#she is the voice of a generation

[basofy]

guys nayuta is okay she was delivering the news just now

[eats-a-berry]

i wasn't sure exactly what i thought adult gideon should be doing, but i DO quite like the triple combination of cowboy-biker, drag queen, and used car salesman at the same time. she's always a busy person!

[aashiyancha]

Step 1

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It's been some beautiful spring days that made me think of the summer to come. So, I decided to give this game another whirl

Also peak summer moment. I wanted Jeremy to come back just so I could pour another cup on him.

[ineed-to-sleep]

Some sketches I did to try to get a feel for what I want my Rook to look like 🤔

[starflungwaddledee]

some rather strong first impressions were made.

required reading for the magical "voice" headcanon and another for starstruck's signature in particular. asked by @trainerbob23 !

[revvethasmythh]

It actually feels very meaningful when Laudna tells Orym, "You wield a blade gifted by the Voice of the Tempest, why would want this wretched thing?" and Orym pauses for a long second before saying, "The blade's from my family, first."

Whether this was intentional or a slip of memory, Laudna does not know the origin of Orym's sword. She connected it to a gift from a powerful political figure, not from Orym's husband, who gave it to him and is the reason he still carries it as a poignant connection to a lost loved one and also a reminder of what the Vanguard has taken from him and countless others. Paired with her asking him, "Why do you care so much?" and Orym turning to the others to answer for him because he's made it very clear for a very long time why, exactly, he cares so much, it feels telling that Laudna is not actually considering and/or aware of the place he's coming from in this conversation.

She doesn't even know where Seedling came from.

[starstruckodysseys]

does rekha know she’s the funniest person alive

(taken from this article! it’s very good you should all read it)

[valtsv]

she doesn't have a single speaking line in the podcast but i know exactly what agnes montague sounds like in my head

[leahaart]

Guys I really need DBD season 2 so Edwin can get really into gay icons and start quoting Kylie Minogue and Britney like it’s Keats.

[leggy-mceggy]

The "Some of them are benevolent" comment is so????? woh to me bc, that was NOT A THING in TMA. I wonder if we will meet any benevolent beings or if Lena just has a bad definition of benevolent.

[dancefloors]

you see all this taylor/brittany mahomes stuff?

yeah

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[lucabyte]

DO YOU REMEMBER ME?

CAPTURE YOU OR SET YOU FREE

[flowerbloom-arts]

AU where the Shifting Mound doesn't snatch the Damsel so soon and you have to deal with the repercussions of existing past "Happily Ever After" with a voluntarily undeveloped Sweet Love Interest™.

(also, yippee finally found a way to put my 2 interests together!!)

(absolutely incomprehensible ramble under the cut.)

Okay so I'm going to make this as understandable as possible for the uninitiated, whether it be for the Moomin comic strip or the franchise at large.

The plushie the Damsel is holding is that of the Snork Maiden (or just Snorkmaiden), the girlfriend/love interest for the main character, Moomintroll. Now, Snorkmaiden is an interesting and largely misunderstood character, especially when it comes to her comic version where she's a bit of a "promiscuous" character who oftentimes ditches Moomintroll for another man when she sees fit, this is where the misunderstanding lies.

Snorkmaiden haters will dismiss this (if they were to read the comics, because in all honesty they aren't that widely considered or even read in the fandom) as an addition to her general unlikeability as an "obstacle" to the fandom's main gay ship between Moomintroll and his best friend, Snorkmaiden sympathizers will leap to justify this with the good ol' It Was Heteronormativity All Along, which is a very... Honestly lazy reading/justification of her character which doesn't hold up under scrutiny. I, however, have an obviously superior reading of her character (/not serious)

Snorkmaiden simply has a very different definition of romance or at least wants to gain something different out of the concept of romance as opposed to the general public perception built up around it, one which even Moomintroll can't even begin to grasp.

What she gets out of romance, and where it begins and ends for her, is the adventurous fall and honeymoon of it, and each new man she gets into a relationship with is thematically appropriate to the adventure/problem of the week that she and her boyfriend's family are currently facing. When she goes to the French Riviera she starts dating a rich actor because it is a tourist shoreline city where all the celebrities go, when she finds herself in the wintery unknown (she and the Moomins usually hibernate through it, they're creatures like that) she catches a crush on a professional winter sportsman, when she decides to live a hedonist life because some self-proclaimed prophet came in and told everyone to she decides to start it by running away with someone new, when she gets a job as a secretary she falls in love with a coworker who is really interested in accounting, so on and so forth. Even with Moomintroll, they fell in love upon her introduction and Moomintroll signifies a new life in the valley in which they currently live in.

