#mousebrass

[kimberlyannharts]

Yes! Netflix usually drops eight to ten episodes of a show at a time, and Cosmic Fury is only ten episodes, so it makes sense

Months of folks insisting that the whole Red Amelia thing won't be bad for Zayto, that he's not demoted, he'll still be super awesome in some kind of special mentor role..........

.......all for a majority of the early reviews to say that how CF handles Zayto was one of the worst parts of the season lol

[betterbemeta]

re @mousebrass

[context]

Sorry for the delay, I just needed some time to simmer my answer. (for frame of reference, I'm mostly referring to fallout 3 and fallout 4. not new vegas, and I don't know enough about FO76.)

When I said 'Bethesda's fallout will never say no to you', I meant in sort of a structural sense. The gameplay and the storytelling combine in Bethesda's fallout games to do nothing but affirm the player's forward motion.

They do this so well the storytelling is ONLY a function of the gameplay loop: a relay race that progresses with total blindness to what the player actually does so long as they hit the checkpoints that advance things along.

Forward motion is good, we need stories to progress and to get from one event to another, we don't want to run around in circles in a game achieving nothing. And we don't want to encounter a true dead end, or a frustrating 'sorry mario the princess is in another castle!' situation where we feel our prior actions were pointless.

BUT. Hear me out. Negativity, 'being told no', friction along the way, is important to an 'adventure' being more than just an endless gopher loop.

Lucy MacLean IS given objectives in her journey. But the narrative is not her personal facilitator; instead she can't proceed UNLESS she does these increasingly heinous uncomfortable things, okey dokey! She COULD choose not to do them, but she'd 'fail' or thinks she would. Her struggle 'drives the story' rather than styling her actions as intuitively synonymous with 'progress.'

In Bethesda Fallout games. It really doesn't matter what dialog options you choose, progress is inevitable. And blind. If you choose peaceful or guns-blazing approaches. Want to join the fascists? You won't encounter too much content that places pressure on you for doing that. Want to side with the scrappy underdogs? Done, it won't be that much of a strain on your resources. Take the evil option? Except for maybe a few NPCs that could desert you, you won't be constrained by that commitment very much.

It's 'the customer's always right', when that idiom exists basically to facilitate transactions and nothing else.

In fact, the one time in a Bethesda fallout game where meaningful pressure or negative consequences impacted you, in fallout 3, the ending was so unpopular it was retconned in a DLC. But it doesn't have to be this way; there are many times in New Vegas where you might feel conflict or constraints on your actions, a 'no' that makes what you actually choose to do feel more interesting. Like, enough times that I think anyone who's played it, could think of one (their favorite one?) right now. I don't even have to list examples, because the variety is great enough that different people can choose which one feels compelling to them.

Remember when I said we wanted to avoid scenarios where we feel futile, running around in circles, pointless, or obstructed? Well, after a while a lot of Bethesda games become that anyway even if they always take the player's side. People just... give up playing a save usually by level 30. Boundless affirmation towards forward motion, where all paths are THE path and you're the main character of reality, it sucks. it's why Lucy MacLean's wasteland experience will leave you wanting to play fallout and then sighing when you boot up the game that just got a 'remaster' and it's still mostly drudgery. When SHE hits 'quest objectives,' her world doesn't say 'yes! now go do...'

It says "oh, hell no. but you gotta... unless maybe..."

[oviids]

'Cas is all of Buffy's love interests at once' - OH MY GOD, HE IS. The brooding immortal, the loyal soldier who rebels against his superiors, the Constantine knockoff? It all tracks.

HE IS he literally is...his range is truly unparalleled. also what really makes it is a. apart from the obvious ‘one moment of true happiness’ curse its all accidental (like pretty much all the good things in this hellshow) and b. he is more of a stereotypical vampire boyfriend than dean’s ACTUAL vampire boyfriend ever was

[renaroo]

Diana, Karen, Kate, Jo Mullein, Wally, J'onn - who would you add to that list to round out a seven-person Justice League lineup?

Assuming the Karen in question is Power Girl and the Kate in question is Batwoman, I would probably round out the team with Ryan Choi’s Atom. Gotta get your sci-fi shenanigans doubled. 

[khawla-gfm2]

$14,653 raised !

[tagging people for reach]:

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📰Khawla's Family Campaign Update: 64📰

$14,513/$20,000 as of October 17th [11pm CDT]

Currently $487 away from $15,000 as a short term goal.

We're getting really close to the $20,000 goal!

Please consider donating even just $5, $10, or $20 to help the fundraiser further along to reaching it's goal. And remember that reblogging/sharing to reach more people can help a lot!

