#merc discourse

[yesloulou]

wdym not one of the merc ppl show up in parc ferme to congratulate lewis?? 's podium?? literally what the fuck? im not even a lewis girlie but that's maddening

update: can't believe i endured two unwarned zak brown sightings for this but i did a little research. lewis has had 5 podiums this season:

Australia: no show (top left) (lewis asking where are my team) Spain: showed up but we only saw them interact w george (top right) Canada: a small amount (<10) of ppl showed up (mid left) Britain: no show (mid right) Singapore: no show (via @ formuLau16 on twitter)

idk what's happening but nobody should be on their own in parc ferme???

[blorbocedes]

saw a tweet that's like "redbull has driven the highest number of drivers to need psychiatric help" which made me think of how nico had been seeing a sports counselor since 2008 (and did therapy 2 hours a day in 2016), and lewis has been open about going therapy, and valtteri needing it for his merc years and speaking it ab it now, and george is literally campaigning mental health on men's health 2023 issue....... so like, maybe it isn't One Uniquely Evil Team and rather the cutthroat nature of the sport that requires drivers to seek mental health help (which is already stigmatized) 🤔 and portraying it like it's something bad further stigmatizes it

[ratofthewoods]

I sometimes do not understand how people cannot have multiple ships for the same character (not in a mean way I just genuinely don't know why someone wouldn't want to do this w a lot of ships). Like, you're saying you don't have fifty versions of this character in your head each one w different relationship dynamics? That's wild bro.

[fineredmist]

at this point i just block people for making fem fortress designs that i think fundamentally misunderstand both how the characters work and how gender works. They would not fucking look like that

[the-physicality]

can i just say something about sports reporting? i ned them to stay in their lane. talk to me about tactics and stats for teams and players. ps don't try to contribute to the discourse. i hate the discourse.

[shovson]

love learning about discourse that doesn't pertain 2 me or my interests its so beautiful

[randomnameless]

Let's be honest, all the people saying "incest has always been part of FE" are incapable of distinguishing the 3 flavors of incest within the series, especially as the Avatar always end up with the less bothering one : the fake one, since Intsys uses whatever poetic licence to justify the "non relation" of the characters, such as.. multiverse. And they know they can since mutliverse has whatever rule you write for them

3 flavors of incest?

What do you mean? The hard baked in game, aka Arvis'n'Deedee and Raquie'n'Eldie*, the "joked about but never explored" like all the brocons characters, and the "only exists if you wish for it and even then it's technically not the case" like the Avatar pairings?

*This one is also portrayed negatively in multiple adaptations but imo especially in FE5, Raquie leaves Delmud to Aidean and after the BBQ instead of reuniting with her son she goes to Leonster - where Nanna is born - because she was searching for Ares, but then she remembered Delmud so she left Leif, Nanna and Finn to search for him and disappeared?

I can't wait to see the crowd who parroted "Dimitri makes me ill at ease because he wants to kill a woman" react to Raquie ! Will IS be the new scum of the earth by writing a woman who isn't perfect? Or will it somehow be Siggy's fault?

joking, i don't want to see that, it'll be a shitstorm

[yesterdayiwrote]

This genuinely isn’t intended as a dig at anyone, but I’m genuinely intrigued as to how much success luxe brands actually get out of partnering with WAG influencers.

I know I’ve made posts and comments before about how I find the whole practice kind of questionable but it seems to be becoming more prevalent rather than toned down. I can imagine brands getting clicks out of it, but are they actually getting sales out of it?? Some things being promoted these days cost more than an actual race ticket?!

Surely none of it is making a mark with your standard, run of the mill ‘fan’? I’m just… perplexed by who it’s actually targeting?

[livetogether--diealone]

It pains me to say but his best possible move would be doing a reverse seb and going to the evil team.

