#other people noticed this too right

[the-pea-and-the-sun]

quintons new video teaching me so much abt my little pony

[shepscapades]

X isn’t big on hugs, but Doc does what he can. It’s the little things that help.

[bixels]

This Twitter MLP human redesign drama is a mess, leave me the fuck out of it.

[kataracy]

Kataang Week 2024 DAY 1 // Cultural Sharing

“I’m nervous. Am I doing okay?”

“You’re doing amazing Sweetie.”

[dumb-doll-lips]

Maybe controversial, but on posts about being dumb where girls are like saying ‘but I’m actually smart.’ Like tbh, I don’t really believe them. Like if you’re smart why does feeling dumb feel so good or hot or whatever to you then? I kinda feel like it’s having an excuse to let go of trying as much as you would be when you’re saying your smart. If you’re like really actually smart, I don’t feel like a break from ‘being smart’ would be such a relief or like as appealing.

[internetdruid]

Evening, ladies

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[muninnhuginn]

Thinking about "your weakness is how you always want to be the hero" and how the series returns to this at the end

Li Lianhua hated how he acted as Li Xiangyi and spent years trying to distance himself from it, but ultimately he still fell back into the similar patterns, for all his added experience

His main priority was always to "do the right thing" regardless of how that would impact on those around him. And it *did* impact those around him. From Qiao Wanmian and Shan Gudao as Li Xiangyi to Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng as Li Lianhua

Giving the Styx flower to the emperor so he could use it as leverage to guarantee Fang Duobing and his family's safety. Using the last of his power to save Yun Biqiu. Constantly putting others above himself whilst actively refusing to recognise that his self-sacrificial nature would hurt those he cared about most

And sure, he thinks he's going to die anyway. They're going to be hurt regardless and he can't do anything about that. His odds are low of the Styx flower even working. But ultimately, he refuses to even consider trying. Li Xiangyi has been dead a long time and Li Lianhua is just there to tide things over. What value is the life of a ghost

To the end, he lives and dies a hero. To the end, he refuses to live for himself.

[quietwingsinthesky]

see my brain just doesn’t register the idea of anyone having a ‘one true love’ which is why the common fandom tropes of making canonical love interests terrible in order to justify why your ship is better always bugs the shit out of me. it feels like the only reason you would do that is if the idea of the characters in your ship having any other sort of romantic relationship that was important to them, even in the past, is a threat to their current one, therefore all their past relationships need to be demonized in order to make them ‘not real love’ so that they remain pure and chaste and ready for the True Love of the endgame ship.

[batsplat]

do you know why vale seems to have a soft spot for pedrosa?

there's not any single one reason, I don't think, but here's are a few contributing factors that come to mind:

history! in large part because of the honda link, dani's the alien he's known the longest... valentino was the number one honda rider at a time at which dani was honda's rising star. photo on the right is from the 2001 honda celebrations at the last race of the season (when dani was sixteen); from oxley's valentino rossi: all his races: "that night vale celebrated in style at a raucous honda victory party, where he taught honda youngsters daijiro kato and dani pedrosa how to drink". they've known each other forever! valentino was getting teenage dani drunk! quite natural to be fond of someone you've seen grow up like that, even if they are being moulded to be your next big rival

circumstance! the way it basically works with valentino is that if you want to have a feud with him, you generally need to have a title fight with him when you’re already ‘established’ rivals (ignore marc, that’s its own thing, 2015 is a freaky season). biaggi and valentino were enemies headed into 2001 and then were worse enemies, he was cool with sete in year one but not year two, mostly *wiggles hand* the same with casey and jorge… feuds aren't build overnight. valentino and dani weren’t ever really direct title rivals - closest they got was 2006 and 2008, but in both cases valentino probably didn’t see dani as his main problem that year. there wasn't really any competitive necessity for valentino to get nasty... also with one or two notable exceptions, valentino did kinda have dani handled in their actual wheel-to-wheel fights, which let’s face it probably didn’t hurt

yapping! so this is just a theory but it’s one I believe strongly in. you know how valentino loves to talk, right? the thing about pressers and podiums is that you're always going to have a few regular attendees, if you will, corresponding to the front runners in any given year. now, unfortunately for valentino, there were periods of time where almost every other regular attendee was someone he had pretty active beef with. that doesn’t mean he always avoided yapping at them, but relatively speaking you want a guy you can build up some good repartee with to pass the time. dani was his guy… less complicated than casey and jorge, plus dani is polite enough to go along with it and maybe even enjoy chatting to valentino (it’s been known to happen). pressers can be boring and at podiums you're still full of adrenaline, valentino wants to share a joke with someone! my completely unscientific sense is that valentino does this a lot with dani around 2008-ish to 2012, then for two years marc is the number one yap victim, then for a while it’s a bit…? oddly valentino does seem to chat quite a lot with jorge in 2015... he likes to throw in a quirky behavioural pattern sometimes to keep you guessing. anyway then in 2016 he is Actively Ignoring two of these men so vale goes!! hi there dani!! and takes it from there (though the field is more mixed up post-2015 so he becomes more of an opportunistic yapper). in general, valentino will chat to pretty much anyone with A Few Exceptions, but he does usually have a bit of an order of preference

