeemable, complex characters who exemplify the Gemini archetype. Note: This list is in no particular order, I love all these characters equally haha!

 1. Shouko Nishimiya from A Silent Voice | Koe no Katachi

June 7th

Shouko Picture Link

Shouko is a gentle, sweet, and overall kind soul who struggles to communicate and connect with other people because of her deafness. Despite the barriers she faces, more than anything she yearns to communicate and socialize with others and hopes to make friends. Because of this desire, in grade school she uses a journal to communicate through writing, and she often urges her classmates to write in her journal in order to talk to her. This is certainly fitting, because Gemini, being ruled by mercury, is all about communication—whether through body language, speech, or writing.

Shouko faces many hardships throughout the story—such as bullying, the worsening of her hearing, and her grandmother’s death—but through it all she smiles to mask her deep inner pain and to ease the minds of those she cares about. This reluctance to engage negative emotions, and desire to not trouble other people with one’s own emotions, is truly characteristic of Gemini energy.

Gemini energy is associated with the third house—the house of communication, short distance travel, and siblings—and as such, it’s no surprise that Shouko has an extremely close connection and relationship with her sister, Yuzuru.

2. Shoya Ishida from A Silent Voice | Koe no Katachi

June 6th

Shoya Picture Link

Shoya is a deeply troubled character who struggles to connect with other people because of his intense anxiety, self-loathing, and remorse over his past mistakes. His past consumes him, and the mistake that troubles him most is the fact that in elementary school, he bullied Shouko Nishimiya, a deaf classmate.  

In grade-school, Shoya was a social boy with many friends despite his propensity towards rash, reckless behavior. But things changed for him in sixth grade. Keenly observant, Shoya noticed the frustration of his friends and classmates that developed because of Shouko’s seemingly “special” treatment. Additionally, Shoya felt the dynamic in his friend group changing. In his immaturity, he blames these changes and his frustrations on Shouko, and begins to bully her as a result. Part of the tension between Shoya and Shouko was that Shoya could not understand Shouko or communicate with her. Above all, understanding and communication are central to Geminis, and so it’s no surprise that this lack of understanding is what leads to major tension between these two characters.

Shoya is shown to be an intelligent person; for example, when Yuzuro decided to give school a second chance, it’s Shoya she seeks out in order to tutor her. He is also shown to be a gentle person. For example, when it comes to his family, Shoya is shown to deeply care for his mother, sister, and niece—he works extremely hard to pay back his debt to his mother, and he is always gentle, kind, and attentive towards his little niece, Maria.

3. Mamushi Hojo from Blue Exorcist | Ao no Exorcist

June 4th

Mamushi Picture Link

With her textbook tsundere personality, Mamushi embodies the Gemini archetype of “the twins!” On the surface, Mamushi is aloof with an independent personality, however, underneath her cold social mask she has a deep affection for her family (especially her sisters), and her mentor, Todo. Also, later on in the series, her husband Juzo comments that she has a soft side to her personality, too. This extreme duality is quite characteristic of Gemini energy.

Unfortunately, it is her misplaced affection, loyalty, and trust towards the traitor Todo that leads to her betraying her family in the Impure King arc of the series. However, once she realizes her mistake, she is genuinely devastated and remorseful because she cares for her family and is devoted to her responsibilities to the temple and as an Exorcist.

Mamushi is a calm and studious person with a strong sense of loyalty and justice. Mamushi seems to experience some degree of anxiety when it comes to socializing, partly because she is a serious individual who prefers to keep to herself and her close friends. She seems to enjoy nature and the company of animals, and takes great care of her Nagas (snake demons), for which she has great affection.

4. Kōshi Sugawara  from Haikyu!!

June 13th

Suga Picture Link

Suga is a dependable pillar of support for the Karasuno volleball team and is known as “the indomitable setter” because of his enduring nature. Though Suga has a predominantly calm, gentle, and nurturing presence, when he gets impassioned he shows no qualms about yelling at his team from the sidelines or saying what’s on his mind. Suga also has a good sense of humour and enjoys teasing his teammates! Despite his calm demeanor, he has a prominent mischievous side, too; for example, he encourages Hinata to crash the Youth Camp and finds it hilarious that Hinata does indeed go ahead and attend uninvited. These noticeable dualities are definitely characteristic of Gemini energy!

Suga truly wants what is best for the team even though it means allowing Kageyama to be the team’s main setter without protest, despite the fact that Suga has seniority. Though he is often sidelined, Suga is an intelligent and observant player, who excels at detecting the mood and state of his team-mates. Further, he is good at coming up with new and clever game plays and tactics. He is also shown to be a studious individual who prioritizes studying.

