#maybe i'm being unreasonable

[cicadasides]

still annoyed w my friends...they're both finally active in the gc again after they both flaked yesterday and now they're trying to plan something for friday...

[teaboot]

(I'm a security guard.)

[tacticalfiend]

played Mouthwashing and loved it, don't think I have anything that insightful to say about it though. I will say, however, that the fan reaction to it is incredibly disappointing to me. Like do whatever you want I'm not your dad, but I find it a little contemptable that a game clearly about sexual assault and gendered violence is being completely eclipsed by fucking yaoi posting. There's so much to discuss and explore about Jimmy and Curly (and Anya!), but I guess that's just too boring when you can hallucinate toxic yaoi!!! (BUZZWORD!! BUZZWORD!!). It's kind of incredible how Jimmy seems to just.. forget or brush aside the violence he's inflicted upon Anya in favor of obsessing over Curly, and a majority of fans seem to be eager to do the same!

[phoenixcatch7]

Security breach's story (including ruin) was super weird, right? Left a lot unexplained, introduced a lot of confusing elements, cleared nothing up, and made it worse with the ending of ruin. Very frustrating.

But.

I have a bold claim - in this essay I'm going to tell you that I think I've found the unifying theory of security breach, INCLUDING ruin. And no, it's nothing that's mentioned in the actual game.

It's 'Remnant'.

Now presumably matpat or some other theorist has made more detailed connections and I just haven't been able to find it, and I'm a casual fan at best lol. But I'm quite chuffed, so. I'm sharing.

Remnant is basically glowing soul juice produced by high emotions - children, trauma, excitement, suffering, death. Ectoplasm, essentially. It gets into physical objects and stores that emotion, like how a stuffed teddy is full of love or a torture device is full of pain. Yay!

Afton, during his killing spree, harvested this remnant from kids to fuel his plan for immortality (or something). He discovered along the way that if it was infused into a material like metal, then it could be shaped and, when combined with any form of intelligence ('even ai', he says!) it acts as a source of independent power 'that translates into movement, which is why things may appear haunted'. Ergo, animatronics. His perfect army of golems and test subjects.

The first round was, of course, fnaf 1, with the children literally stuffed into the suits to power them, which, yikes, horrible, and in a food establishment? Later he figured out how to skip the rotting corpse step and directly infuse metal, which made it temperature volatile and apparently hard to store. Anything is better than the first round. This resulted in sister location with the scooper, which could (as best I figure?) take the remnant out directly and store it for later use. It could also recycle animatronics, to scrap them without wasting all that precious soul juice that could theoretically power something forever.

Anyway, decades later, the same company is still running, and their precious 'animatronics' are now full on artificially intelligent robots with an army of drone cleaners and a dozen well covered up missing children.

You see where I'm going with this?

I think the glam rock animatronics are crafted out of the newest, highest grade remnant metal to bring them to life (maybe a little too much)... and to aid in the gathering of remnant to power Trap/afton, in his little recharge pod under the earth, at vannys direction. (And presumably all that after hour neon lighting, let's be real.)

The animatronics are all secretly equipped with track and destroy technology - roxy with her sensitive ears and x-ray eyes, chica with her stunlock voice box, monty with his metal rending claws and pouncing ability... Freddy with his chest cavity big enough to fit a small child. Like old times!

I swear the daycare attendant has infrared vision and very possibly direct access to the cctv, but anyway. (I also swear freddy collapsing on stage and triggering the safety protocol after hours was the only thing keeping him from joining, even leading the pack of machines to comb the place and take Gregory down to the scooper by trick or by stick, and Gregory almost made a fatal decision when he hid in the chest cavity. No freddy has ever been nice after hours, and there's no reason given why this one is.)

Back to the DA, it gives the implications of their old power core (freddys original upgrade and heavily theorised to have previously belonged to the only 'tronic out during the hourly recharge) a whole new meaning. Perhaps the setting of the daycare and all that happy sugar high children energy making happy memories was a perfect environment for a low level (experimental? Inefficient?) sort of... Emotional photosynthesis? It would explain why one half is the daycare and the other is the security patrol. Food for thought. Obviously freddy isn't able to receive all those benefits for a number of reasons.

(And it might explain the poor treatment of the DA, too, if the core was removed for some reason, and why sun is struggling so hard to keep his hopes up if it can no longer absorb and process literal happiness vibes for the best haunting ever. Poor guy always gets the short end of the stick. Maybe it also explains why the DA is the only animatronic to glow... because of the remnant metal? The extra juice they were supposed to have?)

Yeah, but what about ruin? How does it fit into this?

