#not everyone uses it to reduce

[mithranon]

God, seriously though. It's such a weird read, and I can understand relating to it. Some people have things like anhedonia, too, and I can see conceptualizing it that way, that it's nice to find relation in things and be able to read them in a way that supports you, but...

I think some people get that read on it because they want to "disqualify" him from shipping. You really can just dislike something, though. You don't need a reason, and making him incapable of love to justify a headcanon feels fundamentally cheap.

He's treated so well in canon. He's given such deep respect and is so very important to the source material regardless of his own feelings and his guilt and his sense of worthlessness, but God. His arc is about love and connection and the sometimes impossibility of reaching it. It's isolation, and closing yourself off to your ability to connect because you can't even see the possibility of a thing like you being loved. You lock yourself off from the possibilities. Your sense of self-worth has probably always been low. You see yourself as ugly, shove yourself aside and leave it to rot. Opening up is the only way to be loved. If you open up, they'll see. The body. The corpse. You're inside yourself trying—trying so hard—but it isn't working and it makes you angry because no matter how hard you try, you can't seem to get what you want, and, God, when will it be your turn? The body is alive and scrambling in its casing. It's scratching at the walls. You feel like you deserve it. Lacking confidence yet overconfident at the same time. You want good things. You want so badly it burns you alive. Destroys you inside and out. You're seeking in the wrong places. Trying to get it where it doesn't exist. You can't find it so you take it. You make it up. Mirror. Illusion.

The ability for Mithrun to love and be loved. It's so key to his story that he is loved in the end, surrounded by love. He's in the crowd. He's in the world. He was removed from the cycle. And now he makes noodles! He wants to help people! Even before, even in the Dungeon, even looking down on everyone, Mithrun held everyone at the same table. He wanted to. He has always wanted to, do you understand? He couldn't accept it, though. He was destroyed by it. The Goat is abuse. It's punishment. Betrayal. You were loved by something and you open up and the reality you feared comes true. And you think it's your fault. You think you deserve that, too.

He says it; as if opening up is a punishment. That it saw what was inside of him and took. He thinks it's fair. An eye for an eye, maybe. There's no doubt in me that it was also his vanity, that his treasured traits were taken, but deeper, that just reads as an admission.

Guilt says a lot. Negative feelings always tell us things about our wants and ourselves. It all serves something. Everything is valuable.

That's what Mithrun can remind us of. He's... Very important overall. In a way, I think. I saw a little comic. That the vessel is useful because it is empty, and I think. Yeah. That's how he can be purposeful. Not despite that, but because of it. That's infinite possibility.

And. God. He's a part of the cycle he was so removed from. He's not on the sidelines anymore. He's not seperate from people. He's got friends. He isn't denying himself. He's honest and he is loved, regardless. There is so much love in him. What do you mean he can't? He has always loved so much. It was just twisted. It was just wrong. He is so capable of love. He gives it casually.

He helps Marcille. He tells her that they're lucky to have people who love them to fill that hole. He may not be saying that he loves her, but he gives her that. He tries to help her, and he can be cruel, he can self-sabotage, he can fail. Again and again. But he keeps trying. Because he wants to.

And he loves. It is so clear that he loves.

That he wants to help. Even if he can't.

That doesn't mean he isn't cruel. It doesn't mean he doesn't cause harm. It just is.

And I just think that the idea of Mithrun being capable of love shouldn't be so... distant. It wouldn't make him less if he couldn't, but for someone like me, to see this, that even with everything, Mithrun can love and be loved. It's a kind of grace. Hope.

Saying Mithrun doesn’t have the ability to love is pretty dismissive of his character arc and ending.. The point of his resolution is that he’s made the decision to live and try and develop new desires. Whether you think he ever falls in love or not is up to you, ofc. But the belief that his disability makes him unlovable/ unable to form deep relationships— platonic or not— feels kind of messed up :/

Some disabilities can make the development of relationships difficult, true. But in Mithrun’s case, saying this character who’s trying to form new desires could never have a relationship is just………. The whole point is that he’s working on his ability to desire.