[for more information on the campaign: check my pinned post, the campaign page itself, or message me directly if you have any questions]

[tag list under the cut]:

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[duhragonball]

Happy Piccolo Day!

Thank you.   

I kind of blew off Piccolo Day this year, but I just wasn’t in the mood, and I’ve been trying to get back on track with my writing.    Then again, I suppose the purest celebration of Piccolo Day is to stay at home, wondering about the survival of the world as you know it.  

Not gonna lie, this whole pandemic business has been wearing on me mentally.   My day-to-day life hasn’t been impacted by this much at all, but it still eats at me that all of this is going on, and I have no real control over it, and it feels like no one else does either.    I kind of liked it better in the 80′s, when I could reasonably assume that Reagan and Gorbechev knew better than to start a nuclear war.   

I should try to get back on the horse with this blog, since it usually makes me feel better, but I’ve just been frustrated with one thing or another, and I covered just about all of DBZ in detail last year.   

Yeah, this picture of Post Boy makes me feel a little better already.    I gotta try to get out of this funk.

[mewtwowarrior]

@mousebrass said: Man, imagine if Kingdom Hearts let Disney characters just bounce off each other like this.

-

Oh man, yes! That would be so much fun!

[about-faces]

Since you're on the subject: Gamma Flight dogpiling Child Hulk while he's just begging for help is more evocative of real-world attitudes to mental health than anything in Identity Crisis II - uh, I mean, HiC.

Forgot to respond to this when I talked up the last issue of Immortal Hulk a few weeks back, but this is an incredibly powerful interpretation that I’m amazed I hadn’t even considered. Like, I always sort of had the “classic Hulk as a depiction of a trope usually associated with neurodiversity” in the back-burner of my brain, but thinking about it in terms of that issue? Jesus, man. Jesus. I just had to sit and think about it for a while.

I actually didn’t like Gamma Flight being so reactionary and horrible to poor Hulk when I read it the first time. It seemed like a disappointing return to the trope of superheroes (plus a couple villains trying to be heroic) being kneejerk violent and causing a fight scene. Now that whole fight reads a WHOLE different way, and given Al Ewing’s work throughout, that may well have been entirely intentional.

Between that and what Ewing seems to be doing in Guardians of the Galaxy, he seems to have a handle on mental health that’s so, so much better than most writers, particularly King. That said, I know a person who writes about abuse recovery from superhero perspectives who actually loved HiC by the story’s end (though he was apprehensive throughout the rest), so I can’t speak for everyone’s perspectives on that.

[sinvraal]

Rereading bits of Exitus and Certus again. Just finished Shepard's moment of despair and resignation before the Collector base mission, and damn. You know how to pack a punch.

Thank you! <3 It’s lovely to get a comment like this.

I always wanted the ME2 stretch of the story to be Shepard’s long dark tea-time of the soul. There was so much between the lines that the game never really addressed... I think it came out as a collection of (often good) parts rather than a cohesive whole.

[secretlystephaniebrown]

Here's an idea: at some point after Steph and Klarion become friends, he learns about her crush on Cass. Suddenly, Steph has to deal with an overeager witch-boy trying to play matchmaker.

Oh my god

[ladyloveandjustice]

mousebrass replied to your post “wellll i may never be able to login to my main twitter account again....”

That sucks. What happened?

basically completely forgot the account was associated with a very old email address, that email company went bankrupt or shut down or whatever and cant be contacted so i can’t access the email, now my accounts locked for ‘security reasons’ or whatever the fuck and I can’t reset the password.

guess i’ll rebuild eventually. might not have the energy for a long time though.

[kimberlyannharts]

OK, that preview panel reminded me of Tommy's super-dramatic entrance in the show, and the actual 'refrigerator logic' behind that is occurring to me for the first time. I'm just laughing at the idea that Zordon and Alpha apparently decided the best way to reintroduce Tommy to everyone was to have him Descend From The Heavens.

DEATH BY GLAMOUR PLAYS FURIOUSLY IN THE BG

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I just saw the preview for the next Legends of Tomorrow and immediately thought of your 'everyone on the Waverider fighting over the bathroom' post.

I haven’t watched Legends in years but I still want that royalties check 

[biomic]

Starninger and the Twelfth Doctor have a rock-off. Who wins?

we do.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

You've said before that either Ax or Marco could've stopped Jake draining the Yeerk pool with a word. How big a difference do you think it would've made if they had?

For those 17,372 yeerks in the pool?It’d make a pretty damn big difference, yeah.

