#liveblogging made in abyss

[hummelig]

MITTTTTYYY 😭😭😭😭😭

LOOK AT HER

LOOK AT HER EYE

SHES SO PRECIOUS

THE WAY SHE NIBBLES ON HER PLUSH

MITTYYYYYYY 😭😭😭😭😭

[katabay]

so. I have never. actually finished watching s2 of reunion. we're fixing that! slowly but surely, I'm going to finish s2 and not get sidetracked by anything, like watching ultimate note.

starting this off with some portrait sketches of liu sang and er jing :)

bsky ⭐ pixiv ⭐ pillowfort ⭐ cohost

[freakliveblogs]

[the-ebil-eye]

fam

[sokumotanaka]

Both eyes

Both legs

Or half your organs.

Uh huh uh huh...

[cindered-shadows]

into the underground

Hello! You can call me Void. This is my secondary blog dedicated to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, although things from other Fire Emblem games may also feature! My primary blog is @anguis-sapphire, so that's the URL from which I'll be liking posts and so on.

For more information about myself as well as this blog, you can take a look at this page here, and for a list of how I'll be tagging posts on this blog, please see this page. I'd also like to request that you please read through this page before following the blog or interacting with it, just to make boundaries clear and everything.

In any case, though, thank you for stopping by! I'm always open for questions if you'd like to get in touch! ^-^

[sevi007]

Tales of the Abyss, part 4

You probably already noticed, but my liveblogging will be all over the place. I'm sorry - kind of. It's just that I play longer sessions and I'm so absorbed in it all I hardly look up to take notes for posts. So I write these afterwards, and focus mainly on the scenes which stood out to me the most. ^^

So further on in the Cheagle forest!

Pfffft. Don't underestimate Luke just because he does not know anything about the world. Boy clocked Ion right IMMEDIATELY at a glance. Like how Ion immediately confirms it too.

... That's a cheagle? Please tell me these were sold as plushies after the game came out.

Slapping Luke over the back of his head for this one.

... Ah. XD They are not just cute but apparently deadly! Lmao

I hope the fact that Luke is letting him spit fire all over the place will come to bite him in the arse at some point.

Now see here, this is probably why I immediately like Luke despite all his complaining and rudeness. It's what we first see when he talks to Pere the gardener, and now when he instinctively jumps to protect Mieu. He is a good kid first and foremost.

Still rude though XD

Knew it! Party member! Now, what to think of this guy. On one hand, Jade seems a little haughty at first, talking a bit down to Luke and Tear. On the other hand, though, he IS quite more higher-ranking than either of them, and in this fight we immediately see him take the Liger Queen apart, so he is leagues stronger too. (Addition: Checked the stats, he is Lv45 to my party's Lv 6. LOL) So in a way, his haughtiness is earned. And it could be much worse. He is not belittling our efforts, simply stating that his are stronger. Which is true. And the fact that he kneels to go on Anise's eye level while talking to her is sweet.

I assume he will not be a party member just like this, though. He is overpowered for this early game.

This made me look up Jade's age and he is 35. I'm 28. Luke who are you calling old here! XD (Though it IS sweet of him for protecting Ion. Even if he is being a tsundere about it right after.)

We got our personal fire spitter, guys! Nothing can possibly go wrong! (Show burning forests in the background while I say this)

@magicmetslogic

[leareadsheresy]

Battle for the Abyss

This post contains spoilers for Battle for the Abyss, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) July 29th, 2008, although sources disagree -- some places I've found assert it was published on August 1st, 2008. Something I've found when trying to date specific works in this series, though, is that a lot of places will say "Published on [Month] 1st" when they actually mean "Published in [Month], we don't know which exact day," so as a general rule when I do this dating thing I assume any source that's specific about it being published on an exact date is accurate unless that date is given as the first of the month, in which case I assume that's filler information and only the month is reliable. I guess it makes sense for a book published two days before the end of the month would be attributed to the next month in some databases. Also I kind of don't care if I'm off by a couple of days about a publication date because I'm tumblr liveblogging a series of, at best, high-school-essay-quality book reports about a media tie-in novel series.

So this book is kind of infamous; I've seen it described as The Worst Horus Heresy novel with the possible exception of some of the Salamanders books that come later. Thing is, I don't hate it. To explain why, I will have to go into some of the events of the Horus Heresy that haven't been covered in these novels yet.

