#scarlet nexus spoiler

[linusbenjamin]

DEADPOOL WOLVERINE SPOILERS AHEAD. i loved how it felt like a comic movie. jokes were actually funny. action scenes were so creative. cameos were super cool. matthew macfadyen served, smashed, killed etc. i would define it as a tribute to fans. it's a solid 8.5 for me. but as someone who went to cinema wearing a fucking wanda t-shirt, i demand some fucking answers about that scarlet witch statue which i've fucking seen with my own two eyes and then i screamed out loud.

[lostcassildaao3]

They should get this girl to voice Kozakura She really nails that vibe of a "tired thirty year old woman stuck in the body of a teenager" thing

And she's a cola-guzzling, computer girl to boot

[aparticularbandit]

Anchor beings sound a lot like Nexus beings, Deadpool & Wolverine.

And Wanda got called a Nexus being in WandaVision.

🤔

[daily-rayless]

Happy Birthday to your mother, and possibly the mother of more people than you think, Wakana Sumeragi from Scarlet Nexus.

[rayshippouuchiha]

Scarlet Nexus really does have it all: weird ass brain eating monsters, brain punk vibes, a grown man named Karen, Big Brother warning flags, mandatory military conscription and forced age pausing, tons of costume items, a 9 year old who is actually at least 30 years old and is also obsessed with getting absolutely jacked as a way to cover his own anxieties, time travel.

[senel]

[armormodekeeg]

nobody played Scarlet Nexus so that means I can be like "Kasane Randall is so autistic" and you can't stop me

[kofureene]

i love alice so much i wish we could’ve known more about her. like i wish we could’ve seen her in battle more and her relationship to the ichijo family and the two main platoons and how she felt as someone metamorphosed into an other and how her power works. and also more about her feelings for karen and fubuki rather than karen and fubuki’s feelings for her. also alice platoon is apparently a thing at the end of the anime and i need to know about that

[arquivista]

get yourself a man that would end the world to get you back. and accept no less.

Photos of Karen Travers (Best Man- even though he tried to end the world)

[humanjeff]

Scarlet Nexus

got gifted this 2021-era game randomly by a friend, and ... it's kinda great actually?

it calls itself "brainpunk", which is exactly like cyberpunk only with the word "brain" stuck in front of everything to denote that it's weird psychic technology. this doesn't quite work, but I freely admit that I would definitely 100% call psychic texts "brain messages".

"I AM SENDING YOU A BRAIN MESSAGE. FROM MY BRAIN." <- all my friends would get this Brain Message every single day, until they Brain Blocked me

anyway, first I should cover the bad: this is an anime-style game; some of the characters have semi-skimpy outfits (however there's zero fanservice). the main character in the male playthrough is of the Romantically Oblivious subtype that - naturally - all the girls incessantly flirt with. some of the jokes are ... dated, or poorly translated. at it's heart it's a JRPG, so there's a fair bit of grinding. etc.

now the parts I like: the game is all kinds of fucked up.

[I'll try to stick to non-plot spoilers (i.e. background info) but I probably won't 100% succeed.]

at the start of the game, you pick one of two different characters, which follow two radically different plotlines - I chose the male, Yuito. both characters are psychokinetic (though their weapons differ), both are new volunteers in the psychic branch of the military. after selecting your character you get to watch as the special brain equipment is attached to you and your fellow volunteers/conscripts and you all collapse screaming in agony. perfectly normal start to a game.

yeah so straight away it's revealed that most of the soldiers - not just the new guys - look like teenagers, and are being given grown blockers to slow their aging (to various degrees). if you pay attention to what one of the characters says about how she was forcibly conscripted a few years earlier, you start to realise that the occasional Actual Children you see walking about are extremely powerful psychics subjected to mandatory enlistment when they were very young; they invariably outrank you.

older-looking soldiers are either new adult conscripts (that everyone expects to die) or child soldiers that the growth blockers are ceasing to work on.

also hey there is government censorware in your eyes that prevents you from seeing certain things. don't worry about it!

so on to the game itself. first of all, you don't have skills as such - you modify your own brain. sometimes the map of your brain gets larger and more irregular. don't worry about it!

you are in a squad of guys with variable powers (different to your own) that you can briefly share. as you hang out in your Secret Teen Hideout and become closer and more compatible, this sharing will start to last longer, and you will begin to have visions of your friends that will help you out. sometimes you become them, just for a second. this is normal and fine. sometimes you forget little things, like who is supposed to be giving you orders, or which side you're on, or how you got here, but on the other hand nobody is stopping you from dressing as bad as you could ever want.