5. Umetarou Nozaki from Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun | Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun

June 6th

Nozaki Picture Link

Of all the Geminis on this list, no other better represents the Gemini archetype of “the storytelller” than Umetarou! He is a passionate mangaka who is wholly devoted to the art and craft of producing his shoujo manga, “Let’s Fall in Love.” Umetarou is an observant person who constantly looks for story ideas in his everyday life.There is a strong duality to Umetarou’s personality—underneath his serious demeanour, he has an incredibly imaginative and playful nature that  comes out when he tests possible story-lines for his manga out on his friends.

He is a gentle, social, and considerate person who goes to great lengths for his friends. When his assistants/friends gather at his apartment, he’s a thoughtful host who makes extra food for everyone, and he genuinely seems to enjoy sharing meals with other people and attending to guests. He even often lets his male friends stay overnight. He also allows his friend Mikorin to stash his suggestive manga, dating simulation video-games, and figurines at his apartment (talk about a good friend!). Also, Umetarou does his utmost to ensure Chiyo is happy—her distress is shown to greatly unnerve him. Umetarou is also close with his siblings despite living apart from them.

Though Umetarou is intelligent, he is emotionally dense. He doesn’t recognize that Chiyo has a crush on him even though her feelings are incredibly obvious. It’s unclear whether he TRULY doesn’t realize her feelings, or if he is only pretending to be oblivious because he is uncomfortable with his emotions and Chiyo’s emotions. Since he writes a manga about love, his discomfort with romance is pretty ironic! However, discomfort surrounding difficult emotions is quite characteristic of Gemini energy.

6. Mitsuri Kanroji from Demon Slayer | Kimetsu no Yaiba

June 1st

Mitsuri Picture Link

While all the characters on this list have an inherent caring, gentle nature that is characteristic of Gemini energy, Mitsuri takes it a step further! In the tarot, the card associated with Gemini energy from the major arcana is “the lovers.” This is certainly fitting, as she is the Hashira of love. On top of that, her goal is to find a partner who is stronger than she is to marry.

Mitsuri is passionate, sweet, and affectionate. She greatly admires her peers and compliments them nonstop in her own mind—though, her shyness prevents her from voicing these thoughts aloud. Additionally, Mitsuri’s being and personality embodies duality; though she has a gentle personality, she is a fearsome fighter with great agility and strength.

Like others on the list, when it comes to difficult emotions, Mitsuri becomes withdrawn. It’s clear that Obani Iguro is in love with her, yet she remains largely ignorant of his emotions. She also seems to experience some degree of anxiety and overthinking when it comes to expressing herself to her peers, and is most comfortable residing in her own world inside her mind.

7 & 8. Kaoru & Hikaru Hitachiin from Ouran High School Host Club | Ōran Kōkō Hosuto Kurabu

June 9th

Hitachiin Twins Picture Link

The mischievous and witty twins, Kaoru and Hikaru, certainly tap into the gemini archetypes of “the trickster” as well as “the twins.” As twins, the two have a deep sibling bond. Both are intelligent, witty, and curious.

They both have a great capability for affection, however, before joining the host club, Kaoru and Hikaru are shown to be somewhat aloof with everyone but each other, leading their peers to think they are simply stuck-up. The truth is that their distant, cold exteriors mask a deep turbulence and sadness within them that arises due to an inner isoation and loneliness that both of them carry. Identity is a key theme for the twins because other people cannot tell them apart. The failure of other people to recognize them as individuals brings both of them great inner sadness, but at each of their cores, they long for true connection and friendship with people other than each other.

Easily bored, these two enjoy playing jokes and tricks on their friends. They both have playful personalities, and don’t mean harm, but at times their playfulness moves beyond mischievous toward manipulative. Personality wise, Hikaru is more expressive, open, and emotionally immature than Kaoru, whereas Kaoru is more observant, reserved, and attuned to the emotions and expressions of other people than Hikaru.

9. Ryota Kise from Kuroko’s Basketball | Kuroko no Basuke

June 18th

Kise Picture Link

Of the “Generation of Miracles” characters, Kise is arguably the most gentle— next to Aquarius Kuroko, that is! Kise has a sweet and friendly personality with a bit of a competitive edge. Emotionally, Kise is quite expressive, even crying upon his first ever basketball loss.

Kise is extremely intelligent and observant. Additionally, he is an insanely fast learner. His “special talent” is the ability to see any basketball move once, analyze it, learn it, then execute it as if it were his own all along. This exceptional ability to mirror others’ and learn quickly certainly plays into the strengths of Gemini energy!