According to the pseudo-history of the Horus Heresy, following the Istvaan III Atrocity but before news of it had reached the larger galaxy, Horus issued orders to the Ultramarine Legion to muster at Calth, a planet in the Veridia System within the realm of Ultramar (the Ultramarines' empire-within-an-empire, conquered by their Primarch prior to his discovery by the Emperor of Mankind). An airless world with massive underground cities and an expansive orbital shipyard, Calth served as one of Ultramar's major military bases, and the order was for the Ultramarines to gather there with the Word Bearers Legion to prepare for a campaign against an ork force who were moving in the direction of Veridia. Unknown to the Ultramarines, the muster at Calth was a trap -- the Word Bearers, upon their arrival, immediately attacked the planet, using the slaughter of the gathered Ultramarines and Calth's human population to fuel a ritual that poisoned Veridia's sun, and ultimately this ritual fueled a massive warp-storm, the Ruinstorm, that both interrupted FTL travel between one half of the galaxy and the other and made it much easier for daemons to manifest in realspace in its vicinity, allowing the traitor forces to summon daemonic reinforcements to aid in their war against Imperial loyalists.

(If you've played Space Marine 2, this is what Chairon is talking about when he says he was born on Calth -- the game takes place ten thousand years after the Horus Heresy but many of the first generation of Primaris Space Marines, of which Chairon and Gadriel both are, were taken by Belisarius Cawl as children during the Heresy for experimentation and spent most of the intervening millennia being brought in and out of stasis as Cawl developed the Primaris aguments.)

Calth is important in the annals of the Heresy. Visions of Darkness, an art book (the second of four, compiling card art from the 2003 Horus Heresy collectible card game; the Visions series also served as the outline for the events of the Heresy as a whole), detailed the Word Bearer assault on Calth in 2005, a year before the publication of Horus Rising. (I would have covered the Visions series on this blog except I didn't realize three of the four were published before Horus Rising until after I'd done my entry on False Gods; the fourth was published between those two novels.) Calth is the subject of future novels and in 2015 got its own boxed game, Betrayal at Calth, which contained the first Horus Heresy plastic miniatures -- Mark IV armor, Cataphractii Terminators, two characters, and the first (truly awful; thank God we're rid of it) plastic Contemptor Dreadnought. Betrayal at Calth also had its own ruleset but hardly anybody ever played it; that boxed set was a way to justify pulling money for development of plastic Horus Heresy figures from the self-contained-boxed-games budget and everybody knows it.

What the pseudo-histories of the Horus Heresy don't say is that the attack on Calth was part of an intended two-pronged attack, meant to occur simultaneously with a sneak attack on Maccrage, the adopted homeworld of the Ultramarine Primarch Roboute Guilliman and the Ultramarines' primary recruiting world, while most of the Ultramarine forces were on Calth awaiting Word Bearer rendezvous. The other half of this attack would be carried out by a massive battleship of a new class, the Furious Abyss, commissioned by Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum of Mars (and secret Horus ally), with the intent to shatter Maccrage's second moon and then use the debris field to bypass Maccrage's orbital defenses to deliver a payload of life-eater virus to the planet directly in a repeat of the Istvaan III Atrocity. This attack, together with the betrayal at Calth, would have knocked the Ultramarines out of the war and prevented them from rallying and rebuilding later, and without the Ultramarines as a rebuilt force later in the war serving as a counter to the traitors, Horus would have been able to commit forces in greater numbers to the Garmon Sector, allowing him to land more forces on Terra much earlier. This likely would have won the traitors the war.

The reason why the pseud-histories of the Heresy doesn't say any of that is the attack by the Furious Abyss failed, because a small group of Astartes from the Ultramarines, Space Wolves, World Eaters, and Thousand Sons legions, none of whom even know that the Heresy was a thing yet, found evidence of the Furious Abyss's weapons test against an Ultramarines battleship and investigated, followed the Abyss's trail, and ultimately destroyed it before it could succeed in its attack on Maccrage, and this battle was so small -- the Furious Abyss itself versus a pursuit force of six much smaller ships -- that it was entirely swallowed up by the chaos of the Heresy's eruption and was ultimately forgotten by later historians.

The early Heresy is so replete with devastating loyalist losses that I kind of love the idea of an early loyalist win, entirely forgotten by later histories, made by a mixed group of members of legions who'd later be on both sides of the conflict, being one of the unknown lynchpins of Horus's ultimate defeat. The Horus Heresy game book series, the Black Books, do not to my knowledge even mention this battle, because their setting sections are written in-character by a post-Heresy historian, and the narrator would have had no way of knowing Calth was intended as part of a two-pronged attack. (Actually I'm not sure it's never mentioned; if I eventually get to the Black Books while doing this readthrough I'll keep an eye out for it.) I just... I love the idea of a small, forgotten event being so important. I think it's genuinely interesting, and this sort of attempt to expand the timeline with new events that make sense (of course the traitors would have had a plan to follow up their Calth attack with an attack on Maccrage to finish the Ultramarines off completely!) is exactly what these Horus Heresy novels ought to have been doing once it became apparent that they sold like gangbusters and were therefore going to be published for a very, very long time. This is, at least in theory, what I am here for. I'm sure not here for Primarch drama! I don't even like the Primarchs! (God, me reading this series is a mistake. Yeah, Lea, read a 64-book-series where you don't care about any of the ostensible main characters; that's a great use of your time.)

