#maybe i thought too much into that line

[wraithinkorporated]

Just got done grinding to finish Side Order with the Final Pallette, and as I lost my second to last run to Asynchronous Rondo, Marina said something that I found interesting.

A smarter person wouldve screenshot it so I could put it here, but I didnt plan on making a post about this until I started really thinking about it. She said something along the lines of "The spotlight reminds me of the lights during concerts."

I found this interesting because I thought it was odd that Marina would associate her pride and joy, making and performing music, to the Spinning Horror Prison.

And then I started picking at another thing that I found odd about Asynchronous Rondo: the wretched noises it makes even before you approach it. Many have pointed out that it's """singing""" Ebb and Flow, which is a very interesting and cool detail, but Why? Why is it the only boss (I believe, since I haven't seen mention or noticed this from the other bosses) that is echoing one of Off the Hook's songs -- and not only just one of their songs, but the prolific Ebb and Flow? Sure, there are motifs of their songs throughout Side Order, but none of the other bosses are actively singing them.

The conclusion I came to is that Asynchronous Rondo could be a twisted interpretation of Marina's worst thoughts about being an idol -- as she said herself, the bright light being pointed at her. The panopticon represents that at any given moment, she could be being watched. The sudden carnival motif that plays in the song -- she's on a stage, putting on a performance at any given moment. The many faces spouting a distorted version of Ebb and Flow, the nebulous fans voices muddling together into one cacophonous symphony of her own making.

Anyway Im very unwell about this. And to be clear, I dont think these are Marina's active thoughts about being an idol. It was revealed that Order/Smollusk was made from the intrinsic desires of its creators, so this is likely just another implication of that.

[saltedbiscuiit]

Silly 15!skk comic that I sketched awhile ago and dont remember what compelled me to draw this

[axolotlclown]

We need to remember that Shubble stated that Wilbur would manipulate and gaslight friends and family. With this, we must be patient with streamers that were close to Wilbur. This was likely surprising and shocking for them. They may need time to come to terms with what has happened.

I have been vocal about how important it is for men to be critical about abusive behaviors. However, Wilbur had many close friends—some would even consider him family—and now they may feel they hardly knew him at all.

There is a deep stress felt by viewers. It is difficult to think we have given any amount of time or money to an abuser. Could you imagine a close friend right now? The pain and betrayal must sear. They need time to understand what has happened and come to terms with it. Many of them may not be live in the coming days (weeks even).

That being said, as time passes, criticism may be necessary. Complacency is not an option. Men that are willing to ignore abuse to protect an abuser are just as pathetic as the abusers themselves.

Let's give this situation time to breathe. I ask that we give patience and courtesy to those close to Wilbur at this time. But please do not forget that this happened. There may be a few streamers hoping to lay low and then drop a collab in a few months. Do not let them. This is too important.

[wanderer-clarisse]

I've reached the Helm's Deep chapter :>>

'Where is Gimli?'

'I do not know,' said Aragorn. 'I last saw him fighting on the ground behind the wall, but the enemy swept us apart.'

'Alas! That is evil news,' said Legolas.

'He is stout and strong,' said Aragorn. 'Let us hope that he will escape back to the caves. There he would be safe for a while. Safer than we. Such a refuge would be to the liking of a dwarf.'

'That must be my hope,' said Legolas. 'But I wish that he had come this way. I desired to tell Master Gimli that my tale is now thirty-nine.'

---

'Forty-two, Master Legolas!' he cried. 'Alas! My axe is notched: the forty-second had an iron collar on his neck. How is it with you?'

'You have passed my score by one,' answered Legolas. 'But I do not grudge you the game, so glad am I to see you on your legs!'

[wickmitz]

— THE ELECTRIC-FEVER REMEDY.

[bigkickguy]

some daan marcoh doodles around some dialogue bits I hit in game haha - gave me some thoughts on how one could think of daan if you only bumped into him at certain points? I don't remember the lines exactly but there were a few like this? 'Are you moving on? I guess we'll split ways here.' 'Someone has figure out how to treat these people...'

'You were very heroic stepping in there.' 'In the dark, your thoughts can really get to you out here...' 'Am... I... still a good man? Or...'

