#man those are some dense answers there is just so much LORE and STORY here hahaha

[dingoat]

betrayal, bound, and pain, also for oc of your choice!

Ahaaa thank you for asking!! These ones are all way too juicy for Ahuska to not answer for her, especially in the werewolf au!

Betrayal: Has your OC ever been betrayed by someone they thought they could trust? Has your OC ever betrayed someone who trusted them?

Hoooo boy, yes. First of all, there's all here early days as a werewolf, when she had no idea that she was a werewolf, and the simple blind trust she had for her kind supervisor at work when he was in actual fact her first handler, taking her out to murder on command every full moon. That was a tough one to stomach. Then there was her 'rescuer', ex-Intelligence agent Nines, who managed to whisk her away from the Empire's clutches and reveal to her what she'd been made into... but still, ultimately, kept her in the dark about a great deal and absolutely didn't hesitate to use Ahuska's conditioning and control words to serve her own purposes. Once Ahuska clued into that, she got out of there as hard and fast as she could.

But the worst of all came courtesy of Blakk, a very loyal Intelligence agent and werefox- where Ahuska had been one of the Empire's werebeast prototypes from a project that was ultimately terminated, Blakk was from Intel's new, refined generation, with all the rage issues dealt with and much greater control over shapeshifting through top of the line cybernetic implants. He also happened to be the first fellow werebeast she met, and after a rollercoaster of events she wound up fascinated, entranced, and ultimately head-over-heels for him, bonding with him through the Force and overjoyed to not feel alone in the galaxy. He did what he could to see her safe, independent, and hidden from the world while he inevitably returned to his work... only for the real tragedy to begin. Through their bond, she would find him and visit him in their dreams, where she assumed they were pursuing and progressing a very real relationship. Blakk, meanwhile, would wake with no memory of their meetings and as time went on, she faded from his thoughts, and he became wholly absorbed in his work and the ruthless training regime of his new Watcher.

So when, after years, he became lost to her in dreams, and she began to feel achingly lonely again, she decided to take the terrible risk of seeking him out to see him again face to face. When she finally found him again, she briefly experienced what she thought was one of the most wonderful, beautiful moments of her life-- only to find herself delivered directly into the cold, controlling hands of Blakk's Watcher. One of the most intensely emotional, heartbreaking things I've ever RPed out, brilliant and terrible all at once. (They're both free of that horrible situation now but not even close to being done unpacking, processing and resolving everything that happened. So much fodder for ongoing plots!!)

Now, what with everything Ahuska has been through, I really struggle to imagine her ever betraying someone who's placed their trust in her. Doing her best and failing, definitely. Losing control and having werewolf mishaps, for sure. Blakk probably feels a bit betrayed by their current circumstance but I don't think it qualifies as a real betrayal, though there's the potential for things to get messy depending on what she winds up sharing or not sharing about her current time away.

Bound: Has your OC ever been imprisoned or captured? What happened? How did they get out? Did the experience leave any scars?

Ha, so, that first question definitely covers this one to a degree! Yes, she was absolutely held captive in pretty cruel conditions under Watcher Five (who was obsessed with 'taming' the werewolf that the Sith had created but ultimately couldn't control, therefore proving himself able to do something that the allegedly superior Force users couldn't).

Ahuska fought him for a long time, leaning heavily on her wolf-half to see her through long periods of duress, and she was absolutely left mentally, emotionally and physically scarred by the experience. She lost faith in herself and in her 'friends', she had ribs and her jaw fractured, and all manner of cuts and bites and bruises. She was a wreck, and she was eventually broken... the knowledge of which now rests very heavily on her. And it was witnessing this that finally struck Blakk hard enough to make him see clearly, and galvanise him into action to orchestrate Ahuska's escape.

As it turned out he wasn't the only one who didn't entirely approve of Five's methods, and though the escape didn't go remotely smoothly it was successful in the sense that Ahuska got out. Less so in the sense that Blakk's secrecy was blown wide open and he wound up not only having to flee with her, but having to flee while stuck in fox-shape and with his presence in the Force by all accounts obliterated. If not for Thirteen's tactical absence that night, or the fact that the Sith Lord Ulfran was actually a Jedi in deep, decades-long cover, there's no way Blakk or Ahuska would have survived the escape attempt.

Pain: What’s the worst pain your OC has ever felt? Do they have a high pain tolerance?

Ahuska has pretty incredible pain tolerance. She's always been a tough little cookie, a kid growing up working with animals and doing rough labour in a Mandalorian settlement, always of the inclination to grit her teeth and carry on rather than be set back by a cut or a bite or a blow. But becoming half-wolf, with all the resilience and endurance that came with it, and then being trained as an ultimate death machine in the hands of the Sphere of War, put her tolerance through the roof.

Part of the way she was designed was to experience a blinding, all-encompassing pain while in the presence of a Force Sensitive, with her only option to relieve herself of that pain being to hunt them down and kill them. She was trained not only to tolerate and work through the pain, but to actively seek it out, making her into a Jedi-seeking missile. While she's experienced plenty of emotional pain that she'd rank infinitely worse, I don't think she's been through any physical pain that would rate against what she goes through on her worst werewolf nights.

[bouvillea]

G25 Part 2 Essay, Very Dense

There is very little I will say as a preamble besides that Part 2 was a very powerful conclusion to an extremely climatic arc. That being said, spoilers below and my Part 1 essay can be found here.

I will start by saying that although I am quite satisfied with this ending I wish things could have ended differently. This is the first time we were given antagonists who were actual individuals we had to overcome. And in doing so, we were faced with people who had powerful reasons and motivations to sacrifice for. That is something I will come back to later so—

In a broad overview of the plot of Part 2, we were given an uplifting reunion with Talvish, who claims that his decisions and choices were made with the Milletian’s best interests in mind. And it’s nice* to work together after so long, to finally have him fulfill the promise of being with the Milletian at the very end. There is a sweet moment where the roles are reversed and the Milletian asks him if he is alright. Instead of being asked to trust him, he wholeheartedly puts his trust in the Milletian.

*if you know me even just a little, you know I simp hard for this man and let me tell you I went from “I will be the first one to punch him” to “please don’t go” in a matter of minutes

And then, when everything is rewound and the Milletian is able to protect their friends and prevent the worst possible ending, all the Good Guys have a Good Time. This is of course, glossing over the fact that Deirbhile sacrificed herself, Tani dying with a finality that Milletians shouldn’t have, Piran falling apart, Treasure Hunter breaking down, and Marleid conflicted over what to do with her extremely Problematic Childhood Friend.

We still got to have a good time! We got to revel with our friends! Speak with everyone and catch up and talk and chat and eat and—

It was nice but I am very bitter because those good times only emphasized how different it ended for Cethlenn and Vayne.

If Part 1 was about trauma, Part 2 was about breaking out of predestiny and walking a different path that was set before you. This comes quite literally when Talvish appears and rewinds time* to save the Milletian from the future he saw. He (and later, Hymerark) reveals to us something that touches the fourth wall:

*not sure why I was so surprised that he could manipulate time in such a way when the Milletian’s first meeting with him was through time. Maybe I just thought it was through the Milletian’s powers that they managed to communicate but clearly Talvish’s powers were doing something.         Oh dang it makes sense why he isolated himself in a desert for centuries now…because he can’t affect time that he has been personally involved in

The ability to redo main storyline missions when we fail them is quite literally the Milletian, breaking the flow of time to try again until we succeed. Due to the nature of altering timelines, those uninvolved with the messing of time don’t remember all the previous attempts. Later, it is revealed that all our redoes and failures have a negative impact on Erinn; it increases the entropy in the world as different realities are created and then stopped. Tani is a result of that.

It is further revealed that Vayne⁠—or I should say now, Beimnech, is a singularity who experiences all these timelines and realities. He must return to Mag Tuireadh whenever the flow of time breaks because it is the role he has been forced into by Hymerark. He is the counterpoint for Talvish. The two are diametrically opposed, canonical foils with mirroring ideals and views of the world. Beimnech mentions during Eternal Dreams that he has seen Milletians fail to convince Talvish* to change his mind about the world, or fail to garner enough faith in their friends. In the current timeline, Talvish is enlightened by the Milletian and so takes control of his fate and chooses to rewind time instead of having it cut off and restart.

*It is implied that Talvish also experiences the different timelines over and over again, but he forgets it the moment the timeline is replaced with a new one. Alternatively, Beimnech is also taken out of time and space whenever the flow is broken, so the cycles are even more unbearable because he is forced to witness them as an outsider.

Beimnech did not have the liberty of meeting the Milletian before he met Hymerark. Unlike Talvish, he could not surround himself with equal companions and could not hope for a life where he was not just fulfilling a role to balance the world. The only way he could have some control over his own fate as cycles repeated over and over again was to orchestrate his own death*. He remarked before in G24 that had he and the Milletian walked different paths, they could have been friends and not enemies. Both he and Talvish see the Milletian as a savior—as a guiding, bright light. But while Talvish burned alongside the Milletian, Beimnech burned out like dying embers** or a shadow too weak to hold up against illumination.

*maybe it’s selfish, but who can blame him when he only has himself? I seethe with the unfairness of characters that have no choice but to be the “darkness” to contrast the “light”. The “what could have been if things were different” hurts as do the inability to break free from what was laid out. I seethe, but that means the story is doing as intended and I am by no means criticizing, just empathizing (I’d highkey write something like this ngl I am a ball of angst).

**the refrain that plays when the Milletian is prompted to deal the final blow to Beimnech is called The Last of the Heat Fades/Residual Heat Fades Away.

Beimnech’s disappointment in the Milletian in Part 1 is suddenly very understandable. He had pinned all his hopes in one person and he knew they were going to fail. We even saw him return to end the Corrupted Milletian in the future that we never got to witness. He did for the Milletian what he hoped they would do to him*. And then for once, to have time rewind instead of abruptly ending? I can’t imagine…

*I chose to not stab him. Apparently that gives you more of his backstory. Regardless of the decision, when he tells you he lies for the first and last time about his death…

Something can be said about Cethlenn, too, who was “emptied out” by Fodla. His current name, Cethlenn, was given to him by Beimnech, which honestly if you know your myth and lore spawns so much food for thought*. Speaking to Cethlenn in Tech Duinn on Saturdays reveals that Beimnech gave him that name because he always wanted a right-hand man with that name. Whatever that implies to the nature of their relationship… If you have the time, please, please speak to him with all the keywords at your disposal. It’s worth it.

*another food for thought includes Sera being the one to help Piran escape and Beimnech noticing that. Beimnech being Super Old and Super Tired with so much bottled up Memories and Experience like the opposite of Talvish With a Purpose okay one day I will actually write a whole essay about their foils⁠—

Ultimately, Cethlenn is given the choice to be the watcher in the mists of Feth Fiada. He acknowledges his crimes* and so he refuses to exit (except on Samhain aka Saturday). He is openly antagonistic towards everyone except Marleid, which is understandable. He thinks he has tied Marleid down. Further conversations with him in Tech Duinn reveal that he’s pugnacious and as eager as Vayne once was to spar with the Milletian. He’s also very easy to bully. He implies that in the future, he may recover the powers he lost in his deal with Hymerark and will use those powers for the greater good so…more Cethlenn content in the future? Hopefully?

*what worried me the most at the end of G24 was that I could not see how he or Vayne could be redeemed. I would scoop them up in a heartbeat. But could my Milletian? Could the people of Erinn? Obviously not.

I know I brought up the concept of escaping predestiny and then dropped it like a hot potato so I’ll do some quick rundowns now of other examples. Enya realizing that she can have a life beyond just staying in her sanctum and caring for the Holy Flame, Piran gathering the courage to recognize his own existence is worth something,  Hymerark* realizing that there is no reason to continue to mess around with people and she can just observe. I’ve rewatched the conversation the Milletian has with Hymerark after the battle and I don’t even know where to start…Talvish remarked that she’s the closest in resemblance to Aton Cimeni’s will since she balances both freedom and chaos. Maybe these higher gods were never meant to have sentience or conscience because the moment they do, they make decisions and bam the whole world is a mess.

*the Milletian seem to do this to all the gods, huh?

My current understanding of things is that the Evil God Balor was created by Aton Cimeni as a counterpoint for Talvish, who is the Guardian, the sentinel of Erinn. Why? For Balance of course. But you can’t just create someone to be evil. Somewhere in between, Aton Cimeni stops answering and while Talvish plots machinations for the future he saw, Balor’s disdain for his role grows and eventually beefs it in a fight with Lugh at the battle of Mag Tuireadh. His body is dead, but his spirit remains, picked up by Hymerark to be the…plug stopping Noitar Arat. I imagine Hymerark also faced the same struggle that Talvish did of attempting to carry out duties imparted on them by their creator but yet new to independence and the weight of their responsibilities that now fell on their shoulders. Hymerark expresses her faint indecision of hearing the wishes of everyone. There will always be conflict in decisions.

Meanwhile, Talvish realizes that the balance has shifted in the absence of the Evil God Balor and so the events of G21 happen, where he attempts to recreate the balance with his own hands and summon something to replace Balor. While this fails, Hymerark tries to do the same again by corrupting the Milletian and making them the final obstacle to correct the unending cycle that, frankly, started because of her.

In G25 Part 1, Vayne mentions that Aton Cimeni will always have a solution. I suppose in this case, he was talking about how even if he were to disappear completely, someone will always take his place. Just like how Triona’s role was passed on to Millia, a new darkness grows. Not without repercussion, of course. Something is coming and that’s for G26.

In the final confrontation with Beimnech, he offers the Milletian a choice to either kill him now and escape, or perish together with him in the rift. He mentions that in the end, we are all forgotten anyway. I don’t think that is the case. The Milletian lives and the memories of everyone they’ve fought with lives with them. That is their burden. Not everyone can walk a righteous path. Sometimes, desperate individuals seek the wrong help and I like to think that the Milletian recognizes that it isn’t just black and white, and that they are fortunate to have found the right people. Things are just going to get rougher for the Milletian because they’re also a guardian of Erinn, which begs the question: who is the counterpoint for the Milletian? Does one even exist? Does there need to be one?

Instead of ending on such a gloom and doom note, I’ll go full circle and talk about Llywelyn again and his mentions of a sibling again? And also tea time?? 10/10 would fake date Llywelyn just for the court gossip. (LF > political intrigue comic ft. Milletian and Llywelyn dating like it’s 17th century France) Also Llywelyn being the next captain of the Elved Squad?? Tried to imagine him in Talvish’s armor and as I type this I realize they won’t do something stupid like that they’ll just change the emblem on his armor. Alright I think that’s it I’m hitting 2.3k words so—

Oh right something something the Aces go off somewhere again just as Hunter was going to say something…can we get a base for them please? So we can just visit them? So they don’t just pop in and out of the Milletian’s life? Thanks.

I’m about to get super sappy so readers, feel free to skip all of this. I’ve been playing mabi for about 11 years at this point and it has been a long ride. I didn’t start writing these rants and essays until G21 and I also started drawing in earnest about mabi around the same time with comics and fanart. I don’t participate much in the community as a whole because I am an anxiously overthinking person. It’s no surprise that I found comfort characters in mabi and so I return here again and again (not that I’ve ever really left). We’re getting a new game director after G25 and I am extremely grateful for all he has done for the game. And in the same vein, I’m thankful to all of you reading this. There’s no point in creating content when there is no audience, especially when I am as reclusive as I am. So, to my new readers: thanks for coming along. And to my old fans: thanks for sticking around. Until the next chapter!