Unfortunately, Battle for the Abyss just isn't very good. Fortunately, at least some of the ways it's not very good are themselves of at least some interest.

So. Let's go with a summary.

We open with Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars, watching as the Furious Abyss launches from Thule, which we're told has been a moon of Jupiter for six thousand years. Jupiter doesn't have a real moon called Thule but there is an asteroid called 279 Thule, so I think we're meant to assume that this is 279 Thule, having been dragged into orbit of Jupiter six thousand years previously. The ship is described as being impossibly big. Inside, a Word Bearer is giving a speech to a bunch of other Word Bearers about how religion is cool and it's their destiny to overthrow the emperor, and how they'll finally get their revenge on the Ultramarines. (Much like Calth, there is another important pre-established bit of Heresy lore where the Word Bearers insisted on worshipping the Emperor like a god even after he told them not to, because the Word Bearer Primarch, Lorgar, believes firmly that life is only worth living in service to a divine power. The Emperor then sent the Ultramarines to the Word Bearer homeworld to humble them by leveling their biggest temple-city, which Lorgar pretended worked but actually just drove him to hate the Emperor and seek out alternate gods to worship, which lead him to Chaos.) After the ship launches, Thule is rigged to explode so everyone who worked on the Furious Abyss dies, keeping the ship's design secret.

We then cut to some Ultramarines heading towards Vangelis Spaceport (I appreciate the name) on the Fist of Maccrage, but the Furious Abyss comes out of nowhere and attacks it as a weapons test. Judging his ship doomed, the captain of the Fist orders a distress signal sent before they all die.

Then we meet the protagonists. Some Ultramarines on Vangelis Station lead by Captain Cestus are waiting to be picked up by the Fist of Maccrage to be... stationed at Terra, I think? But it's late and they're worried. Cestus meets up with a Space Wolf named Brynngar, who leads a couple of packs of Blood Claws (that's a type of Space Wolf unit in 40k but, importantly, not in 30k; I'll get back to this at the end), in a bar, Brynngar is carousing and fighting and drinking special Space Wolf mead that can get even Space Marines drunk (another 40k thing). Cestus and Brynngar are old battle buddies who saved each others lives a couple of times. Suddenly alarms go off -- there's been an incoming astropathic message, and Cestus thinks it might be from their late ship, so he goes to check it, but it's a bunch of ominous nonsense that kills the astropaths who receive it and then feedback from the astropaths into the station's systems threatens to overload the reactor. Cestus and Brynngar rush off to the reactor room to do an emergency shutdown and in the core of the overloading reactor Cestus gets a psychic vision of Maccrage in flames.

There is some evidence the astropathic message of doom came from the Fist of Maccrage and Cestus decides to investigate, rallying all the other space marines on the station -- his own Ultramarines, the Space Wolves, some World Eaters lead by an captain named Skraal, and a single Thousand Son, Mhotep. They commandeer a warship called the Wrathful and its escorts, captained by the reasonably cool Admiral Kaminska, who's sort of pissed off she's been drafted into this potential fool's errand, and Mhotep brings along his personal ship as well. They encounter... you know, I don't remember, either they find a debris field or an energy signal or something, they find some evidence that the Fist of Maccrage has been destroyed and are able to follow an energy signature to the Furious Abyss, which they hail, it blows up one of their escorts when the escort gets too close and there's a space battle. Our protagonists kind of freak out when they realize that's a ship full of space marines that just attacked other space marines, which isn't supposed to happen, but mainly they're like "Oh, this is a fight? Cool, I know how fights work" and then they fight. One of the Wraithful's escorts is a fighter carrier but the Abyss use a psychic attack to drive all the fighter pilots insane when they get too close, Mhotep's ship gets blown up but he escapes in a "savior pod" (one of the things 30k/40k does is give slightly off-kilter names to SF staples, so escape pods are savior pods, the teleporter room is called the teleportarium, etc) and gets picked up by the Wrathful, etc. All but one of the escorts are destroyed (the survivor is the Fireblade), so the protagonist's fleet is down down from five ships to two, and Abyss escapes.