When it comes to basketball Kise starts out as a competitive and selfish player, but after losing to Kuroko’s team and realizing he can’t win on his own, he begins to lean on his own team-mates more and appreciate them. All in all, he is a popular person who cares about his friends and prioritizes developing his friendships. Kise clearly desires a friendship with Kuroko, as he makes every effort to seek him out and talk to try to establish a deeper connection despite their situation as rivals from different teams.

The End! Notes:

*apparently May Gemini’s don’t exist in anime which breaks my little May Gemini heart 😭

* Keep in mind this list is limited to characters that I have personally encountered in anime and/or manga or light novels :)

Tell me your favourite Gemini characters!

[spn-mediabigbang]

Blessed Be The Norm

Title: Blessed be the Norm

Author: @a-insominia

Artist: @leafzelindor

Betas: Quinn Quentin

Pairing: Castiel/Dean Winchester

Rating: M

Word Count: 45,270

Genre: Dystopia

Source Material: The Chrysalids - John Wyndham (1955)

Summary:

After The Tribulation, those that remain are desperate to keep their homes free from the mere mention of monsters, mutants and deviants. As a city guard, Dean Winchester is one of the first lines of defence protecting the populace from the unnatural. But Dean’s life is one of secrets, from the demon-killing knife in his pocket to the fact that his own brother is psychic, a lesser-known kind of deviant. Then there’s his brother’s psychic friend, Meg, the illegal stash of coffee he’s hoarded and his suspiciously detailed knowledge of what goes bump in the night. His crush on his superior, Cas, isn’t ideal but compared to everything else is the least of his worries.

In Cas, at least, he finds an unlikely ally and an even more unexpected one when Sam and Meg are exposed. The four of them must contend with demons, monsters and each other as they face life on the Fringes, struggling to make it from one day to the next, searching desperately for somewhere to make a home. But Cas has secrets of his own that could blow apart the fragile bonds that hold them all, to say nothing of the growing feelings between him and Dean.

Preview:

And then there was Cas. Cas who was off-limits even by the standards of a society where, for Dean, every man was off-limits. In fact, the issue of his gender was the least of Dean’s problems. He was a captain of the watch, he was the captain of Dean’s watch. It was his job to find Offences and Blasphemies and make sure Dean didn’t slack in finding them either. He didn’t even like Dean, or at least, he liked Dean as much as he liked any of his subordinates; bordering on the friendlier side of professionalism but still distant. But when he looked as good as Cas did, with blue eyes so bright Dean was surprised they hadn’t been deemed illegal, a voice low enough to be a sin in its own right and his hair…Dean could forgive Cas a lot given the circumstances. 

Warnings: Bigotry, Discrimination, Implied/Reference Homophobia, 

Tags: AU - Dystopia, AU - Post-Apocalyptic, AU- Post-Canon, Psychic Sam Winchester, Psychic Meg Masters, Protective Dean Winchester, BAMF!Castiel, Canon-Typical Violence, Azazel’s Special Children, Secret Identity, Slow Romance, Requited Love, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Happy Ending

Link to Fic

Link to Art 

[deck16]

Good Bad Ugly - Pillars of Eternity

I’m writing this to get some closure. This game has set up an embargo in my brain, and I need to write this to put it behind me so I can move on.

Pillars of Eternity is a spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate games of the 1990’s.

I have a love-hate relationship with the game. It seems the world at large doesn’t, with a score of 89 on Metacritic. Read on for what I think…

I didn’t get too far into the game. Made it to Defiance Bay, and did a number of quests there. Is that far enough to get a good idea of the game? I think so.

One nifty feature is the ability to add your own character art. I stole mine from Deviant Art. Before you click the link... can you guess which one is mine (as opposed to the rest, which are in-game characters)?

The Good

Spot-On Spiritual Successor. It is a good remake of the Baldur’s Gate games. It updates the look and feel but keeps the spirit alive.

Engaging Characters. I liked most of the party members. Some were endearing enough that I wanted to keep them around. Some had story things going on that I really wanted to uncover. I truly did enjoy talking to them, following their stories, and listening to their voice acting. (Except Durance. He seemed like the person from D&D who plays “Chaotic Neutral”. You can stay on the crossroads, Durance, and find yourself some other party.)

Pretty and Polished. It’s technically limited but I don’t hold that against a game born of Kickstarter. The environments are pretty and the user interface is pleasant. The combat goes above and beyond with some pretty effects.

Difficulty Options. Lots of options to fiddle with difficulty. Want to have hard combat but no restrictions on accessing your global inventory stash? You can do that.

Pew, pew! Many of the spells have pyrotechnic flair.

The Bad

Normally, with these, I use dot-points to keep myself on-track and terse. Forgive me, I’m departing from that for the first point.