[poltergeist-coffee]

slimeriana yuri if you even care…

reblogs appreciated!!

boobs under the cut because idk if that’s something i need to warn people about,,, it’s suggestive??? aaah fem!qmariana is wearing an open button up shirt 👍

[lynxfrost13]

Thinking about my Penrose prototype mynah and Elster again bc I wanna flesh them out more..

I think I at least have names for them right now!

MHNR 001 is called Kosmos! As a prototype mynah variant built for the Penrose mission the technicians that worked on her affectionately gave her the name. She’s your typical mynah persona but in a smaller frame (still bulky by other replika standards!) and also has some additional ship piloting knowledge uploaded into her memory. Her three primary tasks are to pilot the ship, to mark planets/asteroids/etc that have valuable resources for the nation, and to extract some of those resources.

Btw Her favorite plush (they let her bring some for stabilization! They don’t take up too much space!) is a dinosaur with a grumpy expression. It reminds her of her new Elster friend :]

LSTR 001 was dubbed “Dorredt” by Kosmos because according to the mynah calling her 001 was boring, and while trying to think of a name she misread a package and came up with Dorredt. Elster doesn’t care if it means Kosmos will stop bugging her about potential names. She’s your typical elster, quiet, serious, and maybe a little awkward! Her duties involve anything involving ship repair/maintenance and land survey. Her and Kosmos both tend to the Penrose ship’s garden but Dorredt is better at handling the plants due to her less clunky build.

Her favorite spot to be alone is the storage area, sometimes she just sits there and reads the labels on items for fun. There’s other things she could do too but not a lot was provided for her specifically..

[seventh-district]

Sam: "Look at me. Hey- look at me a second. I know. I know you're tough. I know how strong you are. You have every right to be proud of that. But being able to handle somethin' doesn't mean you should have to. Least of all when I'm right here trying to help. Please let me help. If not for you then for me, because I don't like knowin' you're hurtin', especially when there's somethin' I can do about it."

Me, shaking my head, fighting back literal tears: "B-but it's gonna give you another headache!"

[tacroyy]

LMAO YELLING!!! this is from diana wynne jones to her editor—

Dear Miriam, I have been on the phone to Terry Pratchett who sent me a rough draft of a story which is going to be very good, but he is very anxious to know at what stage in the process he actually gets the money.

[astrolotte]

Genuinely intrigued by the potential of Peri and Irep's dynamic but only in a platonic way so I end up not vibing with the fandom's portrayal of it 😔😔😔

(No but listen LISTEN they were kinda-almost-friends when we last saw them in FOP, yeah? Now they're enemies, with both actively fighting each other, and Irep going so far as to try and kill Peri's parents. What happened? When? What influenced it? Did they ever become friends, or did it nosedive the moment the cameras turned off? What about Sammy? How do Irep's parents factor into this? Could it ever be fixed? There's just so much we haven't seen, and romance just feels like too easy a solution to me. Let their friendship be easy to break, fragile. Let them have to work to keep the connection. Fairies and Anti-Fairies are literally made to be opposites, so what happens when two genuinely and truly become friends?)

((and yeah I guess a lot of this could factor into a romantic angle but ALAS the fandom seems to be leaning heavily into the funny toxic yaoi angle 😔 I don't mind it! By all means, please have your very harmless fun! But it ain't my jam :P Perhaps I'll have to write a oneshot myself...))

(((see tags for more rambles i guess. whoops a bitch spoke too much in there as he always does)))

[renmorris]

I think my thing is like, I’ve yet to find a satisfactory answer for the Stanley Bill parallels that aren’t same coin theory. But maybe there just isn’t one! Maybe it’s genuinely a half baked plot element that was used for shock and building intrigue.

except like. Why is does the axolotl keep bringing up reincarnation? why does the time pirates' hidden page seen to all but confirm same coin?

[transmascutena]

thinking about how akio sees his younger self in utena and wondering if there's any fondness there. doesn't change the horror of what he does to her obviously but i do wonder

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[mislamicpearl]

Just improving some lines, don't mind me.

[puppyeared]

Gripped with ideas but….. the panelling………….