Like, calling him ace/aro solely because you can’t comprehend a disabled person being in a relationship is a misunderstanding of Everything involved in that .

[canon-gabriel-quotes]

Transcript:

COME ON MACHINE, FUCK ME LIKE AN ANIMAL.

Audio source

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Results from the ‘Who is the tallest MDZS Character poll! Thank you all for voting!

[pnfc]

infodump: plat spurs are in fact semi-retractable (or rather, extensible). so even setting aside that pnf is a cartoon where things disappear when theyre not relevant (perrys watch) u could just assume his spurs are usually nonobtrusive/hidden in his fur until the scene where he uses them. neat right. details below

src

[mspoodle1]

Rambling thoughts...

So are we not reducing polys on converted hairs anymore? And do converted shoes seem sorta big?

🙈

[royalarchivist]

Quackity: Oh, it's gonna be so cool to see how this develops. I'm excited, I'm gonna try my best. I'm not the greatest at Minecraft whatsoever, I did nerf Green Team a little bit by accident on the second day. My bad! But, you know, I'm so ready to just grind out and see what we can do, and I just–

I wish everyone saw it with the same amount of, like, kind of enthusiasm. I think all of this and all the development and all the potential arcs, that's going to fcking allow for something absolutely incredible.

And if anyone ends up clipping any of this, something I do want to say is I implore people to view everything with a lot of enthusiasm. No stress, no anxiety, just a lot of enthusiasm. Because, again, this is going to allow for a lot of cool things in the server. Not just now, but in the future, too.

[trans-androgyne]

sorry but I do think doubling down here is a bad look. If you can provide a single way that using she/her pronouns could have reasonably lead to someone finding her blog then I’ll accept your reasoning. But outside of that, it is misgendering.

You yourself even say in your pinned that referring to you wrong is degendering and misgendering, why is this different? Would you be ok with someone referring to you totally wrong for ‘anonymity’ come on now.

This is your “different perspective” doubling down on misgendering a trans woman is bad! Even if one trans woman who obviously wants to agree with you says it’s fine actually

At this point, everyone else I talked to including multiple trans women and transfems all agree that vaguing is not the same thing as misgendering. To me, it’s standard etiquette to not use any information like that in vague posts. People have used “he” on me in vague posts specifically because they clearly thought me being a guy was relevant to their point, and I don’t think that’s appropriate when the person’s gender doesn’t matter for the point of the vague. Calling me a man or woman is misgendering, but calling me a person instead of a guy and otherwise using neutral language in a vague about me is not, and I would rather people do that than bring my gender into it if they think I have a bad take. I want to hear more perspectives on the matter because I genuinely do not want to harm other trans people. But it has nothing to do with her being a trans woman, this is just how vagues work to me and currently many more people agree than disagree with that perspective. I am sincerely sorry if she feels hurt by me vaguing her and not bringing up her gender, as if I knew that was her preference i would have done it; if I post anything else about her I will be certain to gender her. I hope not to though, she is not someone I want to interact with or talk about more.

[bloodsbane]

fuck it. making a poll for my homies who also commit biting/picking crimes

[blueskittlesart]

any thoughts on how once again zelda was robbed of her agency because her "father figure" didn't listen to her? even if rauru was kinder to her than her father. and that she had sonia who was patient and loving for a little while before she died (just like her mother). i know rauru apologizes for his hubris but still, i wish we saw zelda be upset about it. and even if zelda was such a big part of the quest she still literally sacrificed her humanity once again because of someone else's mistake- because rauru literally didn't listen to the girl from the future that warned you that shit was going to go down. o know nintendo just loves putting zelda inside crystals and stones but i wish we got something better. even if it was her decision to become a dragon... did she have any other choice? it really just feels like they robbed her of agency again just like botw and the games before