For Jake?Controversial thought: maybe not as much.  By that point in the war, he’s already done a lot of unforgivable things that’ll haunt him for the rest of his life (e.g. his nightmares about David and all the innocent hosts he’s killed in #41).  By that point in that battle, he’s already gotten James and most of the Auximorphs killed and sent Rachel on a suicide mission to assassinate Tom.  From his point of view, what’s 17,000 yeerks more or less?  He’s already depressed and traumatized and struggling to function.

For Cassie?That might actually make a difference.  She mostly understands that Rachel made her own choice and that Jake’s orders there were a necessary evil.  But she’s disgusted when she finds herself starting to defend the decision to Erek after the battle, and she’s even more disgusted when Jake later admits to enjoying the mass murder.  Cassie feels a visceral horror with Jake when contemplating this moment, and it’s a big factor in her barely standing to be around him.  Given how much her opinion of Marco softens in a year apart, her opinion of Jake might do the same if not for Jake’s flushing the Pool ship.

For Rachel?Might create a big problem.  In canon, she uses the moment of distraction created by the Blade ship controllers gaping in horror at their dead brethren to go from flea morph to battle morph.  Without that moment, she’d have to find a much better hiding place — no easy task, in flea morph — just to start the fight without being killed prematurely.  It might be doable, and it might get her smushed mid-morph before she ever manages to have a go at Tom.

For The Visser Formerly Known as Three?This is the real question.  Jake et al only flush the Pool ship because they need Visser Three to realize they’re there and rush to the bridge, at which point one of them can fire on the Blade ship to disable it and prevent Rachel from having to go kamikaze on Tom.  If they don’t flush the yeerk pool, the Blade ship still gets away, and Rachel still dies.  

Maybe the Animorphs go unnoticed for long enough that Visser Three focuses on Toby’s people in the engineering room and kills all of the free hork-bajir instead.  Maybe Visser Three doesn’t bother with the Animorphs, discovers Tom’s yeerk’s betrayal him all on his own, and destroys the Blade ship along with everyone on board.  Maybe Visser Three rallies his troops enough to take back control of the Pool ship from the Animorphs, and then wipes out the rest of the resistance on the ground.  Almost certainly, Jake forever regrets not flushing the Pool ship, because in the moment he knew that doing so would increase the odds of saving Rachel in time.

For the rest of the Yeerk Empire?This one depends on how much you buy into the shock-and-awe theory of war.  If you believe Jake that war is about “kill the enemy.  Kill so many of them that those who are left alive lose their will to fight on” (#53), then flushing the yeerk pool might have been instrumental in most of the rest of the empire choosing to surrender.  If you believe John McCain (among others) that the only way to achieve enemy surrender is through showing that defeated combatants will be treated well, then flushing the yeerk pool may have hampered what otherwise would have been a total peaceful surrender.  I’m neither a philosopher nor a military strategist, so I couldn’t say for sure which it would be.

[renaroo]

Peter Parker for the meme.

First Impression: Peter is one of those characters I literally could not tell you the first time I came across him because he’s just always been a part of my life. My father and uncle were both giant nerds and comic book collectors, mostly of Marvel, and by the time I came around they had a big collection of their favorites. For my dad, that included Thor and Spider-Man. My earliest memories in childhood were reading comic books with my dad and playing with figurines of Peter, he’s just like an old friend that’s always been there. 

Impression Now: It’s hard to tear me away from my bias with Peter more than just about any other character because I have such a history with him. He’s not a character that I read every appearance of or collect new issues for religiously like I do some of my favorites, but a good Peter Parker story will make me smile in ways that few stories can. I’m very particular about “my” Peter, but I just love him. I just hate how stagnant and repetitive he’s been forced into becoming over the last two decades. 

Favorite Moment: I initially was going to use a scene from Kraven’s Last Hunt because it’s still my favorite story overall, but since I used it for MJ already I thought back to another moment that I think really encapsulates Peter’s ingenuity, his strength of will, and his willingness to put his own body on the line and it brings me back to his first defeat of the Symbiote in “Birth of Venom”

[Web of Spider-Man (1985-1995) #1]

Idea for a Story: It’s not starring Peter, but I’m currently working on a story surrounding legacy and becoming your own hero in Resonance through Miles where Peter is going to play a pretty big role in the way I feel is the most natural place to take an aging Peter Parker. 

Unpopular Opinion: Peter makes the MOST sense as an adult by making him a high school biology teacher. It fits his journey and it also keeps him close to the high school/teenage antics that defined his initial stories while allowing him the distance and maturity of being an adult. 

Favorite Relationship: It’s a tie between Mary Jane Watson and Johnny Storm. In, like, every possible way. I love both of those relationships so damn much it’s ridiculous.

Favorite Headcanon: I’m so here for Jewish Peter Parker and the fact that it’s canon in Spider-Verse makes me so freaking happy I don’t even have words.