During the fight, they damage the Abyss so the protagonists know that if they just follow it, it'll have to get repairs somewhere, and they can attack it then. The Abyss heads towards a warp jump point which serves as a known entry point to a stable warp corridor (to my knowledge this is not how warp travel is described as working elsewhere in the setting; there are stable warp corridors, but there's nothing like Babylon 5 style jump points you have to use to enter them), and the protagonists follow but after entering the corridor the Word Bearers use a psychic bomb to collapse the corridor, so the Wrathful and the Fireblade enter the unstable warp. Both protagonist ships are attacked by daemons in the warp; the space marines aboard the Wrathful fight theirs off but the Fireblade takes significant damage, and the Wrathful moves to bring it into a repair bay, but surprise, the whole ship has been compromised by daemons who've fused the souls of the crew into the ship, and the Fireblade has become a sort of giant anglerfish monster thing that attacks the repair bay as it opens. Mhotep, the Thousand Son, senses that something is off and rushes to the repair bay where he uses warp sorcery to fight the Fireblade off, breaking the Edict of Nikea (when the Emperor declared that any Space Marines who were developing psychic powers had to immediately stop using and developing them, which the Thousand Sons are bitter about because they'd made their psychic talents their whole thing). Everyone else in the repair bay dies in this process and Mhotep lies about using a ruptured fuel line to fight off the Fireblade's incursion but Brynngar the Space Wolf doesn't believe him, because Space Wolves, being viking barbarians, hate witches. (Space Wolf rune priests are not witches, as any Space Wolf will tell you.)

The Wrathful continue following the Abyss until it leaves the warp and stops off at a repair station, and Cestus plans a three-pronged attack involving infiltrating groups of space marines to the station and sneaking into the Abyss to sabotage it. The three groups are Ultramarines lead by another named guy who convinces Cestus to stay behind and command the Wrathful, Skraal and his World Eaters, and Brynngar and his space wolves. The World Eaters ruin everything because unlike the other two groups, they can't resist killing innocent station workers along the way to infiltrating the ship ("A bit of killing will sharpen our senses"), and this results in an alarm going up. One touch I sort of like is that at no point later in the book do our protagonists realize this was what gave the attack away; at one point they speculate that the Word Bearers may have had daemons on the Wrathful passing info back to the Abyss and then it just doesn't come up again. The attack fails, most of the infiltrating Ultramarines are killed, the Space Wolves fall back, but the World Eaters and one Ultramarine get in... and are immediately killed because when like twenty space marines try to just rush into a ship filled with hundreds of space marines on high alert, things go badly. Only Skraal survives, fleeing into the depths of the Furious Abyss.

The Furious Abyss takes off, the Wrathful follows, back into the warp with both of them towards Maccrage. On the Furious Abyss, Skraal, sneaking around in air ducts and behind pillars and things, witnesses a ritual where the Word Bearers use the corpse of the dead Ultramarine lieutenant to appease a daemon named Wsoric, while on the Wrathful, Cestus and Brynngar try to get some info out of a captured Word Bearer that Brynngar and his 40k Blood Claws brought back from his failed assault. Asking nicely doesn't work, torture doesn't work, Cestus finally loops Mhotep in to do a psychic probe and Brynngar freaks out about it. They argue, Mhotep tells them to leave so he can do his interrogation without witnesses, demons attack the ship, Mhotep finishes his interrogation and then heads to the spot of the daemon incursion and uses more sorcery to defeat them, which saves a bunch of Ultramarines but drives Mhotep unconscious. Brynngar witnesses this and decides to kill the unconscious Mhotep for witchcraft before he can wake up and share what he got from the Word Bearer, Cestus refuses, they have an honor duel about it. Cestus barely wins and Brynngar abides by the terms of the duel but makes it clear their friendship is over. Mhotep wakes up and tells Cestus the plans for the attack on Maccrage that I went over many many paragraphs ago at the start of this blog post. Cestus confines Mhotep to an isolation cell because Brynngar made it clear the next time he sees Mhotep he'll kill him, honor duel or no. Also, Mhotep touches Cestus's head and gives him a vision of the future, and confesses that he'd foreseen farseen foreseen all of this years ago and knew his fate was to die on the Wrathful.

