#not directly because both of them could never be honest with what they're feeling imo

[little-demy]

Does your Tiso annoy your Hornet? Asking for ...reasons -dooblebugss

He does!!! I love the idea in which he teases and annoys Hornet from time to time (not gonna lie I am inspired by your tiso quite a lot.......😔😔😔)

I also like to think despite trying to act as some lone wolf, Tiso is kind of a social person. At the same time him acting like an older brother who will keep annoy/tease his little sister sounds funny

[slycooperconfessions]

This isn't a confession, I just wanted to have a discussion about this because I'm curious to see if anyone else feels the same way. Does anyone else feel like Sly 4 sort of retroactively lowered your opinion of Sly 3? Because I've realized a lot of the poor writing decisions in Sly 4 stem directly from flaws in Sly 3's own writing. For example, I hated the villain twist with Penelope in Sly 4. But I've actually seen a few people defending it, saying that Penelope was always kind of sketchy with her whole Black Baron persona. And to be honest, they're kind of not wrong. Sly 3 never really did give us much of an explanation for why the hell Penelope acts so different as the Baron. Honestly, as the Baron she's fucking RUTHLESS. She's willing to cheat and kill to win, is capable of fist fighting Sly on the wing of a moving plane, etc. Yet afterwards she acts all sweet, helpless and innocent and gets used as a damsel in distress multiple times, despite us seeing her combat capabilities as the Baron? Begrudgingly, I can kind of see how Sanzaru (or anyone else) could get the impression that there's something "off" about her.

I also hated the Carmelita belly dancing bit in Sly 4 and thought it was fucking gross. But to be honest, Sly 3 itself sort of set a precedent for treating Carmelita this way. "Carmelargea" from the Rumble Down Under level was maybe less overtly sexual but no less gross. They literally had us climbing up her pants for that fight. You can't look at that and tell me someone on the Sly 3 dev team didn't have a giantess fetish. So them skimping on giving Rumble Down Under a proper antagonist just so that they could instead have the Mask of Dark Earth as an excuse to enlarge Carmelita is... pretty sleazy, actually.

Then there was the whole Sly faking amnesia thing. During Sly 4 I couldn't help but feel like Carmelita was being a little hypocritical for her anger at being lied to by Sly. She literally lied too. She lied to someone she thought was an amnesiac about his identity. Which just sort of highlights how bad the end of Sly 3 is. They decided to have Sly and Carmelita start off their new relationship based on lies? Ok then.

I'm not sure if I would go so far as to say that Sly 4 changed my opinion of Sly 3, but there are some valid points here.

As far as Penelope's huge personality shift from the Baron to her normal self, I think it was partly to throw people off of the reveal that the Baron IS Penelope. Hell, Penelope even helps the gang in Episode 3 by defending their hangar from goons looking to wreck their plane, whereas the Baron seems to have no issues with foul play and engages in it often. Thinking about it deeper, the Baron might have become a full-fledged alternate personality for Penelope since she was using the ruse so often and got pumped up by people treating him as a celebrity. When she gets some sense slapped into her after fighting Sly, I think it snapped her out of this pattern and she was able to let it go. As far has how strong the Baron is, there's theories that the Baron suit is actually a cybernetic situation that greatly enhances her physical abilities, which I think holds water because her natural abilities are more tailored to her technical know-how and inventions. Once she abandons the Baron suit, she abandons the raw strength and ruthlessness the Baron gave her. I've held the opinion that her turning more villainous in Sly 4 is not necessarily out of nowhere, it was just written horribly and abruptly IMO. There's nothing we see leading up to it that makes it make sense, it just happens. Had it been handled differently, I think it would have been received much better.

As far as giant Carmelita...yeah, I got nothing. Probably a case of the "writer's poorly disguised fetish" meme because I remember being 11 years old thinking "This is...odd." But by then I had also developed an attraction to both Sly and Carmelita, so I rolled with it lol.

What do y'all think?

[aihoshiino]

Was talking about this in passing to my friend Isa (@astrabysm) the other day but the more I engage with Oshi no Ko & the side stories, the more I come away feeling like centering lies and lying as the driving core of Ai's character really misses the forest for the trees.

