#mod commentary: yes. enough said | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

auspex · 1 year ago

Text

1 on 1 mark session recap! As always, sorry not a lot of context is given.

Mark first finished reading a book 'on thorns and their consequences' which was basically explaining how the sabbat came to be and their PoV on things and then with an anarch commentary towards the end expressing their disagreements. but on the first last page was red runic lettering which mark could not recognize and which sucked up his vitae when he placed it on it.

He tried to do some internet research and came across an obscure forum which claims to be for learning about obscure languages but actually seems to have a lot of vampires on it posting real and fake runes, kinda like testing each other

The runes mark was looking at were on there but the mod, who basically posts in every server, says 'you wont find anything about that in this life.' the posteris like 'cmon doesn't someone have any family who could help' and the mod replies 'ask J' so that smenacing.

idk if J is Julius? it probably isnt but anyway. mark has already reported reading this book to julius and so is gonna ask him about it cause he couldn't figure it out.

the rest of the night he spends teaching G -G is doing well and did remember his vowels : ) also explained to Gs sister how he made sure the investigation would stop and ask if she needed any other help. she asked if he could get them free or at least out of their current essentially prison sooner and mark said no but they would be out in a month to a month and a half. she didn't know how long that was. so he explained how torpor and weeks and months and years worked

she still didnt say thanks or bye to mark but there was maybe something where she was close to doing so

i love G im so glad he is doing well he learned a lot he is almost through the alphabet

ok now for the meat of the session. the next night he goes to the chantry to talk to cassidy about the books. Knocks on the door. no answer.

He is getting a bad feeling. represented irl by the ST playing absolutely terrifying music as i search for him.

In the chantry apartments there is an often ignored ghoul at the front and so then he asked her where Lilian’s apartment was (Cassidy’s best friend.). She told him. He knocked on her door. No answer.

Checks the cafeteria. nope. library. nope. physics department (where their circle head, Dr. White, is). Nope. He asks someone there if she had seen either of them. nope.

so i'm worried as hell

im trying to think what mark could do and im like. i cant scry on him cause i dont have anything of Cassidy’s.

and the st gives me a Look as if 2 say u do ur forgetting

But he kinda gives it to me for free hes like, ur wearing the same coat you did when you went to the movies

Turns out mark has cassidy's ticket. so thats close enough to being his so. mark does scry on him

its not super juicy but it is super concerning. Cassidy is by lilian in what is probably the side door in his haven that mark hasn’t been in. barricading the door. with a fuckton of furniture. and also pushing against it. lilian looks terrified. cassidy looks So Done With This Shit (tm). something is banging on the door.

so with that mark goes back to the ghoul and is like. So. Uhm. Yeah i actually have permission to enter cassidys haven yes. please let me in

she looks scared - mark put her in a real bad spot. If he doesn’t actually have permission and she lets him in he could get in trouble. but he reassures her that itis fine and his decision and nothing bad will happen.

so she says ok and goes to open the door (she is able to if she is doing so of her own consent, she functions as a key ig). As she goes to open it, Mark says uhm. they are doing experiments so when you open the door. back up. and she's like "okay?' and opens the door and immediately vine tentacle thingies burst out and she falls back on her ass and scrambles back, screaming

she gets away and mark engages in combat. its the same sort of monster, just smaller, as the one on his territory in the conservatory, that navigate by sound. it has a lion's mane around a beak in the center and vine like tentacles around it.

mark takes a LOT of damage in its first attack he had like 1 unharmed box left but he manages to win :)

cassidy and lilian pop out from the door and are like. mark is that you?

Cassidy’s haven is wreckt sadly. Mark's like. yeah its me. its dead. you can come out.

lilian is SO sad it's dead but she isnt mad at mark. its clear she wanted to subdue it but they had no way to do so and mark comments as such

she's like "i was sooo close " :(

cassidy looks So Done and is like. thank you for your assistance mark but how did you . get in.

mark is like. thats not really important right now, is it? cassidy says 'somewhat, but we can discuss that later'

mark says that unfortunately this made quite a lot of noise and the ghoul went screaming for help so time to get your stories straight.

theres a few other things said but then zach rolls up

If you dont know who zach is he is a newly turned tremere. dr. white's child. elevated into power due to his sire. he's a classic skater boy. hes head of security. he figured ALL of marks shit out when he broke into a lab - he is GOOD at his job despite his casual attitude. he says 'chill' all the time.

he skates up (yes skateboard in the hall) and asks whats up. mark says 'hi zach. it's chill, i handled it.' (Mark kinda likes Zach).

And hes like. 'whats chill? can you explain?' and marks like. looks at cassidy and lilian. 'they would know better i just came at the end' and cassidy’s like. looks at lilian as if to say to her. u did this shit u explain!

so lilian starts a story which is kind of obviously partially a lie.

she says that she was doing her research, developing off of Leanah's (which was the stuff mark uhm. stole and sabotaged for her). and she noticed this evening that some things were off. papers where she wouldn't normally leave them. but the chimera project was So Important (TM) for the chantry that she just HAD to press on. Oh Also I found this Lipstick (produces lipstick) that looks JUST like what Leeanah wears isnt that interesting! (zach has her put it in an evidence back for him). She says 'Cassidy even made a joke that maybe I should wear makeup more often." Cassidy grunts but keeps a poker face. he would obviously Never Fucking Say That and lilian is messing with him.

god i love them sm. mark also knows cassidy would never fucking make that joke

(explaining a story that may dictate ur fate as u are investigated. does not miss an opportunity to fuck w the bestie* girl!

she continues to say that she got the embryo (described as tadpole) out of the cauldron she starts growing it. and it kept well. growing.

she pauses there. zach is like. okay and? it grows and?

Cassidy steps in. 'when it got bigger than our couch we realized we had a problem.' (also hehe ‘our’ couch their friendship is everything 2 me…)

lilians like yes. then thankfully cassidy, with some assistance from mark, killed it. and here we are :) and then zach turns to mark and is like. what do you mean how did you get here how did you know.

and marks like Oh Well You Know "I was coming here for unrelated reasons, cassidy and myself are working together you see. And I had permission to enter. And obviously I would assist him in combat. *Coughs.*

he coughs cause i rolled 1 success on the lie T_T

zach is like. you have permission?? and cassidys like uh yes. 'as needed he can enter. its easier that way' so yay that ghoul won't get in trouble LOLLL mark got retroactive permission

even if each can tell he lied like. how do u call him on that when the person who was to have given him that permission said he did.

Liliana finishes up by describing how awful it was to be sabotage. At the end of her story. she says "Im sure leeanah would be very sorry if she saw the destruction she caused and would say so' and cassidy said 'i would not accept her apology' annnddd thiswent over my head but the st explained that was lilian apologizing to cassidy and cassidy telling her to fuck offlkdsafjlkdsjf

and zachs like. aight seems chill! (Perhaps all was not chill). lemme go in your haven here to see evidence of that sabotage

and cassidys like oh, please do let me clean up first :) and zachs like :) noo you should see my room haha its fine :) and then cassidsy like. okay fine. you do not have permission to enter my haven. which is something respected in the chantry

zachs like do u really wanna go down that route.

Cassidy appears to hesitate. Mark is FREAKINGGG out he CANNOOTTTT find those books mark had him gather. thankfully cassidy says. Yes. Yes I do.

And so zach says fine thats chill. ill see you soon- and he has one of his guys (he had a small posse with him) stay. cassidys like. well that was a mess. mark says yes. which is why you should start cleaning it. do you want help.

The person Zach left behind enters cassidys room and was making sure the pc was ok. mark is like cassidy is that ok?? and cassidy says 'oh, hes chill.' It seems this was the little fucker that set up the pc and internet for cassidy in the first place! cassidy makes friends with fledglings :) he doesn't speak but cassidy calls him Hack. because that's what he does, ig

Anyway. Mark helps lilian gather monster body parts to the center of the room where she starts some sort of chanting incantation to get rid of it. cassidy goes into his Side Room to start cleaning. When mark is done gathering body parts he knocks and peeks into the side hallway. cassidy tells him to enter and mark starts helping him put books away

well first theres this hallway which has 2 doors. mark enters door two with cassidy.

its a beautiful study room with mostly books, but also some old clothes, including a duster (COWBOY CASSIDY REAL...) and a painting with someone in a cuirass but the face is oddly blurry

also, all the books do not have legible titles.

with sense the unseen it seems the chandelier in the room has some sort of enchantment blurring those things out

there is also a TALL ASS stack of those notebooks he writes in. Mark glances at it and looks at cassidy who pauses and says. i need to call in a favor. can you just keep packing books away for 10 mins ? and marks like Sure

and hes left alone in cassidys study. but he decides to NOT snoop and figures he wouldnt be able to read shit anwyay due to that enchantment so he does literally just put books away.

Cassidy returns and unfolds a piece of paper that he remembers Wendy using before - its like. a bag of holding.

he unfolds it and puts it under the stack of notebooks carefully . the note books fall in. then he carefully, very very very carefully, folds it up. mark comments 'got a few years in there, huh?" he replies "A good deal more than that.".

but yeah theres also furniture and stuff everywhere btw, its a mess. The pack up books. During this time mark asked like. ok we cant keep these books about resisting blood bonds in her haven. and Cassidy is like. really mark. you're gonna make me haul them from the library every time ur gonna read them, and mark is like. sorry. yeah : )

They finish and return to the mainroom. lilian is on the floor, hands splayed, miserable. done with everything. cassidy makes a point to step over her.

cassidy and mark hauled books up to lillian's haven which was much smaller. and complained about stairs. together <3 lol

When they return hack is no where to be found. cassidy looks around and comments that the should not be in the back rooms. he does open the door to the second room but he asks mark to step back so he cant see in : (anyway mark ends up finding zach with sense the unseen (he went Invisible ig) and he was rifling upstairs through lillian's things

cassidy is like 'hack ive been through enough tonight please just give it back' and hack goes to the computer and types:

";)

I have to give them something, y''no"

and cassidy is like. sigh. will this make our unlives harder in the future. and he writes

"maybe a little"

and marks says “you know what that's fair” <- has done the same shit of finding something Smaller so it proves he was Trying but actually not

cassidy comments that he is sad about his clothes getting thrown around and wrecked - 'over the decades he had collected quite a collection, some of which are hard if not impossible to replace' and mark comments 'i hope the tv is ok too'

and upon saying that cassidy actually reacts as opposed to being stone faced "Oh no you're right, the tv!" and he goes right for it

drops to his knees to prop it back up. and theres a crack through a fourth of it. he looks so sad. mark turns it on and it does still display but there is that crack

mark is like its ok we can get another and cassidy is like ' but this was my first tv :('. hes sentimental about it my fucking HEART

marks like. im sorry. i can help you pick out a new one maybe. cassidy says he'll likely take mark up on that. and mark also says maybe it could be fixed and cassidy says he will also try that

but yeah its cute that he got attached to the tv T_T (edited)

anyway zach skates right back in after the bit with hack that i described above. and says. ok in the name of the authority invested in me by blah blah blah... everyone but you, get out please! (hack being that one)

sooo the three leave. And mark is like.well. good luck with everything.

Cassidy and lilian do not look very happy but give ike a half hearted thanks

mark is lowkey like. ok u could be a bit more thankful i saved ur ass and helped u clean up but OKAy . . . .

cassidy also mentions that they can still work on their shared research in a few nights

oh also mark finally got the opportunity to ask if they had showers and they do not and mark is like. wow that sucks.

Cassidy diddnt seem to care but like. dude. imagine only having washrooms. L.

thats the session!

#mark vtm oc

5 notes · View notes

houseofsannae · 1 year ago

Note

For the director's commentary, I think the stories of yours I find most interesting are Turnabout Court Martial and Equilateral.

Since I'm being indecisive, how about you pick whichever one of those you think you can give better commentary on?

:P You know, Anon, you could've just asked for both separately and I'd have never known the difference. That said, I'm going to pick Equilateral, because it's shorter.

Equilateral was written for the Entwined in Trine SoRiKai zine, which was my first time working in a zine project, so that was a new, fun experience.

