#never mind please continue

[egophiliac]

"IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A JOKE" As someone who's been playing TWST since march and stopped going out of my way to be spoilerfree after I got stuck at Overblott!Jamil? That's honestly been one of my favorite things about it - seeing something in fanart or a comment you think is just fans joking, only for it to be canon. "The economy!", "May I also throw a tantrum?", Malleus' gargoyle thing, and... everything about Rook being my top examples.

there's a whole bit in Trey's platinum birthday card where he goes on about how he became increasingly obsessed with mustard for like a week straight until the other students held an intervention. how are you supposed to talk about this. how can you bring up something like Trey's descent into mustard obsession to the point that the other characters are worried for him without it sounding like the most obvious lolrandom "he mentioned it once and now fandom acts like he puts mustard in everything" joke. also, how can I slip this into every Twst post from now on, because I need everyone in the world to know that this is a real canon fact about Trey "I'm just an average normal guy (who sticks my hands into people's mouths and owns 20 toothbrushes and used to eat flowers off the side of the road)" Clover.

for bonus points, 1) the punchline is that he still doesn't even like mustard that much, 2) he's saying all of this to Leona, and 3) Leona is actually kind of invested in Trey's mustard story for some reason, which is the most unbelievable part of all of this to be honest. (then Trey gets distracted by a painting of the Cheshire Cat and Leona takes the opportunity to powerwalk away to freedom before they can start talking about dijon versus spicy brown or whatever and extend this bit even longer)

[sysig]

Experimentation (Patreon)

[crabussy]

IS ANYONE ELSE FEELING KIND TODAY!!! IS ANYONE ELSE FEELING GENEROUS TOWARDS OTHER PEOPLE!!! IS ANYBODY ELSE BEING KIND AND TRYING TO UNDERSTAND EVEN WHEN ITS HARD!!! IS ANYONE ELSE ASSUMING THE BEST OF OTHERS INTENTIONS AND RESPONDING IN KIND!!!! CAN ANYONE HEAR ME

[corviiids]

sparknotes for chapter 9 of as you like it because a very kind commenter asked for a breakdown and if theres one thing im good at it's breaking down

(spoilers for the fic obviously)

tihs chapter gave me so much trouble. i sat on it for so long i literally hated it by the time i posted it but im starting to forgive it now. it was, as ive said, originally way longer, and the next part of the fic was supposed to be the second half of this one... but it was starting to get absurd and i realised that neither part would have the weight i needed them to have if they were lumped in together. (with some relief, honestly, because i kind of had wanted them to be separate initially but didn't think they'd be long enough. i dont know myself very well.) anyway, the next chapter should be a bit of a doozy now although hopefully not SO absurdly long.

this chapter picks up where the previous cliff hung off, which is to say, after the 'shadow' akechi reveals that he's actually just the real ass guy. akechi in the palace what will he do. the chapter doesn't immediately kick off with ren's reaction though and that is because ren is the most repressed man alive and does not know how he feels about it.

so, akechi disguised himself to enter his palace, which is significant for a few reasons:

1. he's disguised as himself

which i think is ironic in a fun way, but it's also just a very basic nod to the fact that akechi pivots between which of his personae is his default. this isn't necessarily super meaningful, but he does later refer to the black mask suit as

a costume, instead of an outfit. i mean, don't read into it too much, he's just talking, but i did think that probably points to how he feels about his appearance generally.

2. more importantly, his disguise involves taking off his mask.

so he's disguised, yes, and he's disguised as himself, yes, but that disguise is a literal unmasking, which is also kind of ironic. in presenting himself this way he has literally and figuratively made himself vulnerable. they're inside his heart, and the entire time he's in the palace, he is exposed... again both literally and figuratively because he also starts sharing more with ren than he ever has. look, i just think it's fun to have a character who has so many layers that he has to lie so hard that he becomes himself again.

i only want to point this out because (this is also part of larger meta about mona lol) akechi knew about the metaverse, but there is no way to intuit the method of stealing hearts without guidance. it's such a specific and involved process. thje most akechi could work out on his own was that if you killed a shadow, that person would have a mental breakdown. no way to guess that if you send a calling card and then go in within the next 24 hours and take a physical manifestation of a thing that you didn't know existed (process) would lead to that person ahving a change of heart (result). so even if akechi had a palace and knew about it, even if he wanted to do something about it, he would have assumed there was nothing he could do about it - i also have no idea what the process would be for sending yourself a calling card, even if he DID know about the process. so basically in this fic akechi found his palace and just assumed that was it. he was like, fucked up lol. anyway

this just straight up isn't true HAHA so i put in the silly little dichotomy of akechi gently taking ren's arm to protect him from slipping on the ice while telling him that he lied about caring about him. i think in this chapter as akechi begins to openly explain more and more of his thought process, this is probably the first truly clear glimpse you get of exactly what akechi's distortion is and how deep it runs.