[finding-fallen-stars]

YGO Questionnaire Part 2 Electric Boogaloo

So, my gf/bf @howaboutalittlehelpneos tagged me to do this again a... good long while ago, and I had wanted to wait until I'd finished my GX rewatch before trying this again. But ouch oof I accidentally also got through all of 5Ds again before getting to this lol

But the 5Ds rewatch definitely reshaped a lot of my thoughts, so... cracks knuckles. This won't be spoiler free, fair warning~

Favorite Series: ugh the formatting killed my original essay on this but okay GX and 5Ds are pretty tied in my book, now-- I love them equally, but in different ways! GX fulfills my love for subversive coming-of-age stories with a heartwarming, humorous, and also soulcrushing touch, and I love how each season brings a new story and new characters-- it's like reading installments of a novel series, and I think the formatting works wonders for it as a whole. It has some absolutely phenomenal character writing, too-- even the characters I dislike are ones I can appreciate for what they introduce to the story! And honestly, not enough people give the first two seasons of GX the credit it deserves: they're half the charm, really. How are you going to feel the full impact of the heartbreaking content in seasons 3 and 4 if you aren't properly attached to the characters?

But on 5Ds's side of things... it fulfills my love for stories with time loops, found family, human nature, and of course, love and death and how they intertwine. I love how the leading characters are just a bunch of broken kids from broken circumstances who all find a home with each other, and of course, how it highlights class disparity and how fucked up the prison/"justice" systems are. Yea, sure, maybe it underwent executive meddling and all, but I genuinely love it for what it is and I wish more people appreciated it... my only problem with 5Ds is the untwist with Z-ONE and then the ending s m h I adore it overall and I could go off for a long while on it. Overall, these are my two instinctive recommendations for anyone getting into Yugioh!

(look at these boys they're so important) Favorite Protagonist: Oh, believe me, absolutely nothing has changed here-- Yusei Fudo is and always will be my favorite protagonist, and my rewatch only solidified that.

I just... love him so much? He's seen so much hell in his life and carries so much guilt on his shoulders, but he still has room in his heart to believe in others and to believe that anyone can defy fate and find hope even at rock bottom. I love that he's initially introduced as this quiet, brooding figure when he really just turns out to be a huge softie who wears his heart on his sleeve half the time and wants to bring about change for Satellite and its people. Plus I just really love that his greatest flaw is something that would ordinarily be a positive trait-- he's Overly self-sacrificial, to the point where he's basically setting himself on fire to keep others warm, and that's not really framed as something Heroic

Just... he makes me so happy. I have two Yusei charms that I ordinarily keep on my keys (one was a gift from Zenzen) and they're a constant source of serotonin for me. He's Peak comfort character for me. Best protag in my book Favorite Rival: Same deal here-- still Manjoume!

look at him he's so important

While he spends a lot of the anime getting the good old damsel in distress treatment (getting suckered into a cult, getting knocked into a coma, becoming a zombie, getting fucking Killed, etc), I still think his character arc is really well-written overall and I only appreciated it even more when I watched GX again. I love the fact that he's got a soft heart he buries beneath the edgy facade, and that he's simultaneously really sharp and also kind of dense lol. He's just a fun character and watching how he evolves from episode one to episode one hundred eighty is such a satisfying journey.

Plus, props to him for being such a versatile duelist-- 50 wins in a row is HARD as is, let alone with a deck full of cards he just found laying around in the Arctic. Three ace monsters, three different archetypes... he's a really good duelist and I'm proud of him for it

Oh, but honestly, I don't really dislike any of the rivals-- I'm neutral towards Revolver and Reiji, but the remaining four (Kaiba, Manjoume, Jack, and Shark) compel me. yes I accidentally wound up liking Jack Atlas shhh Favorite BFF: Honestly, I really like most of the characters who fit this archetype-- Joey, Crow, Gongenzaka, Soulburner... I still lean a little bit more towards Joey, but I really appreciate all four of them. I'm gonna say Joey again, just because I find his evolution as a character the most compelling, but I appreciate the other three a lot. Soulburner has the best design though Favorite GFF: Oh absolutely still Aki, but I honestly... really love most female Yugioh characters? I'm assuming this is lead girls only, but like. I'm dumb and gay and I love Girls so this is naturally the most difficult one for me to answer lol

Aki just resonates with me the most because she's the prime example of how trauma doesn't always manifest in palatable ways-- when we first meet her, she's angry and lashes out at anyone and anything just because she wants the world to suffer in the same ways she's suffered, and then... we get to watch her grow from that, once she's free from Divine and able to heal the way she needs to heal. I know the second half of 5Ds didn't give her character the attention it deserved, but I'm still proud of her for winding up on the path she did-- seeing her channel her power and energy into wanting to heal and help others was just so good and was one of the few things I really Loved about the 5Ds ending.

oh, but like. Asuka Tenjoin and Aoi Zaizen are very close seconds for me!!! Aki just has a vice grip on my heart Favorite Villain: Okay, it's still technically Vector-- I think he's the most entertaining, well-written, and effective villain out of all of the ones we've seen so far, but... I also want to add Takuma Saiou and then all of Yliaster as honorable mentions?

As someone fond of tarot myself, I was naturally pretty intrigued by Saiou the first time I watched GX, but my attachment to him only grew the second time around where I actually got the chance to understand his character better. Plus, like... the visuals with him are fucking astounding and he's always so interesting to watch.

As for Yliaster, I just... really love how the big bad of 5Ds turned out to just essentially be a broken man desperate to save anyone and anything and three robotic reconstructions of the friends he'd lost. I still think the untwist with Z-ONE was stupid and I much prefer the idea of him and Yusei being the same person, but I'm still compelled by the other three-- well. Paradox less so, because we don't get a lot of Paradox lore, but. Aporia and Antinomy for sure.

ugh Yugioh has some damn good villains

Favorite Card: now that I actually play the TCG game...

Stardust is always going to be my favorite of all cards because it checks every box for me (my favorite YGO character's ace monster, space theme, what more could I want), but Aromaseraphy Rosemary has really become one of my aces in my best TCG deck! I'm still mastering irl plays, but I'm happy with my progress and I love my plant gang...

Favorite Episode: alright, here's where there's actually been a Lot of change, so...

Season 0: Episode 16: "Turnabout by a Hair's Breadth - The White-Robed Crisis" -- The more I think about this one, the more I love it; there's a... lot of corruption in the medical industry, and I've seen a lot of it firsthand, so just. Seeing a corrupt doctor get what he deserved at the end was cathartic, in a way? Plus, a Jounouchi-centric episode is always a good time.

Duel Monsters: Episodes 96-97: "Darkness vs. Darkness/One Turn Kill" -- this hasn't changed, I still love seeing Marik and Bakura bitch at each other for two whole episodes LMAO

GX: Episode 152: "Activate Super-Fusion! Rainbow Neos" -- This one hasn't changed and it likely never will-- I take so much pride in seeing Judai push forward, past the fear and guilt he's carrying, all to save Johan... it's cathartic and I never get sick of watching it.

5Ds: sweats. still all of Crash Town, but also episodes 137-147-- the Ark Cradle is one of my favorite parts of 5Ds and one of my favorite YGO arcs period, and even though each duel is a fucking gut punch, I love the emotional intensity and weight in each episode... It hurts but in a mostly good way

Zexal: Episode 143: "The Aloof Duelist 'Nasch': The Destined Final Duel" -- this one hasn't changed! Still hurts, still love it, I still weep over Ryouga Shark Kamishiro on a daily basis

Arc-V: Episodes 81-82: "Our Respective Battlefields/The Ultimate Falcon VS The Black-Feathered Thunder" -- Okay, honestly, this was hard because I... genuinely. really don't like Arc-V very much at all lol (it's just not my cup of tea, but more power to those who do like it!), but I thought this duel was a lot of fun! Shun is my absolute favorite from Arc-V and I really like the friendship he struck up with Crow a lot, so here we are

VRAINS (so far): Episode 25-26: "Virus Deck Operation/Three Draws Leading to Hope" -- honestly I am so biased because I just really love Blue Angel and I loved seeing her get a well-deserved victory like this lol. I'm not done with VRAINS, so this is probably gonna change, but anytime Blue Angel or Soulburner are on screen, I'm happy

Favorite Decks to Use: Aromages will always have my heart, but I adore Cyber Angels too! I'm building my Trickstar deck, my Synchron/Stardust deck (just waiting on Dawn of Majesty...), and my Magician Girls deck, too! Fusion, Ritual, Synchro, XYZ, Pendulum, or Link?: Synchros my beloved... but also Ritual Years in fandom: I've been here for just a little over one year now! and I wuv it... I'm never looking back Who am I tagging: no one I'm too shy

[razorblade180]

More Breakthrough

Months ago I was asked a question about if I ever thought about an original story; which I answered. Check it out right here!

In that I post I only talked about the lore and world building of that story. Plenty of you seemed interested and I’ve had this on my brain a lot recently so I thought I’d talk about it some more.

Modern Day creation

Centuries have past since the tale of the eight warriors who saved the world was immortalized into history. Today As humanity grew developed it’s knowledge, the story sounded more and more like a legend; one that sprouted a religion that branched out. The main group celebrates all the crystals and keeps the story alive and well while the smaller groups devote themselves to a single crystal and live near them like the old days. It was this shared celebration that spurred on the idea of traveling. New groups of people met, ideas were shared, ideas became reality. Cities, transportation, machinery; nothing was impossible. The threats of elementals became easier to handle. People lived longer, which meant more people made settlements. And for insurance, a special school was built for those willing to continue learning about the power of potential in order to keep the world safe. Much like the churches, that school spawned smaller schools across countries for more to learn and focus on particular techniques of one’s choosing. All the ideas and development created the world as they now it. A place where finding modern day art is a common as locating nomadic group that stick to surviving of the vast lands the world has always offered.

Synopsis

Christian, a six teen year old ice user, takes the test to get into Breakthrough: the school for aspiring hunters. What started off as a joke attempt just to test his abilities suddenly becomes serious when he gets accepted in along with his older sister, Amber. Now he goes from a boy from a small town, to being the youngest student in over a decade going to the most intimidating school in the world where every day is one chaotic step closer to his dream to be like the ice warrior of legend.

Additional lore

It has been recorded over the years that there are people who don’t stay on the normal track when it comes to unlocking limitations to access greater potential. Stories of people encountering or hearing an unknown voice whenever they were in a time of great need circumvent the world. All stories differ from each person, but the endings are all the same. breakthroughs that should’ve taken considerable amount of training, effort, and self discovery were already unlocked; making those people prime candidates to fight elementals or contribute to the common man actively. If they so choose that is. The phenomenon while incredible, isn’t something people fear or particularly seek. At the end of the day, that gap in power can still be closed by the regular means. Such is the beauty of potential. Many jobs have incorporated a special group in their line of work for people with advanced skill sets. Not only does it make business better, but it doesn’t lock trap talented people into only being a hunter or a soldier in order to use their power to the fullest. (I might’ve said that before but I can’t remember.)

Threats

Elementals are still a big problem; constantly causing natural disasters, attacking people, stunting progress. The only changes itself are humans willing to commit crimes and do things for personal gain. Naturally leading to wars, hate, and unnecessary loss of life. The two threats mix in mingle in mysterious ways that can be rather unpredictable and create situations beyond control....

Other stuff

Overall I think there’s 49 characters with significant and interesting things people would latch on to and 29/30-ish of them could be considered a main character, or at the very least, Grade A supporting character; that’s including villains in that list and third party individuals. They are all introduced over time, have backstory, and you bet your bottom dollar that not everyone makes it to the end of the story. There’s also a bunch of other characters that pop in and out.

The more I look at those characters and the. Look at some of my RWBY Au concepts I realize my brain was set on doing certain things, but knew I wouldn’t know how to if I started from scratch. I literally groaned out loud because I realized certain things I put in Twin Snowflakes is essentially a baby version of how key things happen in Breakthrough. It honestly tempts me in the worst way possible to just write it; that’s dangerous. This world is so dense and vast because I wrote it like a JRPG. I could easily see this being over a hundred chapters unless I made it multiple stories that weaved together one massive arc. Yet here I am, refusing to spoil everything about my original story I’ve thought about for what has be six years now? Maybe one day in a far off future when I know how to adult 💀 [Or I finish my rwbaby stuff.]

[storywriting]

Anemone, An Enemy, Anemone, An Enemy Anemone, Anne, Nemo, and Another Me

[ So.......Anemone huh? Here’s some loose thoughts after a first viewing, including my takes of H1-Evo #1 and how my opinion has evolved now that this film is in the mix. I’ve seen it through with the JP audio exactly one time and I do wonder if my opinion on this film will change at all on a second viewing or when I get around to the dub. It’s less about plot details and more about review  and general discussion type stuff, doesn’t delve heavy into theorizing just yet. That’s a trip for a different post. Cut because long as fuck even though literally nobody asked. ]

Hi Evolution #1, starring our main man Renton “Only a Miniscule Few Braincells Above Himbo” Thurston, hit me in weird ways which I think is true for most everybody I’ve seen talking about it. Part of my problem with it honestly was that I came into things with the misconception that Hi-Evolution would be a reboot of sorts. A somewhat faithful retelling of the original story with new insight into things we didn’t get to see much of. I don’t know why this is the impression I had other than screencaps and stuff, but if you only watch the first Hi Evo movie you definitely could continue to think that once it’s over. When I thought it would be an encapsulation of the original series, I had intended to use the film to introduce @himbologythestudyofhimbo to the story. She has long known it to be one one of my most favorite anime franchises and I thought a film would be a good way to gauge whether she might find it interesting enough to hit 50 episodes with me.

Ha. Haha. That didn’t work.

I hadn’t seen Hi-Evo when I was like “hey wanna watch this?” so that’s my own fault. I had seen screenshots and thought it looked gorgeous, but that was about it. I was imagining something akin to the Berserk trilogy of movies, mostly faithful to the original story with some new tidbits of information thrown in for old fans.

And again, you could be forgiven for seeing the first Hi-Evo movie and still thinking that’s what you’re in for. It is mostly compliant to the original canon and the parts that aren’t compliant are pretty wishy washy about saying so. Unfortunately what I found out really quickly is that that it’s not at all a good entry point for new fans, and that really disappointed me. I’ve been hoping for years for something to get more young blood in this fandom, BUT ANYWAY--

The whole play forward/play back thing really hinders the flow of the film, as much as I understand the point of it, especially with the Anemone film for more context. Skipping around the timeline harms new viewers in particular. It’s challenging to understand the timeline and flow of events because everything is presented out of order and without context. Sure, the first Hi-Evolution covers a ton of major story beats surrounding Renton’s personal development, but the non-chronological presentation coupled with the utter lack of lead up to key moments from the original series robs this movie of carrying any emotional weight. Who is Renton? What’s the deal with him and wheelchair girl? Are these people his parents or not? Why do we care about this Eureka girl who has been on screen in Renton’s presence for a cumulative 30 seconds. Wait a minute what’s this ship? Where did he leave from again? I thought he had a home and parents? Who are these people and why do I care?