Out of curiosity, how long after you all got back home did it take for you three to confess how you felt to each other? Aqua asked, drily. “The hard part was getting Riku to admit he liked both of us. We actually had to pin him down so he wouldn’t leave,” Kairi whispered, amused. Literally or figuratively? “Yes.”

This quote in the pre-fic notes is taken from Land of Oblivion, where I first touched on how Sora, Kairi, and Riku got together in KHΨ. It was my first idea for what I wanted to do when I came aboard the zine, and the mods liked the idea of expanding on it as well.

For a second, she thought she saw her face flicker like a skipped frame in a movie. Her purple eyes turned blue, her auburn hair turned blonde. “Naminé?” she gasped, but by the time she opened her mouth to speak, the other girl was gone.

Being as this fic is technically a "prequel" to KHΨ, there are a number of call-forwards to things that happen later in the series. Here, Kairi (and we) see a flash of Naminé in her mirror, indicating that Naminé isn't quite as gone as she wants to be, as we'll see in More Affection Than You Know.

“I love Sora and Riku,” she repeated, and slumped forwards on her hands. Great. Now what was she supposed to do about this? It would be hard enough telling just one of them she liked them, but both? She let her face slide out of her hand to land forehead-first on the desk itself. “Oh, fuck me.”

I had to ask the mods' permission to make sure I was allowed to say the fuck word. Fortunately, they were familiar with the way I write Kairi enough to have been expecting it, and also Kairi spends the entire rest of the fic in the company of either Sora or her father, so she refrains from swearing for the rest of it.

Kairi busied herself with retrieving the cereal box and a bowl in order to avoid his gaze. “I mean… I know you have experience in the area,” she said, casually. Her dad laughed. “I’m a little out of practice, Kai,” he said.

Kairi's dad is gay! I've alluded to it several times in other fics, but this was the first time it's mentioned. Kairi's got a gay dad!

“That so?” he asked, teasing. “Well then, purple is definitely more your colour than–”

I stand by this, Kairi does look better in the purple she had in her KH1 design than the pink she'd have in subsequent installments.

“If, hypothetically speaking, it was two boys, would their names hypothetically rhyme with ‘Yozora’ and ‘Miku’?” her dad asked, casually.

Yozora will never appear in KHΨ as anything other than a running gag. I have spoken. ;) "Miku" is both a Hatsune Miku joke and the ship name for Mickey/Riku.

“Kairi,” her father said, “I’m going to level with you.” “Dad, please don’t use the ‘public service announcement’ voice,” Kairi moaned. “Hey, I’m hip and cool,” her dad said, smirking. Kairi rolled her eyes. “Dad, saying things are ‘hip’ was outdated when you were my age!”

He's hip He's cool He's 45 (or somewhere around there, I don't have a solid age for him) It is the solemn duty of parents to playfully annoy their children.

I think this was the first time I ever had Kairi's dad in an extended scene. Writing the kids' parents is always an exercise in "what kind of upbringing would have resulted in who these characters are and how they act", in addition to any canon facts we do know about them (in this case, that Kairi's parent of unspecified gender is the Destiny Islands' mayor).

“No,” her father said, “We’ll get a huge tub of ice cream and invite Selphie over for a movie marathon.” He leaned over and put a hand on her shoulder. “It won’t be the end of the world, I promise.”

You'll note this is describing basically the same sort of get-together Kairi et al would have in Girls' Night. Equilateral was written immediately after Loose Ends, but I'd had the series ending locked in long before that.

Kairi snickered. “Yeah, but it’s a moot point anyways. Besides, I don’t even like girls like that.” She took a sip from her own mug of coffee and by doing so completely missed the incredulous look that flew over her father’s face.

Again, a call-forwards to the running joke about Kairi being oblivious about her own bisexuality, which her father of course noticed long ago - the incredulity is because he didn't realize she hadn't realized.

Boys, Kairi had decided, were really dumb.

This was the first line written for the fic. It was actually supposed to be the first line of the fic, but the tone it sets isn't the one I wanted for the scene with Kairi in her room - it's too frustrated and doesn't lead into her idly thinking about how much she loves them, only to realize she means it romantically instead of platonically. It got moved down to this scene, which also became the portion of the fic that was taken as an excerpt for the physical zine.

If she were Sora, she’d probably back off, practice for several hours to improve her performance, then come back later.

This is a joke about level grinding in a video game.

She was trying to figure out what exactly to say to the boy next to her when Sora said, out of the blue, “I heard Selphie has a new boyfriend again.” “Oh, really?” Kairi asked, at once irritated and relieved for the distraction. “Again? Think this one will last longer than the last one?” Sora shrugged. “No idea. What was the record again?” “Her third girlfriend lasted three weeks,” Kairi recalled. “The real question is, how long do you think it’s going to take her to figure out she’s not interested in romance?”

This is the first mention that Selphie Tilmitt is pansexual and aromantic in KHΨ. The idea that Naminé would end up dating her for a week before Selphie realized Naminé wanted a romance she couldn't give her had long been plotted by the time of writing.

�� Sora blinked. “She’s not?” Kairi shook her head. “I don’t think she ever was.” Sora was frowning. “But… if she’s not, why does she keep trying to find it?” Kairi snickered. “I don’t think it’s the romantic aspect that she’s interested in, Sora.” “Oh,” Sora said, and then a couple of seconds later, “Oh.” He reddened, and it was adorable.

Selphie fucks.

Sora opened his mouth to respond, confident, then frowned, reconsidering his answer. “Oh… yeah. It’s Riku. He’s probably going to panic, and think we’re just humouring him, or something. Good point.” Kairi nodded. “If we don’t have a plan to counteract his Riku-instincts, we’re sunk.”

I like Riku, but I also like dragging Riku by pointing out how his character works.

“Right,” Sora said, nodding. His face scrunched up. “Man, I wish there was a way we could send each other messages just between the two of us. Like, a portable phone, or something.” “Yeah, that’d be really convenient,” Kairi agreed.

I would introduce gummiphones after the timeskip between Seeker of Darkness and Mistress of Evil. This is a joking call-forward to that.

Sora took a deep breath. He was bad at lying. He knew he was bad at lying. Unfortunately, his mom also knew he was bad at lying. Which made it awkward to try to keep secrets from her.

This scene was not in the outline. Sora's mother doesn't realize that he, Riku, and Kairi are together until a ways through More Affection. So she can't find out here that they like each other. Originally I was going to avoid the issue entirely and just not have a scene of Sora talking to his parent, but the fic felt unbalanced without it - Kairi and Riku both talk to theirs, why not Sora? So I decided on this balancing act where Sora goes out of his way to keep the truth from his mother, and while she can tell he's full of shit, she doesn't know how much shit, and knows him well enough to know it's probably nothing bad he's hiding, and he'll tell her in his own time.

But he had a plan. He’d met Tidus on the way back from his talk with Kairi, and had begged him for help. Tidus had volunteered his services, always ready to help a friend, and had also promised not to say anything about Sora and Kairi to Riku or to anyone else. Sora figured Wakka would know by the end of the week, but hopefully the older boy would be able to exercise some impulse control over Tidus.

I don't think I had started FFX before I wrote this; this is one of the last times I had an excuse for writing Tidus and Wakka wrong if I had ;)

But he wasn’t sure how his mother would react if he said that he was trying to take things with Kairi and Riku to an even higher level.

Well, Sora, all you gotta do is say the word; you know they'll follow ;) I enjoy putting song lyrics in the narration quite a bit.

“Does she have a name?” his mother asked. “Yuna,” Sora blurted, on instinct.

Several worlds away, a fairy sneezed.

I'm also glad I put this scene in because this is my favourite joke in the fic ;)

That was very sensible, and also not the answer Sora wanted.

No commentary, I just like this line.

“Oh, one other thing,” his mother said. Sora jerked up from his thoughts. “Huh? What’s up, mom?” She leaned over to the fridge and pulled open the ice box. “I don’t suppose you know who keeps eating all my sea-salt ice cream? I could’ve sworn I had more than this.”

And a call-forwards to Roxas (and Xion) borrowing Sora's body every once in a while to watch the sunset, which would eventually be how Sora's mother discovers they exist.

Riku had had a lot of time to think during his year apart from both of them, but he’d done his best not to. Singular focus on his goal of reviving Sora had been all that drove him forwards; drove him forwards and kept him willingly blind to the effects his actions were having, on Roxas, on Naminé, and on… on… Riku shook his head, not sure where that train of thought was supposed to be going.

At this point in the timeline, the only person who remembers that Xion ever existed is Naminé (who is trying very hard to pretend she herself doesn't exist anymore).

Riku declined to comment on the subject. “So I went to see a therapist,” his uncle continued, respecting his silence. “He’s a bit on the younger side, only a few years older than you are, I think, but… The things I talked about with him made a lot of sense. Not just about my relationship with you, but about…” he trailed off, staring at the bottom of his glass. Riku sipped his own water. “About my mom and dad?” “Yeah,” his uncle muttered. “He said something like… ‘with all the problems in this world, you’d think there’d be more answers, but there aren’t. It’s not fair, but it’s the way things are.’ And that if I wanted to find an answer, I had to do it myself.”

The quoted sentences here is a direct quote from Final Fantasy IX; hinting that Riku's uncle's therapist is Zidane Tribal, whom Naminé would also start going to for therapy in Whatever Lies Beyond This Morning.

“I wasn’t going to just bury my head in the sand,” Riku said, defensively. “Yes, you were,” his uncle deadpanned.

I love Riku, and I also love reading him to filth.

“And it’s a bad idea,” his uncle added. “Take advice from your elders who made mistakes.”

Listen, boy, it's good information from a man who's made mistakes Just a word or two that she gets from you can be the difference that it makes She's a trusting soul, she's put her trust in you But a girl like that won't tell you what you should do

My outline says:

h. Riku’s Uncle: Trust me, trust them i. Riku’s Uncle: And for the love of nonspecific deity(ies), Tell them about it, tell them everything you feel i. Riku: I’m not sure if we’re allowed to print lyrics from a Billy Joel song

Basically Riku needs to give them every reason to accept that he's for real. ;)

His uncle smiled back. “Then all you have to do, is tell them everything you feel. Not,” he added, “that that’s going to be easy.”

Yeah, exactly!

Even if it might be taking them longer than it’d taken Sora to realize, or admit it. Sora could afford to be patient with them. They had all the time in the world. Kairi’s teasing, Riku’s sardonic smile, their laughter, their faces, everything he loved about them were here to stay. And, he sometimes thought to himself in the part of his mind that wanted to be rebellious, they both had nice butts. This was just an objective truth.

KHΨ Sora is an ass man. I have spoken.

Riku sat there, in silence, held down in a patch of sand by his two best friends, unconsciously enjoying the sensation of them pinning him down while consciously trying to figure out if they actually were making his wildest dreams come true, or if this was some sort of convoluted, extended way of letting him down gently.

Riku gonna Riku.

“It’s like a triangle when all the sides are the same,” Sora said. “Equilateral.”

“An mmf threesome by default,” Kairi agreed, smirking at Riku, who rolled his eyes. “A what threesome?” Sora asked, looking over at her in confusion. Kairi and Riku met each other’s eyes and privately agreed to do their best at maintaining Sora’s innocence for as long as possible.

And thus began Kairi and Riku's quest to prevent Sora from acting his age, which would eventually come to a head in Adjustments.

“Of course not, my Princess,” Riku said, taking her hand as she turned bright red once more. “Nicknames are cheating,” she muttered. Riku smirked. “Sorry, Kairi.” “I didn’t say ‘stop’,” she added in exactly the same tone.

This bit is just to point out that while Kairi does get flustered over being called "Princess" as a nickname, she does actually enjoy it.

The news would come out to Selphie, regardless, and Kairi knew there’d be a reckoning if it didn’t reach Selphie’s ears through Kairi’s lips, so she’d taken him up on the offer. Her father was fetching the ice cream, and Kairi was fetching Selphie, assuming she wasn’t busy with her newest partner (Kairi had long since learned to knock before entering).

Selphie fucks.