the things akechi says with total conviction in this chapter are just... not true, not a fair or founded way to view the world (or the art of performance haha), but he says them with total conviction, and hopefully it should show off how unreliable he is as a source of exposition. one commenter asked about this moment of akc's eyes going yellow and if it was somehting that happened in canon - not really, i was just thinking about those little moments in the game after you send a calling card where the game cuts from the person to their shadow to do a little oneliner about their distortion.

akechi's IN his own palace, so i thought it would be fun to kind of make it a physical thing that can happen to him where he sort of merges with his shadow for a brief second in the moments when the distortion is strongest.

OKAY this is one of my favourite bits of the chapter HAHA the deep soda lore. i dont expect anyone to remember all the way back to chapter 3 but:

literally nobody asked about this but i love the phantom thieves!!! i dream of all the little silly moments of being a team that they must have that we don't get to see in gameplay, for obvious reasons of it wouldn't really work in a game, but i can imagine them in my brain. i can imagine their trickshot contests that get their asses kicked. i can imagine them chanting at each other to chug while joker and oracle compete to down an entire bottle of brand neutral mountain dew baja blast. i can dream.

soda lore is gay.

i dont honestly think it's inherently a bad thing necessarily but this part does kind of set up like... you can see akechi very early on in life forming this worldview that the truth isn't always what you want, you know? this was a 'lie' he and his mother both bought into, they both knew what the truth actually was, so it wasn't real dishonesty, but they just had this little fantasy. i just thought it would be fun for akechi to have a way to bond with his mother and feel closer to her, and that way is by buying into this white lie. idk

akechi's mother isn't really a character and i don't want to form her into too much of one because i think it's very much the point that, like... he made this point in an earlier chapter but having lost her at a pretty young age i think it's quite crucial that akechi doesn't really have a fully formed image of who his mother is outside of what she was to him as a child. so i actively don't want her to feel too real or defined. im not interested in making an oc out of her because i think it defeats the purpose. that said, this line exists to maybe gesture very vaguely at the notion that akechi's mother was a very bright person who similarly was stuck in circumstances that didn't serve to foster her real potential. just the image in my mind of a person who's clever enough to get across algebraic notation in chess by flipping through a book in a few minutes, but was never exposed to the opportunity to learn chess until this moment in someone else's house, and also the particular situation of learning this skill WHILE at someone's place as a call girl, i dunno . i hope im treating this with the grace it deserves but i wanted to build just this particular image in vivid colour while also keeping the reality quite blurry and vague, just to give the reader a sense of where akechi came from while still preserving his limited pov.

my thoughts on the phantom thieves' methods (and how they compare to maruki) are definitely too long and involved to put into a post about this fic chapter specifically, but maybe one day. i also wanna stress im not like... strictly anti-phantom thief or anti-heartstealing lol but i do have thoughts about the philsophy of it and the thieves' hypocrisy WHATEVER that's not for this post. i bring this up only to crow about finding a way to bring up the experience machine (ie maruki's reality) in this fic without it being royal compliant and have it be... hoepfully... sufficiently relevant to the plot. wa hoo! the experience machine came up for the first time back in chapter 4 and im just delighted that i finally got to close that loop. by the way, that experiment is also called the lotus eater machine after the lotus eaters in the odyssey! i dunno that it's actively my favourite thought experiment but it's definitely up there and i think about it a lot.

TITLE DROP

i think i spoke once about what 'as you like it' means. it's obviously the name of the shakespeare play from where 'all the world's a stage' comes, but it has a couple more layers to it as well - akechi's palace is a place where he performs to what he believes other people want or need to see from him - so his appearance is as you like it. and his accusation of the thieves' heartstealing methods is that they twist a person's internal reality to suit their vision - that's the meaning he's taking here, claiming that joker is turning akechi into an unfamiliar new thing, as [joker] like[s] it. you get it.

this running joke of ren really hating vents wasn't something i planned but im attached to it now. prayer circle for his knees

ive basically given up on making sense of samerecarm, which is par for the course for any rpg or video game really where reduction to 0hp/revival are mechanics. like, im inclined to think 0hp is more equivalent to unconsciousness, because... well... otherwise it's pretty cold that they left akechi dead in the engine room without even looking for a way around the wall. lol. but one of mona's revival lines is 'being dead isnt easy!' or something like that, so i kind of just give up and assume it's video game logic you'r enot meant to look at too hard lol. the way i reconcile it for my purposes is to say it's a sort of metaverse-exclusive state of being which is not quite dead but sort of in a limbo state wher eyou can be brought back with specific revival magic, which i refer to as being down. that's uhhh, that's different from the battle status of down... which you get after being hit with a crit/technical/weak skill... look, don't think about it. joker in crow's arms.

this is literally meaningless i just wanted to include a cameo of my very favourite persona q2 battle theme.