Put bluntly this movie sucks if you can’t answer these questions going in, and even if you can you may feel a bit cheated by it.  As much as I feel the need to talk about how the film is inaccessible for new fans, these films clearly are not for new fans. They function to remind you of events of the original story and then play off of those events with the new content. Even as an established fan, Hi-Evo #1 feels very watered down on its own, but it’s not on its own anymore is it? So let’s finally talk about Anemone.

What becomes clear about these movies is that they are not divided by chronology, but by character. The first movie was about Renton which is why we saw so so little of everybody else even when that robbed the story of needed context and worked to the story’s detriment.  I’m telling myself the reason titular character Eureka was not on screen demonstrating her relationship to the world and to Renton despite it most likely being a central element is because they shoved her scenes into Hi-Evolution 3: Eureka, which will not be released for another year or so. 

I do feel a bit more forgiving toward these movies now that I understand the format they’re going for, but I think most of my previous criticisms still stand despite that.  The character focused presentation may be a deliberate creative decision, but that doesn’t make it an ideal storytelling mechanism. THAT SAID, while a character centric format really harms well developed characters like Renton, it does loads and loads of good for a character like Anemone whose screen time was always hindered by her role as accessory to Renton and Eureka’s story. We don’t get that constant stream of unfiltered perspective from her or really any secondary character, so it’s very interesting to see the world filtered purely through her eyes. I honestly found myself significantly more interested in all the new Anemone content than I ever could have been over watered-down, abbreviated rehashing of Renton’s character arc. I’m much more excited for the last film than I was with just the context of the first Hi-Evolution movie.

Speaking of which, very early on in the Anemone film, the viewer is clued into the fact that this is most certainly AU content, something that was less clear about the first movie. Eureka Seven as a franchise has really been in the 24/7 AU zone for like 10 years, which I think is cool but I also find a little disappointing. I like AU content well enough, but I also think they had a rich world already in the original series and I feel like there are a few more rich veins to explore further in the original world without necessarily needing to wrap it up in a convoluted alternate universe. Not to say I’m against like the AU stuff or anything, I’m okay with it existing, I just want a little more variety in the stuff that’s coming out. Keep up with the AU stuff if you guys wanna but I wouldn’t say no to more backstory and lore, you know?  If they’re gonna pander to old fans instead of attracting new ones, they may as well hit me where it hurts. But I digress. Hi Evolution#2: Anemone’s AUness is pretty central to the story it wants to tell, so it has my full attention there.

Alternate universe characterization is something I’ve had both complaints and praise for in the past, and I’m happy to say that in the case of Anemone I have mostly praise. It’s nice to get a glimpse of an Anemone who isn’t like....as unhinged as her original incarnation. She’s well adjusted comparably, which makes her a decently reliable narrator. While she loses some of the edge that people are drawn to about her, she maintains most of the underlying personality traits you would expect of even the earliest incarnation of Anemone. This is an Anemone who had the opportunity to be socialized. You can relate to her and appreciate her feelings more easily than the Anemone viewers are most familiar with. This is an Anemone with hardships, but she hasn’t been pushed to the same extremes as her PoP counterpart. Likely due to the pretty direct narration and background, there’s also a lot more substance to her than PFoR Anemone in my opinion. It’s not really a chore to like her and take interest in her. She feels very natural in most instances. She’s a real breath of fresh air for fans who love Anemone and wanted to see her living with a healthier mindset and some better outcomes. Good on you, Anemone. Four for you, Anemone.

Most of the other characters--Dominic, the scientists, background people, Anemone’s father, new crew members, etc--are all about what you’d expect from either their previous incarnations or the archetypes they’re filling. None of the new characters or secondary characters are particularly developed, but I don’t really consider that a huge fault of it. I wouldn’t expect a 2 hour movie to meander the way a 50 episode anime can, but in times like this when I am with very few developed characters, I am forcefully reminded of what an asset and a strength the original’s depth and breadth of character writing is.

And then there’s Eureka. I expect her to be polarizing in the reviews, assuming at least some people didn’t straight up hate her in it. Everybody may have just hated it, idk.

As I said earlier alternate universe characterization is something I’ve had both complaints and praise for in the past, often both at the same time. What often comes about is characterization that I don’t necessarily like, but because the character has lived a different life I can’t really say that characterization is wrong. I feel that pull in this film quite a bit. Wrathful Eureka is boring to me. Conceptually, it just is. But does that make it bad?

Man, idk, I guess not. I didn’t like it, but I’ll defend it to a degree. In the original story Eureka was born into violence and conditioned to perpetuate violence early in life. The original Eureka Seven has a dense messaging about propaganda and information and the ways in which society conditions people of all kinds.  Eureka is a docile character in the original but more and more as we learn about her, we realize that this tendency toward gentleness isn’t just a cutesy character trait of hers. It’s a choice that she’s making on a daily basis, even when more forceful options would be easier or make more sense to her. It’s a choice that has come about from a collection of experiences. Eureka becomes pacifistic because she develops her own ideals about the world. She comes to conclusions about what things make her a good or bad person and she makes the decision to be the person she wants to be. There’s weight to it. That’s something that always really drawn me to her as a character. It’s very easy to blow up in the face of something horrible. It’s much harder to keep a cool head and exercise mercy. I just don’t find the Eureka of this world all that compelling.

That said, I don’t necessarily think this read of her is wrong or even impossible. In fact, I think if this read had 50 episodes of development and justification behind it, I might even come to appreciate it. Certainly if anything could drive her to this, it would be losing Renton, so it’s not exactly out of left field for the character given the circumstances she’s in. I feel somewhat similarly about PFoR Eureka. Only somewhat. Eureka in general is a character who would probably be much more in touch with her anger if she had been raised any other way than she was. Even in the original series Eureka has a passive aggressive streak. She’s probably very fortunate that more productive methods of expressing her feelings were accessible to her before any natural tendency toward aggression was. Angrier more volatile reads of Eureka aren’t wrong or even uninteresting necessarily, but to me a lot of her charm is wrapped up in the reasons she works so hard not to be that type of character.

I also think that subversion and role reversal can be an interesting in AU stuff, so I don’t really fault them for using it here. In contrast to our typical unhinged Anemone, Eureka gets to be the one teetering on the edge so that Anemone can shine and show a little more humanity than she typically gets to. I think that’s honestly okay. I want to see Anemone have her day to be the hero. That’s something I’m okay with sacrificing a little of my preferred characterization for. I see a lot of value in a portrayal that allowed Eureka and Anemone to bond and more directly learn together. I think a lot of fans, myself included, wonder about a reality where Eureka and Anemone could have been sources of support for one another rather than pitted against one another.

That isn’t to say that I’m automatically okay with chopping up the writing in arbitrary ways, though. The thing about the reversals and subversions in Hi-Evo #2 is that they’re consistent. Compare to something like Pocketful of Rainbows and you’ll see what I mean. In that movie Renton, for some unclear reason, is the one who can understand Nirvash even though that writing decision doesn’t really serve the story in any meaningful way because Eureka is still the one who isn’t human and still is wanted by the military for....being whatever unclear thing she is in that film. Renton is no longer childish and is in fact the patient one in the story while Eureka is the one with a stubborn attitude and defined temper. Renton is made out to be more of a coward so that he has something to grow from, except for all the many many times he isn’t cowardly pretty much immediately, and the only flimsy defense of this concept that is that he was afraid of adults with guns when he was a literal child.  Meanwhile, Eureka in this film is a much more brash character than we’re used to. Unlike Original Eureka, this one doesn’t want to be led or take orders anymore. She’s a loose canon who takes matters into her own hands except for all the times she cries for Renton to save her both before and after she’s teetering on her own Independence Event Horizon. There are a lot of creative decisions in that film that just plain don’t make sense to me because the writing doesn’t commit to them at all and tends to flounder around between them. I could barely make it through that film because I felt like it was contradicting itself every 5 minutes. It feels less like a new exploration of old characters and more like a bunch of ideas the writing team couldn’t agree on and slapped together anyway. If it wasn’t unclear, I don’t like Pocketful of Rainbows very much.

By contrast, any subversions or reversals in Hi-Evolution 2 fell earned enough. The writing choices are for the most part played straight and well justified. The choices are interesting. Unlike literally anything about the lore of Pocketful of Rainbows, I want to know more about Hi-Evolution. I want to understand what Anemone’s mission is and about Silver Box. I want to know why Dewey is so different from the Dewey I know. As much as I complained about Eureka’s characterization, the portrayal is decently justified by the writing. Eureka believes she killed Renton and seems to be privy to other realities where she turned out much happier. She has good enough reasons to be bitter in this iteration.  

This film has honestly made me way more forgiving of Hi-Evo #1 and given me a lot of reason to take interest in what the last film might be. I’m going to reserve any big overarching judgement until that comes out in 6000 years, but I’m getting the sense that it might be New Order adjacent, in that Renton and Eureka will have to find one another and possibly revisit places that will be nostalgic for fans.I wouldn’t complain if this becomes the flagship verse wherein Eureka and Anemone form a meaningful friendship because they’ve been denied that opportunity in basically every other telling that exists so far.

Also big thank god the last film will be hand drawn because, I hate to be that guy but the GC looked like shitgarbage. I’ve become very forgiving of CG and Mocap recently but I just really disliked it in this film. Animation is a medium I know a lot about, I know compositing is a tricky job, I respect the work put into it, but...oof. I do wonder if that was a stylistic choice or more of an “oh shit the budget is disappearing” choice.

My final word on Eureka Seven Hi Evolution #2 is that....I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either but I had a nice enough time watching it. I’m realizing I’m having trouble landing in one particular spot on Hi Evolution #2 because I expect the next film will effect how I judge this one in the same way that this film has affected how I judged the first one. If you’re an Eureka Seven fan who is on the fence about the Hi-Evolution trilogy, I’d say give it a watch. You’ll still love your favorite characters even if they’re a little different than you’d hoped. If you’re still feeling iffy maybe wait a year until the last one comes out and binge them all at once. I suspect the experience might be improved that way. Definitely don’t go in expecting the story you already know, though. Doing that set me up for failure here.

Honorable mention for the fansubber who kept translating 勘 as very rude words describing the penis for some reason? That really enhanced my experience.

[xaeneron]

A Smol Nerd Talks about Backstory and Character Development

Hello frens,

I had someone ask about how I write character backstories, but since they included their discord information in the ask, I thought it might be better to answer that privately and put up this as a public post because the more I wrote, the more obnoxious it got. And because I thought it was interesting! I don’t claim to be an expert at any of this, especially since this is purely a hobby to me, but I do absolutely love character design and development and it makes me happy that the characters that I’ve put time and effort into are encouraging others to develop their own. So this is absolutely a post to skip if you’re not interested, but read on if you’re curious as to how my weird little brain works.

Essentially: Bits of insight into how I write character backstories, which blends a lot into character development and creation. Not really a step by step process, more word vomit.

...under a cut because holy fuck it got long. I’m sorry, I talk too much ><

Visualizing Characters

I’m not sure there’s really a starting place beyond “I would like this character to exist,” but I think it’s important to first stress how I view my characters in perspective to myself. No one method works for everyone, but it is kind of relevant to my own process. 

My friends in undergrad made fun of me for this constantly, but for me, characters sort of...how do you put it, take up space in the mind. Even though they are functionally me since I created them, they’re...not? They exist as their own entities, telling me what they like and don’t like, what they’d like to do next, etc. Ive, who has dominated this space for years, has a tendency to claim any music that I listen to as his own (so I associate it with him), throws parties, and wants to play and write more stories when I want to sleep. I get that this is a really weird way of looking at characters because I’m essentially blaming myself for keeping myself awake, but I think it’s the best way to describe how I see the characters that I create. They’re friends that talk, and they develop their own opinions instead of me dictating what it is that they say (even though...well, I am. I’m sorry this is really fucking weird LOL).

Obviously I’m not saying that this can or would work for anyone, but it’s just how my brain works. It helps me visualize them, along with details like how their voices sound, the facial expressions they tend to make, the tone that they take when saying the same phrase as someone else, etc.

Assembling Personalities...

I know the original question was essentially just about backstories, but backstory writing and character creation bleed into each other a lot. Enough that I don’t really think you can do one without the other, and why as a result I’m kind of writing about both.

So that being said, when assembling those characters, I tend to go piece by piece and let things happen, instead of distilling in all the characteristics I want them to have. That’s a pretty surefire way to make a Mary Sue, and I have plenty of experience with making Mary Sues. A lot. It’s embarrassing. ;A;

Let’s take Ive, for example. His initial personality when I first made him was a happy-go-lucky, debonair, massive flirt without a care in the world. He waltzed through life, never getting attached to anyone or anything. A fairly simple and shallow character base. As I played, pieces just kind of came together - some from the Commander’s in-game characterization, and some from my own ideas. I let him pick up different facets of his personality over time, some good, some bad.

This works because Ive’s personality wasn’t set in stone from the get-go and changed drastically as time went on, but if you do have a personality you have your heart set on, then make sure your character responds to new challenges accordingly. Consistency is key, and the way they act in the present can also help you road map their past, figuring out how they got to where they are. And who knows, if you take another look, they might surprise you.

...Including the Weird Shit

Sometimes the tiniest quirks help make characters memorable to you, and help shape who they were and grow up to be. One of my OCs, Beck, is an obfuscating idiot who legitimately knows his way around a blade and is insanely clever when he wants to be. He also has a random deadly allergy to mangoes. Does he have a story that he (somewhat) fondly looks back on where his adopted daughter chases him around with a mango in retaliation for making fun of her? By golly yes he does. Is it important to the overall narrative? No. But does it establish more of his relationship with his daughter, even when she’s an adult? Yes. It also is the sort of anecdote that can snowball - what was he saying that was bad enough for her to chase him with tropical fruit? How did she even get a mango in the first place? Does she have a crush on someone? What sort of person is that? Is it someone new in town, or is it a stranger? What makes them different? Is Beck just assuming, and if so, is it because he’s dense or because he’s just trying to be a doting father? Even little things count, especially when sometimes it’s the anecdotes and sides stories that help make the world and characters you’re creating feel more real.

Write What You Know

This is pretty common advice, but it’s also pretty solid advice. It’s also something that I do often. None of my characters are straight self-inserts (arguably), but many of them have one or more facets of my personality, which makes it much easier for me to write them. Anyone who knows me personally will attest to this, particularly when you begin to note the amount of deadpan snarkers that my cast contains. My primary OCs (who don’t show up much here unfortunately) range from politely snarky to full on deadpan. Ive and Etiery are prime examples of this, while Richter also has his moments. Sharing traits with you helps writing their dialogue and motivations more organically, because again, it’s not what you want them to do, it’s how they would react as a living individual. If you’re not a naturally sarcastic person, it’s going to be harder to develop and accurately write a sarcastic character, etc. (Flashbacks to when I was a kid and my attempt at sarcasm and wit was “Go home old man, nobody needs you.”) Not impossible, of course, but something to keep in mind.

It’s not just personality, either. Rayne (one of my OCs) and Etiery are a chemist and engineer respectively because that is what I am. Part of the way their brains work stems from the fields that they choose to specialize in, and as someone in that field, I do have a certain amount of experience in thinking from that perspective. It’s okay to base characters on yourself or people you know, or take bits and pieces from people here or there. Again, it grounds you, and if you can write a realistic personality, you can write a more fleshed out backstory for said character, taking into account their motivations and decision-making.