Well, for one, the new scooper. It's the literal gathering tool and storage place for all this remnant, so it's presumably pretty vital. Afton is parked directly above it in a recharge pod, sucking up all that sweet sweet juice. He's literally drinking children's tears, the monster.

And the mimic. Because there's a second part to remnant that only becomes relevant now. It's the worst and strongest emotion that can only be created through immense pain and suffering. 'Agony'. A black sludge of distilled horrors. And the thing is, it's highly infectious. But agony is useless. Unless it's combined with remnant in a specific way, and the resulting reaction is extremely powerful and dangerous.

The mimic is infected with agony. And it's found itself probably the biggest source of remnant in the world. The battery of (potentially) the whole pizza plex, and every animatronic inside it. (Moon may well have been the first infected... If the patrol animatronic encountered the mimic on its arrival. Ooh, now there's a thought. It's more likely it saw and tried to stop vanny from some unethical activity (it's a purely robot job!) And she... Prevented it from becoming a recurring issue with the glitch code. Ah, but there's no proof.)

Either all that remnant is now corrupted, or converted. My money is not on converted because the mimic is not spreading a plague of suffering across the land, and is instead trying to lure kids in again to replenish the remnant. And the poor animatronics are still clinging to blackened, crippled life.

It certainly would explain why the company just dropped the entire location without either bulldozing it to the ground or trying to scavenge and repair. With the animatronics infected with agony, it's far too dangerous to do either, and of course officials absolutely cannot find out.

TLDR: I think the missing puzzle piece is 'Remnant' to explain aftons presence, the strangely alive animatronics, the point of all those child disappearances Gregory was supposed to be investigating, the scooper, the mimic, vannys actual job as head enabler for afton, the animatronic's violent upgrades, the true goal of the pizza plex and why it was built over the sinkhole, but most importantly... how they're footing that electricity bill.

But hey ;D! That's just a theory!

[crossbackpoke-check]

tagged by ko @tofumilanesa for wip wednesday! big shout out to writevember for making me feel like i can actually call any of these works in progress… your guide to my emoji code under the cut

wip!

🪻🐈‍⬛ - the doc title is still just. YOWLING but i am like 7/8 of the way done with omega yamo fic and hopefully salem isn’t reading this so i can just drop it over a year later with no warning <3

🫃2️⃣ - DEWEY^2 P2!!!! she is almost done (i am lying) but she is so close i can almost taste it. sorry to my pwp that grew its own feelings baby

😇🤭 (🕒 -> 🕜) - rip i’m not telling you about this one until it’s posted but it IS complete aside from being ao3 formatted and the eight billion edits i inevitably do right before full-sending it

☁️💧 - cloud petey fic, which exists mostly as an embarrassingly large tag on a different blog and is condensing into a narrative about as well as water at 30° N/S. the time loop fic also falls under this description

eternally in progress (short list)

🌑🐕 - tyler borzoituzzi exists… there is an index of scenes/plot points… it plays like a movie in my head…

💯❕- fantastic! ‘verse

👁️👻 - stevie brandon seeing ghosts au, which has eight different (now nine i guess but you haven't seen the mustache adam post yet) plots. sorry

just. rotating like a microwave

🍎 - because they didn’t have a pomegranate emoji, this is what i used for the fic that feels like it should be a 50k connor bedard character study hanif abdurraqib/cathal kelly thesis about legends and mythmaking in sports and eating your young. yes i know pomegranates aren’t actually pomes and apples are but it’s fine

🦈 - the one cat da fuck they doing over there meme but about the sharks just like. in general. more on this at five

tagging @colap1nto, @songsandswords, @whitenikes, @gordiemeow, @acheronist, and anybody else who wants to share!!

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I would really like it if the hive mind could move away from the idea that the exception disproves the rule every time

there's such a thing as statistical distribution, the species is made up of unique individuals that nevertheless aggregate into identifiable trends, you can have something be true of most or virtually all people and nevertheless find exceptions. This runs the gamut from effective medical treatments, to the kinds of media people like, to gender roles and expressions, all kinds of things

This Procrustean effort to force everyone to conform to the standard and/or the delusion that the standard is just an axiomatic lie that can be tossed out on a whim are both ridiculous, you can have rules of thumb and broad heuristics that allow for all kinds of exceptions without being falsehoods

[keen-eye]

i love when people comment on a sam post (any form) and say something neutral/positive but start it with "i'm not a sam fan but"

[moongothic]

Genuinely, the mere thought that OPLA may have accidentally confirmed that Crocodile is trans is making me go absolutely apeship (also this being accidentally "revealed" by Luffy's actor saying things he shouldn't say is such a Luffy Thing To Do, it's absolutely amazing)