It would be a risky gamble, he might end up crushed by max.... or he might just as well be be the one crushing max. remember their preferences of car are quite similar and aggressive, so I don't think he would struggle like the others

in ferrari he is only gonna get more disrespected and the influence of the spanish will grow now.

they already seemed super influential when charles was the one fighting for the wdc and performing better, so imagine how it will be now

people are too caught up in the whole vasseur and charles are besties to notice that vasseur the other day was calling charles inconsistent compared to carlos. this weekend he said carlos was a benchmark to charles.

charles got reprimanded by ferrari when he spoke once against the team. carlos and his entire family never had to apologize about anything.

this last two seasons I saw more respect and praise for charles coming from red bull than ferrari.

while vasseur is calling charles inconsistent, horner is saying charles is their biggest threath

people said charles is ferrari's favorite but I don't see this at all. even their social media seems to be more pro carlos.

charles is the favorite of fans, which is different, but even that might change. after monza a lot of people turned against him. very similar to how their turned against seb before.

Charles needs a reverse Seb situation so bad at the moment, but please not rb with everything that happened in these past few years i couldn't watch him there and cheer for him, because he'd get sucked in their policies and ways so much, from a moral stand point.

And tbh, him and max might have a probably spot on same preference for how they want the car to be, but he'll get side lined there too, even if he ends up outperforming max which I have no doubts on that because Charles handles pressure 100% better*, he will be stopped because I don't see Horner switching Max for another one right now or ever.

Charles is now in the worst position ever, yeah he's still extremely talented and has what it takes, but this alone in not the right team is worth nothing and he's "getting older" and his reputation is being run through the mud

* sky italy can say whatever charles would handle a real competitive season without making mistakes because he's scared or throwing temper tantrum at random when he's not first, one thing is a driver who's upset he's not winning that's normal another is being whiny and crying about it and calling it an absolutely shocking experience, and Charles loves a challenge

[yesloulou]

lewis: where the fuck is my team me: where the fuck is lewis' team ppl in my notes: stop spreading misinformation xx

[artbyblastweave]

Recently a post has been doing the rounds about military propaganda in the latest COD, yea yeah, sky’s blue, fork in kitchen, et al et al. This got me thinking about the shooters I actually play, and one thing that strikes me about the multiplayer shooters I play is that a lot of them dodge that same major discourse bullet by expressly grounding themselves in amorality and Kafka-esque dysfunction- a structural fingerwag towards their own content, acting as a paradoxical green-light to enjoy the game with no sense of moral injury. And there’s a big example of one that didn’t do this that kinda winds up with egg on its face as a result. 

To start with, I’m thinking about Team Fortress 2. The original Team Fortress, inasmuch as it’s possible for a game where you shoot each other with real firearms to be apolitical, was fairly apolitical. The soldiers had no markers of identity beyond their arbitrary team affiliation; the fighting was over no discernable real-life resource or point of political tension; the environments were decontextualized labs and facilities. It was platonic violence. 

Team Fortress 2 rolls around. Now that the general novelty of a 3d multiplayer class shooter has eroded, development stalls out on the following aesthetic problem; you can’t have semi-realistic militaristic character models rocket-jumping themselves across the map in the early 2000s. The cartoonishness is too dissonant when you’ve got similar semi-realistic militaristic characters in much more “grounded” games. Eventually they resolve this by taking the other tack, leaning into the cartoonishness, crafting character models so completely bombastic and over the top that no action taken in gameplay, no matter how absurd, will ever feel dissonant. This philosophy extends into the map design; the environments are farcical. Military instillations built mere yards from each other, with paper-thin pretenses of being civilian facilities despite the constant gun battles occurring inside. It’s self parody. And when the game extends to the point of having lore and worldbuilding, the idiocy becomes diegetic. This is a conflict fought on the behalf of idiots, by idiots, over idiot-goals, in spaces designed by idiots. It’s completely amoral, but it’s also contained amorality, since the fighting doesn’t spill out of these Helleresque Designated Pointless Fight Zones- and that leaves the mercs sympathetic enough that you can play them as protagonists in stories that take place “off-the-clock” without a ton of tonal dissonance. I can’t stress enough that the TF2 protagonists are amoral PMCs who work for callous megacorps. In a vacuum, this is not a well-regarded Kind Of Guy around here. There is some implementation of this broad concept that would invite a shitload of discourse that I’ve never seen materialize!

