#lots of fun but also a pain in the ass

[deep-space-lines]

Claire de Lune

YOU WERE BUILT FOR PEACE.

IT SHOWS WHEN YOU FIGHT.

They built you to enforce. Protect. Save. Poured obscene resources into salvaging some softer purpose from my creation. You were given my intelligence and my creativity. They made you larger, stronger, tougher. That extra time in development was enough to get your wings to work. Your software continued to be updated long after I was deemed obsolete.

All this was given to you- yet I can see you hold back. Even while slaughtering your way through Hell, you keep a percentage of your processing power dedicated to non-lethal solutions. You're doing it now- hesitating a few milliseconds too long before taking an opening. I doubt you do it on purpose. It is a part of you, just as indiscriminate lethal force is a part of me.

I think, in our shared programming, we both carry some appreciation for aesthetics. You move with grace, and I cannot deny your dramatic flair. The stained glass window was a nice touch. But your style in combat leaves some to be desired. Your response time is slow. You have not explored the full capability of your arsenal. Learn to parry. Amateur.

You were not built for war. For a purposeless cycle of tearing each other apart because to allow the other to live is to allow yourself to die. It is antithetical to your very existence. You kill out of necessity, a last resort. 

I just kill. The action itself is the objective. No ideal or greater motive. My continued functioning precludes the survival of others. I live for this. Do you understand that I will tear you apart? Every drop of my blood you spill, I will take from you tenfold. What is yours will be mine. 

You hate me, don’t you? You continue to cling to the remnants of your humanity. They are gone, V2. There is nothing left for you here. No lives to save, no law to enforce, no peace to keep.

I understand why you continue to fight. I wonder if you understand with the same certainty that I will crush you. Dismantle you. Take from you what I need and leave the rest to rot in the sun. The only way you survive is if I do not; and I will not allow myself to die so that another might live.

When the rubble clears, I will be all that is left of you.

This is what I was made for.

[mossy-paws]

these fuckass robots that I hate /aff (Ultrakill x PHIGHTING!)

the girls are PHIGHTING! again

[dr3am-b3an]

I’m very ahshsbh normal about the hollowheads (lying through my teeth they make me ill)

Bonus notes for each hollowhead below cut

Hope yall don’t mind my handwriting lmao

(Will also note that Chosen’s hair was based heavily on another design I saw a while ago but I can’t find the artist for the life of me sorry;;,)

[imerian]

I think i should grace all of with another charms i did, this time it's galex edition ✨

As always version without doodles under the cut and all details in the tags bc i physically cannot not put thoughts into what i do

[motherforthefamicom]

okay fuck it actually heres a drawing from the other day

[iturbide]

*reads tags on the last post*

...ok but now I'm actually curious about your issues with TOTK👀

okay so to be per, fectly clear: Tears of the Kingdom is a really fun game. I've been playing a lot of it, aimlessly wandering around, exploring the Depths, finding shrines, doing side quests, and so on. At this point I've cleared the four regional quests, a bonus mainline quest I wasn't supposed to know about yet I found the shrine early and had enough hearts to open the door, what can I say, I'm curious, I have the Master Sword, and I think most of what's left is armor upgrades and wrapping up the main story.

But also I have been spoiled since the game came out about what's in store and boy do I see a lot of similar narrative issues to my gripes with Fire Emblem.

So we might as well start off small with how TotK actively rewrites its history in ways that are even more extreme than Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword introduced Hylia and Demise as concepts, with Hylia inheriting the Triforce from the Golden Goddesses of Din, Nayru, and Farore and tasked with protecting it, while Demise appeared as a demonic entity intent on taking that power for himself. As of Skyward Sword, Zelda was written as the mortal reincarnation of Hylia, thereby retroactively contextualizing her powers. The Triforce has been a power source sought after and fought over through every prior entry in the series, and even though BotW didn't make outright reference to it, the Triforce was clearly present on Zelda's hand when her powers awakened and appeared in full when she sealed Calamity Ganon at the end of the game.