The road to Selphie’s house passed by Sora’s, and Kairi was pleased to see the boy himself, sitting on the branch of a tall tree in the yard, watching the sunset. He had a stick of something that was probably an ice cream bar in his hand. Kairi almost called out to him, but something held her back. This moment seemed… private, almost. Like there was a spell over the area that she would break if she wasn’t careful. There was a brief pulse in her heart, a momentary feeling of warmth. “Naminé?” she asked, placing a hand over her heart, but there was no response. She looked back at Sora, up on the branch. Slowly, almost mechanically, he took a bite of the ice cream. There was a strange air of loneliness around him, almost melancholy. But it was private. Not her place to intrude.

And here we see Roxas doing what he'd be doing in More Affection; eating Sora's mom's sea-salt ice cream and watching the sunset. I don't have a set amount of time between Equilateral and More Affection, but you could easily consider it only a couple of days.

And that's everything! This was fun, thank you for asking for it! ^_^

#kingdom hearts Ψ #director's commentary

1 note · View note

longlivefeedback · 1 year ago

Text

@afriendlyirin you know you can always just block this blog, right? Why have you not already done so when you take everything we do on this blog in bad faith?

My response to xxsksxxx was sincere and not intended to be a jibe at them. If you're reading it as a passive aggressive response, I can chalk it down to the lack of visual/non verbal cues this time, and we all know that going off written communication alone can lead to misunderstandings. But, you've clearly taken issue with what or how things are said on this blog numerous times as you have reblogged our stuff with added commentary quite a few times and always with a backhanded criticism of what we've written included. Based on this past history of your behaviour, I cannot help but conclude that you're negatively biased against us, and anything we do or say will be taken in bad faith and seen as wrong. Unless you're actively trying to pick a fight with this blog, please block this blog for both our sakes.

Next, I've never tried to present anything on this blog as objectively the best thing ever and "spreading this idea as if it's objectively the best way to learn how to comment." I'm well aware that viewing comments as a form letter doesn't work for everyone. It'd be kind of sad and weird if it did. But are you saying that we should stop giving these suggestions because they don't work for everyone? Must it be a 100% success rate for something like this? We don't track success rate or anything like that, but for people who have been kind enough to respond in tags and the like, it seems like the advice we give on this blog has been helpful to at least some people, so why shouldn't we continue?

I thought it would be obvious and understood that the content on this blog is mostly advice, and that advice can be taken or left at the discretion of the person receiving it. Sorry if I didn't put a big disclaimer at the top of every post saying how everything is the personal opinion of one of the mods of the blog, please take it or leave, and use your own judgement, etc. My bad. I should have known that anything said on this blog would be akin to shoving tHe BeSt WaY tO cOmMeNt EvEr down afriendlyirin's throat.

And yes, in case you couldn't tell, I'm being super rude and passive aggressive to you right now 💅💋

Lastly, if you don't like people giving you comments because the comments they leave are too generic and form-like, unless they've told you "longlivefeedback told me to comment like this and I am incapable of learning any other way to comment," I fail to see how it's my problem. Maybe you should just talk to them instead of this blog. $10 says that at least 80% of them have never even heard of us.

But maybe you can't get them to talk back to you because here's some feedback for you: You're really unpleasant to talk to.

Please block us.

If you comment on some fanfics and not others, pick an answer that applies most commonly to when you don't comment.

2K notes · View notes

lordoffireandflame · 1 year ago

Text

Angry opinions on Downpour

Downpour was fun, I have angry opinions on it.

I think a major issue with Rain World: Downpour is that it spits in the face of the old game's themes. Like, when you play the old game, you FEEL helpless, you're a reasonably intelligent tool-using prey animal that is in an environment that your species isn't suitably acclimated to and you will die if you don't adapt.

I've seen people argue that the reason why the other slugcats are so overpowered is because an iterator made them so, but that just has has the same vibe as 'a wizard did it'. The Hunter made sense as essentially a supersoldier compared to the other slugs, it wasn't overpowered, you were still hunted, but you were reasonably fast and strong.

The ones that make the most sense are Rivulet (Rivulet should have just been able to breathe underwater and not just thirty seconds, the stress should have been on the more advanced water predators, not the drowning. Hell, have the Rivulet be immune to leeches) and the Saint (at least until it got God powers).

Other issues:

Artificer just feels like it was made by a guy who didn't know how to behave around scavs, died one too many times and coded in this abomination. This was the only campaign I never finished (unless you count the modded attempts). The story feels infantile and pathetic.

Gourmand's okay. I hated the story, though. Not much else to say here other than it feels too... well, 'feel good' for Rain World.

Spearmaster was ok, the only slugcat where I actually killed a red lizard with just spears.

The Saint was so fun, zipping around the structures was legitimately the best part of the game. WTF was the rubicon, though.

-Okay, I need to talk about the new Survivor and Monk endings. The base game is extremely nihilistic and vague, there's barely any good feelings here. And that's okay! Art doesn't really have to make you feel happy or satisfied. The new endings completely change the tone of the base game and, as said before, makes everything all 'feel good' instead of the enlightened struggle in the base game.

They gendered No Significant Harassment D:

Just the plot holes in general.

I actually liked the idea of Five Pebbles missing the ancients in his cities, but it clashes with what Moon said in the base game. You could make the argument of faulty memory or just being unreliable but... I don't see any reason as to why she would specifically be wrong about that one specific detail when we believe everything else she says.

Bad dialogue, 'And as your Big Sis, you know how protective I am of you!~' for example.

Honestly, I really don't like Five Pebbles' characterization here. In the base game he is best described as cold, condescending, but overall polite. He only turns rude and extremely patronizing during the Monk's campaign while barely keeping that veneer of helpfulness, he's annoyed and tired and wants to be left alone. I get his behavior in the Spearmaster campaign, but the others? Ehh... he's just kind of an asshole. Especially towards the Gourmand. I get it, Gourmand is showing obvious signs of gluttony, but if Five Pebbles was insulting the Gourmand for that sin, he should have been just as cruel towards the Artificer (yes, he calls her a barbarian and a beast a few times, but that isn't enough) for embodying violence.

My god do I hate the developer commentary. 'We didn't want to make out Five Pebbles to be seen as a villain, we wanted to make him morally ambiguous ' yo, anyone who has ever played the game and has read the lore knows Five Pebbles is morally ambiguous. Don't think we're stupid.

Looks to the Moon felt flanderized as well. People make her out to be some 'nice girl' in the base game. She can be nice, but she is still an iterator and has the similar attitudes Pebbles has. A better description of her is that she is polite, not necessarily nice. In the DLC she's turned into... well, I don't really know how to describe it other than it feels like the character traits the fans hyper fixated on got more and more exaggerated.

I don't like the new Echo names, they make too much sense. The base game Echoes' names seemed nonsensical, and that was part of their charm.

Honestly, I don't really feel like a small animal trying to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, I feel like the hero or a villain, which isn't what Rain World is about. It's about survival and adaptation that ultimately leaves to enlightenment.

There's more to say, but I'm done for now. I enjoyed the DLC, but the story issues were glaringly obvious the more I thought about it. The accessibility options were a good add on, but the story and characters. Saint was the best one by far.

Yeeks <3

#rain world spoilers #rain world downpour #rw critical #downpour critical #downpour spoilers #base game rain world

0 notes

sdr2lovemail · 3 years ago

Note

A love confession letter from Rouxls Kaard? They're so pretty 😩

Hey bro! Haven't heard from you in a minute! Hope everything is well with you.

Yes fuel my obsession with writing for Rouxls. I've noticed that different fanfic writers think that he's made of different material. I've seen goo, diamonds, and I think porcelain. I personally am a proud believer of gooey Rouxls. Careful he'll stain your clothes.

Also I could write a whole fic about how I think it would be for him to go into the Light World, and I just might.

Alright enough commentary from me. I hope you enjoy your letter friend!

⚔Mod Peko⚔

A letter with a rose printed into the wax seal

To mine dearest Lightener,

Everytime I seeth you I cannot help but go blue in the face! I just feel so bashful when you presseth thine hand against my shoulder in greeting. You seem to make Castle Town a brighter place with thine very presence!

Now Lightener, I haveth a very serious inquiry to bestow upon you. I hopeth what I have to sayeth does not ruin the exquisite bond we have.

I wouldst like to begine a courtship with you! I wouldst take you on quite the lavish outing. I mean as lavish as walking around Castle Town couldst be. I wish I could explore other places with mine own legs.

While yes, I could rideth around in thy pocket and exploreth other Dark Worlds but I would love to be with you personally. And I wouldst turn to stone anyway.

And I’m not sure what wouldst befall if I were to enter the Light World! What if I were to die the second I step foot in your world! Then our courting would cometh to a very quicke closure.

Though we couldst go to the bakery or maybe even the café in Castle Town. I shall be paying of course as a proper gentleman should!

Or perhapst we could have a romantic walk through the Dark Forest. That’s something you Lighteners enjoy right? But if you wouldst prefer to stay in, that could be achieved too. That green worm Ralsei said he would prepareth me a room in his castle. Probably shall use me as an inhouse babysitter for that Royal Pain!

After we concludeth our time out, perhapst if thou are alright with it of course, could shareth a kiss before I walk you back to the fountain to bringeth you home!

Well I do hopeth you consider mine offer my dear Lightener. I would just loveth to spoileth you in mine adoration.

Hopefully yours,

#deltarune x reader #rouxls kaard x reader #rouxls x reader #rouxls kaard #undertale x reader #deltarune #deltarune fanfiction #deltarune imagine #deltarune imagines #self insert #x reader #letter event

122 notes · View notes

felassan · 4 years ago

Text

Some DA trivia and dev commentary from Twitter

There’s a lot of different tweets, so I’m just pasting and linking to the source rather than screencapping them all or making several different posts or something. Post under cut for length.

User: Was dragon age 2 your favourite in the franchise?

David Gaider: DA2 was the project where my writing team was firing on all cylinders, and they wrote like the wind- because they had to! Second draft? Pfft. Plot reviews? Pfft. I was so proud of what we all accomplished in such a brief time. I didn't think it was possible. [source] DA2 is, however, also where the goal posts kept moving. Things kept getting cut, even while we worked. I had to write that dialogue where Orsino turned even if you sided with him, because his boss battle had been cut and there was no time to fix the plot. A real WTF moment. >:( [source]

Mike Rousseau: I remember bugging that! And then being told it wasn't a bug, and being so confused. Doing QA for DA2 was an experience. Trial by fire. [source]

DG: So I think it's safe to say DA2 is my favorite entry in the DA franchise and also the sort of thing I never want to live through ever again. Mixed feelings galore. [source]

User: (I personally blame whoever it was for ruining most romance arcs in other games for me; they don't live up to Fenris's romance storyline)

DG: I wrote Fenris, so uh - me, I guess? Or maybe his cinematic designer, who put in the puppy dog eyes. [source]

User: If DA2 had just been an expansion, do you think it would have been better received? There was a lot of great stuff in there, and I think my initial dislike of it was because of the zone reuse. If it hadn't needed to be a full game, would that issue not have arisen?

DG: Hard to say. It was either going to be an over-scoped expansion or an under-scoped sequel. If it had stayed an expansion, it might never have received the resources/push it DID get. [source]

User: I'd love to visit the universe where you had an extra year or so to work on it. You did a very good job as it stands, but it definitely had rough edges. Not just the writing team either. The whole game had hit and miss moments, that just a little more dev time could have fixed.

DG: On one hand, DA2 existed to fill a hole in the release schedule. More time was never in the cards. DA2 was originally planned as an expansion! On the other, if we had more time, would we have started doing that thing where we second guess/iterate ourselves into mediocrity? [shrug emoji] [source]

Jennifer Hepler: This is what I love about DA2. Personally, I greatly prefer something that's rough and raw and sincere to something that's had all the soul polished out of it. Extra time would have helped for art and levels, but it would have lost something too. [source]

DG: Right? I think we could have used some time for peer reviews (and fewer cuts), but I think the rawness of the writing lent a certain spark that we usually polished out. [source]

JH: Definitely. I think the structure (more character-driven) and the tightness of the timeframe let each individual writer's voice really come through. Polish can be very homogenizing. [source]

DG: I should add I'm not, by any means, against iteration. Some iteration is good and necessary. The problem that BioWare often had is that we never knew when to stop. Like a goldfish, we would fill the space given to us by constantly re-iterating on things that were "good enough". [source]

Patrick Weekes: I appreciate your incredibly diplomatic use of the past tense on "had". :D [source]

User: DA2 was my gateway into the series and I’m so happy it is. I love the game the way that it is. It’s one of my favorites of all time. But I am also aware of everything that was said here. If it were remastered, do you think it would change?

