#no spoilers for either game

[destiny-islanders]

haven't beaten ffxvi yet, excited to get to the part where the dog flies

[kagooleo]

i'm of the belief sycamore fumbled. dubbing it parenttrapshipping* (*they're divorced)

[katnissmellarkkk]

the fact that if coryo had made different choices, he could have just lived in 12 with the songbird he spends his life never getting over anyways, the games could have just faded out, haymitch and lenore dove could have had kids and lived happily ever after and katniss would have been everyone’s cousin or niece… and of course still ended up with peeta somehow because “this would have happened anyway”.

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[thylacid]

could not sleep last night cause i was busy thinking about how funny it'd be for loop to come back on a onehat ending

[lavellaned]

I still see some people upset about the Mythal/Solas/Lavellan content in veilguard, so let me point out something that healed my little solavellan heart:

Solas doesn’t just create murals, he does frescos. The very nature of a fresco is meant to be permanent and last the test of time. He destroyed every fresco memory of Mythal. They are even described as things he wants to forget.

Solas also has an entire room covered wall to wall in inquisition frescos, left completely untouched and in a position that they are in his direct eyesight when he sits at the harpsichord. Not to mention he has a painting of the inquisitor’s throne and helmet in his meditation room.

Do with that what you will.

[codenamethebird]

God I have so much to say about Melinoe's characterization, and the fasinating implications about her future arc/the overarching plot of hades 2. I want to make a larger think piece with pictures but for the moment I'm just going to focus on this one specific thread.

In the wake of the Prometheus reveal, she has a slew of convos about his motivations for siding with Chronos, and the gods basically all go: this is his vengeance for us punishing him a tad cruelly. And Nemesis is like, yeah the gods 100% deserve it. But Meli's responds that he must have more motivation than just vengeance, it can't just be that. But when Prometheus explicitly goes, 'I'm doing this because the gods are horrible to humanity and I love humans,' she basically goes, no he must be lying. That motivation is both too pure, but also humans kind of suck why would you care about them?

Mel's humanity hot takes deserve it's own essay (Ms I think Humans should have never gotten fire and are better when they are dead), and I just want to focus on the former for now. She can not comprehend that Prometheus is fighting the gods for noble reasons. It just does not make sense to her. Mel's world is so black and white. She doesn't understand the nuance of the situation, and the thought that the gods might be actually in the wrong doesn't even get close to crossing her mind.

It's a fascinating (and horrifying) result of her upbringing. Of the constant state of war and the very convenient big bad that is Chronos, the evil monster who stole her family. If she accepts that his side isn't completely evil, that they might even be right in some (even many) respects, she would have to grapple with her whole life. Everything she believes would be thrown into question, the literal thing she was training her whole life for.

She can't have Prometheus fighting for a noble cause, because he fights for Chronos whose the Bad Guy tm. But he also can't be fighting for something as simple as vengeance, because that would also mean she would need to really think about what he's angry about. If the punishment was truly so unnecessary cruel.

When talking to Odysseus about Prometheus, when Ody's saying how much he respected him for stealing the fire despite knowing the consequences, Mel says that it was the price to be paid for breaking Olympus's decree. To her, Olympus's rules are sacred and ultimately good. Unquestionably. Prometheus broke the rules with intent, so to her, why would he be so angry at the consequences? Especially if he knew because of his power they were going to happen.

So he must have another reason, some secret machiavellian plan that drives him. Except as I already said, it brings her right back to him doing it for humanity, which she also can't accept. Because that would be admiting that the gods did something wrong to humans. She twists herself into knots to justify her worldview, and it's fascinating! She's so messy I adore her.

Please Supergiant please the final surface boss has to be a human pleeeaaasse (preferably a living one). Or at least have one (or more) show up in some other capacity. Mel needs to come face to face with the other side and have it utterly destroy her worldview.

And/or have (Pan)Dora betray her for Prometheus, that would also be very fun haha.

[soath]

congrats to zerxus ilerez for shooting back up to the top of the “exandria’s sexiest and most likely to fall for a pyramid scheme” ranks. liliana temult, please turn your sash and crown in at the podium.

[teerayus]

Gi-Hun: I need to appeal to people to try and get them to stop playing the game

Thanos, high on a substance previously unknown to man:

[nervoustoastthing]

did you guys know that if you die while Artemis is fighting with you she’ll appear on the screen and say, “No… I swore to protect you.”

[andrew-dramaqueen-minyard]

you know for a fact that if Neil was finding ominous art works taped to his door he would not have brought that shit up at all. It’d be weeks, even MONTHS later and he’d be like “oh yeah this happened” if you’re LUCKY. Meanwhile Jeremy is like “this feels incredibly important let me tell the people closest to me and my support system immediately and text a picture of it to my coach”

[turtlespancake]

i love seeing out of context posts about long-running stories with deep lore because it's always shit like "MAJOR SPOILER WARNING!! i can't believe that the metallic athenaeum's envoy actually used never-ending dance of the 57th universe on rionne as if she's not LITERALLY the incarnate of august?!?!" it's like buddy boy thank you for the spoiler tag but all of those words are incomprehensible without at least 5 years of foreshadowed knowledge, 7 different fan theories, and 21 wiki entries

[bacchuschucklefuck]

we let the ocean drown out our voices/enjoying the bitterness/in the chaotic light, I close my eyes and see

[lucabyte]

Taking pride in One's own appearance.

[naturallydark]

That one post about how Kaycee Inscryption would get along with Kel VotV has never left my mind and now that the 0.8 update is out, I could no longer resist drawing this dream team crossover. I imagine Dr. Kel would be a lot less lonely if he had an equally insane friend living in the base with him and helping him keep the local cockroach population down.

[nellasbookplanet]

The thing is, I can get behind most of the desicions bells hells have taken regarding predathos, it’s more that the road to getting there didn’t really work or was sometimes skipped over entirely in favor of circular discussions.

'Keeping predathos sealed will never work in the long run now that the truth is out, and we'd rather see us as the ones controlling it/keeping it from harming people than risk ludinus/someone else using it as a weapon in the future' and 'the exandrian accord will never agree to anything that would risk predathos being freed/endanger the gods and therefore we must make this desicion without their input' and 'as long as the betrayers exist as gods there will be a risk of a second calamity and it’s wise to seek a way to minimize that power differential' and 'if the gods remain gods and predathos can't be killed they will eventually clash and mortals will suffer in the struggle' and 'the primes will never seek to kill the betrayers or assist mortals in doing so because that is their family' and 'the gods themselves have been hurting and unable to heal since leaving tengar, and perhaps the change of permanently becoming mortals not as strictly tied to their domains will allow them change previously withheld from them by their natures' are all valid arguments.

But the hells rarely if ever touch on these arguments, rather focusing in on individual slights and imagined ideas of the gods being tyrants needing to be humbled. They never slow down to discuss the practical implications of the changes they want to implement (the gods will be back on their side of the divine gate now!), or to consider the good the gods and their followers do (have we already forgotten the changebringer helping fcg find self-worth or the everlight helping resurrect Laudna?), or the nuance behind their harsher decisions and actions (aeor was going to murder them! the primordials were in the process of exterminating all mortals!!), or the sacrifices the primes have made to protect mortals (they went to war against their own family!), or the importance of faith to much of the exandrian populace. No matter how many sensible arguments there are for the end decision, if the characters won’t engage with said arguments leading up to it while dismissing anything opposing it the decision will still feel largely empty and self-centered in the end.