Lying is, of course, extremely important to Ai as a character but I think it functions more as a thematic umbrella which can be used to unify a lot of the disparate elements that inform her characterization - idol culture, purity culture, commodification and infantalization, etc. The themes of deception/masking/falsehood are important to understanding Ai bit infinitely more important - and imo, more core to her character - is WHY she feels she has to lie and what motivates it; her self hate and fear, her history of abuse and abandonment by people she should otherwise have been able to unconditionally rely on, her despairing loneliness and her absolutely desperate desire to form real, genuine connections and companionship with other human beings.

To paraphrase Isa more directly, because I think they really hit the nail on the head with this: "Ai is someone who tells lies but she's not A Liar". Deception in of itself is not her end goal in any respect; it's a survival tactic that she internalised at a formative age and never had the opportunity to unlearn - and even then, Ai is honest and sincere just as often as she lies.

Really, the biggest "lie" Ai is telling is the one people have demanded she tell: the illusion of an eternally pure and cheerful idol. But being an idol has become so forcibly entangled in Ai's personhood at the expense of allowing her to just be a human that of course she thinks of herself as a liar for being unable to live up to that image.

She wants to, though! Ai herself says it in Viewpoint B that her "Ai of B-Komachi" persona is just an idealised self that she desperately wants to become: a kind, invincible girl who loves other people. And the horrible irony of it is that Ai IS that girl already; she's so kind and warm and desperate to connect with other people; even though she struggles to understand them she fights with all her might to close that gap. When she falls short, it's HERSELF she blames for not being good enough. She has never once expressed any bitterness or anger towards the people who've mistreated her, however much they might deserve it.

The real "lie" of Hoshino Ai are these twin, opposing perceptions of her as a pure and perfect idol and a scheming, manipulative liar. They're both wrong. The unvarnished truth is simply that Ai was a normal girl doing everything she could to achieve normal happiness in the midst of an abnormally cruel and lonely life - and in the very end, she was even punished for that.

[gettin-bi-bi-bi]

How is it that as a bisexual, I'm always between "I want to be like her" and "I want to be with her"?? Could I be confused and just want to be like the girls I seem to like, but I just think I'm attracted to them bc I think they're really beautiful and I admire them and so I don't really like them "like them"? It's so confusing.

It’s actually really common as a bisexual to both feel attracted to someone sexually/romantically and also want to be like them. If you want my honest opinion, (even though I know that anything’s possible) I don’t think it’s very likely that you’re confusing sexual/romantic attraction with just wanting to be like someone else. I have 100% platonic friend crushes where I really want to be better friends with someone and I want to be more like them (and they’re actually very attractive) but they are absolutely not sexual/romantic crushes. So if you think there’s a sexual/romantic element then there probably is.

If you want some advice, the thing that made exploring my bisexuality and my gender identity much much easier was to just stop second guessing myself and go with the flow. If I thought I might be attracted to a woman, I let myself explore that in my head. I identified as bi and as trans before I was 100% sure of those things. And it was very freeing. Even if it’s just in your head it’s very freeing to just let yourself be bi. Until you’re actually in a committed relationship with someone, the difference between platonic, romantic and sexual feelings can be confusing, thanks to that bastard called heteronormativity.

The idea that eventually everyone is entirely sure about their sexual orientation comes from heteronormativity imo. And I think the pressure we feel to be entirely sure we’re bi before we allow ourselves to identify as bi comes directly from the biphobic idea that eventually all bi people pick a side. And that creates this anxiety for us because we feel like we need to know for sure because if we don’t then we’re playing into some biphobic stereotype. But your orientation is no one else’s business except your own. And the truth is that being 100% sure of your bi orientation isn’t going to be enough to protect you from biphobia anyway because biphobes don’t give a shit about logic or fairness, so no one should have to live their life worrying about what a biphobe might think.

Sexuality is so much more fluid than biphobia and heteronormativity would have us believe. You shouldn’t have to worry if your crush is really a crush or just admiration. You are entitled to use the identity label that suits you when you want to use it, even if you’re not sure yet, because you may never be sure, but that’s no one else’s business.

Max