i've been trying to figure out how to answer this one. because there are two ways i could analyze this plot point, either from a writer's perspective or an in-story perspective, but neither of those lead to me fully agreeing with your interpretation? I think there's definitely something to be said about zelda consistently being pushed aside in these games, but. well. ok let's get into it ig

from a writer's perspective, I do honestly have quite a bit of sympathy for the zelda devs as they attempt to navigate the modern political landscape with these games. The cyclical lore, though canonized relatively recently, holds them to a standard of consistency in their games in terms of certain key elements. one of those key elements is that there has to be a princess, and that princess must somehow be the main macguffin of the game. The player must chase her, and the end goal of the game must be to reunite the player and the princess. In 1986 this was an incredibly easy sell. women didn't need to be characters. players were content with saving a 2-dimensional princess whose only purpose was to tell them "good job!" at the end. but as society advances, that princess becomes a much more difficult character to write while adhering to the established overarching canon. (as a side note: i don't necessarily believe that the writers SHOULD be held to the standards of that canon. I think deviating from it in certain areas would be a good change of pace. but i also recognize that deviations from the formula are widely hated by the loz playerbase and that they're trying to make money off these games, so we're working under the established rule that the formula must be at least loosely adhered to.) Modern fans want a princess who is a person, who has agency and makes decisions and struggles in the same way the hero does. but modern fans ALSO want a game that follows the established rules of the canon. so we need a princess who is a real character but who can ALSO serve as a macguffin within the narrative, something that is inherently somewhat objectifying.

the two games that i think do the best job writing a princess with agency are skyward sword and botw (based on your ask, our opinions differ there lol. hear me out) in both games, we have a framing event which seperates zelda and link, but in both games, that separation was ZELDA'S CHOICE. skyward sword zelda runs away from link out of fear of hurting him. botw zelda chooses to return to the castle alone to allow link the time he needs to heal. sksw kinda fumbled later on by having ghirahim kidnap her anyway, but. i said BEST not PERFECT. botw zelda I think is the better example because, with the context of the memories, she's arguably MORE of a character than link is. we see her struggles, her breakdowns, her imperfection, specifically we see her struggle with her lack of agency within the context of the game itself. when she steps in front of link in the final memory, and when she chooses to return to the castle, those are some of the first choices we see her make almost completely free of outside influence; a RECLAMATION of her agency (within the narrative) after years of having it stripped from her. from an objective viewer's standpoint, this writing decision still means she is absent from 90% of the game and that she has little control over her actions for the duration of the player's journey. however I think this is just about the best they could have done to create a princess with agency and a real character arc while still keeping the macguffin formula intact--you're not really SAVING zelda in botw. SHE is the one that is saving YOU; when you wake up on the plateau with no memories, too weak to fight bokoblins, let alone calamity ganon. the reason you are allowed to train and heal in early-game botw is because SHE is in the castle holding ganon back, protecting YOU. When you enter the final fight, you're not rescuing zelda, you're relieving her of her duty. taking over the work she's been doing for the past hundred years. in the final hour, you both work in tandem to defeat ganon. while this isn't a PERFECT example of a female character with agency and narrative weight, i think it's a pretty good one, especially in the context of save-the-princess games like loz.