Both ships exit the warp at Maccrage and have another space fight. Secretly, Cestus made a plan with the human crew of the ship -- all the Space Marines would enter shuttles and when the Furious Abyss opens its torpedo tubes to fight, they'd launch the shuttles toward it and enter via the torpedo tubes while the Wrathful and the Furious Abyss slug it out. During that fight, the Wrathful's engines are wrecked and it begins plummeting towards Maccrage's moon. Most of the Space Marines make it into the ship. Their plan is to blow up the torpedos the Abyss was going to use to blow up Maccrage's moon, since they entered via torpedo tubes and are therefore right there on the torpedo deck, but the Word Bearers hit them with a psychic attack. All the Ultramarines but Cestus die and Brynngar goes crazy, hallucinates being a wolf and fighting a bunch of other wolves for pack dominance, and then wakes up realizing he's killed all the Space Wolves he arrived with. He flees into the depths of the ship, has another fight with a named Word Bearer he fought and nearly killed earlier (now half-interred in a dreadnought), but nearly loses and is saved by Skraal, who has spent the last several weeks sneaking around learning the interior of the ship. Cestus met up with Skraal off-camera while Brynngar was fighting the dreadnought and he shares his new plan: Attack the plasma reactor at the center of the ship and cause a cascading failure that will blow the whole thing up. Brynngar is like "How do you know the interior of the ship well enough to be confident that will work, Cestus? Is it Mhotep's witchery? I hate witches; I'll help you with your witch's plan, but after that you and I are quits" and Cestus is sad but agrees to those terms.

Back on the Wrathful, Admiral Kaminska does one of those scenes you get in space navy science fiction where she orders all the crew into the savior pods but her bridge crew all refuse to go, preferring to die with her, and she's mad about it but also appreciative... and then her second in command doubles over like she's being played by John Hurt in Alien, and the daemon Wsoric bursts out of her and then kills Kaminska and the rest of the bridge crew, also emanating a chill aura that kills everyone on the ship... except Mhotep, who leaves his cell and heads to the bridge. They fight, Wsoric taunts Mhotep about corrupting Brynngar and using his hatred of witchcraft to turn him against them, and tempts Mhotep with escape and hints at the Thousand Sons siding with Horus, Mhotep resists temptation and stuffs a grenade in Wsoric's chest during a moment of daemonic instability (daemons don't hold together well in realspace). Wsoric blows up and Mhotep lies down on the deck plating just in time for the Wrathful to impact the surface of Maccrage's moon and be destroyed. Mhotep dies triumphant.

Brynngar, Skraal, and Cestus get to the plasma reactor, pursued by Word Bearers, and once there, Skraal charges the Word Bearers to give Cestus and Brynngar some time. He makes it to the head Word Bearer guy and injures him before being killed. Cestus's plan is to sacrifice himself by jumping into the plasma reactor with a bunch of grenades but Brynngar says nope and does it instead, implicitly apologizing for being so hostile earlier. Brynngar jumps into the plasma reactor with a bomb strapped to his chest and dies triumphant. With the ship about to explode, the head Word Bearer runs off to escape, Cestus follows him, they have a duel, and Cestus is wounded but cuts off the Word Bearer's head. He then succumbs to wounds the Word Bearer inflicted on him during the duel and dies triumphant as the Furious Abyss explodes. The end.

It would be theoretically possible to write a good book based on the above outline. I don't think there is intrinsically anything wrong with the idea of a full-length, 416 page novel that is just one extended battle-chase-battle-chase-battle. Fury Road was great.

Battle for the Abyss doesn't manage it. The prose is workmanlike and the characterization is flat. Everyone is a stereotype and plot points keep relying on things working in noncanon ways, like the warp jump point thing. Not only is everyone a stereotype, everyone is a 40k stereotype, most notably the drunken Space Wolf. There is a whole subplot I didn't go into above where the narrative keeps cutting back to the Word Bearers as they speak exposition to each other and they're all plotting against each other for status, like a group of Decepticons comprised entirely of copies of Starscream. (And not the cool version of that from Transformers Animated.)

That said... I still think the characterization is better than in False Gods. Everyone is a flat stereotype but almost nobody is ever holding the idiot ball. (Exception: Whoever designed Vangelis Station so that bad astropathic feedback, something that people in 30k already consider extremely dangerous, can trivially jump to the power grid and overload the reactor. Like, come on, guys, the Emperor considers psychic stuff so dangerous he's busy forcefully reorganizing every human civilization in the galaxy to weaken it; don't plug it directly into the mains. More to the point, if your story outline requires a crisis where your space station is going to blow up so the heroes can save it, please have the crisis unfold in a way that doesn't leave me wondering why the space station was designed so as to be improbably, plot-conveniently vulnerable.) In False Gods everyone made infuriatingly stupid decisions and failed to see through laughably obvious manipulation constantly for the sake of clumsily driving the central tragedy through; here, people make reasonable decisions and are just sort of boring about it. There is a type of reader who considers the latter worse but I'm not him.