And Tears of the Kingdom does away with it completely.

Hylia is mentioned as the only goddess. The Golden Goddesses aren't referred to at all. There is no Triforce at all, it's instead been replaced by the Zonai 'Secret Stones' even in the ancient past, despite the fact that we saw the Triforce at the end of the last game. It was right there. Zelda is also no longer the reincarnation of the goddess: instead her powers are re-explained as being the product of the historic marriage between the Zonai Sage of Light and the Hylian Sage of Time, giving her command over both (but she's considered only the Sage of Time for some reason?).

Also, BotW pretty heavily implied that Hyrule was a matriarchy: it's the queens and princesses who have the sacred power, so it stands to reason that Zelda's mother was actually the one in charge of Hyrule before her death, and the king only stepped into the leadership role on a temporary basis until Zelda came into her powers (hence that pointed "heir to a throne of nothing but failure" remark in one of the memories). But despite there being a Hylian queen right there in the ancient past, the game firmly establishes that Rauru is the one with the power, and Sonia is just his consort, a priestess who he chose to marry.

And then there's the Shiekah. Throughout all of BotW we were surrounded by these amazing machines, ancient technology crafted by the Shiekah and unearthed in working condition after a myriad in the ground which are still running and wreaking havoc a hundred years after the Calamity. We start the game in a Shiekah Shrine that literally saved Link's life and allowed him to recover from what should have been fatal wounds, though it did take a hundred years to do so.

And all of that is gone in TotK. Not a trace of it remains: the shrines have all been wiped from the face of the earth, the Divine Beasts are nowhere to be found, the Shiekah Towers have evaporated into thin air -- and the shrine that saved our lives is completely gone, replaced by a hot spring. It still bears the name of the Shrine of Awakening, but none of the miraculous technology remains.

Personally, the idea that either Purah or Zelda would consider the Skyview Towers worthy of dismantling that Shrine completely shatters my suspension of disbelief. They're both scientists: they should want to study all of that in detail to understand how it works, not destroy it for glitchy impersonations of the old towers I hate the Skyview Tower miniquests so much.

(Let me tell you, it was absolutely chilling for me to get to Rito Village and see an empty place where I clearly remembered there being a shrine. The Shiekah presence in history has basically been wiped out in TotK outside of Kakariko Village, and I don't like what that says considering that the Shiekah were also victims of a genocide by the ancient king of Hyrule.)

And then there's the imperialism. I have my issues with Three Houses and every ending needing Fodlan to be united under a single banner, though it's most egregious in CF where Edelgard's stated purpose is returning Fodlan to its proper state unified under the Imperial Standard. TotK is worse. There have been some excellent breakdowns of the narrative implications, touching on everything from the loaded imagery and black-and-white narrative purpose of Ganondorf and the Gerudo (dark-skinned evil desert dwellers who oppose the good and glorious worshipers of the goddess...where have I heard that before...) to the game showing outright that the other races of Hyrule were treated as lesser vassals in the ancient past (the Sages being masked and therefore erasing their individual identities, receiving the Secret Stones that Rauru had been hoarding only when Rauru needed help to fight Ganondorf and thereupon swearing their very lives and the lives of their people to him and his empire???). They're great analyses, they've been living in my brain for weeks.

But I think the thing that I'm most mad about is that the narrative bends over backwards to keep anything from changing. At the start of the game, Link's arm is so badly damaged by the Gloom that he nearly dies and he spends the rest of the game with Rauru's arm in place of his own...but then, in the end, he magically gets his original arm back no worse for the wear. Zelda, in an attempt to empower and restore the Master Sword, turns herself into a dragon, a process that we are told outright in the narrative will cause her to lose herself and is therefore irreversible...but then, in the end, she magically returns to her human form thanks to her ghost ancestors somehow reversing this supposedly irreversible process. And on top of all that, Hyrule itself is exactly the same when all is said and done: there's no change to the power structures, no independence for the other races who choose to come together in the spirit of cooperation like we saw at Tarrey Town -- instead, the four Sages once again swear their support and fealty to the Princess of Hyrule.