And in the end all of these new romances fall apart either due to unfortunate circumstances, Moomintroll's jealous intervention or her simply becoming disinterested eventually, and in the end of all of them she returns to Moomintroll, as per formulaic comic strip storytelling. (I must mention that Moomintroll also falls in love with other women based on their looks, and he also fell in love with Snorkmaiden because he thought she was pretty, so, he's not that much better really)

This is a repeating cycle, one that Snorkmaiden is simply incapable of breaking out of due to the conventions of her narrative. No matter what she tries, where she goes, who she gets with, she'll always end up back in Moomintroll's arms whether he "earns it back through chivalry" or she runs back to him much to her previous chagrin. It's a self-fulfilling cycle too, in one comic it's shown that she's so used to Moomintroll's behavior that it sours her current relationship with an already bad partner even further. If she was capable of Truly Leaving then she stopped being capable at that point. Snorkmaiden is stuck with a long-term boyfriend when she normally strives in a short-term relationship.

She's also deeply entrenched in romance tropes and loves to roleplay them with Moomintroll, and especially loves them when she thinks they're real, these tropes she fancies usually tend toward kidnapping (and not alot of rescuing) or romantic sacrifice such as dueling or... Romeo and Juliet. These things are extensions of her ideas on what romance is, more about the short-term thrill than the long-term contentment.

Of course, with most Moomin media having a child demographic as opposed to the adult newspaper readers of the comics, Snorkmaiden's character in adaptations of these stories get presented without the depth or the means for that depth, as she gets presented as either a somewhat boring playdate to Moomintroll with grand, childish ideas of romance or a naggy girlfriend whom the writers try to make feminist but ultimately fails to deliver on anything subversive or substantial.

How this ties into the Princess is the cyclical nature of it all, the choices with no branching ends, the new experiences with seemingly no development, the change and then the sudden stop. And with the Damsel in particular it is the reduction of such an interesting and intriguing person full of potential to a cutout of a simple Love Interest. All that anguish is suddenly washed away into something more palatable, a parody of a fairytale princess, a goodness so pure that it is sickening, no motivation behind the eyes except for one simple goal.

Now. Don't get me wrong, the Damsel is my favorite princess, between the Adversaries and the Towers and the Witches and Wilds, the Damsel is the one which captivated my singular interest, becaus I'm not immune to her trappings of adorable beauty and saccharine sweetness with no other motivation than to make her hero happy, I believe that it's a combination of the player's desire for her to be a normal princess they can have a happy ending with but also her willfully stripping herself out of guilt of what she's done to the player.

She stripped herself of any real personhood just to make us happy, and that is the purest motivation anyone can have, really, a terribly misguided one but the sentiment is immeasurable. I pity her and I love her and I want her to be so genuinely happy because of what she's gone through but I know very well that she's incapable of that because the decisions the player chose made her that way, she is made incapable of genuine happiness without total dependence on the player's feelings and that really breaks my heart.

It breaks my heart when she's reduced to a crappy middle school anime drawing when she's put through the pressure of getting interrogated or being told strange things about what would make the player happy.

It breaks my heart when she's finally free but then immediately met with the coldness of the Shifting Mound and thought that coldness was happiness.

It breaks my heart when she accepts her second death with tears in her eyes and a smile because she thinks that's what made the player happy, and yet somehow she couldn't accept it as a real decision the player made on their own because in the first time she was warned that they were possessed, so the only conclusion she could come up with was that the cabin was causing this pain and so as the Grey she decides to burn the whole place to the ground and stare at you lovingly until her face melts away.

It breaks my heart that the Grey is in a wedding dress, on top of that.

She's so desperate to cling onto the first person to show her kindness that she seems to have become broken over it. She's so terribly tragic that I can't help but keep thinking about her and the million heartbreaks knowing that she's so lovely and selfless but she wasn't Real anymore.

I want her to have a massive fairytale wedding like at the end of Disney's old Cinderella movie and live forever with some physical manifestation of Voice of the Smitten. I want her to come back to personhood and cry and not be snapped like a twig over it. I want the Damsel to be happy in any way she seems fit to be but I know that can never happy, both by the nature of the game but also in the very programming of her character.

She is trapped, whether it's in the cabin, her own circular mentality or as part of the Shifting Mound, she's incapable of of being really free as her own person unless you count the ending of us leaving with the no-blade blade starter princess.

... And that's why I think she should hold a massive Snorkmaiden fair prize won by her darling new butch knight girlfriend.

[project-sekai-facts]

You were right! It's Ichi Saki and Len. And it will be ichika's backstory and first miku contact

Shiho is the anniversary card then! Also I'm happy this event will expand on the Ichika iPad kid lore bc I personally find it really funny.

[wistfulwatcher]

everything I’ve ever watched for carla gugino SHE CREATURE (2001) as LILY