[ghostdnfie]

this might be another genre of posts that only i understand but. am i the only one who gets annoyed when ppl say they like their faves purely bc they're 'unproblematic' 😭 purity culture hurts my soul bc i see ppl time and time again care way more about the absence of mistakes (i.e. perfection, which mind you is impossible) than actually doing good or trying to improve yourself. and nine out of ten times their faves aren't even 'unproblematic' (or what fits their definition of what they believe to be unproblematic) they have said and done things in the past that were either wrong or hurtful bc newsflash we have all made mistakes or misspoken before. its just that with creators specifically, some were lucky enough not to have their mistakes broadcasted to a huge audience, and some were not.

i just hate the fact that some ccs can say or do smth mistakeningly and they're never seen as redeemable by ppl like this no matter how much they grow and change as ppl, or apologise or make amends, because even though the person they are now is different than the person that made that mistake, in these ppls' eyes they will be tied to that mistake forever, because of the fact that what is put on the internet stays there forever. especially when continually brought up and circled around even many years later. and every time i've seen that happen it's done for malicious intent, not because these ppl actually care about the cc improving as a person.

[cable-salamdr]

People ask me how I listen to The Crane Wives’ songs without crying every three seconds at how relatable the lyrics are and my honest answer is to gaslight myself that the text only fits my ocs and other fictional characters and not me nope no siree only oc animatics being thought up over here

[ratatatastic]

do you also think about ekky, in his first full game back after rehab, the practise held the day afterwards, when asked how easy it was to play with forsy again going "its like having your own cheat code out there" and "im blessed to be able to play with such an awesome partner" thanks man very nice

[a-s-levynn]

.

[clowningcrows]

yall im crying fr i just saw a tiktok talking about this video where some girl who was struggling with an ED was telling her audience about how she was intentionally giving all the ppl around her extremely calorically dense food by adding extra oil to meals, adding sugar to protein powder and yogurt, etc. so that they would all gain weight (and i guess therefore validate her own weight?) but ANYWAY i opened the comments and someone literally said, “she did not poison them nd they didn’t die. yeah what she did was wrong but yall love to crucify people with Ed’s!!” and i-

[rapha-reads]

So I've decided to ignore sleep tonight (though it's already 6am so whatever), because several reasons I won't get into. Anyway I'm reading Prince Lestat and I am LOVING it. There is just so much lore?! So many new characters, fascinating characters?! A whole world of vampires whose stories are connected or totally not to the Coven of the Articulate?! There's just so much.

In my last post, about how I skipped quickly Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle, I wrote that I was finding it academically fascinating to read several decades worth of an entire literature world in the span of a month only. To continue in this vein (pun intended), reading PL after having binge-read the original VC books is a deep dive into how history has sped up since the 80s.

I'm not just thinking about because I'm reading Gregory's chapter and that's what he's observing, and also because the changed world and what it means for vampire society ("the tribe", and how I adore that terminology) is the big main theme of this final trilogy. It's something I've been thinking about since TVL at least. How for how these novels pertain to the horror and the fantastic genres, they are also a mirror of the society and time during which AR was writing. And because she kept writing decade after decade, and kept observing the world around here, each new book is its own little observation about the early 80s, then late 80s, then first half of the 90s, second half of the 90s, and now we're right smack in the middle 2010s and these immortal characters are feeling the weight of this rapidly changing world.

And it makes me think of actual human beings born in the 40s or 50s, or even 60s, or my own grandfather born in 1931, and how, just like a lot of these vampires recounted in PL, they sometimes can't follow all the changes brought in the last three decades (the biggest thing is technology, intradiegetically Lestat himself saying he keeps forgetting how to use his smartphone, but extradiegetically, it's how AR writes "to go on the computer" and other phrases like that, that sounds weird to the ear of someone who's grown up with this tech). And AR was over 70yo when she wrote PL, so I'm imagining that she was also writing her own impressions of this 21st century world that she saw developing under her eyes.