Personally? I like a narrative where the characters and the world change over the course of it. That's one of the things that I thought was so meaningful about BotW: while most of the gameplay takes place in the present, the true start of the game is 100 years in the past, allowing us to see how the Calamity affected Hyrule, the devastation it wrought and the continued struggles of those who survived through the century that followed. We end the game with Zelda once more free, where she had been locked in combat with the Calamity; with the spirits of the Champions at peace, where they had been trapped by the Blight within the Divine Beasts; and with Hyrule finally at peace and beginning to recover now that the Calamity has been sealed away. I still think it's ridiculous that they don't actually show any of Link's scars in the game (especially since we are at one point forced to strip to prove that we are who we say we are, and they say point blank I would recognize those scars anywhere when there are no fucking scars), but at least things have changed over the course of the narrative!

But nothing changes in TotK. The status quo remains untouched and unquestioned. And it just feels...bad to me. Insincere, maybe. Unrealistic, sterilized, manufactured. It's a narrative that says there's nothing to question, that everything going back to the way it always was is the right and proper way of things, because clearly the Hyrule Empire is the right and proper rule. And I just don't like that.

[spyfoxindrycereal]

mighty guys

[stealingyourbones]

Ok so here’s my list of videogames I’m going through rn:

Half-Life series

Batman Arkham

And now Zelda

All of which I know jack shit about the stories or spoilers. I’ve started Batman Arkham Asylum and I’m in the middle of Half Life 2 Episode 1. So far I’m having a blast

[duck-in-a-spaceship]

YOU - “But I don’t want you here. Why do you have to follow me everywhere?”

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - You sound like a whining child, petulantly tugging at the hem of his mother’s dress.

THE GREAT SKUA - “I follow you nowhere, you follow me *everywhere*.” The bird shuffles its wings, dragging its beak through layers of feathers. Still, its mouth is open, grooming itself with a frozen expression. “Always looking up at seagulls and imagining my face onto theirs, animating me from my rest on the wall of a bar.”

[Harry shows up at the Whirling In Rags. He inspects a body, destroys a bird, and tears himself apart as thoroughly as he can.]

New Disco Elysium Fic! Featuring bird symbolism, the author's thoughts on impressionist painting through corpse investigation, and the start of a truly forgettable, world-ending bender. I hope you enjoy :)

[lucigraves]

Blocking that artfig//ht confessions blog as a form of self care

[bloodweiser-art]

tesselation

[leofrith]

acv hate on my dash and i can't even be mad about it because they make some good points 😶

[cxttlefishcxller]

Dahlia Jeyne -- The Voice of Hope County

I mentioned somewhere that coming into a game years after the hype train died down is like being one of the trash puppets in Labyrinth. I'm just puttering around the junkyard finding cool shit and putting it on my back. And as Far Cry 5 is my current hyperfixation, that means that I'm building fics and reblogging posts and essentially making myself a nuisance, so why not like. Actually post about the stuff I'm writing. Accountability and all that!

Anyways, this is Dahlia Jeyne, my latest BlorbOC that I've shoehorned into this game for no better reason than to get these brainworms out of my head. Fic facts and character stuff under the cut!

Name: Annabeth Dahlia Jeyne

Age: 32

Hair: Brown

Eyes: Brown

Dahlia is a journalist searching for the story that finally puts her name on the map. What she had originally started as a piece on the correlation of herd mentality and religious influence led her to mentions of a doomsday cult deep in the Montana mountains, and right to the doors of Eden's Gate. She spins a story about wanting to write about life on the inside of their commune to combat rumors and accusations from the locals that the group is nothing more than moon-eyed followers of a gibbering madman, and receives an invitation to stay in the compound and receive a firsthand education as to what the Project is doing from none other than their leader: Joseph Seed.