DG: I'd be surprised if it was ever remastered. If it was, do you really think they'd change things? Do remasters do that? No idea. [source]

User: Both sides got undercut as I recall. Didn't that whole sequence also end with the mage leader embracing blood magic? It was very much "a plague on both your houses" moment, at least for me.

DG: Yep. Orsino was supposed to have his own version of Meredith's end battle, which only happened if you sided with the templars. That got cut, but the team still wanted to use the model we'd made for him. So... that happened. [source]

DG: I would personally say that DA2 is a fantastic game hidden under a mountain of compromises, cut corners, and tight deadlines. If you can see past all that, you'll see a fantastic game. I don't doubt, however, that it's very difficult for most to do that. [source]

PW: I love DAI with all my selfish "I worked on this" heart, but DA2's follower arcs and relationships are probably my favorite in the series. [source]

User: As I've expressed many times, I love the game, especially it's writing and characters but, for me, the most impressive aspect of it, in consideration of it's lack of time for drafts and revisions, is the 2nd act with Arishok. What amazingly complex character and fantastic duel

User: Just played it again and I have to agree. Though he is bound by the harsher tenants of the Qun, he makes valid points about free marcher society. Though it is obvious that he and Hawke will come to blows eventually, the tension builds gradually and understandably

DG: Luke did such a fantastic job with the Arishok I found myself sometimes wishing the Qunari plot had just been THE plot. [source]

User: What do you think would have changed, story wise, if you had more time for DA2?

DG: I would have taken out that thing where Meredith gets the idol. It was forced on me because she needed to be "super-powered" with red lyrium for her final battle. Being "crazy", however, robbed her side of the mage/templar argument of any legitimacy. I hated hated hated that. [source]

User: I deeply lament that there wasn't/couldn't be some sort of DA2 equivalent of Throne of Bhaal's Ascension mod.

DG: I'd have done it, if DA2 had allowed for anything but the most rudimentary of modding. ;) [source]

User: I mean, and I think I understand where you were trying, but how much legitimacy did the Templars and her as top Templar have after they're keeping the mages locked up against their will in the old slave quarters? Feel free to not reply.

DG: I think it's the kind of discussion which requires nuance, and which discussions on the Internet are not prone to. [source]

User: Was a compromise that the quest lines don’t branch? It felt like it was supposed to be that way but then you end up in the same place later regardless of what you pick. Like I hoodwinked the templars so good to help the apostates escape but in Act II they were caught anyway.

DG: I remember us having a lot more branching in the initial planning yes. Most of this got trimmed out in the first or second wave of cuts, in an effort to not cut the plots altogether. [source]

DG: "If you could Zack Snyder DA2, what would you change?" Wow. I'm willing to bet Mark or Mike (or anyone else on the team) would give very different answers than me, but it's enough to give a sober man pause, because that was THE Project of Multiple Regrets. [source] I mean, it's the most hypothetical of hypotheticals. It's never gonna happen. I wouldn't be surprised if EA considered DA2 its embarrassing red-headed stepchild. We'd also need to ignore that in many ways DA2 was as good as it was bad BECAUSE of how it was made. But that aside? [source] First, either restore the progressive changes to Kirkwall we'd planned over the passing of in-game years or reduce the time between acts to months instead of years... which, in hindsight, probably should have been done as soon as the progressive stuff was cut. [source] I'm sure you're like "get rid of repeated levels!" ...but I don't care about that. All I wanted was for Kirkwall to feel like a bigger city. Way more crowded. More alive! Fewer blood mages. [source] I'd want to restore the plot where a mage Hawke came THIS close to becoming an abomination. An entire story spent trapped in one's own head while trapped on the edge of possession. Why? Because Hawke is the only mage who apparently never struggles with this. It was a hard cut. [source]

User: I would LOVE to hear more details about this! I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a short story?

DG: I don't even remember the details of the story, sorry. There was a fight, and you caught the bad guy and then realized none of it was real and woke up idk [source]

DG: I'd want to restore all those alternate lines we cut, meaning people forget they'd met you. Or that they knew you were a mage. Or, oh god, that maybe they'd romanced you in DAO. So much carnage. [source] I'd want to restore the Act 3 plots we cut only because they were worked on too late, but which would have made the buildup to the mage/templar clash less sudden. Though I don't remember what they were, now. Some never got beyond being index cards posted on the wall. [grimace emoji] [source] As I mentioned elsewhere, I'd want to restore Orsino's end battle so he wouldn't need to turn on you even if you sided with him. And I'd want an end fight with the templars that didn't require Meredith to have red lyrium and go full Tetsuo. [source] Heck, maybe an end decision where you sided with neither the mages nor the templars. Because it certainly ended up feeling like you could brand both sides as batshit pretty legitimately, no? That was never planned, tho. No idea how to make that feel like an actual path atm. [source] Maybe an option to go "umm, Anders... what are you DOING?" 👀 [source] And, of course, a Varric romance, because Mary took that "slimy car salesman" character we'd planned and did the impossible with him. I can feel Mary glaring at me for even suggesting this, tho. [source] Lastly, the original expanded opening to the game which allowed you to spend time with Bethany and Carver BEFORE the darkspawn attacked. And, um, that's about it off the top of my head. Zack Snyder, WHAT PANDORA'S BOX HAVE YOU OPENED. [source] Shit, I remembered two more things: 1) Restore the "Varric exaggerates the heck out of the story" at the beginning of every Act, until Cassandra calls him on it. Yes, that was a thing. 2) Make DA: Exodus. Yes, I am still bitter. [source] God damn it, I meant "Make DA: Exalted March". The DA2 expansion, NOT Exodus since that was DA2's original name and makes no sense. Because the expansion ended with Varric dying, and that will always be on my "things left undone" list. [source]

User: Whaaaat?

DG: Well, you know that scene in Wrath of Khan where Spock goes into the dilithium chamber because he's a Vulcan? Well, imagine that but with Varric and red lyrium and because he's a dwarf. ;) [source]

John Epler: I distinctly remember referencing the bit from MGS4 where you crawl through the microwave corridor in the split screen, while cinematic battle rages on the other half. [source]

DG: It would have been glorious, John. Glorious. [source]

JE: I don't think I've ever been so certain what a shot should look like as I did Hawke coming in and finding Varric in the broken throne, just like when he was telling Cassandra his story. [source]

DG: It would have come full circle! Auggghh, it still kills me. [source]

User: Lord, you folks are a little too good at this.

JE: The true secret behind videogame narrative is knowing how to make yourself seem a lot more clever than you actually are. [source] 'Oh, we TOTALLY planned that.' [source]

User: Ok, this thread [the DA2 regrets thread, which is the big chunks above] but Inquisition.

DG: My regrets about Inquisition are, more or less, the normal kind. Nothing so dramatic, I'm afraid. [source]

User: You can keep your Varric romance, I want a Flemeth romance goddamnit!

DG: I would allow for one flirt option, and then a recording of Kate Mulgrew laughing for three minutes straight. [source]

User: I had a hypothesis about the repetitive caves in DA2. They're repetitive because it's Varric telling the story and he didn't consider them important. They're like sets in a play. (Okay, I really suspect it was a time/money/resources thing but I like my fake explanation better.)

DG: Hang a lampshade on it, maybe? Cassandra: "But that's the exact cave you were in last time?" Varric: "Whatever. They all look the same, I'm not THAT kind of dwarf. Can we move on?" [source]

User: that makes sense, hypothetically to make Varric romanceable and keep his arc—that had to happen for the main plot—I imagine you would have to make double the content (or more)? which would've been a tall order given the time/budget constraints the game was under

DG: Right. When it comes to "romance arc" vs. "follower story arc", we generally only had time to do one or the other. Never both. Romancing Varric would have meant not getting the story of his that you did. [source]

Mary Kirby: The one exaggeration I really, REALLY wanted, that we never got to do was Varric narrating his own death scene with Hawke weeping over him, then cutting to Cassandra's pissed off glaring at him. [source]

DG: Haha! The one I wanted was Varric's plot where he takes on the baddies single-handedly, sliding across the floor like Jet Lee, action movie-style, until finally Cassandra gets irritated and he has to admit Hawke & the rest of the party showed up to help. [source]

MK: We did that one! (He didn't do any Jet Lee moves, though.) Jepler gave him letterboxing to get The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly showdown vibes while he shot a ton of mooks single-handed. [source]

DG: Wow. Shows how much I remember. [source]

JE: I found it! I remember seeing this sequence as my treat for doing a bunch of much more challenging work. It was fun to see how far I could push our limited library of animations. [link] [source]

DG: Heh awesome. I could have sworn it was cut, honestly. I think I was even in that meeting. [source]

User: no disrespect but that’s surprising and rich of Mary “Hard in Hightown” Kirby to think DA2 shouldn’t have had a Varric romance when she wrote an entire book of Varric’s self-insert character pining over his Hawke insert character… HIH is the reason we had VHawke Summer 2018

DG: I can't *really* speak for Mary, or how she feels about it now compared to back then. I only know how she felt about it back then, and I'm not sure it was as much the concept of the romance but that Varric's entire story would be bent to "romance arc" ...a very different thing. [source]

JH: I remember pushing to have the first DLC start with Hawke having an option to ask Varric, "Did you tell Cassandra about us?" and if you picked it, Varric would answer, "Of course not, baby. I told her you were sleeping with X..." and then proceed as if you had had a full romance. [source]

DG: I still wonder how that would have gone over. x) [source]

JE: Okay, one more DA2 thing. Putting together the cinematics for this scene was a blast. [link] [source]

MK: These lines are my greatest legacy. I want "Make sure the world knows I died... at Chateau Haine!" inscribed on my tombstone. [source]

JE: I was so glad no one said 'no' to the crane shot. [source]

MK: It needs that crane shot. It's the perfect icing on that cake made from solid cheese. [source]

DG: The designers were all "we need more combat" and I think we were all "I think you underestimate just HOW interesting we can make this dinner party". [source]

JE: And finally. I think @SherylChee wrote the one-liner. I think we had a collection of like, 20. [link] [source]

Sheryl Chee: Yeah! Something like that! I remember submitted a whole bunch and Frank said you only needed one. Wish I'd kept the other fifteen. [source]

JE: A random chooser where, each time through the scene, you get a different one-liner. [source]

JE: DA2 is the project I'm the proudest of. I also absolutely get that it didn't land for a lot of people. But I don't think it's inaccurate to say that, in a lot of ways, DA2 defined my career. [source] Everyone spent a year working at their maximum ability. I was a fresh cinematic designer and was given all of Varric's content, as well as the Act 1 Finale mission. It was a lot for someone who had been doing the Cinematics thing for literally 6 months. [source] There's some stuff in there I can't look at without wincing. And there's some stuff I'm genuinely proud of. Not to mention, it was my introduction to most of the writing team. Several of whom I'm still working with today! Albeit in a different capacity [source] Also, weirdly, one of my most enduring memories of Dragon Age 2 is how much Bad Company 2 we'd play at lunch. It was a LOT. [source] Every game I've worked on has a game I played attached to it. ME2 is Borderlands. DA2 is Bad Company 2. DAI is DayZ. I, hmm. There's a progression there. I don't know how I feel about it. [source]

User: Is DA4 going to be tarkov then?

JE: I've kind of churned out of Tarkov for now. Probably Hunt Showdown, at least right now. [source]

User: I think people also don't take nuance into consideration -- like I FULLY acknowledge the flaws in my favorite games and will openly criticize them, but that doesn't mean they're not my favorite games anymore??? You can like and thing and still be critical of it.