Balancing Story vs. Personality

Part of storytelling is, well, getting across the story that you want to tell. In that, characters are instruments to help you move that plot forward. But if you’re fleshing out your characters, you also want the plot to be a vehicle to help them develop. Really, it depends on the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it, but if you’re like me and you focus first on characters, then my mindset is probably more applicable.

Essentially though, find a balance. You might need someone to do something for the sake of the plot, but think about if the one you’re picking is a good candidate for it, or if it’s better suited for someone else. If no one fits, maybe you need to take a look at the story step you’re making, or at the characters you’ve created. Remember also that although it’s easy to look at things objectively as an author and say things like “that’s so obvious, they shouldn’t go that way,” a character may still make that choice in the moment. Judgment - present, past, or future - can be questionable as it happens.

Pay Attention to the Timeline

This one’s pretty straightforward. One of the easiest things to mess up is to make your character too old or too young to be doing the things that they’re currently doing. Check and double-check. If you’re writing into an established timeline like GW2′s, make sure your character’s timeline fits with the established lore (unless you are very specifically breaking it for some reason). Ive, for example, is not one of the older generations of sylvari, but he is older than the sylvari protagonist in-game to account for his extra time spent training to compensate for his lack of eyesight. Keeping track of when events happen, often simultaneously, will help you decide how characters act and react - Etiery would not have been so kind (relatively speaking) to Ive had she met him before her fallout with her father, and as a result, they might never have become best friends, or friends at all.

Look at Things from All Angles

It’s important to look at a character and ask where they got certain characteristics from - are they naturally this kind/sarcastic/flirty/angsty/mean/etc., or did something happen that catalyzed that? If you’re writing backstory to explain that, take a look at the world you’re in or that you’re building - does the story you’re telling fit reasonably? Really challenge yourself to stay within your (universe’s) rules, instead of being tempted to bend them to make your character (and their story) exactly what you want. All universes have rules, and unless it is a specific plot point to break them, make sure you follow them! Making impossible loopholes to make sure your character has a degree by age 12 or can resurrect someone perfectly when the magic is explicitly stated to not exist can weaken your story and your character!

Richter is a good example of my personal thought process, being a glasses-wearing necromancer whose backstory is a street rat. He’s tall and awkward as an adult, so it’s not unreasonable that he was once a tall and gawky kid, the kind of kid whose arms are too long and everyone picks on. How does a kid like that survive on the streets? One of his major traits is the fact that he’s a bookworm: if he was orphaned, where did he learn to read? If he had parents long enough to teach him rudimentary reading skills (which he did), how much practical experience did he lose out on since he spent less time alone on the streets? As someone with a strong moral compass, Richter had to find a way to justify committing crimes to survive. A child like that would probably be too frightened to ask Grenth’s clergy or anyone at the schools in Divinity’s Reach (which he could not afford) to teach him in necromancy. How does he learn as a result? Is he afraid of his powers? Do people treat him differently because of them?

It’s kind of what I mean when I say pieces start falling into place. Start with a detail that you want for sure, and build up from that while maintaining its feasibility in the world that you’re working in.

And Don’t Ignore the Random

Seriously, I think this is my favorite part. Sometimes the things that you don’t expect sneak up on you and make it in. Fun fact for anyone fond of Ive: he originally wasn’t blind. OG Ive had nothing physically wrong with him. One day I was showing my friend my GW2 characters, including Ive in his full Rubicon set. I was nervous that she wouldn’t think it was as cool as I did, so I joked (although I would have anyway) that I didn’t know how he would see with the brim of the hat pulled so low. She replied, “Well, what if he has the hat pulled so low because he’s blind and it doesn’t matter to him?”

I chewed on that idea for the next day and a half, and suddenly a lot of things fell into place - why Ive and Eet get along as well as they do, more justification for Ive’s growing, below-the-surface jaded personality, an obstacle for him to overcome. I drowned in feels and texted her, and to this day it is still very much her fault that Ive can’t see. 

His lack of vision is now one of the central pillars of his character, and it’s something I hadn’t even considered before my friend mentioned it in jest. So don’t ignore random inspiration!

[myfriendpokey]

clearance sale

clearing out some of my backlog of opinions before the new year so i can start anew. in this post I have accumulated some writing scraps on the only three topics: 1. finance 2. mystery 3. location

FINANCE

i enjoyed these recent-ish posts against the idea of indie sustainability, although as someone who already works a day job i always feel a bit ambivalent about the advice to just work a day job to pay for this stuff - - like yes, absolutely, do it, BUT sell your shit too in the knowledge that the type of precarity we associate w/ creative work is already in the process of being implemented everywhere else as well (or has already been - zero hour contracts, sub-living wages etc). like i am fortunate to still have a day job which pays a living wage and leaves me time to work on my own things on the side - but this feels like an anachronism rather than an inevitability right now.. maybe my unsustainable games will help keep me afloat when my job gets automated and i have to go work in an amazon warehouse, unsustainable games for an unsustainable job, ha ha ha. video games are an exploitative bubble but so is the rest of "the market".

it is true that this is a political problem rather than one in the narrow remit of things that can be fixed with the right 10-point sales plan- -  nevertheless i think the issue of trying to make even small money off these things will remain kind of pressing as, in turn, regular employment comes more and more to resemble irregularly compensated hobbyist labour.

anyway one point i found really interesting, which i think all the above posts kind of grapple with - - the idea that it's not necessarily more "realistic" to aim at selling 1000 copies rather than 100,000. i think while we make fun of the aspiring millionaires a lot of people have just been banking on the idea of a fertile middle ground between the two extremes of tiny and ludicrous amounts of sales, between boom and bust. i'm sure there are still people working in that space but it seems like it's shrinking.

one question brendan keogh asks in his piece is "why should game makers be any different  [from the norm of artists, musicians etc not really making any money]?" i think this can actually be answered a little - because hobbyist game development sort of exploded in tandem with the internet itself becoming more naturalized within everyday life, because the economic basis for indie games was always centered around the internet, which means people working in indie games were always in the vicinity of the massive, startling movements of capital that the internet rendered more visible and immediate. no more were the weird vicissitudes of the market hidden behind closed doors, in boardrooms or stock quotations - now you could log onto any site and see just bewildering amounts of money suddenly funnel into the pockets of this or that individual in real time, frequently to their own surprise as well. and i think this connected to something more general - a sort of ambient awareness of financialization, the way "the financial sector" cannibalized things like industry, the greater visibility of capital not as something embedded in some specific product or set of individual practices but as a kind of weird free-floating aura arbitrarily descending or departing. enormous reservesof "general" wealth became more visible just as the benefits and stability of waged employment became yet more desolate and i think you need to see the draw of one in part as a consequence of the other. 

gacha-capitalism, permanent artificial scarcity coupled with the vague, insistent prospect of fantastic gains, as long as you keep playing. which is a rhythm already enshrined in many areas of working life - broke college students and unpaid graduates hustling for eventual employment, waged workers grinding through until  retirement. but it's one the enhanced immediacy and swiftness of capital on the internet intensified and extended. fabulous payouts can strike anyone at any time, in exchange for slowly bleeding out the prospect of any other kind of livelihood. much like the austerity following the financial crash which levelled so many basic social services for no particular purpose other than the hope that doing so for long enough would please the gods of prosperity to start tossing money around again. all dues, no pay.

i do think it's worth being cynical about the efforts to domesticate this process, building a fair and sustainable biome within capitalism, by using the tools of that same capitalism etc.  but if the format can't be seperated from the wider world then that's something which swings both ways. for me the most interesting critical work around vgames right now is in the effort to move outside of the constant, numbing boom-and-bust cycles of capital, the idiot repetition of exhilaration and depression and exhilaration and it'll all be okay as long as we can hold out one more cycle, particularly when that's a rhythm which has been central to the development of the format from the beginning. i think anyone involved with developing videogames has probably seen multiple generations of cool shit emerge, get abruptly killed off and written out of history in accordance with market diktats, and then replaced with a new wave of cool shit whenever the investors shift gears into "expansion" mode again. a mode of thinking about and preserving what people do that stands in opposition to this is something i can easily imagine being more generally useful in the culture, as ever more areas of life and culture start becoming subject to the same questions.

MYSTERY

there's a mystery in depth and a mystery in shallowness. with depth the habitual glance of recognition goes out and falls through - you can place roughly where something is in relation to the world, but not what it's doing, not where it goes. as a presence it seems to require a new mode of attention to be recognized, which i guess is why it sometimes makes me uneasy - that challenge, the way that challenge can be moralized. are you a bad enough dude to engage with art?? if there are 100 black obelisks in a field which one do you decide to look at? and will it really turn out to be deep, or just dense?

videogames can feel like depth-worship, like the embodiment of an essentially cthonic system of values. how deep did you go and what did you see there? did  you find the gold bars in pac-man? (www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/spies.cgi?action=url&type=info&page=pmgoldbar.info.txt) did you see the secret ending? how far did you get into the game mechanics, into the lore? this marks the top 10 deepest players on this game. surpass  them... if you dare. an ethos of diligent attention, hierarchial levels of  understanding and initiate-dom, a sub-culture. and at best a maguslike  dedication to altered states of consciousness that i can respect, an interest in shifting through mangled pieces of debris in search of secret mysteries. at worst the authority cults and tests of true belonging that spring up around those mysteries, whose value is in being hidden and whose guarantee is in the strenuous effort with which they must be located. paranoia about true spiritual meanings being plundered by opportunistic interlopers. stay out. get good.

the videogame has the basic opacity of the computer system and the act of engaging with this curious abyss is allegorized into dungeons, castles, mazes. trapdoors and secret corridors. one pleasure in looking up older games for me is in seeing them recognize and learn how to thematize this basic sense of mystery. in bubble bobble the obscure scoring mechanics and secret endings are cheekily perverse, arcade challenge by another means - another system to game. in king's quest there's something like a crossfertilization between the strange causal voids of the fairy tale and the adventure game: "Exit the gingerbread house and go east and east. There is a large walnut tree here. Take walnut and then open walnut to discover a gold nut. Head east and take bowl . Look bowl  to see the words “fill” at the bottom. Fill and the bowl will fill up with a delicious stew." the wizardry games took the connection between mysterious game systems and occult knowledge much further - the "true" ending of wizardry iv means finding a secret chamber and answering a series of riddles based on your knowledge of the kaballah (or at least, kaballah-derived tarot interpretations).

it's easy to moralize depth - lotus eaters, magic islands. you wander through a strange land and then return to find it's 5 hours later and you forgot to eat. there's something creepy to me about depth on an industrial scale, about building huge tunnels with massive teams on forced overtime, and then a team of professional tunnel reviewers cautiously start descending on ropes and come back every so often and say, well, 20 hours in and it all looks ok, and meanwhile everybody else is jumping en masse. maybe that's more of an issue with consumer culture in general. but sometimes it feels like a way to avoid dealing with certain inherent limitations of that culture, or even limitations of art in general, by projecting those limits out to the end of ever-deeper tunnels that fewer and fewer people will ever see, the rest of them straggling back, exhausted, getting jobs. well, i can't tell you if red dead 2 is good or not. i only got 60 hours in, and i never even found all the falcons.

if the mystery of depth is having too much space for speculation to operate coherently within, the mystery of shallowness is having not enough space for speculation to operate at all: something is too manifestly there, limited, closed-off, it's hard to push it away to get some metaphorical breathing room. 

i feel this way sometimes reading writers like tove jansson, flannery o'connor - SOMETHING happened, the stories are short and clear and describe some definite event without too much uncertainty, they even have "broader themes" raised - but somehow the themes feel embarrassingly outsize for the stories, and the stories remain too clearly defined to sink back into the murk of a generalized moral or experience. they feel like moral stories when you can't work out what the moral might be.

robbe-grillet on raymond roussel: "Now these chains of elucidations,  extraordinarily precise, ingenious, and farfetched, appear so derisory, so disappointing, that it is as if the mystery remained intact. But it  is henceforth a mystery that has been washed, emptied out, that has become  unnameable. The opacity no longer hides anything. One has the impression of  having found a locked drawer, then a key; and this key opens the drawer impeccably... and the drawer is empty."

there's a famous shallowness to videogames as well that's most often caught by people outside the culture - when you see the fake videogames in a comicbook, or on tv, and they're named something like "washing machine simulator 3000" or "municipal tax assailants". and part of this also stems from the computer, the history of the computer as it insinuated its way into everyday life, as a mysteriously elaborate and convoluted way of doing just impossibly banal things, like balancing chequebooks or printing text. the stubborn thingliness of not-quite-functional machines, the way the thingliness glosses and corrodes their own internal fantasies, mirrors of the basic weirdness that is human consciousness as a material fact within the world. 

with my friend i used to joke  about "e3" just being the dumpster behind an abandoned gamestop - all those needy longform experiences frozen into evocative trinkets. find a nonfunctional disk copy of mario odyssey and it gives you all the same delight as playing mario odyssey, only without having to. i think there's something beautiful about that flatness, that directionless object-hostility, the rejection of the grandoise hero's journey fantasies that it implies – as well as something baleful, a rejection of consciousess in general, the idea that it could take you anywhere not inside your own head.

LOCATION

why are there so many videogames about going outside? every time i've played a videogame it's been inside a room, usually a dark one, mostly while still wearing my pajamas. for me it is an internal activity. but not only do all these games take place in fields and plains, they always talk about the wonders of going on a voyage, the beauty of the great outdoors, the superiority of the wandering main characters to the slugs and layabouts who sit at home all day.... it's weird to me, i demand we move past these cloying pseudo-critiques. raymond williams once pointed out that the first pastoral was written from the perspective of a rentier daydreaming of cashing out and moving to a country home. i demand more games with the courage of their implict convictions and that if they require you to sit motionless indoors  for hours they should explicitly establish and argue for a value system in which this is the best possible thing that you can do. imagine if movies were all set in dark chambers full of people sitting down - i think i can say they would be much less insipid as an artform. "all of man's problems stem from an inability to stay in his room".

(images: Gakken No O Benkyou Soft Kazu Suuji, Legend of Legaia, a Chinese bootleg cart, and ...Iru!)

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

We Asked Eddie Redmayne And Katherine Waterston Your “Fantastic Beasts” Questions                

“This movie could be called Fantastic Beasts and...It’s Complicated.”        

 Posted on July 12, 2018    

Ellie Bate 

In 2016, Warner Bros. announced that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – the Harry Potter spinoff set in a 1920s iteration of J.K. Rowling's wizarding world – would become a series consisting of five films. Now we're only six months away from seeing the second, and fans have questions. We know the story will take place over two decades of the early 20th century, culminating in 1945, when Albus Dumbledore famously defeated the dark wizard Grindelwald. We also know that the sequel will see characters visiting London, Paris, and New York, and that we'll see a young Dumbledore played by Jude Law. But we don't know much else.

Last week, we at BuzzFeed had the opportunity to meet with the film's stars, Eddie Redmayne and Katherine Waterston, to get some info about the upcoming sequel. We asked them your nerdiest questions, and their answers were definitely interesting...

Aside from Dumbledore, can we expect to see any old friends from the Harry Potter series in Fantastic Beasts? – madelinerosee2

Katherine Waterston: You can expect that.

Eddie Redmayne: You can. There’s these sort of lines of connecting families and familiar people and names to the worlds of Beasts and Potter.