haha you can put a stuffed owl on your head! there's a hole in the sky that nobody talks about any more.

after a while, you unlock the Brain Field power, or as I prefer to think of it, AKIRA MODE, where you become psychically overpowered and get to smash everything. your character staggers around drunkenly, clutching their head and laughing and saying things like "I'll destroy EVERYTHING!", "WITNESS my POWER!" and so on. it's unbelievably fun, and will immediately kill you after a few seconds. none of your friends - who see all this - ever tell you to stop doing it.

none of this, though, prepares you for the moment when the media - having had all their computers trashed - releases a sketch of a suspected criminal (the other playable character). I'm putting it behind a break for reasons that I hope will be self-explanatory.

(the effect this picture has on your squad is devastating, by which I mean it immediately cures them of all some of their ailments.)

[kimyrnova]

[SPOILERS FOR SCARLET NEXUS] [PT. 1/?]

POV: The Scarlet Nexus characters in a nutshell coming from someone who has only played the story demo and hasn’t brought the full game. Probably extremely inaccurate but what y’all gonna do report me to the devs-

Kasane - Fuck y’all except my sister she’s coo- oh she’s dead and my parents disowned me okay fuck the whole fucking world

Yuito - BAKI!!!!! Oh shit my friends dead- 😭

Shiden - The flash but without the speed and grumpy tsundere as fuck

Arashi - the flash but without the electricity and also lazy behind the scenes

Kagero - “How many bisexual panics do I have a day minimum? Oh, about 50, why?”

[kofureene]

rest in peace kasane’s dog

Today’s anime dog of the day is:

This friend from Scarlet Nexus (2021)

[kyndaris]

Plot? What Plot?

As someone who aspires to become an author that will someday get on a Best Selling List somewhere in the world, I read a lot of books. While it's not on the level of professional BookTok-ers or those running BookTube channels, I like to think I get through a decent portion of them during the year. Especially when my books of choice are usually 600-page minimum behemoths. AFter all, with the rising cost of books (they're about $24 now in Australia for a standard paperback), I need to ensure I'm getting my money's worth!

However, ever since I joined the bookclub at my workplace, I've been exposed to genres and books I might not have usually thought twice on. Surprisingly, most of them have been much shorter than the books I usually devour.

But the most recent book we've picked is Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes. And, quite frankly, I've mixed feelings about the book. Spoilers ahead for anyone who might want to read this book in the future.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to spy thrillers. Hell, back in 2013, I even bought I Am Pilgrim after seeing the title being advertised nearly everywhere in the London Underground while I was there third-wheeling my friend and her then-boyfriend's relationship (you know you're close if you can get away with hijacking a trip overseas to see a significant other).

Did I love it? Not...exactly.

Still, I gave it a reasonable 3 out of 5 stars!

Year of the Locust, on the other hand, is a rough 2.5 stars (rounded down on Goodreads in this instance).

And I know you must be asking me why. After all, it's a 600-page behemoth. So, it would be in my usual wheelhouse of books I'd like to savour in just shy of a month.

Unfortunately, while I find the writing and sentence structure decent, my main issue are the characters and the surfeit of plot. This is no A Court of Silver Flames where Nesta and Cassian spin plates in the House of the Wind (and by that I mean the training, the bloody 10,000 step staircase and all the unnecessary sexy times), and the plot, when it is remembered, is scattered unevenly throughout before it all gets rushed through in the last few chapters.

No, no. Year of the Locust suffers from what I like to call the Scarlet Nexus issue. It's where the writers (or writer in this case), think any and all ideas are great and insert it into the story as some sort of twist. And in Year of the Locust, the second half has this in spades: space spores which fast-track human into evolving a white carapace, giving them a 'ridgeback,' and heightening their aggression; an experimental cloaking technology affixed to a submarine that somehow makes it travel through time.

Like, why? Why couldn't this be a separate story entirely?

Also, did you have to power up your villain into some video game bullet sponge? Uncharted 2: Honour Among Thieves this is not. But if you blink, the difference between Zoran Lazarevic and Kazinsky are almost non-existent.

Perhaps my gut instinct at the start of the book should have warned me that Year of the Locust would not go the way I thought it would. Especially as it opened with a completely different adventure with Ridley Kane going up against the Magus (which would later be revisited again in Part 3 - most likely to pad the book out because it added little substance to the whole Ridley and Kazinsky dynamic in any shape or form) to highlight a secret technique the dastardly spy would use against our protagonist, one he would repeat in the final few chapters against Kazinsky.