A lot of hero-or-character-based multiplayer games do this, abandoning any pretense of player heroism or productivity in the conceit in a way that shields them from a lot of moral and logical criticisms. Apex Legends and Monday Night Combat are explicitly in-universe bloodsports. Atlas Reactor and Rogue Company are cyberpunk corp-on-corp warfare. Dirty Bomb is about loosely affiliated mercenaries picking over the remains of an evacuated city. I think that Valorant is PMCs in a resource war (Not completely sure on this one.) The never-released Battlecry was expressly tied to actual nation-states, an alternate history where great powers fight wars via singularly-powerful champions instead of via traditional warfare. And in Battleborn the PCs were a hastily-assembled coalition of smaller hastily-assembled coalitions, which means that it makes perfect sense that any combination of these people might be fighting alongside or against each other, at any given time.

Here we see commonalities. Amoral participants. Larger governing bodies delineating clear fight zones centered on specific, if deliberately silly or petty, goals. Most crucially, PCs that are very loosely affiliated with each other, such that you’d see them in different configurations, fight to fight, day to day, as they’re contracted or shuffled around by the powers that be.

You know a game that doesn’t do any of this? Overwatch. 

Overwatch gets 80% of the way to being a superhero universe; it falls short primarily because Blizzard chose not to explicitly market it as such, but it’s got everything short of the purposeful brand designation- powered heroes, super science, codenames, Faceless Hydraesque terrorist groups with shadowy, powered enforcers. There are specific allegiances implied by this; specific policy and interpersonal goals implied by this that aren’t really reflected in six-on-six grudge matches in a smattering of inexplicably depopulated civilian environments. There are roughly half-a-dozen villains associated with Talon, four or five independent villainous mercenaries, and everyone else is a would-be superhero. Why is most of the core roster of the world’s premier superhero team performing some kind of terror attack in London? Why is a woman who murdered a civil rights leader trying to stop them, with the help of two avowed anti-Omnic mercenaries and three Omnics? Why did a cryogenics researcher weaponize her tech and come along for the ride? Why are a dozen envoys from tech conglomerates, grassroots movements, and paramilitary defense forces throwing down over a Gazebo in a charming Greek resort? Fuck if I know. Fuck if the writers know!

So, to round it out, I think that there’s a structural difficulty for multiplayer shooters to stand for something, or advance a philosophy, or whatever. The smart ones embrace this by shielding themselves in ablative nihilism, preemptively deflecting criticism by painting the gameplay as hollow and barbaric, but fun! But Overwatch- Overwatch 2′s tagline is “Get back in the fight.” What Fight? Why? Against Who? Call Of Duty might be a horrific mouthpiece for militarism and imperialism, but when it valorizes the military, it’s at least picking a side! Overwatch is just so strange to me because it’s somehow got the worst of both worlds- it uses these heroic, aspirational language and visuals to hype up a gameplay loop that’s ultimately the exact same kind of cynical, aimless abattoir as the games that are smart enough to explicitly be about amoral paid killers!

[digitulworld]

i dont understand tf2 ship discourse i just assumed every merc is in a poly relationship with each other and scout is their kid

[threewholeants]

i wanted to ask abt your sexuality , in a super polite awesome non creepy way , its says your a lesbian on your profile so im asking . i think im a lesbian too,i like girls and i dont think i could have any feelings or attraction to men irl but i LOVE my male fictional chracters, ive liked them since before i realised ive liked girls so idk if its just attacthments . but how is it that you process all this , im confused , idk what i am now?? ofc you dont hve to ans this im just curious . once again this is very icky questions so im saying it agin im not asking this in a 😈👿👹 way , okay cool awesome bye

ok hi anon!! plspls don’t think this is an icky, creepy, or invasive question bc i’ve been trying to find an answer for it myself recently!!

i’ve always Known i’ve had an attraction to girls, and i exclusively date women nd have since i was 17, but never really had any crushes on girls in media (and tbh, still don’t really(that cunty sabre tooth tiger from ice age was an exception)) which i’ve always found a bit odd!

i don’t want to use a word as Strong repulsed .. but it’s the best way to get my point across i guess! i’ve always been repulsed by men irl, but still find myself fantasying n writing abt fictional men. i think for me personally it’s the degree of separation that attracts me.. like . Knowing they’re Not Real let’s me apply exactly what i’d Want in a man (if i wanted one u feel?) onto them nd they then become the perfect vessel for my fantasy !! like if gojo was real i would Not be interested at ALL but that 2d man on my screen?? gimme him i wanna bite him sooooo bad.