as for totk, you put a lot of emphasis on rauru not believing zelda and taking action immediately, which, again, from an objective standpoint, i understand. but even when we're writing characters with social implications in mind, those character's actions still need to... make sense. Rauru was a king ruling over what he believed to be a perfectly peaceful kingdom. zelda literally fell out of the sky, landed in front of him, claimed to be his long-lost granddaughter, and then told him that some random ruler of a fringe faction in the desert was going to murder him and he had to get the jump on it by killing him first. the ruler which this girl is trying to convince rauru to wage an unprompted war on has the power to disguise himself as other people. no one in their right mind would immediately take the girl at her word. war is not something any leader should jump into without proper research and consideration, and to rauru's credit, he DIDN'T ever outright dismiss zelda. he believed her when she said she was from the future, he allowed her to work with him and he took her warnings as seriously as he could without any further proof. but he could not wage an unprompted war on ganondorf. that's just genuinely not practical, especially for a king who values peace among his people as much as rauru seems to. as soon as ganondorf DID attack, giving rauru confirmation that zelda's accounts of the future were real, he began making preparations to confront him. remember that zelda didn't KNOW that rauru and sonia were going to be casualties of the war--she didn't make the connection between rauru's arm in the future and rauru the king until AFTER sonia's death, when rauru made the decision to attack ganondorf directly. I think the imprisoning war and the casualties of it were less an issue of zelda being denied agency and more an issue of no one, including zelda, having full context for the events as they were unfolding. if zelda had KNOWN that sonia and rauru were going to die from the beginning and was still unable to prevent it that would be a different issue, but she didn't. none of them did.

I think another thing worth pointing out with rauru and his death irt zelda is that rauru is clearly written specifically as a foil to rhoam. this is evident in how he treats both zelda and link, with a constant kindness and understanding which is clearly opposite to rhoam's dismissiveness and disappointment. consider rhoam's death and the circumstances surrounding it. He died because, in zelda's eyes, she was unable to do her duty; the one thing he constantly berated her for. Rhoam's death solidified zelda's belief that she was a failure, a belief which she KNEW rhoam held as well. his death was doubly traumatic to her because she knew he died believing it was her fault. Now contrast that to the circumstances surrounding rauru's death. Rauru CHOSE to die despite zelda's warnings, because he wanted zelda and his kingdom to live. rauru's death was not agency-stripping for zelda; in fact, it functioned almost as an admission that he believed her capable of continuing to live in his place. With him gone, the fate of the kingdom fell to her and the sages. he KNEW that he would die and still went into that battle confidently, trusting zelda to make the right decisions once he was gone. where rhoam believed zelda incapable of doing ANYTHING without link, rauru trusted zelda COMPLETELY with the fate of his kingdom. several details in totk confirm that when rauru died there was no plan for zelda to draconify, that all happened after rauru was gone. it was HER plan, the plan which rauru trusted her to come up with once he was gone. and I think it's also worth noting that zelda's sacrifice with the draconification parallels rauru's!! Rauru gives up his life trusting the sages and his people to be able to continue his work in his place. Zelda gives up her physical form trusting link and the sages in the future to be able to figure out what to do and find her. these games in general have this recurring theme but totk specifically is all about love and trust and reliance on others. zelda relies on link, link relies on zelda, they both rely on the champions and the sages and rauru and sonia and they all rely each other. reliance on others isn't lack of agency, it's a constant choice they make, and that choice is the thing which allows them to triumph.

The draconification itself is something i view similarly to zelda's sacrifice in botw--a choice she makes which, symbolically & within the confines of the narrative, is a demonstration of her reclaimed agency and places her at the center of the narrative, but which ALSO removes her from much of the player's experience and robs her of any overt presence or decisionmaking within the gameplay. again, I think this is a solution to the macguffin-with-agency dilemma, and it's probably one of the better solutions they could have come up with. Would I have liked to see a game where zelda is more present within the actual gameplay? yes, but I also understand that at this point the writers aren't quite willing to deviate that much from their formula. the alternative within the confines of this story would be to let zelda DIE in the past, removing her from gameplay ENTIRELY, which is an infinitely worse option in my opinion. draconification allowed her to be present, centered the narrative around her, and allowed the writers to reiterate the game's theme of trust and teamwork when she assists the player in the final battle, which i think was a REALLY great choice, narratively speaking.