And in light of all the historic events we live week after week these past handful of years only (the 2020s want to bury us), it's quite interesting to apply that way of thinking to our generation too (millenials and younger, the 80s-90s-early 00s kids). Saw a post earlier saying "do you think one day we'll get to live in precedented times", in answer to the classic "we're living in unprecedented times", and I think of how the VC are the stories of one handful of characters in a world full of other characters who are not or relatively not concerned by these big stories. And how the Coven of the Articulate is considered as legendary amongst the rest of vampiredom, while they themselves don't really realise their fame, or when they do, they reject it. And how in the actual world, there are still a huge percentage of the world population that's not concerned at all by things that here make us all go frothing at the mouth because "omg we're witnessing history". Yes, "we" are witnessing something that will appear in the history books, but it is so because we have decided to put ourselves in the narrative. So many people are not even caring a little bit about big news that seem so important to us, because their lives have other matters to care for. And it's not that they're wrong or we're wrong, it's not about that, it's mostly about how the rapid changes of the world in the 21st century has made a category of people (all ages all nationalities alike) the Main Character, concerned by the narrative and trying to control it or change it (voting, protesting, activism) while so many others are still going on about their lives as usual, maybe seeing the same things as the first category, using the same tools, but not seeing the connection between it and them (the "mavericks" as AR calls them), or others starting to realise and not knowing how to join the narrative (Antoine, Gregory), while yet others have picked up a whole other way of being part of the narrative while not being part of it (Fareed).

I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe I do need to go lay down for a couple of hours after all.

[redrobemerle]

not to be a little hater (except that i absolutely am being a little hater and im right to be) but

the "Young Justice - All Media Types" tag on ao3 just. should not exist. YJA is a mishmash of predominantly the og Teen Titans comics and the Teen Titans comic from '03 (not the Teen Titans '03 (animated) tie-in comic. thats a New Teen Titans adaptation.) with bits and pieces from n52 (like kaldur being aqualad). Young Justice '98 is a COMPLETELY different story that shares. basically nothing with the show (only one yj '98 character shows up in the ESTABLISHING SEASON of yja. and hes also a Completely Different Person.)

like, dont get me wrong, "all media types" tags, can be incredibly helpful, especially when it comes to stuff like comics, because of how people have a tendency to pull from different continuities.

but like.

unless its a crossover fic of yj '98 and yja (which. genuinely i would like to see more of its an interesting concept to play with) (or yja and yj '19 for that matter!), the Young Justice (Comics) and Young Justice (Cartoon) tags are mutually exclusive. PLEASE treat them as such. I should not be seeing the following set of fandom tags on 90% of YJA fics:

I know its DCs fault for giving them the same name (and also. releasing the animation tie-in comic of YJ '11. which very much does not help the confusion) but PLEASE i am BEGGING here

[zorkaya-moved]

> Vacher created this drink after discovering the effects of Primordial Seawater after being diluted with normal water. He manufactured and marketed it to fund his experiments, earning a lot of money through doing so.

> Vacher was an adventurer from Snezhnaya who traveled to Fontaine.

> Marcel, real name Vacher, is a quest-exclusive NPC that appears as one of the main antagonists in the Archon Quest Chapter IV: Act II - As Light Rain Falls Without Reason.

With all due respect, Genshin, can we fucking stop mostly using Snezhnayans as main antagonists in Genshin storyline and keep making Traveler have 9/10 people be a damn villain? This is getting very damn old. 'From Snezhnaya' and ofc I see negative connotations next to it or affiliation to it.

Hi, so, if I'm ignorant about this forgive me I'll catch up on the story quests this week.

I had to rant in tags. pls don't read if you don't want to hear rus-tatar's thoughts on representation of snezhnaya across the story AGAIN. i look back on remun's post and scream internally all over again.

P.S. I understand Harbingers are supposed to be the villains, Tsaritsa, yadda yadda but if Tartaglia's quest showcased Snezhnayan's culture in a better light, Genshin can get its shit together and write Snezhnayan NPCs better with some more quests to expose bits and pieces of their WARMER culture. They CAN give us more NPCs who can show doubt, concern, be friendly to others, try to help out. There are TONS of ways to do that.

[fivekrystalpetals]

this story doesn't exist for me beyond this point in Retrace 92:

everyone is back home safe, the world is saved and they have another tea party, The End!

[ikishima]

.

[spaceyflowersart]

hiii! could u draw kenta magami? i never see any content about him here and noticed him in your ryuhei drawings :'>

YES I LOVE HIM SO MUCH HERE HE IS LOOKISM COVER STYLE

this photo was used as reference!