JE: A lot of my favourite shit is deeply flawed! I acknowledge it and I think it's interesting to dissect the flaws. [source]

User: I still wish Justice was an actual character in DA2 rather than a plot point.

DG: There was a moment during DAI where we *almost* put in you running into Justice with the Grey Wardens, and he's all "Kirkwall? I never went to Kirkwall" [source]

User: Does that imply that Justice was shoehorned in to DA2?

DG: Nah, it was an in-joke where we thought it'd be fun to suggest that "Justice" was simply some demon that tricked Anders in DA2. Wooo those tricky demons! We didn't do it, though. [source]

User: [about templars] except, I don't think it had very much legitimacy to begin with. keep in mind, we interact with other characters with the same argument. The one that comes to mind is Cullen, a sane templar in power. The templar's side of the argument is inherently flawed.

DG: I don't doubt that many people agree with you, and yet people can and do argue on behalf of the templars as well. My place isn't to pick a side, but to provide evidence that players can interpret for themselves [source]

User: Can you shed some light for us on how DA was able to do multiple same-sex romance options for different genders but the Mass Effect team treated them like the plague? What process existed for your team that just wasn't their for the other tentpole franchise?

DG: Different people making the decisions, almost different cultures. I don't know what it's like now, but for many years the Mass Effect team and the Dragon Age team were almost like two different studios working within the same building. [source]

User: It truly boggles the mind. Kudos for doing demonstrably better on consistent queer representation than the ME teams. Y'all never needed us to make petitions to try to get the studio's attention and ask them to do better by us. That's the fight we're once again embroiled in now.

DG: Honestly, I don't feel like tut-tutting the Mass Effect team. They did their part, and if they were a bit later to the show than the DA team they certainly did more than almost every other game out there -- and willingly. [source]

Updates begin here

User: So what was the reason for naming Dragon age 2 "Dragon age II" and not using a subtitle?

DG: As I recall, that was purely a publisher decision. I think they wanted to avoid the impression it was an expansion. [source]

User: Is there no chance of ever remaking DA2 under better circumstances? -Somehow remove the repetitiveness of gameplay by making changes and updating the tech and adding much more to the storyline. It could almost be a new very exciting game.

DG: I'd say there's zero chance of that. Let's keep our hopes up for the next DA title instead. [source]

User: I am a little confused here, help me out here please! How exactly was the cut boss battle with Orsino supposed to work out? How it would've kept him from turning against the player?

DG: It means that, if you sided with the templars, the entire boss bottle at the end would have been against Orsino and the mages. No fight against Meredith. The end decision would have been more divergent. [source]

User: I do remember that one of the reasons going around for that, was that resources were going to the transition to Frostbite. I'm still not fully sold on that having been a good choice. I felt that more time should have been given for that transition considering it was made for FPSs

DG: We didn't transition to Frostbite until DAI. Given our time frame for DA2, I don't think we *could* have transitioned to a new engine. [source]

User: Since your talking about the what could have been for DA2. Could you say what your script was for Anthem? Cause I remember reading that you wrote the plot on that game.

DG: I created a setting for Anthem and scripted out a plot - but, as I understand it, almost none of that ended up being used. So it's a bit pointless to talk about what I'd planned, as that'd be for some completely different type of game. [source]

User: [in reference to the exchange above where DG said “Being "crazy", however, robbed her side of the mage/templar argument of any legitimacy. I hated hated hated that.” re: Meredith] except, I don't think it had very much legitimacy to begin with. keep in mind, we interact with other characters with the same argument. The one that comes to mind is Cullen, a sane templar in power. The templar's side of the argument is inherently flawed.

If I missed a tweet, got the wrong source link or included a tweet twice, feel free to let me know and I’ll correct.

Edit / Update: Post update 22nd April

#dragon age #bioware #video games #fenris #the Fenaissance #long post #longpost #cassandra pentaghast #my lady paladin #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #mass effect

260 notes · View notes

shoezuki · 4 years ago

Note

Do u understand the new dream drama??? I am confusion

Whoop sorry i been doin fuckery n hw All day n like. I still aint able to get on my computer rn but im gon give u a tldr without sources because lazee

I know Practically all a it beyond maybe like. Exact time frames n shit. So ill give u the runnerup to all this

John swan is a commentary youtuber w like. A devent following. I think around 200k? He definitely had 'fans' n an audience for all this n crap

At some point i believe a year ago (idk exactly How Long ago but john swan had like 6k subs on yt) dream n john swan Converged and knew each other. Whether they were friends or not im unsure. But thats not exactly relevant

But essentially john swan on discord made his account out to look like dream and messaged at LEAST one person pretending to be dream, saying slurs like the n word, horrible shit, n something about coding a 'sex mod' ??? Pointing that one out specifically cuz it has become a whole goof

This person Relayed this info to dream who confronted john swan about it. John swan essentially said 'i havent been on discord in a few days. My discord login info was on a family friends computer and a 12 yo i know did all that'

This kinda like. I dont think anything happened While it was jus happening. But at some point a bit over a week ago now, dream made a reddit post saying such about john swan, that he was 'a suspicious guy' and such things on a smaller subreddit. John swan himself screenshotted it and brought it up on twitter that dream 'has a large audience' and defamation of his character can do a Lot of damage to him, and that he was lying

Imma speedrun this cuz its gotten to kinda like. Jus twitter beef. Its essentially 'im not lying YOURE lying' between john swan n dream on twitter. There was some drama alert shit, dream's whole 'detective' stream, john swan made some 18 page length Thing i couldnt be bothered to read.

Dream's arguments the whole time like. Objectively were better and jus more understandable. Made more sense. Although some things Couldve been poked through if john swan replied well enough. For instance one point dream made about it Absolutely being john swan was that the messages sent by this '12 year old' used similar speech patterns n terminology. Which Cam be solid evidence but for some fuckin reason all ppl w followings on twitter type n text like they eat cardboard in their free time like. The blandest ass shit. Whatever

BUT it came to some kind of 'end' today because apparently some Absolute no argument Evidence came out against john swan which hadnt been revealed publically as far as i seen. John swan First admitted to it in dms with friends n other commentary yters who'd made videos n shit on the whole bullshit. Dream tweeted bout it too a thread of like how 'he and the community deserve an apology' but he didnt think itd happen.

The john swan made a tweet w an apology that was essentially. 'Yeah it was me me and a friend were messing around on discord when i had a small following and i hadnt thought it was a big deal but once dream found out and confronted me i lied and continued lying im sorry'

All around its jus wack n like. Dumb as all fuck. Like yes in a 'discourse sucks' way but also in My way that this is No Fun. Like not even that juicy drama i live for. What COULD be actually important (john swan basically admitted to using the n word???) Just Doesnt get mentioned. Wack

#discourse #hope this makes sense #another commentary dude whos p chill and said somethin bout it #more on like. john's Apology n shit #is omni i cant grab a link rn but its the first part of todays vid

26 notes · View notes

ill-go-with-that-then · 5 years ago

Text

A NEW ERASERMIC AU I'LL NEVER WRITE!

Imagine Aizawa works at Buzzfeed, and gets the idea to write an article about how Twitch streaming is stupid and pointless (because he’s a video game snob.) He chooses Present Mic’s channel to watch at random, because he’s super popular, but Aizawa immediately goes from undercover reporter to absolute fan. No middle ground. Just “huh, okay i was wrong” and subscribes.

He tunes in to all the live streams, because Mic is very funny and also very good at video games, and it’s cool to watch him play. He has skills, his commentary is A+, and Aizawa develops a little crush. But it’s not a big deal!! Mic is a celeb, Aizawa knows they’ll never meet, it’s harmless.

Sometimes the chat for the stream gets assholes in it, as you’d expect. Mic can’t monitor the chat too much, but Aizawa has no problems telling jerks where to stick it. And once, after a particularly egregious incident where some moron said something crude about women in gaming and Aizawa ripped him a new asshole, Mic sends him a personal message thanking him and asking him if he wants to be a mod, which of course, he does. He doesn’t know how to reply - this is his big chance to talk to Mic!! So of course he just says “sure” - no further conversation.

Aizawa has, of course, zero personal details on his Twitch account. No info, no icon, his screen name is a random string of numbers, he’s a ghost. The Ron Swanson of video game enthusiasts.

So Aizawa is working at Buzzfeed, living his best life writing articles like “10 Video Game Themed Products You Can’t Live Without” because journalism is in shambles and he drinks to forget, and one day his editor is like “hey, we’re gonna do a feature on Twitch streamers. Everybody is gonna go sit and watch a stream in person and get the behind the scenes info. Here’s a list of people who agreed.” And PRESENT MIC IS ON THE LIST

One of his colleagues reaches for Mic’s info sheet, rolling his eyes and sighing. “I can’t believe these are considered celebrities. Have you ever heard of any of them?”

Aizawa practically slaps the paper out of his hand. “Present Mic is a consummate professional and his content is high-quality and entertaining. I wouldn’t expect you to understand it since it involves technology more current than a compact disc.”

The room goes silent. Nobody’s heard Aizawa say anything nice about... maybe anything? Ever? But his editor, Kayama, pounces immediately. “WELL if you like him so much, Aizawa, that can be your interview!!”

Aizawa panics. On the one hand, he wasn’t going to let anyone else take that assignment. But on the other hand, now he’s going to meet Mic IN PERSON. During a LIVE STREAM. Is he supposed to tell him he’s a fan? Is that tacky? Will his crush be obvious? What if Mic sucks in person?? This is a double edged sword.

He only gets more nervous on the day of the interview. He’s tempted to dress up a little, look his best. Mic is a good-looking guy after all, and he’s always well put together when he streams. And even though Aizawa knows, knows he really doesn’t have a chance, he still doesn’t want to embarrass himself.

BUT he also doesn’t want to look like he’s trying too hard. That’s not who he is, and dressing up would be admitting to himself that he DOES want something more than a simple interview, even if it’s as little as Mic’s good opinion or positive attention.

He debates too long. While he’s still thinking about it, the alarm on his phone goes off, alerting him that it’s time to leave. He’s still in his pink sweatpants and he hasn’t shaved, and he realizes, just at that moment, that he probably should have tried harder at least for the sake of professionalism. But it’s too late. He has to go.

Mic actually doesn’t live all that far away. Just a short train ride, less than 20 minutes, and Aizawa is standing in front of his nondescript apartment. It’s a little odd - Mic is a very popular streamer, theoretically with income to match, and his style seems flashy. Aizawa had expected something a little more over the top. But this place is simple. Storing that information away for later, he knocks.

“COMING!!” He hears from inside the apartment, followed by the thud of footsteps. Aizawa just has one moment to brace himself because this is it before the door opens and there he is. Present Mic himself, all smiles. “Come in, come in!! You’re from buzzfeed right? Wow, this is so exciting!!” Mic ushers him in the door, taking his jacket and hustling him into a tidy living room before Aizawa can even respond. And of course, when he finally gets himself together enough to say something, the first words out of his mouth are “You’re... tall.”

He wants to smack himself. Yes, Mic is taller than Aizawa had realized from the stream, even a little taller than Aizawa himself. But those are thinking words, not speaking words. Certainly not the first words you use to introduce yourself to your celebrity crush. But Aizawa, a champion moment-ruiner, has made his bed, and now he must cry in it.

But Mic just laughs. “Yeah,” he says, bringing a hand to the back of his neck. “I get that a lot. Sorry?”

“Don’t apologize,” Aizawa says immediately, then wonders if he is, in fact, under some sort of curse. “Shouta Aizawa,” he introduces himself.

“Hizashi Yamada, also known as Present Mic!” Yamada’s smile is friendly, like Aizawa hasn’t made an absolute fool of himself so far, and Aizawa has to look away from it. He glances around the room, which is tidy and clean, but cluttered with various objects that seem to have no connection to each other. There are books in a variety of languages, musical instruments, shelves of CDs, and an assortment of other things that have nothing to do with video games.

“Quite a collection you have,” Aizawa says, because it is, and because he’s curious.