Furthermore... when this book was written, what 30k Space Wolves were like hadn't been established yet. Horus Rising has mention of Devastator Squads, which are a 40k generic space marine thing that aren't in 30k, so I can't be super mad about this book giving the Space Wolves a couple of Blood Claws squads, a 40k Space Wolf thing that aren't in 30k. Later writers would develop 30k setting elements in new directions, and I can criticize Ben Counter for failing to see he had an opportunity to do that here (maybe if he'd done something more interesting with Brynngar it'd have stuck and we'd have gotten an entirely different version of 30k Space Wolves than we did, because later writers might have followed his lead), but I can't criticize him for failing to guess what later writers would eventually do with them.

Ultimately it's bolter porn. It's just okay bolter porn; it's not even especially bad bolter porn, and it's about what is at least in theory an interesting forgotten early loyalist victory. Next to the violence False Gods did to the plot setup and characterization in Horus Rising, it looks okay.

I can't recommend reading it, though. There are better ways to spend your time.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Super 097

Live!  At the Null Realm Fairgrounds!  It’s the Tournament of Power!

80 warriors from across the multiverse slug it out!  First prize: a super wish!  Second prize: Death!

Plus, check out the 60′s Batmobile!  On display at the fairgrounds!

And don’t forget Kids’ World, where you can meet Fred Flintstone and Spider-Man!

See KISS in a special live performance!  It’s all here at the Null Realm Fairgrounds!  Exit 103A off of I-69.  Be there!

Okay, so we finally made it!  We’re here!  The part where Dragon Ball Super finally gets good.  I would say “without any further ado”, but the Grand Minister makes a big entrance and insists on going over the rules one more time.  So it takes about five minutes to get rolling, but this is it.  The Tournament of power will start in this episode.

“Assembled gods and mortals, the Omni-Kings requested musical accompaniment for this auspicious occasion, and so we have provided it!  You wanted the best, you got the best.  The hottest band in the world!  KISS!

I needed a gimmick for this thing, a way to raise the stakes, and this is it.  While dozens of cartoon aliens and karate guys battle for their continued existence, I face a different challenge.  Can I liveblog the entire Tournament of Power while also assembling a kickass playlist for the arc?  A playlist made up entirely of KISS songs?  I have a chemistry degree and a one million word fanfic that strongly suggests that I have no limits. 

Anyway, the Grand Minister gives the signal and all these randos you’ve never heard of start fighting.

I remember during the buildup to thing in 2017, I wondered how Toei would even animate a battle royale like this.  Sure, you can kind of do close-ups of just a few characters on the edge of the stage, but you have to zoom out sometime, and what happens then?  Well, they solved this problem the same way Dragon Ball solves a lot of other problems: With explosions. 

For the next several episodes, everybody who isn’t getting screen time in this show will be firing off huge ki blasts with little to no effect.  And it’s glorious.

The Grand Zenos are blown away and we’re only a few seconds into this thing.

As for Team Universe 7, well, Gohan had a game plan, but he can only get half the team to follow it.  Goku, Vegeta, 17, and 18 all rush off to fight, and Frieza decides he can’t pass up a chance to enjoy his one-day pass from hell. 

From the bleachers, the gods wondered why they even bothered trying to prepare for this, which sort of proves my point about Episodes 68-96.  A lot of those episodes focused on everyone talking about this tournament and preparing for it, but most of those preparations amount to nothing. 

For example, there was a scene where Universe 3 showed off an enhanced fighter with special mechanical limbs designed for avoiding elimination and sweeping fighters out of the ring.  But Hit wrecks that dude right off the bat.

Oh, and Basil too.  Narirama doesn’t get eliminated in this episode, but it doesn’t really matter, since his whole game plan just got shot to hell.  And it only took a few seconds of this episode to introduce the dude and then take him down.  That other episode where he strutted his stuff was pointless.

Speaking of Basil, he manages to knock another fighter out of the ring.  This is Ryelibeu, one of the few contestants who has wings and could fly under the unique conditions of the Tournament stage.

But she’s so overwhelmed by the fall that she forgets to use her wings, and so she tumbles down into the abyss until she’s suddenly teleported to the bleachers.  Rumsshi is none too pleased about his team being the first to suffer an elimination, but Gowasu says there’s nothing they can do about it, which is the most Gowasu line ever.  Seriously, why did he even bother fielding a team?  I get the impression Gowasu would enjoy nonexistence.

At this point, the Grand Minister shows the Zenos how to use their GodPad devices to keep track of the ring-outs.  Nearby, a guy in a Fred Flintstone costumes watches on as they mark off Rylibeu.  Fred is eerily silent, as he isn’t supposed to say anything for this job.  But if he were the real Fred Flintstone, he would surely be saying “Yabba Dabba Doo!  That’s it for Rylibeu!”