i used to hold a lot of inner turmoil abt all of this nd used to think that i wasn’t a very good lesbian bc i only ever had crushes on male characters.. but u know what? i can Fantasise abt whatever i want.. i know in my heart that im coming home from work everyday to kiss my partner on her lips and that i Am good at being lesbians with them !!

i feel like i’ve just rambled and spouted absolute nonsense so im very sorry anon if i.. lost the plot and didn’t actually answer ur question very well…… but i wish u well in ur journey of self discovery!! nd please please know that ur valid every step of the way EVEN IF that step is forwards, backwards, or even sideways :3

i love u! and i hope u are well!

[aprofessionalwithoutstandards]

The thing about, for lack of a better phrase, "tf2 villainy discourse" is that no one is ever acknowledging the fact that the tf2 mercs are "the good guys" because they are funny and therefore likable. Like it's videogames we know killing people is always bad. Medic tf2 is excusable because he's hilarious but Cheavy (and co.) isn't because he's immensely boring. That's literally all there is to it

[shovson]

obsessed with when a team has some random ass drama revealed where there's some tension and politics at play and there's some puppeteering going on and u really dont know who is going to make it out alive in the end. no tv show could ever write a story like dis

[sylvan-librarian]

In response to the (really good!) story for Murders at Karlov Manor, I've been seeing some (thankfully limited) discourse on the same old tired argument that Magic story has no stakes because characters can die and then come back to life as a ghost or get (seemingly permanently) turned into robot monsters and then get better eventually.

People can obviously feel what they feel and believe what they believe about Magic story, but personally, I'm just so tired of this argument. Magic story is largely a marriage of high fantasy and superhero comics. These two types of literature have much in common, but one similarity stands out in my mind: the impermanence of character death. Comic book superheroes famously won't stay dead, and while this fact has been controversial for decades, it is nonetheless a cornerstone of the genre. And hell, even in The Lord of Rings - the god-emperor and founding text of the entire fantasy genre (for better or worse) - Tolkien's wizard OC Gandalf dies and comes back to life STRONGER ... nigh invincibly powerful (if LotR was written today, people would call Gandalf [and probably Aragorn for that matter] a Mary Sue).

This not my attempt to shill for a corporation, mind you. In contrast, I'd rather see MORE people complaining about things worth complaining about:

The increasing price of the game gatekeeping so many from the hobby

Hasbro firing 1,000 employees right before Christmas

WotC sending hired thugs to someone's house over a mistake the company itself made

The focus on the collectability of cards over how they play

And I'm not even saying there aren't aspects of Magic story itself worth critiquing. To note:

The enjoyability of its prose is inconsistent at times (reread the Magic Origins stories, for example)

The messaging is sometimes off (i.e. - the worst bad guys in the entire universe are folks who use science to make their bodies more in line with their view of themselves)

The stories - especially the big epic ones - are rarely given time to breathe, and the authors are clearly asked to do a lot with very little

War of the Spark: Forsaken

Maybe asking people to have a more nuanced take on the storyline of a children's card game is too much, but I think that "story bad" is far too dismissive. I remember reading through the All Will Be One stories thinking: "Well, there is actually NO WAY WotC is going to kill off ALL of these characters that got phyrexianized." Jace and Ajani are literally two of the main characters of Magic; Nissa, Vraska, and Nahiri are maybe less popular and important to the overall setting, but they all nonetheless have their extremely devoted fans (me; I'm one of those fans; bet you can't guess of which 'walker). I find it a bit silly to assume that the mass permadeath of named characters would be how the Phyrexian arc would end. Modern Magic is just not the type of story where the creators will merc half of their cast just to appease certain sentiments about its literary value.

This post has turned into a lot of meandering nonsense, but here's what I'm largely trying to get across: I wish more people would accept Magic story for what it is, not for what they think it should be. I'm NOT saying people shouldn't have standards for their entertainment, but they also shouldn't expect Shakespeare* - or even Tolkien - from a story about wizard superheroes written to provide a backdrop for a children's card game.

*I also want to mention here: characters dying and then coming back is also present in Shakespeare.