Which relationships between characters are you most excited to see develop in the upcoming films? – queenoffckingeverything

ER: I mean, our relationship! I’m hoping for an extraordinary J.K. Rowling romance. We know that we end up together, basically.

KW: But how?! How is it going to happen?

ER: Jo sort of tells us bits, but I don’t know. I loved our bit in this film. It’s so complicated. It’s complicated.

KW: Look. It’s complicated.

What can you tell us about Newt and Tina’s relationship in The Crimes of Grindelwald? Has it progressed or developed at all since the end of the first film? – Megan Walsh, Facebook

KW: Progressed? Regressed, maybe.

ER: There was so much hope at the end of the last film, but there’s miscommunication.

KW: Yeah. It’s a long-distance relationship!

ER: It’s desperate because they’re sort of pining for each other, but things have gone awry. Part of this film is about them re-finding each other.

KW: Yeah, but you know, there’s a lot going on, so it’s hard to just have a cup of tea and catch up and sort things out.

ER: We were quite excited at the end of the last film. We thought, Oh my god, we’re going to get to have a lot of fun working together on this film! And then the script arrived and it became clear that it wasn’t going to be that easy. We’re going to have to work for this romance.

KW: But that’s fun. It’s fun to have it be complex and surprising and rich.

What’s one thing that might surprise fans about the new instalment of Fantastic Beasts? – katerinap

ER: It’s so much darker than the last one. I think Jo loves that. In fact, I think she even said that to me on set. She was like, “I just love it when it gets darker.”

KW: It’s more complex. I think it’ll be a really fun journey to revisit and look for clues and things you might have missed the first time. It’s really dense and full of interesting dynamics and relationships and wonderful wizarding lore.

ER: I love that she has such an extraordinary imagination for plot. It’s so tightly wound, this story, that you have to pick apart each element of it. It feels like an extraordinary puzzle.

We know Newt prefers working with animals, but the trailer shows him working with Dumbledore. What motivates him to work with his former teacher? – Ginny Lemarie, Facebook

ER: A part of this story is about Newt’s call to action. One of the lovely things that I adore about Newt is that he’s just completely his own person – he doesn’t get pulled in to become a member of the tribe. People are always trying to recruit him, but he’s his own person. And yet, actually, the stakes get so high in this film that it’s really him questioning whether he can continue doing that or whether at some point you have to engage.

As for Dumbledore, he and Newt have always had this kind of wonderful master/apprentice quality and there’s kind of a joy between them. But Dumbledore’s sly. Dumbledore’s been recruiting Newt a little bit, and he certainly does in this film. I suppose the reason he’s pulled to engage is because the stakes are so high. That Grindelwald dude is causing havoc.

Since you already know what happens at the end of the series thanks to the Harry Potter books, does that inform the way you approach your characters? – Lucy Friedl, Facebook

KW: I would say no, because we – within our series – don’t have any clue where it’s going. You know, Jo will occasionally give us a little hint about something, but unlike the Harry Potter series, we don’t have books to refer to, so it’s a lot more, in a sense, like real life. You know, events happen and we respond to them.

ER: But it’s kind of wonderfully reassuring to know that we’re gonna end up together, right? Hopefully happily married.

 KW: We still have to play it like we have no clue what’s happening, though. And isn’t that fun? That the audience is a step ahead of us? They can watch us fail and misunderstand each other and fail again and struggle to come together, and they can think, “Aw, these suckers. They don’t know it, but we know it. It’s going to work out.”

But maybe she’s going to change her mind! Who knows?! She’s J.K. Rowling! She can do what she wants!

How did it feel to have the fantastic four reunited? Have their relationships changed since the end of the first film? – Wanda Atlas, Facebook

KW: This is the kind of question that’s gonna get me in a lot of trouble.

ER: Do it. Get in trouble.

KW: It was amazing to be reunited. We spent so much time together on the tour and working on the first film, and it’s always so exciting when everybody goes away and people’s kids get bigger and people fall in love, all sorts of things happen. It’s really wonderful to all reunite and get the gossip.

ER: Those first early days when we come back to work, there’s no work happening. It’s just life catch-up and David Yates occasionally going, “OK, there’s work going on here, team. Enough with the banter.”

KW: As for this film… [thinks for a bit] Things have changed. With all the relationships in the group.

ER: You said that really enigmatically, it was brilliant. The idea of the quartet... I think, momentarily, the band has been disbanded.

KW: But the concern and the bond and the intimacy is still there. These people are very important to one another.

How much of a role will the beasts play in the upcoming films? Please tell me Pickett has a hand in the defeat of Grindelwald! – clairk

ER: I don’t want to give away too much, but Pickett definitely indirectly – just because he’s brilliant, and does these brilliant things effortlessly – helps us out. But there are also new creatures. One of the things I enjoy most about these films is getting to work with the puppeteers and the visual effects designers. In those early stages, when we’re prepping in the months beforehand, we’re seeing all these wonderful designs, and you’ve had a sense of what the creatures are when you read the script, but you see the visual effects team – who are like actors themselves – come up with these ideas that are like your ideas on steroids. There’s one creature in this – a very, very big, huge creature – and he sort of plucks me up at some point, and so the reality of filming that is you have a guy called Seven-Feet Pete – he’s really tall, he has massive arms – just having to pick me up all day.

What is the relationship between Newt and Theseus like? Are they close? Does Theseus’s relationship with Leta Lestrange cause issues? – Kerry Endicott, Facebook

KW: It’s interesting that you would ask me that. [laughs] I mean, this movie could be called Fantastic Beasts and...It’s Complicated. You know, all these relationships are really dynamic and rich.

ER: It is really complicated. [Theseus] is an Auror, he’s very establishment, and Newt is kind of the antithesis of that. But what I loved, actually, was the way Jo had written their relationship. It was quite antagonistic to begin with, and it certainly is filled with complexities. I mean, his brother is engaged to this girl who he had a huge affection for growing up, so there’s obviously a real tension there. But one of the things I loved is, actually, Jo said to me seeing what Callum [Turner] was doing and how David was directing – there was a lot of love there – that she progressed the relationship as a consequence of that.

What was the most magical thing that happened on set? – KaralineT

KW: There was this PA who seemed to have the magical ability to deliver a dose of gummy bears to the little holding area for the actors at the moment in the day right when I started to flag. It seemed as if by magic they would appear. I often wouldn’t even see him do it. I would just think to myself, Oh, I’m a little tired, and I would look to my left, and there would be gummy bears. It was pretty magical.

ER: One of the things I find weird about filmmaking is you can be filming wide shots and big things in the morning, and then everyone stops for lunch, and you’re feeling slightly tired afterwards, and you have to go straight into a close-up or an emotional thing. That’s why, basically, I’m a coffee addict. Katherine gave me a lot of grief on the first film about drinking so much coffee.

KW: I’ve never seen one man drink so much coffee in all my days.

Have you ever met any actors from the original series, and did they give you any advice? – UrbannaGirl

KW: You knew Emma [Watson] already, because you’d worked with her, but the rest of us met her the day of the premiere. She came by and she was very sweet when we were all feeling very vulnerable.

ER: I met Ralph Fiennes just before we started filming, and he said what an extraordinary time he’d had, and how brilliant David Yates was. He said there are days when you’re in the back of a scene, and you’re thinking like, oh, I’m not really in this, it’s fine, I can coast, but [David Yates] sees everything. That was…

KW: Scary? [laughs]

What was the hardest thing to get used to when you were filming Fantastic Beasts? Was it something to do with the preparation for your character, or was it something on set? – mcflaherty24

KW: In this film, I wear a navy blue leather trench that I think weighs about 30 pounds. Maybe that’s not a lot of weight for a strong person, but I had to kind of get fit for the coat. It was sort of like trying to move through mud up to your neck. It’s like something’s trying to pull you to the ground all the time.

ER: She had a twitch, which was like, before every single take she would not be comfortable unless she fiddled with her belt.

KW: Yeah, because if I tied the belt really tight, it would kind of lift the weight off my shoulders a little. It was the wandwork. It was sort of like doing wandwork with someone pushing down on your arm, so I got kind of jacked just from the coat. I could start a workout – the Leather Coat Workout. Make a video.

ER: I think for this film, we were kind of prepped, but the most hilarious moment from all the Fantastic Beasts for me was on the last film. Katherine and Ali [Sudol] and Dan [Fogler] and I were all so paranoid about what Apparating was, and so we worked with this movement coach for weeks, the four of us. We would take it incredibly seriously and sort of run and grab each other’s arms and try to Apparate, and we would get so worked up by it.

KW: Nothing would happen – we would just still be there!

ER: We saw the film, and basically the moment you decide to Apparate, they just vis-effects disappear you. All these wasted hours and sleepless nights with Apparating anxiety.

If you could choose a Patronus for each other, what would it be? – janavalcke93

ER: I think that you would be, like, a really elegant foal. Because you’re incredibly elegant and brilliant and occasionally wobbly on your feet. It’s because I know your Patronus is a white horse.

KW: That’s true. And I know your Patronus is some kind of hound.

ER: Aw, a basset hound. Please don’t make me anything else other than a basset hound.

KW: Well, I think it suits how I feel about you in this film. There’s a song – it’s from a very long time ago, and it’s by Elvis. It goes something like, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” Which I think suits how I feel about Newt in this film a little bit. Just a no-good, dirty dog.

ER: She’s got it all wrong. He’s not a dirty dog.

KW: Do I? Do I have it wrong? Girls – the ones that look really sweet? Watch out.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/eleanorbate/eddie-redmayne-katherine-waterston-interview?utm_term=.xvR2LldGv#.stADbGpNY

My best wishes to all those who asked questions and received the answers from the lovely Eddie and Katherine!!

[kulvefaggoth]

HI THIS IS YOUR LOCAL GARBAGE GAY BOY AND HE WANTS TO VENT ABOUT KINGDOM HEARTS

A couple of days ago i had an enligtening talk about my favorite hot garbage series with a mutual and i kind of ended up realizing i had a lot of pent up stuff about it that i never really let out

While i did vent a little already i feel like i need to put this really out of my head because it’s been consuming me in a way. And since this site is designed for just screaming random stuff into the void i wanna take advantage of that for once

Now first and foremost this is meant as a very personal thing. This is not an elaborate critique or a well thought work. This is a vent and i want this to be read as a vent by a gay with a lot of feelings about video games. ESPECIALLY about Kingdom Hearts and some stuff about KH3. 

Now let’s get to the meat of this course of mind screaming

I’ve been into Kingdom Hearts for a very long time. The first game i played was Kingdom Hearts II (the original KH was kinda hard to find here for some reason) circa 2005/2006. Bear in mind i had no idead what KH was. Game advertisement wasn’t (and still kind of isn’t) a big thing here in Brasil specially if you were a poor kid like me. Hell consoles were pretty inacessible to most of the people i was close with and me and other 2 kids must’ve had a PS2 in the same time frame. The main way you would know about new or cool games was through word of mouth or recognizing brands like Castlevania and Mega Man. 

But i was always kind of a freaky little avant-garde child which meant i ended up having a very different taste from most of the people around me. I had like 1 other friend who had actually played a Final Fantasy around let alone something like Shin Megami Tensei for an exemple which i also didn’t even knew was a thing. And i’ve always tried to find something new. Something that gave me some new experience. I’ve ended up playing a lot of more niche games like Drakengard and the Atelier Iris games (god i still love 2 and 3 a lot) and it was this mindset that eventually led me into the game that had a bunch of random anime kids and disney characters in it’s cover.

To say that i was confused by KH2 is an understatement. I knew absolutelly nothing about the previous games. Who is this “Sora”? Who was the red haired man? Why the fuck am i fighting with a giant key? Again what the hell is up with the Disney characters? Also bear in mind i must’ve been 9/10 yo brazillian kid whose entire english vocabulary came from video games and a couple of songs. Some stuff wasn’t even the plot getting dense it was just me not getting the actual language. 

And yet it’s also an understatement to say the i fell very deeply in love with that weird little game. The combat was great. The plot had SO MUCH DRAMA and i knew only about 1/3 of what was happening at any given time. Keyblades where fun and ridiculous. Demyx was a bitch.

As soon as i’ve finished KH2 for the first time i used what little internet i had back then to learn more. I found out there was a game for the easy emulated GBA. It kind of sucked but it was more Kingdom Hearts. Being unable to locate a copy of KH1 for a while i did the only thing i could actually do: i’ve played and replayed KH2 to exaustion. I did most of the stuff except a couple of the minigames and gummy routes because they where boring. The feeling of learning how to fight against Sephiroth, mastering his moves and eventually being able to beat him with a Kingdom Key in proud was a big moment for me. Beating all the Hades cups felt great.

About a year later i was able to get a copy of KH1 and by this time Re:CoM was out so i got that too. Played both of them throughly even thought KH1 clumsy mechanics kick my ass to this day probably.

Then another year passes i hear two new games where coming out... to consoles i didn’t own and honestly i couldn’t justify the cost of to my parents. I was pretty bummed but still i kept getting invested. Hell i was already balls deep into this series and only dreamed of how it would take off in the future. I even remember kind of writing a “script” for a sequel that i tried to make with two other randoms in RPG Maker. Never went anywhere and i know in my heart it sucked but still. That was how into this i was. The prerelease hype for Days was killing me even. Member XIV? How?

Also side note: to my edgy ass 12/13 year old self the idea of playing as Organizattion XIII was literally a dream. 

Days came out and if you where like me in the good old days of youtube videos that had like 5 minutes at max then you know that video game let’s play were almost impossible to do. I had to get a LOT of info from second hand about what actually happened in Days. Then i ended up getting a “decent” pc and was able to emulate it with absolute WORST frame rate. Still it worked and i was able to know what was happening.

But BBS was a completly separate beast. PSP emulation was basically non-existant when it came out so it actually took me a couple of years to actually play it. I had a friend that had a PSP (and that to this day i feel only got a PSP because i kept raving about it having both a KH game and a Final Fantasy fighting game on it because he was 100% that little shit but that is completly besides any point) and of course he couldn’t lend me because it was pretty expensive around here and that’s a very useless tangent.

Anyway time passes as it must and just as Sora fell deeper and deeper into the realms of sleep i too fell into as much Kingdom Hearts stuff as i could. The complex theories, the AMVs (GOD the AMVs), the plot summaries for games i didn’t play, all that good shit. So for years i’ve built within myself this... tension i shall call. The grand plot momentum that mr Nomura seemed to be building. The misterious indentities the hinted at hidden plots. The nature of stuff that seemed very vague and opaque. And as the new games where released it seemed more and more that they where building blocks into the grand prize: Kingdom Hearts 3.

Now here’s the thing. I don’t 100% agree of the narrative that we waited “13 years” for KH3. I think if you where actually a fan of the series back then then each game in it’s own way seemed to be it’s own event. With that i want to say the while we ALL waited for KH3 for me at least it seemed it needed time to build up. 

Now here’s the thing. Between BBS and DDD being both in consoles i didn’t own and me getting an Xbox 360 (PS3 prices where absolutelly INSANE here) i seemed to drift a bit away from KH. While before i waited for new game releases with baited breath i now found myself very blasé about DDD. I was getting used to it i guess. Also high school came and a lot of stuff started changing. KH felt like a bit too connected to my childhood too i guess. I was still a fan and still loved it to death but KH ended fading away a little for me even if it lighted a fire in me when people talked about it. This must’ve been around 2010.