In any case, I don't think it's right to say that zelda was completely robbed of her agency in botw and totk. Agency doesn't always mean that she's unburdened and constantly present, it means she's given the freedom to make her own choices and that her choices are realistically written with HER in mind, not just the male characters around her, and I think botw/totk do a pretty good job of writing her and her choices realistically and with nuance.

[pixelatedraindrops]

Yuma Month: Day 18: Future

“Thank you for coming... Makoto.”

“Oh come now... Discard your emotions.

You are my homunculus are you not?”

"...You are cruel for this...shouldering me with yet another burden…

Kurumi...is still looking for you..."

“I know…I’m sorry.

Tell her…my journey has been extended.”

[fisheito]

If you tracked my eye activity on that bliss promo pic with the tops it would be something like this

Making a major stop at topper

Before crashing into a ditch (yakuya corner)

[wheelie-sick]

needless to say there will be no shortage of signs on Friday and no one will have to pick up a soulless fucking PSL sign

[ctl-yuejie]

ramblings on Li Ming (and Heart) and homosexuality

moonlight chicken has so many things to offer in terms of technical beauty and interesting themes but what i cannot stop thinking about is the different ways they approach homosexuality in the story.

we have Wen who has a rainbow flag on his desk and pictures of him and Alan on the wall. Wen, who openly flirts with Jim and has no qualms talking openly about his one night stand. Wen, whose step father knows about his sexuality and is close enough with him to discuss his love life.

Kaipa we don’t know too much about. But his mom knows and is supportive and some of the vendors and the chicken family seem to know. But if anyone was questioning in what reality this show is set with all the class discussion and corona featuring, his part of the story shows that homophobia exists and he is worried about how he fits in with his own family, the expectations of his mother and possible the awareness that he makes the family he has “different”.

Jim is arguably even more visibly gay than Wen in terms of what we see throughout the show. He opened the shop with his ex, they prayed at the temple together and even though he objected due to proprities sake eventually they loudly declared their love to each other and the whole neighbourhood knows. Wen somehow feels like he is living in the remnants of a bubble: his circle of friends seems very queer, his closest friend and the whole gym seem to be all part of that as well. This only might change now with him questioning his work and breaking up with Alan: some gatherings he won’t attend anymore apparently.

And finally, we have Li Ming. At school he doesn’t seem to open up to his classmates on most things and additionally is in the closet. While there wasn’t anything alluding to homophobic rethoric being spread at school we can see how the heteronormativity gets to him and feel that there must be good reason as to why no one knows. And it could just be how Li Ming is judging the situation based on vibes, we don’t know. His mother is or at least was homophobic but at the same time he is raised by his gay uncle who is surrounded by other gay people. And I love how it feels like this might have given him enough security to be comfortable with his own sexuality but how it also isn’t enough to shield him from the world at large.

With so many great shows coming out of Thailand and most of them getting more and more political it just feels so real and 2023 to me that Li Ming is part of a generation that knows who they are but still have to battle with the shadow that homophobia has cast way before they were born.

[fishareglorious]

HELL YEAH 4-9 FINISHED IVE BEATEN THIS DAMNED STAGE BY THE SKIN OF MY TEETH.

[justsomedumbstuff]

the tags about maeda on that gorgon kamukura art…. “why don’t i feel sick anymore” odhfhdhd ripped my damn heart out /pos

NO CAUSE. I. AUUGH. DUDE.

HE DOESNT GET WHY….. HE. HH

[awkward-teabag]

Playing through BG3 with mods (tried some before, it didn't work out) feels like how the game was meant to be played and is so refreshing because of that.

BG1 and 2 were also D&D games so I understand why that would continue in 3 (plus Hasbro being involved...) but the party chatter and questing is so much smoother if you don't have to min-max technical aspects or juggle different party members and their approval. Being able to loot goblin without dealing with carry weight and inventories also speeds things up.

Sure fights are unbalanced when you use the party size mod but if you wanted to focus on combat, you wouldn't use it in the first place. I care more for narrative so zipping through fights is a perk.