Meanwhile, a bunch of guys try to gang up on Gohan’s squad, but they stand their ground and stay in this thing. 

There’s not much to call here.  It’s just absolute chaos.  Goku really wants to pick up where he left off against Top, but other fighters keep getting in Goku’s way.  When Top finally does fight back, some other guy attacks Top, so Goku’s going to have to accept the opponents that present themselves.

Goku catches a glimpse of Jiren, but before he can do anything about it, he gets grabbed by Nink, a big dope from Universe 4.  Nink doesn’t seem to be long on smarts, so his plan is to drag Goku to the edge and eliminate himself and Goku at the same time.  The spectators praise Nink for his smarts, as this is a great way to take out a team’s star player and gain an advantage, except, no.  This is a terrible idea.

Case in point, Goku only seems to be in a pinch because he’s trying to conserve his strength.  So when it looks like he’s doomed, he finally uses Super Saiyan Blue to escape, and Nink winds up eliminating himself for nothing.  The problem with this sort of strategy is that U4 only has ten fighters on the board, so they can’t affort to waste them like this.  Even if Nink’s plan had succeeded, that would only leave Universe 7 in a bad position.  The other six teams would be just fine, and U4 would have to deal with them without Nink’s help.  I don’t think that’s a bargain.

Also, U4 really had no idea what Goku was capable of, so they never stopped to consider if Goku could be eliminated this way.  It’s a bad enough strategy when it’s guaranteed to succeed, but when it’s a gamble?  It’s foolish.

But as Goku recovers from that near-defeat, he finds himself surrounded by Universe 9 fighters.  Looks like they’ve decided Nink had the right idea, but this time they’re going to use more manpower to make it happen.  What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, Spider-Man is having a blast.

[maedaeme]

God okay so the big shift in my blogging in like the last 5 years is that I no longer liveblog my hyperfixations like I used to so instead y'all just get like 2 posts about whatever it is that just made my brain go brrrbrbrbr out of absolutely nowhere before I fade back into the internet abyss kicking and screaming. this is why nothing I post makes sense. you are trapped in here with me

[katyspersonal]

I am CRYING because I watched 7 episodes of Made in Abyss today (will keep the rest for next days because if I binge I start to lose track of the plot) and something funny already happened dsfhhdsfd

I will not ramble too extensively but ONE THING

So, usually I am liveblogging animes I watch by "talking" to myself on Discord and I started to overthink a visual detail:

So I got thinking real hard about it and this is where things got pretty intense so I skipped on liveblogging that and just watched

And then...

Just like I thought from the very start, it was a side effect of Abyss because skin on the skull gets effected by hollowing too - resulting in loss of hair color on these spots, but like. I thought it was super hilarious because it is not JUST Bloodb0rne where I overanalyze occasional visual quirks in a way that ACTUALLY makes me guess lore before its revealed, it is, like... my brain JUST works like this. This is permanent dfsjfdj

[hummelig]

In the made in abyss universe there must be so much poetry about that goddamn hole.

ooooh when I loved you I went down the abyss and now you left me and I'm stuck here and suffering ooooh the abyss resembles sin because it's alluring but will torture you ooooh the yearning for freedom of society oooh your mom's pussy is just as deep

[flecks-of-stardust]

okay year in review eh

this shit's long so i'll put it under a cut, and also all tags are going to be removed

I posted 4,547 times in 2022

That's 1,870 more posts than 2021! (lmao. even though i made my blog sept 2021? i guess i slowed down somewhat)

551 posts created (12%)

3,996 posts reblogged (88%) (honestly not too shabby of a ratio for original stuff)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

liquidlikecats (hi moss)

aroarachnid (hi ash)

flecks-of-stardust (LOL MY FUCKING LIVEBLOGGING)

flame-shadow (huh i guess flame just posts a lot)

I tagged 3,149 of my posts in 2022

Only 31% of my posts had no tags (that is surprisingly high tbh)

#hollow knight - 939 posts (haha yes hollow knight blog)

#ghost - 277 posts

#the knight - 237 posts

#hornet - 177 posts

#bug fables - 163 posts

#rain world - 141 posts

#holly - 134 posts

#the hollow knight - 115 posts

#bookmarked - 113 posts

#pale king - 87 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (of course it's just screaming)

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

the sale is over stop giving this notes pls /hj

160 notes - Posted May 4, 2022

#4

yknow, the watcher knights really speak to the influence lurien had. monomon’s protection is uumuu, a sentient jellyfish that presumably has some ties to her, while herrah’s protection is her people, in her Den. but lurien? lurien gets an army of knights. we fight five/six, but there’s more husks in the background. who knows how many knights he had at his disposal, all ready to guard his body? what kind of power must you have to have access to that?