I think it wasn’t until KH3 was formally announced that it all came back to me. The drive to find and consume and engage with as much of KH lore and theories as possible. Also i didn’t really get into “proper social networks” as a whole until 2012/2013. Weirdo i know. By then consuming these thing was a lot easier. Internet was a lot more acessible. I could just open up a tab of a KH wiki in my phone and read away from there.

And there was this rush y’know. This thing of finally seeing a finish line. Not that actually expected or even wish for KH to end but it was KH3! The big one! And remember the tension i’ve mentioned earlier? It was always kind of present and it ended up skyrocketing during this period. I was already knowledgeable about KH but during this time i was almost a goddamn lore master. I knew the whole gig inside and out. Even the weird shit from DDD. The stuff they added to the collections just kept it going too. As did X/UX (which in my grand KH tradition i too didn’t play but i think most people feel me here).

All a big ball of complex yarn and plot and madness that would SURELLY burst with KH3. After all this time all this tension it would come. Release. Answers.

But to me that was the aspect in which KH3 failed.

Now don’t get me wrong i actually like KH3. Quite a lot. And Nomura did apparently tied up a lot of arcs. The lost are found and saved. Piss Grandpa Xehanort is dead.

But it didn’t release my tension. It didn’t burst it into the magic fireworks and ecstasy. The tension is still here. Hell the tension seems even stronger now.

And a lot of it has to with how KH3 seems to still be hiding so many fucking cards from us. Literally in one case. It was a vague feeling of unceartainty before but when i came through the Sleeping Worlds theory it just RUSHED onto me. The story doesn’t feel complete.

Now this is not the same as FFXV. I have a couple of... harsh opinions about it and it’s plot and story are front and center on the list. That story was absolutelly unfinished but not in the same way. To me it feels like Nomura just HID parts of the story. We are not getting the full picture. A lot of shit is really really REALLY weird. I’m still not over Riku’s sudden haircut.

But here’s the real gag to me. Nier: Automata gave me the same feeling the first time i played it. But then i came upon route B. And then Route C. and that’s when the TRUE game showed itself. Nier kept a lot hidden but it was hidden within itself. If you just keep playing you actually can access those hidden parts and eventually you reach your true goal. The actual ending. An ending so final that you might even like giving up your save data to help somebody else achieve it too is the only true option.

Yet KH3 has no such crowning grace. At least not for now. And that’s half the reason i made this. 

KH3 feels incomplete but in a way i could really love if the game eventually completed itself. Reading the Sleeping Worlds theory i was like “omg this makes VERY much sense. but if it makes so much sense why isn’t it in the game?”. And then it clicked. DLC. It’s 100% possible the actual plot may come as DLC. 

But an even darker thought crossed my mind and it’s filing me with actual rage: This is meant to be another game. This is the Powers That Be (Nomura, Disney, Square-Enix, take your pick...) unaturally extending this “Saga” beyond it’s ending point. If it does turn out that KH3 had some dream hijinks going on then it was 100% possible and BETTER to include that in the actual game. But since KH is known for having so many side games what is the harm in doing another right?

Well you harm the integrity of your plot. I know we say the plot is hot garbage but come the fuck on that is what is holding us here. Or at least it’s what is holding me for so long. Setting up another saga is absolutelly fine but breaking away for you ending like this is even worse. How? Why? The why is probably money but still.

Or maybe KH3 is just meant as that. There is no twist not weirdness. Maybe all that is by design y’know. 

This is long enough already. I’m tired. I started writing this at 2:30 am. It’s about 4am now. I slept very little last night.

This is a big colletion of nothing i guess. Not even sure it helped me. Oh well.

[d-reamingwideawake]

another writing contest, different site. this time loosely around the lore there. I used a pair of my own OCs and got first place ~

sorryIdon’tposthereasoftenasIshouldIjustneverfeellikedrabblinganymoreIguess I guess this sort of counts as a drabble though. I miss my bby Sinaht ~

While Esta, the daughter of his clan leader, possessed knowledge in every corner you could name, Sinaht had been less inclined to pay attention in almost any given class as a child. Her ability with stratagem and negotiations in particular were rather astounding, sometimes even better than her father's--though maybe she'd been forced to study those harder with her social standing looming over her. There were times as they grew older that he wondered if the other elf somehow magically absorbed everything she learned, to simply pluck from the back of her mind when a given situation demanded it. However, that was absurd. Even with all the known magic upon their vast continent, and despite the advances made by their very own region, such magics didn't exist. Or maybe he'd missed that memo? It wouldn't surprise him. Esta wouldn't take such an easy, ill-earned path though, so the notion was again, in fact, quite absurd. It wasn't that he lacked capacity for learning, but simply that books and such didn't suit him. His affinity with magic was passable; he was a brown elf after all and earth magics came to their race rather easily. Esta was more adept with magic than he was, but then, she was better than most elves at various, countless things. Because she had to be. It was both admirable and very annoying to Sinaht, but she was a dear childhood friend nonetheless and he couldn't hate her for excelling flawlessly. Physical activities, though, are where Sinaht had always shined and thrived. During sparring matches he nearly always came out on top. The man could even win now and then against his mentor and strongest elf in the clan, Ryfon. He could win out bouts with Esta...sometimes. Sinaht was one of the most skillful warriors in his clan, yet this woman was the only elf he had trouble besting. He blamed it on her ability to think critically while she fought without it slowing her down. Whereas he often let his muscles and instinct take over, only on occasion needing to scheme in the middle of a fight to get the better of his opponent. It was certainly no surprise that with his rank and skill he was often found helping patrol the north-east borders of the Dark Forest now that he'd grown into his more adult years. He was by no means part of the specialized group that dealt with closer patrols, but all of the forest's edge couldn't be watched by a handful of elves alone, no matter how good they were. If Esta wasn't held up learning to be heiress to her father, he was sure she would be at his side showing off how much better she was at topping off the magic on the sigils in their area, or chasing off the creatures that sometimes strayed too close to the outer edges of the eerie cluster of trees. Of course he'd been told all the stories as a kid. Who in Sine hadn't? To this day it did little to faze him. But, during the previous autumn season, there was that one time he'd watched a man suddenly break from their group to wander through the trees until he couldn't be seen any longer. He hadn't said a word, just veered from the path. It hadn't taken long for a piercing scream to fill the air around them, only to as quickly be silenced. His body was never even recovered. The memory chilled him. That incident gave credit to the bedtime stories, certainly, but Sinaht firmly believed the strong-willed wouldn't so easily be lured into some monster's clutches. While that had been unfortunate, it led him to often wonder that the stories never did tell of what exactly the awful creature used to ensnare its prey. Could it be a sickly sweet song, much like a siren? Or a whisper that burrows deep inside the target's ear, coercing them into actions they cannot refuse? Or were those who fell prey to it simply too curious for their own good? The questions were endless. The morning's trek was uneventful thus far. The sigils were strong and the Dark Night was many months away, therefore the less-than-friendly creatures that dwelled within the dense forest likely wouldn't fight the magics that kept them at bay. The troupe of elfin warriors were thinking more about what they might have for lunch than what they might do if a wendigo were to approach them from the forest looking for a snack as well. Crack-krrrsshhhhpfff!! A loud crash came from deep inside the forest, putting the men on their guard in the blink of an eye. The complaints of hunger and boredom ceased as they watched and listened. He and the others had drawn their swords, or other weapon of choice, and stood, waiting. Sinaht's guess was that the noise was a tree sent falling to the ground. And by something large enough to do it. The Dark Forests trees were by no means small or frail. Deep, repetitive thumping could be heard rumbling from somewhere through the fog. It was impossible to tell from which direction, but it was getting closer, that was obvious to him. Then a gravelly howl sounded and they had barely enough time to scatter before what he recognized as a gnennaron burst through the tree line, speeding its way toward them, and toward the closest town to wreak havoc, no doubt. The creature was twice Sinaht's own height, and ten times as wide. Gnennarons were beefy things, and had armored skin too. But they had a single sweet spot if he could just...he lost his chance as it sped right by him, nearly squashing him in the process. It appeared spooked, not malicious like so many creatures did that resided inside the Dark Forest. From his memory, Sinaht vaguely recalled these massive quadrupeds as being one of the gentler residents of the forest; they preferred darkness to light, usually, as well as took quite a fancy to how large the trees were--good for back itching, as well as hiding from the harsh rays of the daytime sun. The sigils didn't effect them simply because they had no evil intents. What could have happened to make it so fearful? He glanced back toward the Dark Forest as if it might give him answers, then shuddered at the thought of the gnennaron being chased by something even bigger than it was. He returned his attention to the problem at hand once he assured himself that terrifying scenario wasn't the case. All he knew was that it needed to be stopped. And fast. Grabbing the attention of a stampeding well, anything, was difficult on its own, let alone one which was several times larger than the elves chasing after it and out of its usually much calmer mind. As he ran after the giant creature with deft footing, Sinaht summoned a bit of wind magic to carry his already long strides even farther and faster. It being his clan's specialty, the effort to multitask was minimal on that front. They surrounded it on its sides shortly, but were unable to slow it down as it charged across the fields that would soon give way to cobblestone walkways and buildings. Orders were being shouted by the elf in charge of their troupe to get ahead of it, and above if they could, to distract the beast. He snorted. Easy enough. At least the first part was. His robes billowed out behind him as he focused the wind under him to propel him through the air at greater speed. He held back the urge to guffaw with laughter when he heard an elf on the ground shout "no fair!" below him. The brown elf brandished his sword while balancing upon the clouds of swirling air beneath his feet. He didn't wish to harm the frightened beast, and if the men on the ground couldn't perform the necessary spell, or spells, to halt it, he might just have to. Sinaht frowned, tapping the blade upon his palm in thought as he flew backwards so as not to get run into. The gnennaron clearly didn't care that he was floating in front of its face. He motioned how useless he was up here down to the others. Steadying his sword between him and the giant creature, Sinaht took in a heavy breath, hoping it at the very least wouldn't try to take a bite out of him in its confusion. "Excuse me, my friend. I don't want to hurt you. I know you to be gentle. I've seen your kind grazing in the open fields upon late hours. You don't want to hurt anyone either, I am sure..." His head tilted to the side, wondering if even his kind tone might calm it down some. "Why are you so scared, you silly thing?" It howled at him in response. That guttural scream could be heard miles away. It shook him to his core being directly next to the source--and also deafened and...wettened...him a bit. He let out a whistle and gathered his wits back about him. He wiped away some of the slimy spittle that had exited the creature's mouth and gotten all over his new tunic. "Excuse you," he muttered. Sinaht lowered himself halfway to the ground and kept pace beside the beast, deciding to search for that sweet spot he'd missed as it ran past them closer to the forests border. He sheathed his sword and wrapped the fingers of one hand around an armored plate on the gnennaron's side while he used the other to search behind it's front leg where the armor was not present. In hindsight, he probably wouldn't have been able to reach this spot from the ground earlier even if the creature hadn't bulldozed passed them. Just as he thought he'd found the sweet spot that would make the gentle giant relax and, hopefully, pass out from the pinched nerve, a magic shield was erected not too far ahead of the stampeding beast-- 

Of which it slammed into with considerable force, concussing itself and collapsing heavily to the ground. Sinaht was barely able to whiz out from where he would have surely been crushed otherwise. He landed with a skid upon the ground, further sullying his clothes. "Could have warned a guy!" he shouted over his shoulder toward the rest of the troupe as he stood and wiped more of the gnennaron's spittle, now laced with dirt, from his person. A lilting laugh reached his long pointed ears, which twitched slightly in response. He whirled with surprise at the familiar voice that came next, "As if I had the time, Sinaht Immeril!" His green and gray eyes landed on Esta, looking bemused as she walked up to him with only a couple elves behind her who had helped erect that powerful barrier in no time at all. He wondered if the men with him had done anything useful at all! "Is that the tunic I gifted you this past seven-day?" she asked, mock-horror and outrage laced each word. The only reason he knew she wasn't actually angry with him was the mischievous look upon her face. Anyone who couldn't see it would surely think Sinaht was about to get his throat ripped out by the clan's heiress. "Look how disgusting you've gotten it, and so soon!" All he could do was give her a shrug. How was he supposed to know a gnennaron would charge out of the forest and bellow at him while he attempted to calm its panicked rampage? "It's a tunic, Esta. It can be washed," was all he could think to say. "Or so I hope," he added with a bit of chagrin. He felt daggers being stared into the back of his head for speaking to such an esteemed elf so casually but couldn't be bothered to care. "Poor thing," he mumbled, looking over to the unconscious beast. Her gaze followed his and she nodded her sympathies, the tunic forgotten. "How ever did this happen? They don't exactly have predators." "Can't say. It was inside the forest when we heard a crash, and then it was stampeding out. Better than anything else that could have come out of those dreary trees at us, I suppose," he added. "Thank you, by the way." "I hope I didn't hurt it too badly," she said quietly, reaching a hand out to pat its huge snout. A grunt sounded behind them as the elf leading the troupe approached. "I apologize for your intervention becoming necessary, ma'am," he intoned, glancing sharply at Sinaht. Having not known their shared childhood, he was annoyed with him. He was from their clan yet he didn't know the slightly older elf well. He fixed his eyes respectably on Esta once more, "We nearly had the spell ready, but the speed we had to travel to keep up with--" "It's no issue," Esta interrupted,holding up a hand. "I wanted to be here in the first place today but my father...well. You know," she said, cracking a smile at Sinaht and digressing from the topic that only he, out of all the others here, knew about in the first place. She waved off the pair of elves behind her to take leave for other duties. "Those of you in this troupe may help bring the beast back to the shade of the forest where it should awake and wander back inside with no harm done. You said a crash? Maybe a tree?" "That was my assumption," he affirmed, wondering where her mind had wandered and interested to find out. The look on his face invited her to share. "I think it may have had a tough itch upon its back to reach and toppled a tree in doing so! Spooked itself, poor creature!" Her laugh trilled as she motioned for them to gather their magic together to haul the gnennaron back toward the Dark Forest border before it might awaken and cause another fuss.

[apsbicepstraining]

Parties Are Doing It At Your Gym: 6 Personal Trainer Secrets

It’s been months since you signed up for that gym membership, and hitherto here “you think youre”, staring at a screen instead of working out. Maybe you’re doing the right choice. Sure, sitting on your ass will almost certainly kill you sooner, but at least you’ll be saved the ache, lies, and body fluids you know a gym excursion will be generated. And at the least you won’t have to look at the smiling appearance of a personal manager like Ryan George, who wants to tell you that …

6

There’s Plenty Of Sex At The Gym

stokpic/ Pixabay

I’m proud of the number of buyers I’ve bedded … because that figure is zero. I did a dwelling period formerly with the status of women who indicated activity in the nude( I admonished her not to — the pinching alone !). I had a male buyer invite me to a threesome with his wife( again, I said no; that is not what we mean by a “partner membership” ). At a hotel gym, I worked with a purchaser who wanted me to rub his glutes and asked if I’d ever been with a husband( I told him that I wasn’t training at as massage ).

Body-n-Care/ Pixabay “No, I’m not trained in groin massages either.”