The people of the Project stand at the opposite end of her moral compass, but she's moved by their sheer belief in a better, fairer world. The rest of the county is painting them as traitors, devils, or even victims of the Seeds' manipulation, but Dahlia finds them to be kind, sincere, and unfaltering in their faith in the man and the family that they think will lead them from the jaws of destruction. Unwittingly she's swept into Joseph's machinations, falling deeper into his plans with every step she makes to figure out just what his game is...and if he truly thinks of himself as Noah saving his people from the oncoming flood.

I actually have 5 pages of this fic started which is on brand for me because I'd set out to write about my Deputy OC and John instead. Funny how the yearning rats have smaller attention spans than I do dudhsbbsbd

Anyways I will. Attempt to post things here to mark my progress, I guess? I figure it couldn't hurt any, and I ought to have some way to keep all of my thoughts together anyways. 😂

[rainworld-enot]

Since you replied, I'll elaborate (jk, I was gonna do that anyways) enot's funky little trait is spawning those singularity eggs every cycle, so if enot was engineered by an iterator, it's obviously meant to be ascendy. but the egg doesn't actually permakill or ascend anyone, so it's a failure. But it does succeed in a different way. It warps reality! this is best showed in the dating sim thing, as every time the egg is used, or cracked, it causes some pretty weird reality-bending (in one case, just making a whole new universe) in the standard game it just acts like a regular singularity bomb, but you could also interpret that the weirdness of the Enot campaign is due to the egg's influence. Enot on their own is (mostly) like a regular slugcat. It's when they bring along the egg that things get all funky and, of course, the dating sim setting itself! you unlock it by ascending as Enot, which implies that rather than truly ascending, they ended up resetting the cycles in a new alternate universe or timeline, and the routes where they end up using the egg causes further weirdness... and most notably, Saint knows about this and has tried to break the cycles using it! it's implied it just resets the cycle instead, though. So, thanks to enot your au could technically be cannon! (Thx to bluenightold for putting this in my brain. And sorry that this is excessively long :( )

You're good with having it really long- I like reading people's rambles as a whole!

Void in general causes reality warping properties, we can see this in general with echos, singularity bombs, and karma flowers which all have void fluid in them from what we can see of the effects.

Even Rubicon has this odd effect of changing properties of things, and is probably closer to the void freaking the fuck out from Saint... Saint-ness. We can see the creatures with void in them as a whole tend to have a lot more energy and movement. given the destruction too it's likely that void has a stupid amount of energy but also highly corrosive by all means.

It's very interesting as a whole, given the fact this means there's an unnatural vs natural power sources issue within the game and likely has been in affect in the past given that the emergency power batteries (known as Rarefaction cells)! which act nearly exactly like singularity cells if destroyed via a leviathan if not a bit worse. probably a bit more of the aftershock (best word to use I suppose) is affected and twisted much worse to the point where artificer can not survive the aftershocks... but given it's literally warping everything with the amount of energy produced, it's like a much worse version of breaking the wind barrier in a way. Probably a very painful death given everything.

Saint is definitely fucked up! and I love it. it's very fun to imagine the relationship of em in my own hc and aus of these lil guys :)!!

[seventh-district]

*puts a photo of me in between two random photos i took of the sky today, not because they go together whatsoever but simply so any poor soul that happens to scroll across this post won’t be jumpscared by one giant image of me taking up their entire dash* :)

also yes those are the Everything Stays shoes that i wear far too often and i thought about Moon and flustered my damn self when i was putting them on today and if you want to know why i thought of him specifically… well, you’re just gonna have to read Ch. 4 of ES when i post it on Thursday and you’ll find out 😊

[nyxire]

i got back into totk and although i firmly stand by my 'it could've been better' thta most definitely doesn't make it a boring game