dani’s personality! now, obviously dani is very much capable of feuds, but he’s not that naturally combative a character. valentino generally needs a competitive justification for beef, though some personal animosity can help too… but he never really hated any of that trio of young riders to come through. valentino's known dani forever, he’s been around dani a fair bit because of their respective statuses in the sport, dani isn’t going out of his way to pick fights with valentino, so no reason not to get on! he does clearly quite like chatting to dani and seems pretty fond of him even towards the start of the alien era, at a time in which it was broadly expected that dani not casey would emerge as vale's primary challenger... god knows if the relationship would have soured if dani had assumed that mantle (probably at least a little lol) but failing that, valentino does just seem to quite like him. y’know, sometimes it’s like that

They Have Also Had Their Disagreements, But There Hasn’t Been Much Cause For It To Escalate Further. these disagreements have tended to be over racing standards, where dani is generally in the ‘you people are all insane’ camp and valentino is generally in the ‘ah it’s fine’ camp (though, obviously, there is nuance here… cf vale also criticising sic over the le mans 2011 incident that left dani with the broken collarbone). generally, they don't get into direct conflict over it, more of an underlying difference in positions (hey, aragon 2013 is an example)... but there’s been dani’s suggestion that valentino’s sepang 2015 stance is inconsistent with his generally laissez faire approach, and also some other isolated little scuffles over the years like say 2017 aragon (see below). pretty small scale stuff in the grand scheme of things and if you've been on-track rivals for that long it's kinda inevitable you'll eventually disagree about some stuff, but perhaps worth bringing up

went through all of the alien combos in my head and these two slot in just behind dani/casey as probably the two most consistently beef-free inter-alien relationships? dani/casey gets extra credit for surviving The Teammate Test. but, y'know, the thing about valentino is that he's a sociable, outgoing guy... he likes talking to people... he's actually interested in them... he's a decent conversationalist, easy to get on with, all that stuff. so if you expose valentino to this nice fella who at most was like... perhaps a bit more reserved towards the start of his time in the premier class (partly due to his mentor's approach), but really was generally pretty chill... well, if valentino isn't given any reason to hate dani, then default state is that he won't. good on them etc

[eclaire-went-bam]

although i think it's important to acknowledge the complexities of aro & ace identities, & to be welcoming of aroace identities that may be sex/romance favourable/hypersexual & seek those relationships, i think it's still important to acknowledge that completely romance/sex repulsed aroaces are still a minority in the ace community despite being the stereotype. & we should still listen to those voices,

[bonefall]

Do Nightcloud and Leafpool ever talk after the gathering? Or will it be a case of forever misunderstanding?

I think I want to add a moment in Nightcloud's Pannage. I got fixated on it last night and made a pretty rough outline; but a BIG snag I hit is that I don't have a fantastic ending in mind.

I have these little scenes linked together by Nightcloud encountering each humbug, ending with her being injured, saved by Marge, and then spending a week or so recovering with Pickle. But something isn't clicking enough yet. I might get all my ideas together and then release it so I can get feedback.

But anyway-- to answer the question, I think I should have Night and Leaf just chat at a Gathering. SUPER briefly. They'll never be friends, but I think it'll benefit Nightcloud to realize that Leafpool caught SO much more shit than she did. They're both victims of Crowf in different ways, and it was never fair to hate Leafpool for her awful husband's actions.

After a life of hating Leafpool, thinking she was a pawn of Firestar in "finding" the Moonpool, furious of how Crowfeather seemed to be awfully fond of her, going absolutely ballistic when she found out she BIRTHED Crowf's other children; I think it's good for Nightcloud to slow down and realize demonizing her was easy. And Leaf is still dealing with that fallout; even though she's reinstated as a Cleric.

[in-need-of-another-name]

am i the only one who's Not Normal about the void – dark, real void, tinged purple – surrounding the island in the Ender Cup... how people (can choose to) fall through it, down and down... between games... like another void between another set of games, in which its participants are constantly falling through in between...

martyn's life series lore in mcc real

[averagemartian]

Gen V really missed the opportunity to make Luke/Cate/Andre a (closeted) throuple instead of that dumb cheating plot

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

wanna ask how you feel about the eridan bpd headcanon/theory(?? not sure what to call it!) you're so good at your character analysis and i'd love to see your outlook on it

Since I don't have a degree or any formal training in psychology, I feel deeply uncomfortable diagnosing characters. I've made an autism joke before but only because I'm on the spectrum. He's definitely traumatized and anxious, but I mean those as descriptors of his behavior rather than capital-D Diagnoses. I try to focus on those when I can - the cause and effect of cognition, self-image, and behavior - and those factors may very well match up with DSM criteria, but I try not to touch an actual diagnosis with a ten foot pole unless the author has explicitly stated that X character has Y condition.

[elvisqueso]

#bye felicia

Pocahontas (1995)