Less ethical coaches take advantage, though. There was one I worked with who went after every attractive woman that came in. One era, a girl came storming onto the fitness floor and requested every staff member where he was, but he was nowhere find work. A few minutes later, there was a raucous agitation: The girl didn’t know about the trainer’s reputation and found out that he had been hooking up with someone else. The gym pointed up canceling both women’s bodies for contending. They prevented the coach, though, as he had among the best sales amounts at the gym.

One high-end gym that I was working at is seeking to incentivize us to stay on-site all day by building a “sleeping” room for the personal teaches, ended with bunk beds. Yes, some genius thought it was a smart thought for groupings of predominantly young, attractive, and single trainers to have their own bedroom in the gym, and much to everyone’s startle and feeling, the chamber became a love-den. I did try the chamber out for its intended objectives on one occasion, only to have my siestum ended by two tutors running one another out. Eventually, we lost access to the chamber because the housekeeping staff rejects to clean it.

kadmy/ iStock “Seriously, how difficult is it to make the condoms IN the trash barrel? ”

One tip: Never go barefoot in a steam bath. At the place I work now, the steam bath is pretty regularly stained with semen. It’s most likely research results of jacking off pre-workout, which presumably drops your blood pressure and loosen you. Hey, they say you have to erased exclusively your sweat down after you’re finished.

5

A Personal Trainer’s Looks Matter Way More Than Their Suitabilities

Satyrenko/ iStock

Like most of the service industry, gyms hire with an eye toward beautiful. As a manager told me, I have to be what the customer wants me to be. To female tutors, he mentioned, “If it’s a guy, you have to give him a really tough exercising. When he’s finished, take him to the rub counter. Rub his legs, extend him out, and when you are doing the hamstring extend, lean over, expose a bit of cleavage and announce, ‘I’d like you to be my purchaser. What kind of pack can I put you down for? ‘”

g-stockstudio/ iStock “I’m very committed to your hap-penis.”

It’s pretty clear what kind of business he thought he was passing, and it didn’t involve a lot of careful vetting of qualifications. As a upshot, many of us didn’t have any. I get licensed through the NASM, but plenty of managers I work with haven’t. Some take multiple-choice online tests and use that, plus their visible muscles, to get hired. Don’t assume your coach is some former athlete or even passionate about fitness — numerous join up merely because they think it’ll be an easy-going job.

But all that isn’t necessarily the occasion. When I first met one high-end gym, one of my fellow newbies was a stunning fitness modeling. She aimed up going lots of scrutiny from the male clientele but couldn’t move that into paying clients and retire the field wholly. Meanwhile Adrian — a middle-aged, slightly overweight female tutor with a dense Colombian accent — sketched $250 k a year. She was at the top of her environment because she knew her shit, plain and simple.

Alex_Koch/ Pixabay “The quicker you touch your fitness aims, the quicker I thump my financial ones. So pick that up. Now”

4

The Gym’s Business Model Is Completely Dependent On Your Lack Of Motivation

tpsdave/ Pixabay

I can confirm some of the stuff Cracked joked about in this video: We genuinely do count on a certain percentage of members signing up but not expending the facility. If most gyms were used by anything close to the full listing of members, they’d be space beyond capability. One time, a major blizzard back in the early 2000 s basically shut down the city, but we stayed open. Tallies of lapsed members, with nothing else to do and against all anticipations, represented their practice through our entrances. It was the busiest period that gym ever had, there wasn’t nearly enough material for everyone, and it was a goddamn madhouse. Luckily, it’s fairly difficult to get trampled in a treadmill stampede.

Capitol Records Treadmill-related injuries have descent drastically ever since OK Go canceled their membership .

Beyond tricking the masses into memberships they’ll never exploit, we’re supposed to sign buyers up for personal conferences because that’s where the real money is. An hour of personal course might expenditure upward of $100, more than a whole month of gym membership. So once we’ve got parties in the fitness chamber, we tell them the gym itself will do nothing for them, and they need one-on-one time if they want to improve. Not because of our lore, necessarily: The genuine selling place of a personal manager is having to look mortal in the appearance and predict you’ll come to the gym at a specific time and appointment. It’s harder to stay on the sofa when you’ve became that personal and financial commitment.

mastermilmar/ iStock “You just knowing that, only give me your pocketbook. You need to earn it back.”

Sometimes they do fight dirty with your firmnes, though. Right after 9/11, the fitness administrator gave us this long-winded discussion and included a line he wanted us to tell potential patrons: The rationale so many beings died during 9/11 was that they were not fit enough to flee the buildings. It’s a awful statement, from what I heard. I never got around to applying it, because inferno is mostly one big-hearted steam room — can you thoughts how much semen is on the flooring? No thanks.

3

Personal Trainers’ Advice Can Harm You

Highwaystarz-Photography/ iStock

Here are the subjects a qualified manager can speak on, ideally with a shooting dance beat backing them up: posture and push, muscular persuasivenes and tenacity, sporting concert, cardiovascular conditioning, and flexible. That’s the ideal register, recollect — we may not know anything about any of that trash. We may exactly search rockin’ in spandex. Whatever the speciman, we are most certainly not powers on nutrition, reclamation, or anything medical. Yet in every gym you’ll find teaches happy to advise you on all of those circumstances no matter how disastrous the consequences.

gpointstudio/ iStock “No , no , not the muscles, that’s a common story. You have to eat another man’s nature to gain his strength.”

I know one teach whose patron was contending( due to coach incapacity, primarily ), so he answered, “Tell your doctor you have asthma and have them give you a prescription for Advair. That will help you with your cardio.” There was another who thought they were qualified to give diet admonition to a diabetic. One buyer is intended to get in shape for her August wedding, so her trainer introduced her in a sauna suit to run on the treadmill the morning of the wed to fit into her dress. And then there was the tutor who decided to fix a client’s back pain using “core exercises” that patently just made the agony worse. We scarcely evaded a lawsuit on that one.

Even I’m not immune to the occasional climb up my own ass. I used to tell patrons doing bench presses to touch the barbell to their chests. Then I learned this was shredding up their shoulder joints, so I stopped, but others still insist on it. Leg expansions are what everyone uses to build their quadruplets, but I tell people not to because they’re ruining their knees in the process — you’ll still realize a shiny leg extension machine in every gym. One trainer will tell you the lat drag got to go behind the cervix, and I’ve is evident that do terrible things to people’s shoulders long-term, but I’ve sounded other trainers insist that doing it in front of chest, like I say to, is also bad.

Gennadiy Kravchenko/ iStock It’s only a matter of season before it gets is the responsibility of autism and grease-gun violence .

You’ll never know who’s right until you bolt yourself up doing it wrong.

2

Gym Employees Might Slip You Steroids

Dario Lo Presti/ iStock

At one gym I worked at, the first Monday of every month, a person in a dres would show up, change into workout gear, and take a pitch-black backpack into the gym with him. The human, who we dubbed “the doctor, ” would do a 30 -minute session. At some quality, he would casually residence the knapsack somewhere behind the pull-up depot, and the fitness director would later take it with him into the role. For the coming week, all the Terminator-looking guys strolled in to the fitness manager’s office when the sales director wasn’t around. I got the find they weren’t considering that quarter’s revenue.

Ozimician/ iStock “Oh my divinity, I finally pictured Hamilton , and telling you, absolutely worth the wait ! ”

One trainer I know mails his clients to a medical doctor at an anti-aging clinic, admonishing them to claim that they’re suffered by low-pitched testosterone. The doctor then leads a series of tests which magically confirm this, and the customer, whose simply real evidence is a lack of swoleness, skips away with a law prescription for testosterone. You can even get your insurance to pay for diminishing your testicles.

1

In The Result, The Gym Is Selling An Impossible Fantasy

Milan Stojanovic/ iStock

Cracked has told you over and over that the number of people who lose a large amount of weight and keep it off is statistically zero. Now, I have worked with people who’ve transformed their bodies in prodigious behaviors, so I’m not going to say it’s impossible to lose weight, but it is much harder than most people guess. A huge part of that is because the fitness routines we prescribe you are unsustainable, and we know this. Most people will get through the first few days of a educate routine just fine, and we’ll tell them it will get easier, but in reality, it gets harder . If it starts to get easier, you’ll stop witnes outcomes. And anytime you take on a new project, whether it’s starting a fitness routine or a habit dildo business, it steals from something else in your life.

Eva K ./ Wiki Commons “In the end, it was my free time with my boys that I was certainly leaving the shaft to.”

I try not to given impractical possibilities: During my first had met with a patron, I extract as much info as possible on the person’s life-style, mindset, objectives, and exercising biography, then try drafting a intention they can actually follow. But if gyms everywhere told buyers the truth — that there is no finish line; you are able to never reply, “OK , now I have a six-pack, so I’m finished with my person and now I can focus all of my time on video games”; that maintaining that six-pack is now your part-time activity for the rest of their own lives; and the older you get, the more working here will take — a billion-dollar manufacture would disappear overnight. Forget rising health-insurance premiums — that’s how paunch would maim the economy.

Ryan George hosts The GymWits podcast and has a new notebook out , Freeweight Training Anatomy . Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for trash slashed from this section and interesting thing no one should ensure . Have a tale to share with Cracked? Email us here . For more insider attitudes, check out 5 Insane Realities Behind The Scenes Of A Weight Loss Ad and I AM Compensating For Something: A Bodybuilder Speaks Out . Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out If Gyms Were Honest, and other videos you won’t meet on the site !

Also, follow us on Facebook, and let’s get a speedy spout sesh in, bro .

The post Parties Are Doing It At Your Gym: 6 Personal Trainer Secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

Parties Are Doing It At Your Gym: 6 Personal Trainer Secrets

It’s been months since you signed up for that gym membership, and hitherto here “you think youre”, staring at a screen instead of working out. Maybe you’re doing the right choice. Sure, sitting on your ass will almost certainly kill you sooner, but at least you’ll be saved the ache, lies, and body fluids you know a gym excursion will be generated. And at the least you won’t have to look at the smiling appearance of a personal manager like Ryan George, who wants to tell you that …

6

There’s Plenty Of Sex At The Gym

stokpic/ Pixabay

I’m proud of the number of buyers I’ve bedded … because that figure is zero. I did a dwelling period formerly with the status of women who indicated activity in the nude( I admonished her not to — the pinching alone !). I had a male buyer invite me to a threesome with his wife( again, I said no; that is not what we mean by a “partner membership” ). At a hotel gym, I worked with a purchaser who wanted me to rub his glutes and asked if I’d ever been with a husband( I told him that I wasn’t training at as massage ).

Body-n-Care/ Pixabay “No, I’m not trained in groin massages either.”

Less ethical coaches take advantage, though. There was one I worked with who went after every attractive woman that came in. One era, a girl came storming onto the fitness floor and requested every staff member where he was, but he was nowhere find work. A few minutes later, there was a raucous agitation: The girl didn’t know about the trainer’s reputation and found out that he had been hooking up with someone else. The gym pointed up canceling both women’s bodies for contending. They prevented the coach, though, as he had among the best sales amounts at the gym.

One high-end gym that I was working at is seeking to incentivize us to stay on-site all day by building a “sleeping” room for the personal teaches, ended with bunk beds. Yes, some genius thought it was a smart thought for groupings of predominantly young, attractive, and single trainers to have their own bedroom in the gym, and much to everyone’s startle and feeling, the chamber became a love-den. I did try the chamber out for its intended objectives on one occasion, only to have my siestum ended by two tutors running one another out. Eventually, we lost access to the chamber because the housekeeping staff rejects to clean it.

kadmy/ iStock “Seriously, how difficult is it to make the condoms IN the trash barrel? ”

One tip: Never go barefoot in a steam bath. At the place I work now, the steam bath is pretty regularly stained with semen. It’s most likely research results of jacking off pre-workout, which presumably drops your blood pressure and loosen you. Hey, they say you have to erased exclusively your sweat down after you’re finished.

5

A Personal Trainer’s Looks Matter Way More Than Their Suitabilities

Satyrenko/ iStock

Like most of the service industry, gyms hire with an eye toward beautiful. As a manager told me, I have to be what the customer wants me to be. To female tutors, he mentioned, “If it’s a guy, you have to give him a really tough exercising. When he’s finished, take him to the rub counter. Rub his legs, extend him out, and when you are doing the hamstring extend, lean over, expose a bit of cleavage and announce, ‘I’d like you to be my purchaser. What kind of pack can I put you down for? ‘”

g-stockstudio/ iStock “I’m very committed to your hap-penis.”

It’s pretty clear what kind of business he thought he was passing, and it didn’t involve a lot of careful vetting of qualifications. As a upshot, many of us didn’t have any. I get licensed through the NASM, but plenty of managers I work with haven’t. Some take multiple-choice online tests and use that, plus their visible muscles, to get hired. Don’t assume your coach is some former athlete or even passionate about fitness — numerous join up merely because they think it’ll be an easy-going job.

But all that isn’t necessarily the occasion. When I first met one high-end gym, one of my fellow newbies was a stunning fitness modeling. She aimed up going lots of scrutiny from the male clientele but couldn’t move that into paying clients and retire the field wholly. Meanwhile Adrian — a middle-aged, slightly overweight female tutor with a dense Colombian accent — sketched $250 k a year. She was at the top of her environment because she knew her shit, plain and simple.

Alex_Koch/ Pixabay “The quicker you touch your fitness aims, the quicker I thump my financial ones. So pick that up. Now”

4

The Gym’s Business Model Is Completely Dependent On Your Lack Of Motivation

tpsdave/ Pixabay

I can confirm some of the stuff Cracked joked about in this video: We genuinely do count on a certain percentage of members signing up but not expending the facility. If most gyms were used by anything close to the full listing of members, they’d be space beyond capability. One time, a major blizzard back in the early 2000 s basically shut down the city, but we stayed open. Tallies of lapsed members, with nothing else to do and against all anticipations, represented their practice through our entrances. It was the busiest period that gym ever had, there wasn’t nearly enough material for everyone, and it was a goddamn madhouse. Luckily, it’s fairly difficult to get trampled in a treadmill stampede.

Capitol Records Treadmill-related injuries have descent drastically ever since OK Go canceled their membership .

Beyond tricking the masses into memberships they’ll never exploit, we’re supposed to sign buyers up for personal conferences because that’s where the real money is. An hour of personal course might expenditure upward of $100, more than a whole month of gym membership. So once we’ve got parties in the fitness chamber, we tell them the gym itself will do nothing for them, and they need one-on-one time if they want to improve. Not because of our lore, necessarily: The genuine selling place of a personal manager is having to look mortal in the appearance and predict you’ll come to the gym at a specific time and appointment. It’s harder to stay on the sofa when you’ve became that personal and financial commitment.

mastermilmar/ iStock “You just knowing that, only give me your pocketbook. You need to earn it back.”

Sometimes they do fight dirty with your firmnes, though. Right after 9/11, the fitness administrator gave us this long-winded discussion and included a line he wanted us to tell potential patrons: The rationale so many beings died during 9/11 was that they were not fit enough to flee the buildings. It’s a awful statement, from what I heard. I never got around to applying it, because inferno is mostly one big-hearted steam room — can you thoughts how much semen is on the flooring? No thanks.