Another thing that rubbed me wrong was how often Ridley, as he recounts the story sometime in the future, would tell the reader how deadly all his foes were. All the while underselling his abilities as a Denied Access Area spy. Rather, our protagonist is just an ordinary guy who once wished to be part of a submarine crew and has mastery of multiple languages like Russian and Arabic.

The other parts I felt added little to the actual plot were the foreshadowing dreams Ridley has, and which many of the supporting cast attribute to PTSD. Why can't intuition just be that? Did Ridley truly have to emphasise he could hear 'gunshots from the future?' It's not as if he was ever shown to be clairvoyant about other things in his life.

Oh, and don't get me started on how much of the book 'tells' the backstory of all of its characters rather than simply 'showing' it. Did we need to have several chapters dedicated to Kazinsky talking about his childhood of hunting for mammoth tusks? How did it add to his characterisation? Did Ridley really have to exclaim to the rest of the CIA that Kazinsky was expositing to hammer the exact same point home to the reader?

By the time I reached the end, I was praying for the story to end. Especially when typical tropes began being pulled out: like Ridley refusing to go back in time and only did so when his wife (when did he and Rebecca even get married again?) died in his arms. The writing truly could be seen on the wall.

Also, how did the spores manage to travel around the world? How much was on some asteroid ore? And if they could become airborne, why couldn't people get infected after Devil's Night?

All I can say after reading the book was that the author definitely needed an editor. One who wasn't afraid to tell the author to kill his darlings if he wanted to write something that might not have been a complete mess. Or, at the very least, split the plot in half and write them separately with different characters. There was absolutely no need to mush two disparate ideas into one book. Especially given how strange the tonal change would be.

Do I regret that I read this book? A little. There are a million other choices sitting on my bookshelves. And yet, I also think it's important to read books one might not always enjoy. After all, such things help widen one's understanding of taste. If you're lucky, though, you might just find a new genre you'd fall in love with. Or a new favourite author.

While I know some might argue there isn't enough time in our very short life spans to read books you don't like, it's hard to distinguish what you do and don't like without experimenting a little. If one reads only the classics, thinking they ought to like them because of how they've managed to stand the test of time, it may deter them from books entirely. Especially if the writing might be too pretentious or too dry.

Besides, what someone else might like but I might detest is all very subjective. There are many people online who have elevated Sarah J Maas to such heights I'd not be able to reach while leaving other authors, who might be just as good, in the dust.

In any case, I know for certain Year of the Locust isn't quite the novel I expected. While there are some reviewers on Goodreads who love the rollercoaster ride they were presented with, it is this humble blogger's opinion that the story would have been better split into two separate novels. Coupled with a good editor who wasn't afraid to leave certain threads on the cutting room floor, those two separate stories would have been more tightly written and given Terry Hayes the springboard to leap into a wholly different genre.

[daily-rayless]

Today is also the birthday of overaccessorized antagonist Kodama Melone from Scarlet Nexus and definitely no one else from that game.

[themculibrary]

any fics set in Earth 838? (the one in Multiverse of Madness)

Here's some fics I found in the tag

there doesn't seem to be very many, unless I'm missing some!

my dreamer's disposition (or my wicked streak) (ao3) - synchronicities T, 3k

Summary: Multiverse of Madness spoilers

Earth-838's Wanda Maximoff returns home.

psychological horror (ao3) - olsenbcttany wanda/vision G, 1k

Summary: set in earth 838. wanda struggles in the aftermath of the scarlet witch's dream walking. vision is there to comfort her.

Redemption Is A Road To Infinity (ao3) - DoctorWhiteFox T, 12k

Summary: Stephen Strange had founded the Illuminati to deal with threats as dangerous as him. Execution is certain, he knows, and he deserves to die - yet he falters.

In a moment of weakness - when his need to survive drowns out all rational thought - he jumps into a glowing tear in the Nexus between universes.

He's not the only one in need of a second chance.

What if… An Earth-838 IronStrange Story (ao3) - gurkenpflaster tony/stephen T, 1k

Summary: "Just 'cause someone stumbles and loses their way, doesn't mean they're lost forever." What if Tony Stark managed to convince Charles Xavier, the mightiest telepath in the known universe, to spare Stephen Strange Supreme?

- Tori

[rayshippouuchiha]

This is him btw, my new Baby Girl who is also probably gonna end up being evil because I have A Type(TM)

They made me fight my new Baby Girl Karen and he beat my ass like I owed him money and I was just like "yes Daddy, thank you, harder please"