Real-Time With Pause

Real-time with pause is a means of controlling your characters where everything happens simultaneously (like it does in reality) but you can pause at any time to plan and action things carefully. This is opposed to turn-based where characters take turns, either individually or as a group. Pillars only supports real-time with pause.

Which is better? It’s a matter of taste, of course, and it’s controversial.

As for me? I hate real-time with pause.

Actually, let me walk that back a little. I hate it unless the game gives you a flexible AI system for “programming” your characters. Like Dragon Age did (to my approval).

Pillars sort-of has AI options. But they’re rubbish. Choose your poison: turn it on and correct the dumb things it does, or turn it off and do every little thing yourself.

But that’s not fair, is it, saying I have to “do every little thing” myself? After all, isn’t that literally what happens in a turn-based game? So it’s not as simple as that. For some reason I get pissed off when the fighter doesn’t take two steps to the left to attack an enemy really close to him in Pillars, but I don’t get angry when I have to do much the same in Divinity: Original Sin.

I think it has something to do with irritation and interruption. I can’t concentrate on one thing in a real-time with pause game. I have to constantly be watching. Is the fighter close enough? Has the archer stopped firing because she killed her last target? Is the wizard about to be attacked in melee? If so: pause, fix, resume.

In a turn-based game my concentration is on one thing at a time. Sure, I have a grander strategy in my head. But when I’m creeping my rogue up for a sneaky flanking attack I don’t have to keep an eye on whether the fighter needs a healing potion or the chanter has charged up enough song-power to cast a decent spell. That can wait.

I found myself dreading combat in Pillars. That’s not a good sign. Contrast with the Divinity: Original Sin Games, where I loved to lose because it meant I could re-try the same combat again.

The old “bottleneck-in-the-door” trick eh? Tried and true.

And now back to bullet-points for the other Bad things:

Obscure Rules System. Obviously they couldn’t pinch D&D’s RPG system, so they cooked up their own. I only vaguely understood it. Is (for example) “Accuracy (+10) vs. Reflex” is good or mediocre? No idea. I’m picking equipment and character level-up perks based on loose guesses. Now this might be mostly because real-time with pause smears combat into an unintelligible soup. Maybe I would’ve gotten a better sense of things if I could see things happen action-by-action?

A Load of Lackluster Lore. The game’s lore is cliché, it’s boring, and it’s waved in your face. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t rise above mediocre.

The Ugly

There’s only one Ugly thing, but it’s a big one!

Bad Backer Bunkum

Pillars was a Kickstarter game, and so they added extra pledge tiers to entice bigger donations. That’s fair enough in and of itself. But they took it too far.

Pledge US$ 1,000 or more: NAME AND DESIGN AN NPC (Non-Player Character). Help us design PROJECT ETERNITY! We will send you a PROJECT ETERNITY NPC character sheet for you to fill out for our design team. We will turn your personalized character design, with your name, class, and race into an NPC in the shipped game (within reason of course)

I don’t care about the price levels. Caveat emptor. What I care about is seeing masturbatory fan-fiction spread across the game world! It was everywhere.

The gravestones and memorials, carved with idiot memes and smug in-jokes, I could at least ignore.

The backer NPCs were harder to ignore. They looked like rejects from an anime game, standing on street corners and crowding out the locals at the village tavern.

If I accidentally clicked on one – thinking it might be an actually-important NPC – I was presented with a bit of donor-supplied fan-fiction.

I know I didn’t have to read them… but how could I look away? Even after being cleaned up by Obsidian for spelling, grammar, and continuity sins they are awful, edgy, Mary Sue yarns. There’s a drinking game in these.

(Though sometimes I was surprised. I remember enjoying a wholesome one about a character buying an old tavern and getting to work on renovations while dreaming of running a new business.)

Conclusion

Right at the start I mentioned I was partially writing this so I can leave this game unfinished. It’s not an awful game. I wanted to play through it just to enrich playing its (reportedly better) sequel. But I can’t bare to baby-sit my brain-dead party through a hundred more combats. Nor would I want to turn on Story Mode and play a game like this just for its mixed-quality story.

I’ve got a few turn-based palette-cleansers in mind. Here’s hoping they’re good.

Pillars of Eternity II, patched to include turn-based mode

Pathfinder Kingmaker, with this mod which apparently works well

Battletech

As for Pillars of Eternity itself?

Rated Ordinary ★★☆☆

An otherwise-decent game ruined (in my humble opinion) by real-time with pause combat coupled with poor party-member AI. If you are tolerant of real-time with pause, you might fare a lot better.

[whispered-pear]

The Dark Power

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Reference image for L-Drago

[whispered-pear]

Spiritual Summons

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Day 15: Crystals/Gems

Without Effects

[whispered-pear]

The Shadows

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Day 10: Guts

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No Glow