3

Personal Trainers’ Advice Can Harm You

Highwaystarz-Photography/ iStock

Here are the subjects a qualified manager can speak on, ideally with a shooting dance beat backing them up: posture and push, muscular persuasivenes and tenacity, sporting concert, cardiovascular conditioning, and flexible. That’s the ideal register, recollect — we may not know anything about any of that trash. We may exactly search rockin’ in spandex. Whatever the speciman, we are most certainly not powers on nutrition, reclamation, or anything medical. Yet in every gym you’ll find teaches happy to advise you on all of those circumstances no matter how disastrous the consequences.

gpointstudio/ iStock “No , no , not the muscles, that’s a common story. You have to eat another man’s nature to gain his strength.”

I know one teach whose patron was contending( due to coach incapacity, primarily ), so he answered, “Tell your doctor you have asthma and have them give you a prescription for Advair. That will help you with your cardio.” There was another who thought they were qualified to give diet admonition to a diabetic. One buyer is intended to get in shape for her August wedding, so her trainer introduced her in a sauna suit to run on the treadmill the morning of the wed to fit into her dress. And then there was the tutor who decided to fix a client’s back pain using “core exercises” that patently just made the agony worse. We scarcely evaded a lawsuit on that one.

Even I’m not immune to the occasional climb up my own ass. I used to tell patrons doing bench presses to touch the barbell to their chests. Then I learned this was shredding up their shoulder joints, so I stopped, but others still insist on it. Leg expansions are what everyone uses to build their quadruplets, but I tell people not to because they’re ruining their knees in the process — you’ll still realize a shiny leg extension machine in every gym. One trainer will tell you the lat drag got to go behind the cervix, and I’ve is evident that do terrible things to people’s shoulders long-term, but I’ve sounded other trainers insist that doing it in front of chest, like I say to, is also bad.

Gennadiy Kravchenko/ iStock It’s only a matter of season before it gets is the responsibility of autism and grease-gun violence .

You’ll never know who’s right until you bolt yourself up doing it wrong.

2

Gym Employees Might Slip You Steroids

Dario Lo Presti/ iStock

At one gym I worked at, the first Monday of every month, a person in a dres would show up, change into workout gear, and take a pitch-black backpack into the gym with him. The human, who we dubbed “the doctor, ” would do a 30 -minute session. At some quality, he would casually residence the knapsack somewhere behind the pull-up depot, and the fitness director would later take it with him into the role. For the coming week, all the Terminator-looking guys strolled in to the fitness manager’s office when the sales director wasn’t around. I got the find they weren’t considering that quarter’s revenue.

Ozimician/ iStock “Oh my divinity, I finally pictured Hamilton , and telling you, absolutely worth the wait ! ”

One trainer I know mails his clients to a medical doctor at an anti-aging clinic, admonishing them to claim that they’re suffered by low-pitched testosterone. The doctor then leads a series of tests which magically confirm this, and the customer, whose simply real evidence is a lack of swoleness, skips away with a law prescription for testosterone. You can even get your insurance to pay for diminishing your testicles.

1

In The Result, The Gym Is Selling An Impossible Fantasy

Milan Stojanovic/ iStock

Cracked has told you over and over that the number of people who lose a large amount of weight and keep it off is statistically zero. Now, I have worked with people who’ve transformed their bodies in prodigious behaviors, so I’m not going to say it’s impossible to lose weight, but it is much harder than most people guess. A huge part of that is because the fitness routines we prescribe you are unsustainable, and we know this. Most people will get through the first few days of a educate routine just fine, and we’ll tell them it will get easier, but in reality, it gets harder . If it starts to get easier, you’ll stop witnes outcomes. And anytime you take on a new project, whether it’s starting a fitness routine or a habit dildo business, it steals from something else in your life.

Eva K ./ Wiki Commons “In the end, it was my free time with my boys that I was certainly leaving the shaft to.”

I try not to given impractical possibilities: During my first had met with a patron, I extract as much info as possible on the person’s life-style, mindset, objectives, and exercising biography, then try drafting a intention they can actually follow. But if gyms everywhere told buyers the truth — that there is no finish line; you are able to never reply, “OK , now I have a six-pack, so I’m finished with my person and now I can focus all of my time on video games”; that maintaining that six-pack is now your part-time activity for the rest of their own lives; and the older you get, the more working here will take — a billion-dollar manufacture would disappear overnight. Forget rising health-insurance premiums — that’s how paunch would maim the economy.

Ryan George hosts The GymWits podcast and has a new notebook out , Freeweight Training Anatomy . Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for trash slashed from this section and interesting thing no one should ensure . Have a tale to share with Cracked? Email us here . For more insider attitudes, check out 5 Insane Realities Behind The Scenes Of A Weight Loss Ad and I AM Compensating For Something: A Bodybuilder Speaks Out . Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out If Gyms Were Honest, and other videos you won’t meet on the site !

Also, follow us on Facebook, and let’s get a speedy spout sesh in, bro .

The post Parties Are Doing It At Your Gym: 6 Personal Trainer Secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

Parties Are Doing It At Your Gym: 6 Personal Trainer Secrets

It’s been months since you signed up for that gym membership, and hitherto here “you think youre”, staring at a screen instead of working out. Maybe you’re doing the right choice. Sure, sitting on your ass will almost certainly kill you sooner, but at least you’ll be saved the ache, lies, and body fluids you know a gym excursion will be generated. And at the least you won’t have to look at the smiling appearance of a personal manager like Ryan George, who wants to tell you that …

6

There’s Plenty Of Sex At The Gym

stokpic/ Pixabay

I’m proud of the number of buyers I’ve bedded … because that figure is zero. I did a dwelling period formerly with the status of women who indicated activity in the nude( I admonished her not to — the pinching alone !). I had a male buyer invite me to a threesome with his wife( again, I said no; that is not what we mean by a “partner membership” ). At a hotel gym, I worked with a purchaser who wanted me to rub his glutes and asked if I’d ever been with a husband( I told him that I wasn’t training at as massage ).

Body-n-Care/ Pixabay “No, I’m not trained in groin massages either.”

Less ethical coaches take advantage, though. There was one I worked with who went after every attractive woman that came in. One era, a girl came storming onto the fitness floor and requested every staff member where he was, but he was nowhere find work. A few minutes later, there was a raucous agitation: The girl didn’t know about the trainer’s reputation and found out that he had been hooking up with someone else. The gym pointed up canceling both women’s bodies for contending. They prevented the coach, though, as he had among the best sales amounts at the gym.

One high-end gym that I was working at is seeking to incentivize us to stay on-site all day by building a “sleeping” room for the personal teaches, ended with bunk beds. Yes, some genius thought it was a smart thought for groupings of predominantly young, attractive, and single trainers to have their own bedroom in the gym, and much to everyone’s startle and feeling, the chamber became a love-den. I did try the chamber out for its intended objectives on one occasion, only to have my siestum ended by two tutors running one another out. Eventually, we lost access to the chamber because the housekeeping staff rejects to clean it.

kadmy/ iStock “Seriously, how difficult is it to make the condoms IN the trash barrel? ”

One tip: Never go barefoot in a steam bath. At the place I work now, the steam bath is pretty regularly stained with semen. It’s most likely research results of jacking off pre-workout, which presumably drops your blood pressure and loosen you. Hey, they say you have to erased exclusively your sweat down after you’re finished.

5

A Personal Trainer’s Looks Matter Way More Than Their Suitabilities

Satyrenko/ iStock

Like most of the service industry, gyms hire with an eye toward beautiful. As a manager told me, I have to be what the customer wants me to be. To female tutors, he mentioned, “If it’s a guy, you have to give him a really tough exercising. When he’s finished, take him to the rub counter. Rub his legs, extend him out, and when you are doing the hamstring extend, lean over, expose a bit of cleavage and announce, ‘I’d like you to be my purchaser. What kind of pack can I put you down for? ‘”

g-stockstudio/ iStock “I’m very committed to your hap-penis.”

It’s pretty clear what kind of business he thought he was passing, and it didn’t involve a lot of careful vetting of qualifications. As a upshot, many of us didn’t have any. I get licensed through the NASM, but plenty of managers I work with haven’t. Some take multiple-choice online tests and use that, plus their visible muscles, to get hired. Don’t assume your coach is some former athlete or even passionate about fitness — numerous join up merely because they think it’ll be an easy-going job.

But all that isn’t necessarily the occasion. When I first met one high-end gym, one of my fellow newbies was a stunning fitness modeling. She aimed up going lots of scrutiny from the male clientele but couldn’t move that into paying clients and retire the field wholly. Meanwhile Adrian — a middle-aged, slightly overweight female tutor with a dense Colombian accent — sketched $250 k a year. She was at the top of her environment because she knew her shit, plain and simple.

Alex_Koch/ Pixabay “The quicker you touch your fitness aims, the quicker I thump my financial ones. So pick that up. Now”

4

The Gym’s Business Model Is Completely Dependent On Your Lack Of Motivation

tpsdave/ Pixabay

I can confirm some of the stuff Cracked joked about in this video: We genuinely do count on a certain percentage of members signing up but not expending the facility. If most gyms were used by anything close to the full listing of members, they’d be space beyond capability. One time, a major blizzard back in the early 2000 s basically shut down the city, but we stayed open. Tallies of lapsed members, with nothing else to do and against all anticipations, represented their practice through our entrances. It was the busiest period that gym ever had, there wasn’t nearly enough material for everyone, and it was a goddamn madhouse. Luckily, it’s fairly difficult to get trampled in a treadmill stampede.

Capitol Records Treadmill-related injuries have descent drastically ever since OK Go canceled their membership .

Beyond tricking the masses into memberships they’ll never exploit, we’re supposed to sign buyers up for personal conferences because that’s where the real money is. An hour of personal course might expenditure upward of $100, more than a whole month of gym membership. So once we’ve got parties in the fitness chamber, we tell them the gym itself will do nothing for them, and they need one-on-one time if they want to improve. Not because of our lore, necessarily: The genuine selling place of a personal manager is having to look mortal in the appearance and predict you’ll come to the gym at a specific time and appointment. It’s harder to stay on the sofa when you’ve became that personal and financial commitment.

mastermilmar/ iStock “You just knowing that, only give me your pocketbook. You need to earn it back.”

Sometimes they do fight dirty with your firmnes, though. Right after 9/11, the fitness administrator gave us this long-winded discussion and included a line he wanted us to tell potential patrons: The rationale so many beings died during 9/11 was that they were not fit enough to flee the buildings. It’s a awful statement, from what I heard. I never got around to applying it, because inferno is mostly one big-hearted steam room — can you thoughts how much semen is on the flooring? No thanks.

3

Personal Trainers’ Advice Can Harm You

Highwaystarz-Photography/ iStock

Here are the subjects a qualified manager can speak on, ideally with a shooting dance beat backing them up: posture and push, muscular persuasivenes and tenacity, sporting concert, cardiovascular conditioning, and flexible. That’s the ideal register, recollect — we may not know anything about any of that trash. We may exactly search rockin’ in spandex. Whatever the speciman, we are most certainly not powers on nutrition, reclamation, or anything medical. Yet in every gym you’ll find teaches happy to advise you on all of those circumstances no matter how disastrous the consequences.

gpointstudio/ iStock “No , no , not the muscles, that’s a common story. You have to eat another man’s nature to gain his strength.”

I know one teach whose patron was contending( due to coach incapacity, primarily ), so he answered, “Tell your doctor you have asthma and have them give you a prescription for Advair. That will help you with your cardio.” There was another who thought they were qualified to give diet admonition to a diabetic. One buyer is intended to get in shape for her August wedding, so her trainer introduced her in a sauna suit to run on the treadmill the morning of the wed to fit into her dress. And then there was the tutor who decided to fix a client’s back pain using “core exercises” that patently just made the agony worse. We scarcely evaded a lawsuit on that one.

Even I’m not immune to the occasional climb up my own ass. I used to tell patrons doing bench presses to touch the barbell to their chests. Then I learned this was shredding up their shoulder joints, so I stopped, but others still insist on it. Leg expansions are what everyone uses to build their quadruplets, but I tell people not to because they’re ruining their knees in the process — you’ll still realize a shiny leg extension machine in every gym. One trainer will tell you the lat drag got to go behind the cervix, and I’ve is evident that do terrible things to people’s shoulders long-term, but I’ve sounded other trainers insist that doing it in front of chest, like I say to, is also bad.

Gennadiy Kravchenko/ iStock It’s only a matter of season before it gets is the responsibility of autism and grease-gun violence .

You’ll never know who’s right until you bolt yourself up doing it wrong.

2

Gym Employees Might Slip You Steroids

Dario Lo Presti/ iStock

At one gym I worked at, the first Monday of every month, a person in a dres would show up, change into workout gear, and take a pitch-black backpack into the gym with him. The human, who we dubbed “the doctor, ” would do a 30 -minute session. At some quality, he would casually residence the knapsack somewhere behind the pull-up depot, and the fitness director would later take it with him into the role. For the coming week, all the Terminator-looking guys strolled in to the fitness manager’s office when the sales director wasn’t around. I got the find they weren’t considering that quarter’s revenue.

Ozimician/ iStock “Oh my divinity, I finally pictured Hamilton , and telling you, absolutely worth the wait ! ”

One trainer I know mails his clients to a medical doctor at an anti-aging clinic, admonishing them to claim that they’re suffered by low-pitched testosterone. The doctor then leads a series of tests which magically confirm this, and the customer, whose simply real evidence is a lack of swoleness, skips away with a law prescription for testosterone. You can even get your insurance to pay for diminishing your testicles.

1

In The Result, The Gym Is Selling An Impossible Fantasy

Milan Stojanovic/ iStock

Cracked has told you over and over that the number of people who lose a large amount of weight and keep it off is statistically zero. Now, I have worked with people who’ve transformed their bodies in prodigious behaviors, so I’m not going to say it’s impossible to lose weight, but it is much harder than most people guess. A huge part of that is because the fitness routines we prescribe you are unsustainable, and we know this. Most people will get through the first few days of a educate routine just fine, and we’ll tell them it will get easier, but in reality, it gets harder . If it starts to get easier, you’ll stop witnes outcomes. And anytime you take on a new project, whether it’s starting a fitness routine or a habit dildo business, it steals from something else in your life.

Eva K ./ Wiki Commons “In the end, it was my free time with my boys that I was certainly leaving the shaft to.”

I try not to given impractical possibilities: During my first had met with a patron, I extract as much info as possible on the person’s life-style, mindset, objectives, and exercising biography, then try drafting a intention they can actually follow. But if gyms everywhere told buyers the truth — that there is no finish line; you are able to never reply, “OK , now I have a six-pack, so I’m finished with my person and now I can focus all of my time on video games”; that maintaining that six-pack is now your part-time activity for the rest of their own lives; and the older you get, the more working here will take — a billion-dollar manufacture would disappear overnight. Forget rising health-insurance premiums — that’s how paunch would maim the economy.

Ryan George hosts The GymWits podcast and has a new notebook out , Freeweight Training Anatomy . Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for trash slashed from this section and interesting thing no one should ensure . Have a tale to share with Cracked? Email us here . For more insider attitudes, check out 5 Insane Realities Behind The Scenes Of A Weight Loss Ad and I AM Compensating For Something: A Bodybuilder Speaks Out . Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out If Gyms Were Honest, and other videos you won’t meet on the site !

Also, follow us on Facebook, and let’s get a speedy spout sesh in, bro .

The post Parties Are Doing It At Your Gym: 6 Personal Trainer Secrets appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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