“Yeah! I have too many hobbies but what can you do? Come on, I’m sure you’d rather see my workspace.” It’s not true, Aizawa has seen the office where Yamada streams before, and he’d much rather stay here and poke around, build up his mental picture about who Yamada is outside his Present Mic persona. But he’s not here for that. This is business.

But the streaming room is also not what Aizawa expects. Some things are familiar - the area visible to the camera is the same, set up and ready for tonight’s stream, but the rest of the room, the part that isn’t on screen, is PACKED. There’s a wobbly desk in the corner, covered in neatly stacked papers and binders labeled by month and year. The wall over the desk is a massive whiteboard filled with notes and ideas for upcoming streams. And there, in the lower right corner of the whiteboard, right where it would be even with Hizashi’s eyes as he sits at his desk, is a familiar string of numbers - his own Twitch username. And next to it is a little note - don’t forget. Good dude.

Aizawa sees his username and just - freezes. It hadn’t occurred to him that Mic thought of him at all outside of that one occasion he DM’d him, let alone that he considered Aizawa important enough not to forget. And the idea that Mic thinks he’s a “good dude” makes his face BURN in pleased embarrassment. He wants to say something but what? Is it weird? It’s weird, it’s too weird, and before he can think of how to do it, Mic is talking again.

“Okay, this is where the magic happens!! Actually, it’s more like weeks of frustration and repetition followed by 3-4 hours of intensely stressful streaming, but hey! People seem to like it!!” Aizawa wants to say something here - Mic is being a little too self-deprecating for his taste, but he stops himself. He can’t defend Mic’s honor to Mic himself - can he? The moment passes while he debates.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be on camera or not?” Mic says, tentatively.

“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you,” says Aizawa. “I’m more the behind the scenes type.”

“Totally, no problem!” Mic says, gesturing to his desk. “You can sit there, if that’s okay? The only other seat is by me.”

Aizawa looks at the chair, then back to the small couch where Mic will be streaming from. “I think I’ll have to be closer to get photos for the article, if that’s all right.”

“You’ll be on camera,” Mic bites his lip. “I mean, maybe i could re-angle it, but then the screen-“

“It’s fine,” Aizawa says. “Journalism is about hardship.”

Mic snorts, and Aizawa can’t keep a little smirk off his face, proud that he got a laugh.

The stream goes smoothly - Aizawa likes it even more like this, without the chat to distract him, and close enough to notice things he’s never seen before. Mic’s feet twitch when he’s focusing hard, and his socks have cats on them. It’s adorable. Aizawa takes no notes - he doesn’t really need to, he’s seen enough streams to write this article in his sleep, and anyway, it’s not like he’s going to forget a minute of this.

Afterwards, once they’ve signed off, Mic talks him through his post show routine, everything from calculating how much he made and comparing it to previous weeks in a spreadsheet to going over the chat. “Huh,” Mic’s eyebrows crease as he looks at the chat logs. “Things got a little out of hand tonight.”

“Oh?” Aizawa says, shuffling uncomfortably. He suspects he knows why that is.

“Yeah, one of my regular mods wasn’t on tonight. I hope he’s all right - it’s not like him to miss.”

“You have a lot of viewers,” Aizawa says, tentative now. “Do you know them all so well?”

Mic shrugs, embarrassed. “No, i wish I did! But this guy’s special, he’s really funny and he keeps all the trolls in line. I’d DM him to see if he’s okay but that’s weird, right? That’s weird. And anyway I tried to talk to him once before but he shot me down.”

“I didn’t-“ Aizawa says before he can stop himself. The curse is real. Mic stares at him, open mouthed, confused at first but then his eyes widen as he realizes what must have happened. Before he can say anything, Aizawa cuts him off. “Sorry. That i couldn’t mod tonight.” He mumbles, hand buried in his hair. He can’t meet Mic’s eyes anymore. “I’ll be back next week.”

Mic opens his mouth to speak, but Aizawa interrupts again, before he can. “And I didn’t - I didn’t shoot you down. I just didn’t think you’d want to talk to me. Why would you?”

Mic blinks, and Aizawa isn’t sure what he’s going to say. Will he be mad? Aizawa kind of lied to him. Is he disappointed? Does Aizawa not look like he expected? Has he been too silent? Too unfriendly? Does Mic not want to get to know him anymore? But when Mic finally speaks, what comes out is

“I can’t believe you made me memorize that stupid fucking username, we’re picking you a new one right now.”

#erasermic #maizawa #my writing #my ramblings #I have no explanation for anything I do ever

5K notes · View notes

are-they-plural · 2 months ago

Text

Reasoning: Four consciousnesses in one body. Uses we/us pronouns, aside from when they are trying to trick Michael to earn his trust by posing as Elizabeth (in which case it's I/me). Could also have a consciousness of their own alongside the Funtimes, given they refer to themself as "me" in the teaser image (there's a little bit of me in every body). Also briefly takes over Michael's body, which maybe makes Michael temporarily plural?

#are they plural #plural headcanons #system headcanon #five nights at freddy's #fnaf #fnaf ennard #sister location #mod commentary: once again yes enough said

12 notes · View notes

equivalentexchangeanthology · 4 years ago

Text

About / FAQs

The Equivalent Exchange Anthology will be a ship-friendly project open to Fullmetal Alchemist creators of all types. Content about any and all FMA characters and ships will be allowed (with appropriate ratings and warnings). Hate, harassment, or disparagement of contributors will not be tolerated.

The project will have multiple parts*:

A printed zine of gen fanwork and meta**

A printed zine of SFW ship-based fanwork

A digital zine of NSFW content (including a section for ship-based content and a section for gen)

A digital zine of NSFW ship content, including trigger-heavy content

(*This general project structure is provisional and open to change, as the final scope of the project will depend on contributions. Under no circumstances will an alteration of the structure result in SFW and NSFW content being mixed into the same project.)

(**Meta can be personal essays about what makes FMA meaningful to you, analyses of characters, themes, or details from canon, stories about your experience with FMA, or another type of non-fiction)

What is a zine? A zine is an unofficial fan-made publication compiling textual and visual contributions from fan creators.

What is the theme of this project? We want to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Fullmetal Alchemist by letting creators express their love for FMA however they like! We are leaving this very open-ended on purpose. This fandom is full of creative people with varying perspectives – to us, the most important thing about FMA is the message that all of us coming together despite our differences is what gives us strength. The name “Equivalent Exchange” was selected to highlight the way that being a part of the fandom has given us so much in return for what we’ve put in, which is another element that we’d love to incorporate into the project.

What do you mean by “meta”? “Meta” in the context of this project can be any non-fictional content that someone wants to create: character analysis; thematic analysis; extended commentary on a scene or plot point; a short essay about your personal experiences with and/or your discovery of FMA; what FMA has meant to you. A description of the work or process that went into a cosplay or another type of fan creation could also fall into this category. You can find more information on what could qualify as “meta” here!

Will there be merchandise? Yes! We will have merch bundles available, and it will be possible to purchase them together with the zine parts of the project, or on their own.

What is the schedule? The full schedule is available here! Pre-orders will open August 1st and remain open until October 3rd.

Will the project have a Discord server? Yes! The Discord server, as well as periodic emails, will be the primary methods used for communication with contributors. The Discord server is carefully organized by project, so that contributors will only have access to content for the project they are contributing to. The server will be SFW by default, except for the project-specific spaces for the NSFW projects, and all server spaces will be moderated. All of the general “chat” channels will be strictly SFW.

Who can apply? Anyone who loves FMA, wants to create for it, and respects others in the fandom regardless of differences in fictional preferences (character interpretations, ships, etc.). Contributors must be prepared to collaborate with others despite differences of opinion, and should not have a history of shaming, belittling, or attacking others based on what they enjoy in fanwork. In short, applicants’ philosophy should be “Ship and let ship”!

Can people under 18 apply? As long as an applicant under 18 is legally old enough to work in their country of origin, their application will be reviewed. (Contributors under 18 will only be permitted to apply to, contribute, and view SFW content.)

How many contributors will be accepted? We don’t have a maximum number of contributors as of yet. For the two SFW physical zines, we will determine the number of contributors based on page limitations, but each SFW zine will have an extended digital PDF version to include contributors whose work or full work won’t fit into the printed zine. The all-digital NSFW PDF components will be able to accommodate more contributors. We’ve designed the project in the hopes of including as many creators as possible.

What will be required for an application? We will ask for a few samples of work similar to what you would be contributing (this does not necessarily have to be FMA fanwork), as well as your social media accounts and email address.

I haven’t created for FMA in a while… all my FMA work is old. In my application, can I submit more recent sample works from other fandoms instead? Yes, that’s fine! Having at least one FMA sample in your application (regardless of the application type) is great, but not required. We would mostly just like to get an idea of your style, so please feel free to submit samples that you think represent you well, regardless of the fandom!

Are all ships accepted in the ship-oriented parts of the project? Yes. As long as you are willing to tag and warn as appropriate, all ships are welcome. We will expect contributors to tag and warn diligently, to be mindful of others’ sensitivities, and to keep ship-related discussion in the appropriate parts of the server.

Can I contribute adult and/or controversial content? Yes. As above, all contributors will be required to tag and warn carefully with their submissions and when interacting with other contributors, to use the appropriate channels on the server at all times, and to respect others’ boundaries. The NSFW projects will only be open to contributors who are 18 or older.

I’d like to apply, but I don’t like certain ships and have some triggers. Will I have to see this content in the Discord server? While we can’t guarantee that you won’t encounter content that you would prefer to avoid, we will be compartmentalizing ship content, NSFW content, and potentially triggering content as much as possible in the Discord server. We are counting on all contributors to help us with this, and will do our best to facilitate a safe and friendly collaborative environment!

Do podfic recorders have to edit their own podfics as well as recording them? How many recordings will be expected, and how will work be assigned? Anyone who is accepted to record podfics for the Anthology is welcome to edit their own podfics, or to submit unedited podfics to our moderator team. We have a few mods who have volunteered to help others edit their audio.

Applicants accepted to record podfics would be able to choose which works they wanted to record for, so that everyone can edit an amount and specific content that they’re comfortable with. The total amount will depend somewhat on the amount of textual contributions that we end up accepting. Several of our mods will be helping to record any works not selected by applicants, in the hopes of making as complete a collection as possible (including descriptions of visual content). Depending on the amount of effort that we’re able to recruit, we hope to record podfics at least for every submission in the two SFW zines (fanfics for which will have a wordcount limit of 3,000 words, whereas PDF-only fics may be slightly longer).

Applications for podfic recorders are due by March 7, 2021, but the acutal recordings will be done between July and September (after text and art are finalized, while pre-orders and layout work take place).

Are AU (Alternate Universe) works allowed? Yes! AU works (canon-divergence, alternate universes, crossovers, etc.) will be accepted, both for application samples and for final contributor submissions if desired. Any AU works in the final Anthology will be tagged and described clearly.

Is this a 20-year anniversary project? Yes! We are hoping to open pre-orders in July to celebrate 20 years of Fullmetal Alchemist. It is not required that this theme is represented in any of the contributions, but it would certainly be welcome!

I am a recent pro-shipper. Some people may remember things that I did and said in the past that were not pro-ship, but I have changed my stance. Can I apply? As mentioned above and in the Contributor Protection Policy, our first priority is the safety and comfort of all of our contributors. Each application and applicant will be reviewed by our team, and decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis as to whether we anticipate that an applicant would be able to work well and interact positively with other contributors.

Is this project for-profit, or for charity? We are currently planning to donate half of the proceeds to the Archive of Our Own (AO3), and divide the remaining half evenly among all contributors to compensate them for their work.

I’m a little confused about the different parts of the zine. Could it all be combined into one zine? Our intention with this project is to provide space to as many creators, and as many different types of content, as possible – specifically including NSFW content and/or ships that are often not permitted – but to also make it easy for purchasers to choose only the content they are interested in or comfortable with. So you can think of it as four separate projects, with different “ratings” but with the same goal of inclusion. Dividing the project into subsections will allow us to accept more contributors overall!