192 notes - Posted November 27, 2022

honestly i still don't know how this has so many notes. where were yall even coming from?

#3

[image description: a crochet doll of a very round Radiance. She is roughly spherical, has a three pronged crown, a pair of wings each with three fronds, and round yellow eyes set into a black heart shaped mask. Everything about her is rounded and soft, though her eyes are ovals. end image description]

Orbiance

i saw someone’s radiorb plush in the main tag and was hit with the realization that i, too, can make the roundest radi to ever moth. she’s the biggest thing i’ve ever made thus far, which is... fitting, i think. her crown was surprisingly easy to wrangle into place, but i won’t complain sfjkghjk her face took more effort, honestly.

it’s interesting trying to simplify a design as layered as radi’s down into what is essentially a fancy ball. i thought about adding more fluff to her wings, but honestly, the triplet wing-crown-wing probably makes it cuter. also, from experience with the wooly aphid, adding more fluff just tends to look weird, so eh. simpler is better sometimes.

also, there is a surprise under her...

See the full post

236 notes - Posted May 7, 2022

bro tumblr gave this post a cliffhanger DKJSJKS all hail radiorb

#2

i ship lurien with a bed and a good nap

340 notes - Posted August 12, 2022

fran i blame you for this /j

My #1 post of 2022

the abyss cutscene after you dream nail the egg is a somber one, but i do have to wonder. how does ghost know what the pale king asked of the vessels? like the pale king is clearly going ‘no mind to think, no will to break’ as ghost is climbing up to the top in the cutscene, but surely he couldnt have told each individual vessel as they hatched ‘hey heres what i want you to do’ since theres probably billions of them

the most likely answer is probably magic, somehow, or. gameplay reasons. because this is a video game. but i want to entertain the idea that ghost knows what the pale king expected of the vessels because he stood at the top and screamed it repeatedly down into the abyss

661 notes - Posted January 4, 2022

thanks flame for helping this post blow up /s

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

anyway this is interesting. if i'm still on the hellsite next year we'll compare again lmfao

[freakliveblogs]

I don’t understand what’s going on in Made in Abyss. I am highly disturbed by a lot of it. A lot of it is very questionable. And yet I still really like it for some reason. I like the world building, I like the creatures, and I love the characters.

[luparaneo]

Lupa’s Get Shit on Impact recap, part 5

and now for the freshest part of the recap because I finished it yesterday, my summary in Sumeru

this area made me so hungry like give me the shawarma

e. excuse me that is the biggest motherfucker I've seen yet

the Akasha thing definitely got my hackles raised like holy shit do not want (it's not optional)

AND THIS FURTHER PROVED MY POINT

...WAIT, SAY SIKE??

NO CAN WE GO BACK TO THIS I'M STILL PROCESSING IT--

I will face god and walk backwards into hell.

let! him! vibe!

And just like that, Dehya became a favorite.

LET THE SPEED MEND IT

if you thought I could resist linking this you don't know me at all

I'm kicking myself for not trying to pull Cyno, brain decided I really like him ;o; also weirdly didn't really take many screenshots of Scara yet? despite this being his biggest role? dw the flood comes later

Also I just want to say that a god being actually bullied by her own people is one of my favorite plot points in this game so far.

anyway still thinking about this baklava and now I want some OUGH THEY'RE SO GOOD

I wanted to see more of these two aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

"oh, he's up on a cliff" "OH, HE'S UP ON A CLIFF."

Caribert quest was a mindfuck 11/10 no Paimon and I greatly enjoy the nightmare vibes of Abyss shenanigans

:') godspeed you crazy son of a bitch

that's sure some fucked up advice Nahida

this whole scene was fucking great

I WISH I'D GOTTEN THE MOMENT WHERE HE WAS SAYING "DIE"

return of the Hat Bastard

a face that screams "ah shit she's onto me"

SO

as much as I wanted to call him something really silly like "Juanderer" I chanced upon someone picking the name "Akash" for him. Their reasoning was it's an Indian word meaning "sky" and reflects his rebirth in Sumeru as a holder of an Anemo Vision c: yeah yeah it's one letter off from "Akasha" I dun care it sounds cool and Nahida got rid of the Terminals anyway so it's free real estate

And that's a WRAP. I did this because my friends really want to see me liveblog Fontaine and I thought it would be confusing if I just jumped right into that.

[sokumotanaka]

They still wanna help Faptuta. Cool cool cool