But I swear to god if I see one more news article or YouTube video titled "OPLA made Crocodile A WOMBYM?!??!?" I am going to nuke this entire planet out of orbit

[macroglossus]

ohhh yeah for sure i'm willing to do radical revolutionary things! i'm willing to work towards a better world unlike those other selfish fucks yeah iWhat? you're asking me to inconvenience myself very slightly? are you being serious right n

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

kindle for ipad can suck my fucking nuts bc what do you mean im on my fourth delete -> deregister -> download and my fucking textbook i paid fifty fucking dollars to be able to read on your application doesn't fucking work

[fluffacep]

I might be really petty/sensitive for getting annoyed by this idk but is anyone else frustrated when like you're playing a game or reading a visual novel (where you get dialogue options and stuff) and you're like. Eating a meal with a character or something. And you don't have an option to be vegetarian/have dietary requirements

Like I know it's a silly thing to be irritated by and it'd be extra stuff to write or code but if I'm playing a self insert character then they would not eat meat because I don't. And I personally find the idea of putting meat in my mouth upsetting. Idk.

[sisterdivinium]

I always find it amusing how some people seem to be earnestly shocked by how not every viewer falls in love with Ava from the get go or how some don't really like her at all.

Disliking a main character is not a moral flaw, nor is it a novelty in the history of humans reacting to stories. There are no rules pertaining to how an audience must be fond of a protagonist. Different people like different things, as the saying goes, and, regardless of whether the title of the show is "goofy" or not (it was Forbes' Paul Tassi that deemed it so, if memory serves right), some of us were reeled in by it and expected what it says on the tin rather than following a reluctant hero for a handful of episodes while she avoids precisely that same narrative we might have initially signed up for.

It's both a matter of expectations and values; I've said somewhere before that JC's gang is unbearable to me also because I find no common ground with characters who embody a lifestyle I have seen up close and strongly rejected. They remind me of people I loathed and who certainly loathed me back. Subjective? Entirely, even though I also object to them as characters given how mind-numbingly dull and superficial they appear to me, as they are presented in the show (flat characters instead of round, if you want to E.M. Forster it, but so flat, so thin, that they might be ripped apart any moment). JC's speech on institutions is all pretty and commendable, but it sounds empty when the big middle finger he and his companions are giving to a higher social class is... The remarkable "cause" of crashing at their places so kids can get high on drugs in raves around Europe, apparently. His professed idealism doesn't really go beyond words -- and it's hard to sympathise with that.

Of course anyone could say the OCS also boasts of void discourses, ultimately meaningless words that deform reality, obscure it, manipulate it (the halo bearer, the gift, worth, God, grace, faith...) and they would be justified in their protestation seeing as the church's words are proven to be hollow as the story progresses. I won't argue with you there.

Yet this is thematically relevant considering the show's title. That is what I had hoped to see when I first hit play on the initial episode some time in 2021 (I'm neither of the "original" fans who watched WN as soon as it came out nor of the post-s2 crowd). So when Ava momentarily chooses that other lot, that other nucleus over this one, it almost led me to choose another show (and I have friends who did, despite my guarantees that it would pick up the pace quickly enough).

Now, none of this is meant to point fingers or judge people who loved Ava from the start or even those who might have a soft spot for JC's gang. The only thing this little text aims to accomplish is to explain how we all watch the same thing but wearing different pairs of lenses -- and that is a quality rather than a disadvantage. It means Warrior Nun can speak to all sorts of different people with different interests, values and sympathies, and it once more demonstrates how foolish Netflix's decision to cancel a show with so much potential reach was.

And, if you must know, I came round on Ava later on thanks to the powerhouse that is Alba Baptista's portrayal of her, allied with the clever writing I was treated to in season two.

If the power to change a viewer's opinion and feelings over a character she had disliked doesn't speak to the sheer talent of the people involved in a project, on and off-screen, I really do not know what else could serve as a higher compliment to everyone that brought it to life.

[moe-broey]

Anyways I hope I'm not just the local Alfonse and Sharena blogger to you, I hope I'm also thoroughly Just Some Guy

[22degreehalo]

Hey, anyone wanna see someone react to the trolley problem as though they actually personally lived through it and were traumatised and and are irrationally upset at people talking about it like it's some funny haha meme but it's NOT A JOKE it was my REAL LIFE!!!!!

Just scroll down 👍

[maraschinocheri]

Killian Donnelly in another shot from the new production photography for Les Miserables in the West End.

[pa-pa-plasma]

typo in the title orz it's supposed to be "if you ask someone if you can have their food & they say no, do you:"