In addition to making it more difficult to delineate types of content, ratings, and warnings, combining the projects into one zine would likely result in an extremely long volume. This would raise shipping costs for physical copies, and also make the digital version into a very large file! Our goal is to make it possible for people to buy a single project that they will enjoy every page of; or to bundle multiple projects together if they’re interested in several or all of them.

A lot of zines fail or turn out to be scams. Is your mod team experienced and prepared to see this through? We kept our moderator bios a bit more personal, but many of our mods have prior experience with multiple zines from start to finish. Mai is the lead mod on another zine that is currently open for pre-orders, as well as the finance mod on three others in progress; Feo has been a mod on ten zines, one of which she headed and several of which have reached completion; and Noct has headed two zines, been a mod on four others, and contributed to six more. Kari has also modded and contributed to over a dozen zines; and Getti has been the lead mod for a completed zine and has contributed to numerous others. Many of our other mods have real-world and/or paid work experience relevant to the project: Grace has extensive editorial experience and a background in print and online journalism, and also runs events for work in the RL sphere; and Tierfal regularly runs ship weeks and fandom events, and has been coordinating events as part of her day job for many years. Some of our moderators have not participated in a zine before, but are longtime fandom contributors, organizers, beta-readers, and more; or have additional relevant experience and skills, which they are excited to dive in and apply!

Since the full scope of the project will be determined in part by the number of applications that we receive for each section, we wanted to have a lot of hands on deck to make sure that we can divide the work fairly without anyone getting overwhelmed.

To make a long story short: we trust our team, and we're passionate about this project. We hope that you will be, too!

#admin

25 notes · View notes

blue-shaded · 3 years ago

Note

Hey Dolphin anon! While I respect your opinion, I disagree on some points. I don’t know where the popular sentiment that he doesn’t denounce his stans’ toxic behavior came from but he’s said multiple times that he denounces it (https://twitter.com/PooGnf/status/1399592255657156608/video/1 ignore the user lol :) ) and that’s just what he says on Twitter. Some of it yeah is a little more lighthearted, like when he talks about Detective Dream in some of the tweets, but I’d say that a fair amount of those tweets lack sarcasm and are said in full seriousness. In addition, he’s also said not to send hate on his behalf during multiple of his own livestreams, he said it when he went on Kaceytron’s streams, he said he didn’t condone toxic behavior during Kavos’s video, as well as multiple times throughout various drama like the speedrunning situation and the John Swan situation (for Blue and others, John Swan is a commentary youtubers who basically did a lot of weird shit, who Dream worked with in the past and had a bad experience with. man imitated Dream’s discord profile and pretended to be him while sending sexual things to a minor, and then tried to blame everything he did on his 12-year old neighbor when he got caught, saying he left his computer open and that that neighbor got on Discord and was the one who did all that weird shit. Obviously false and got proven false, but even when Dream was debunking the situation on stream, he said not to send hate). He’s said it multiple times and I agree that he should continue to say it as he continues to grow to remind both new and old fans but he’s said it multiple times and at this point, anyone who Is still sending death threats is aware that it’s wrong and that he doesn’t support it and they just don’t care. I personally think that behavior is disgusting and I know most of the people I interact with on Twitter do as well. At this point, it’s just sort of a question of to what extent do people want him to say it. The most recent time he denounced death threats was on May 31st both on Twitter and on stream, and he’s probably said it at least once a month almost every month since like December, so he says it quite a bit, so going further would be personally DMing each toxic person he sees and telling them to stop which. I just think is a little absurd. I know that others want him to post a video on his main channel about it and condoning it as well, but I sort of disagree? While death threats can be sent on any platform, the platform on which people receive it on the most is Twitter. Anyone who’s obsessed enough to send death threats is going to be following him on all socials so they’ve definitely seen him condemning it as he’s tweeted saying that he doesn’t support that type of behavior multiple times, but of course, others are allowed to disagree with me on that, I just think that it’s hard to find a good course of action past that. I agree that toxic behavior should still be called out, but I feel like a lot of people advocating for him to do it more than he is now kind of don’t understand how out of control toxic behavior is and how they rarely listen to creators themselves.

The speedrunning stuff I kind of agree on, though I’ll just go a little more in depth about the situation. basically, for those who don’t watch Dream’s videos, dream codes mod videos for Minecraft and these mod videos would consist of things like “Minecraft but everything is dark” and “Minecraft but we can only see one chunk at a time”. Now because Dream still runs the dream SMP and did speed running at the time he had to move these mods out of the mod folder in order to do everything else that he was doing when he wasn’t recording videos. This would later on lead to the problem where the speed run moderators would ask for his mods folder and he wouldn’t be able to provide a full copy because he had since moved stuff around because it had been a week after the actual speedrun streams they were inquiring about. The thing that ended up being the problem was a recording mod that Dream had asked a separate developer to create for him and the Dream Team in order to make their recordings smoother. that was sort of it there weren’t any specifics given, he just wanted recordings to be better. Now because it was just for recordings and since the mod ran well dream didn’t ask the developer for the specifics of what they coded into this recording mod at the time. In his mind this recording mod sort of just clean things up visually. And for those who have never really played Minecraft, what I mean by that is if you press F5 in Minecraft you get a whole ton of information on your screen about coordinates and computer specs. When people say that the mod cleaned things up visually, they mean that all of that irrelevant information that clogs up the screen in a video was minimized to just coordinates. he was wrong in this assumption, the Recording mud also included coding that allowed for better trades. again for anyone who doesn’t play Minecraft, Dream and the Dream Team record their videos in the 1.16 version of Minecraft. In this version of Minecraft, it’s a widely used tactic to use piglin trades to get ender pearls. Since their videos aren’t just about beating the game regularly, there’s usually more of a focus on fighting or the specific mod that they’re using for that video, the developer increased the likelihood of ender pearl trades with pigeons in order to make recordings go faster. Regardless of that and his misconception of what the mod actually did, Dream didn’t believe it mattered because there was no record of him having loaded that recording mod during the speedrunning streams in question. This is because Dream uses something that a lot of speed runners use, he uses Fabric. Fabric API is something that both allows your Minecraft to run smoother (which is why a lot of speed runners use it, it’s approved to be used by the speed run moderators) and for those who wish to do so, it also functions as a mod loader. So when I said that he had no record of him having loaded the recording mod, I mean that when he checked the logs of Fabric API, it said that the only thing loaded was Fabric itself. this was inherently a wrong way to go about it because the way Fabric API logs work is that you have to be searching for a specific mod, so you can’t just look at what the log says is loaded on because sometimes the logs don’t show a mod unless you specifically ask the program to look for it. Dream figured this out a couple months ago, he went back through the logs, talk to the developer who coded the recording mod and got confirmation that yes, he did have the recording mod on and yes, the recording mod does increase ender pearl drop rates. He recently wrote a pastebin that has since been taken down by the pastebin staff though screenshots of it are still easy to find. I do wish that he had come out about this sooner because he knew of this information for a couple months before openly sharing, but I do get the situation has sort of faded and that he wasn’t excited to re-open that discussion when he himself had gotten a lot of hate and the threats during that situation.

Obviously as outsiders looking in we will never know how genuine he’s being, if he’s telling the truth, but I choose to believe that he did feel as bad about the situation as he said he did because for a lot of people who do consume his content, it’s been very noticeable within the past couple months that he’s been a lot less active both in terms of streaming and just interacting with the community, but of course, it’s all just personal interpretation and we will never actually know.

Just wanted to explain the situation fully because people who may not play Minecraft and understand it the developing behind it may not understand how he could’ve possibly not seen the mod or not have a copy of the mod folder. I would disagree with you on the point that the controversy around Dream’s speed runs has delegitimized the rest of the speed running community. As someone who still watches well-known speed runners like Bennex and Illumina (TapL and Punz if they count as well), I don’t think any of them have really argued that they think that situation has delegitimize them, though I guess you could argue that they simply haven’t spoken up because they’re a little too afraid to speak up against a big Youtuber, which is fair. But as someone who has spoken to a lot of people who have sort of slightly read up on the situation without actually caring about Minecraft or Dream, none of them have said that they think that the speed running community is not legitimate because of it. Not to sound flippant because I do like watching speedrunners (albeit the already more popular ones) or anything, but the Minecraft speedrunning community isn’t exactly very mainstream, not very many people care enough to actively oppose it or say that they’re not legitimate, from what I’ve seen it’s either just you support the community or you don’t care. Even people who actively thought that dream cheated from the beginning, never used that to discredit the rest of the community (at least from what I saw). They simply didn’t care. anyone making that argument is sort of ridiculous, before the 1.16 speed runs that got investigated, Dream already had a couple official speed runs on his YouTube channel. At the time they were posted, they were approved and legitimate (though I believe one’s been taken down now), so it’s not like even Dream’s entire time in speedrunning was completely falsified, so anyone using one situation to delegitimize a whole community is being a little ridiculous. In addition, anyone who actually knows and cares enough about the speedrunning community to try to claim that all of them aren’t credible, would know that a lot of the speedrunning community didn’t even like dream all that much, even before the cheating out allegations, and they didn’t really associate with him, so they would know the Dream’s actions don’t define the entire community. If you’re talking about Dream’s more general fans, like those who watch his YouTube who may now be skewed against the speedrunning community, you can look at comments in his community tab on his channel and see that people aren’t actively against the speedrunning community, they just say they don’t care and they want it behind them which is very different from thinking that they are all illegitimate. Though if you have substantial proof of multiple cases of multiple people being biased against speedrunning community and believing that they’re all cheaters after Dream’s situation, I’d be open to see them.

I also disagree with your point over Dream being a “professional speed runner”. He says this in responses to claims that speedrunning is a huge part of his career. And he’s correct when people talk about dreams achievements, none of them really talk about speed running that much it’s always about the SMP, his manhunt videos, and his coding videos. He’s not a professional speed runner in the way Illumina and Couriway and Bennex are. His career isn’t based on professional speedrunning. Citing the Minecraft manhunt series as proof that he’s a “professional speed runner“ is definitely a little skewed and ultimately wrong. If you tried to claim those as official speedruns, the moderating team would likely have a little laugh and then reject it. Yes, he has speed runner in the title and yes in a way, it is a speedrun because he is trying to beat the game as fast as possible, but more so he’s trying to avoid being killed by his friends in the game so it’s about both speed and being smart. Everyone within the speed run community and a lot of those outside of it would know that being chased down by your friends during the game isn’t a real category in Minecraft speedrunning and therefore the Minecraft Manhunt videos aren’t official speed runs. So people claiming that dream is an official speed runner and that that’s his career is ultimately false, which is what he was saying. His official speed runs were all done for fun and have never been the main focus of his content.

When you say that the legitimacy of the speedrunning community was called into question, I will admit, I’m unsure if you’re talking about the community itself and the people with in it, like the actual speedrunners, or if you’re talking about the moderator team or both. I will admit, even as someone who hyperfixates on Dream, his initial reaction to the moderators video saying that he cheated was godawful. for Blue and others who aren’t as into this and don’t know, basically the gist was he was lashing out and saying it was total bullshit and calling them idiots. He has since deleted that tweet and apologized for it and admitted that it was incredibly childish and impulsive. While I do get why he was so mad since the video had blindsided him after weeks of radio silence from the moderators and as a kid who didn’t finish high school he didn’t really understand the statistics that were being said in the video and since at the time he genuinely didn’t think that he cheated (a lot of people have said that all this combined led to heavy RSD which is why he lashed out like that), I still think that he could’ve handled the situation a lot better. on the other hand I think the moderators could’ve handled this situation a lot better as well. I don’t want to talk about the whole moderator team but I do want to talk about specifically Geosquare, who is probably the most talked about moderator when it comes to the situation. Dolphin anon, if you’re talking about the legitimacy of the moderator team being called into question, I’m assuming the situation surrounding Geosquare is likely what you’re talking about, which is a slightly different situation from just the speedrunning. So for Blue and others, before the video talking about Dream cheating was released, Dream had been told that there were people on the moderating team who didn’t like him. Knowledge of this bias is also a part of what caused Dream to lash out more in his initial reaction (though again it doesn’t excuse it). The biased moderator in question turned out to be Geosquare. This was heavily proven later on in about March of this year, where Geosquare played a large role in spreading the video of fake ‘dream’ saying the n-word. Geosquare was a speedrun moderator, he Has investigative skills and he got called out for spreading that video without doing any sort of investigating because it was clear to a lot of people that the person in the video wasn’t Dream. There were multiple things that made this video seem not credible, all of which easily could’ve been found by Geosquare.

Firstly, antis of Dream had been saying since January that they were going to try to find a way to accuse Dream of saying the N-word whether that just be through spreading rumors or faking a video or whatever else. Secondly, the video really sounds nothing like dream. Now I will say this video that the clip of someone saying the n-word was from 2016-2017. I’m not saying the video was fake, I’m not saying that someone somehow predicted that Dream was going to become a big creator or time traveled and went back in time to set him up for that. but the most common theory is that and he simply did go looking back through old Minecraft videos in order to find something incriminating. Both the creator of this video and a friend of the person who was saying the N-word in the video have since explained this. so basically for blue and others, Dream has not always on the Minecraft username Dream. He got it from someone else. And so the person in this video is called Dream. Since it was a while ago the timeline’s a little fuzzy for everyone and it’s unsure if this video occurred before Dream got the username or if it occurred after Dream got the username and the people within the video simply still called the person in the video Dream because that was what they were used to calling them. The clip’s a little too grainy to see the usernames and the video has since been taken down by the original poster. Either way, two different people. Geosquare has since admitted that this was bias on his end and that he apologized to Dream and that they’re all good and has given an apology to the black community for using the n-word as a weapon for his own bias and he has since stepped from the speedrun moderating team. so dolphin anon, when you’re talking about the legitimacy of the community being called into question if you’re talking about the moderating team, yes, you’d be correct, it was called into question, but I would say for valid and good reasons because it ultimately was biased (though again, doesn’t change that Dream was the one in the wrong in the speedrunning situation w how he initially reacted). I don’t want to fully blame Geosquare and say that it was completely obvious it wasn’t Dream or make it seem completely obvious to you guys, because things like mic changes and puberty do exist, so I’ll give the clips and allow you all to decide for yourselves.

The clip of someone, accused to be Dream, saying the N-word: https://twitter.com/Tommathyinnit/status/1375395156791336964/video/1 (I am not entirely sure which speaker is being accused to be Dream, which was sort of the first indicated to me that it probably wasn’t him because I don’t think peoples voices change That much, but I think he was being accused to be the person who was saying “well you can bring your friend...”) Again, this video is from 2016-2017.

A clip of Dream talking, also from 2016-2017: https://twitter.com/Onciescumbucket/status/1357440678909923335/video/1 (okay so. again ignore the user 😭 but it’s confirmed to be Dream by the fact it does sound like him and his long-time friends Sapnap, who used to go by PandascanPvP, and BadBoyHalo being in the video. I believe the video has captions so even for those who don’t know Dream or what he sounds like, it’ll tell you which one’s him and you can compare that voice to the one in the other clip)

But yeah. aaaaa I’m sorry for such a long submission, I’m hyperfixated on Dream and the Dream Team, though I do understand that there are legitimate criticisms on all of them and that no one’s required to like them, and people don’t need real reasons to dislike them because people are allowed to dislike whomever they want. Definitely not any hate towards you dolphin anon, I think that you do have points, I just wanted to express my disagreement with some of them and it’s nice that you do acknowledge that the toxicity goes both ways for both stans and antis. I think a big problem is that a lot of the creators who condemn or speak against Dream (people like Slasher and Noah Hugbox and Kavos) don’t openly condemn the toxic behavior of their own fans as much as Dream does, so it becomes a very hypocritical cycle where they’re making videos about the toxicity of Dream stans and yet their own fans send death threats to Dream and his community. And since the death threats towards Dream come from multiple different fanbase rather than one centralized fanbase the way it is if toxic people from Dream’s community are attacking someone, he can’t really pin it on one person and ask them to denounce their fans so it just becomes a thing where he’s both receiving a ton of death threats while being asked to denounce death threats towards others when there’s no one really denouncing death threats towards him, which is just discouraging for his community to see, but that’s just how the Internet is, I suppose. Again, no hate to you dolphin anon and I’m sorry if any part of this came off as such, and again Blue, I’m sorry for such a long submission

MY GOODNESS WHAT A SCROLL Not gonna read all of it cuz its clearly dedicated to my dolphin anon.

#long post

1 note · View note

im-a-space-gay · 4 years ago

Text

The Deleted Name Reveal

Another Gay Gamers fic about me making the British boi suffer :D!! I am tired, and really need sleep and validation, but guess what?? I’m not gonna get either!! Oh well.

Trigger Warnings include: Cursing, mentions of pervs, anger, sadness, lack of mental stability, break downs, crying, name reveals that weren’t recorded, Virge been a lil troll, let me know if I need to add more!

Before Virgil went to Florida

~~~~~~~

One more thing. If one more sh*tty thing happened to Virgil in the remaining time of today, he will scream. So many things went wrong today, if you asked him.

It started out when he realized he was out of food, meaning he had to leave his dark and amazing apartment and into the sunlight where people were to buy more. But of course, he missed the bus, had to wait an hour for the next one, had some perv sit next to him that kept leaning into his personal bubble and giving him the bedroom eyes, and then the store was out of Cheddar Broccoli Ricearoni in a cup, making his day so much worse because damn that was the good stuff.

And then when he missed the bus back, he decided walking would be faster, and halfway there, it started raining. He understood he lived in England, but come on!

So now, here he was, soaked all the way through as he entered his apartment, hoping to god his food was dry because most of that stuff didn't last in water, like chips. He put away his snackage first, deciding his health didn't matter anymore as he put the food in the cabinets, ignoring his shivering.

And soon enough he was done putting away groceries and getting into dry clothes and currently was brewing up tea. He was making some part of today enjoyable, mark his words. However, he didn't count on one thing.

His online friends.

They started texting him, telling him to set up and load Minecraft, and that's when it hit him. Recording day. The cherry on top of his already perfect day, huh?

He thought about how he wouldn't make it through the recording without either snapping at everyone or staying completely silent as he turned on his computer, deciding he was gonna need a lot of sugar in his tea for this crap. Hopefully, his mood would make the video more interesting, as it wasn't very often he was like this with no explanation.

Virgil first loaded Minecraft, deciding he could use that time to try to relax and cool down before he had to hear those voices that he was not ready to hear.

And when the time came, he dreadfully opened Discord while sipping his sweet tea. He clicked on the call and oh boy, they were already yelling.

"Hi Anxie!" Patton called over the other two's arguement, making them shut up quickly and say their hellos as well. Virgil just grunted, reading back in the chat to figure out what they were doing and opening one of their modded worlds.

"Did you just wake up?" Logan asked, his stern lecturing voice already coming out which really peeved Virgil off.

"No. I've been awake all day," he growled, trying to ignore his friend's characters as he went down into the mine.

"Okay, no need to be violent!" Roman said, and Virgil just hissed and continued on. As his friends officially started the video, Virgil went to level 23 and made a little hole, barricading himself in and hoping to God nobody would find him. If he was lucky, they wouldn’t mind him doing essentially nothing this video and would be fine with just his barely there commentary.

“Say hello Anx!” Patton said, and wow, did he really miss the other’s introductions? Dang.

“Greetings,” he said, trying not to let his anger out on Patton. He was too good for that. Patton moved on, and he assumed that would be it for five minutes, but of course, Roman was unpredictable.

“That’s it? That’s all?” Roman asked, apparently not pleased with his one word.

“Greetings fellow pieces of garbage, how are you. Better?” Irritation was creeping into his voice as he went on, and if the others didn’t know something was wrong before, they definitely did now.

“Geez, calm down,” Roman said, sounding concerned. Virgil hissed at him again, holding back tears from his frustration as he sipped his tea.

“Are you alright Anx?” Logan asked this time, sounding equally concerned, which did not help his mood at all.

“I’m fine,” he snapped. He became more irritated when there was no more tea in his cup, getting up and going into his kitchen to pour another cup before deciding to grab the entire kettle and drinking out of that as he tried to stay calm listening to his friends.

“So, what do you think of that Anx?” Patton asked halfway into the video, and Virgil just hissed. He didn’t hear what Patton was asking about, and he didn’t want to. He wanted to stay in this f*cking hole, chug his piping hot tea, and not talk. He shall achieve this, even if he had to commit arson to do it.

“Dude, what is your problem?” Virgil hissed again. When he noticed Logan’s gamer tag coming closer, he crouched. Of course, this didn’t matter as Logan broke into his hole, but it seemed like he found it by accident.

“Wha- Anx what are you doing down here?” He asked in confusion.

“Trying not to have a breakdown and burning my tongue on Chamomile,” Virgil said truthfully, his angry tone melting into an unstable one. He felt tears rolling down his cheeks and he chugged more tea so he wouldn’t make any noises.

“Are you okay?” Roman asked in a joking tone, probably thinking he was kidding. Virgil stopped drinking his tea, opened his mouth to answer the usual “I’m fine”, but a small sob came out instead. “Wait, sh*t, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Anx,” Patton said in a concerned and begging voice.

“I’m fine!” Virgil insisted, holding back any noises that might prove otherwise.

“Pause the recording,” Logan said, and it sounded like everyone went through with it like Virgil did. “Anx...”

“I’m okay!” Virgil said, but the small sobs wracking through the two words contradicted his statement. He couldn’t help but curl into a ball in his giant computer chair, wiping his eyes as if they could see him.

“Who are you trying to convince?” Logan asked softly, and Virgil started crying louder, rubbing his eyes harder too.

“I- I don’t know...”

“God damn it Anx,” Roman mumbled, and Virgil started shrinking into himself before Roman continued. “Why do you have to be all the way in England?”

“Because tea,” Virgil sniffled, and smiled brokenly when he heard the surprised laughter from all three.

It took a while, but they managed to calm him down, and never once asked what he was upset about, which he was thankful for because all the things that made him mad sounded stupid out loud. They just asked if he could continue the video, and after reassurances that he could and wanted to, they let it go. But...

“Uh, before we start recording again, can I um... tell you guys something?”

“Of course Anxie!” Patton said cheerfully, and oh boy that made him more nervous. “What is it Kiddo?”

“Uh- um, so uh...” Virgil took a deep breath. It’s like a bandaid, you just gotta rip it off. “MynameisVirgil!”

“I- I’m sorry, what was that? You said that really fast.”

“My name, is Virgil,” he repeated slower, biting his lip. It was silent for a second before Roman spoke up.

“Wait. Wait wait wait, for real? This isn’t another prank? Like, that is actually your real name?”

“Uh, unless mum’s been lying to me all my life, I’m pretty sure that is my name,” Virgil joked before realizing he’s probably said something similar in his pranks. “I could try and find my birth certificate? It’s gotta be around here somewhere, just give me a second and—“

“Virgil?” Logan cut him off, and Virgil stopped from where he was about to get up.

“Yeah?” He responded near-immediately, not noticing the name difference. Patton squealed, clapping excitedly. This of course, made Virgil really scared. “What? Did I do something?”

“That was too quick to be a fake name!” Patton said, and Virgil finally registered what happened.

“Do you still want a birth certificate or...?”

“I think we’re good Anx.”

“Okay,” Virgil said nodding, and was about to start recording again before—

“Hey An- Virgil?”

“Yes?” He stopped, looking at the computer with the call on it in curiosity.

“We love you, okay?”

Virgil felt his face heat up, and thankfully held back a squeak for the most part, only letting out a small flustered sound. He had to remind himself that Roman was most likely referring to platonic love, and not... the love he felt.

“Y- Yeah, okay. I love you guys too,” he mumbled, and he felt his butterflies turn into seething hot rage as not one, not two, but all three of them starting to “aww” at him, saying how tiny and adorable he was.

How insulting. This is why online friends from America couldn’t be trusted.

Needless to say, Virgil left his little hole and kept trolling the others for the rest of the day, his only explanation being: “What? Me? I’m just a smol, cute bean who apparently can’t do anything wrong.”

17 notes · View notes