#side order. While fun

[artidoesthings]

it’s weird. I’m a fan of a lot of Nintendo franchises. But I’ve been So routinely disappointed by their most recent main games that I’m just. Not even sure what to think anymore? Anyway-

[shewaslikeasunflower]

this is mainly for myself to remember what i gave him but. claus if he was trans and had a personality while being commander 🔥🔥silly!!!

probably my official design for him for now unlessi add more things and change him up idk

[minusecko]

More Parallel Canon Tests

Still working on the Parallel Canon stuff, got a basic groundwork for a "boss arena" but is is missing a lot of detail. Did a small test render just to see how it might look.

[hanakihan]

i just love how my brain came up with implication of why Salieri’s minions started to receive enough mana to manifest constantly and have more human like appearance

‘… Count, don’t you think that Salieri’s minions also kinda resemble you—‘

‘How about we do not talk about it, master‘

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears

I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!

The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.

More:

Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.

Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)

Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.

Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.

Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.

The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.

They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.

And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.

I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.

[fisheito]

snakes have something called a jacobson's organ that allows them to smell. they stick out their tongue, and then when it enters their mouth again, the jacobson's organ processes what they just smelled with their tongue. i say this to propose that, after yakumo licks eiden's dick for a good 10 minutes, he closes his mouth and processes it all like O_____O

when i TELL YOU that this message left me bracing the wall like

(overwhelmed with positive affect)

[some-zer0]

Don't know what to do with this but uhhhh something something Gwen wanting so desperately to be taken seriously/treated with respect and something something Sam pretty consistently being the one person who's respectful towards her

[chplatoon]

anyone remembers side order? 💭

[supercantaloupe]

truly detest how pcos tags/forums/etc are absolutely crawling with terfs

[phagodyke]

love being at the climbing gym like yeah im not that flexible and then constantly doing moves matching my hands n feet on the same holds even when completely unnecessary

[toast-com]

SIDE ORDER! It's so good! I'm loving it. :3

Pearl and Marina are so cute! And Acht is super cool!

[antirepurp]

Your post about Ultimate level Digimon is based. I'm now having a new level of brainrot about it xD

Are there any pieces of Digimon Media that you think strike a good balance with digivolving to that level aside from Digimon World 1?

the first that come to mind are adventure and 02 and kinda tamers as well. while i do think the thing where megas trivialize everything prior is still present in adventure where taichi and yamato feel like the true protags who leave everyone else in the dust in the end, and adventure 02 goes even further by giving imperialdramon a mode change on top of a mega, there's still a special feeling to the ultimates. adventure 1 makes them hard to unlock by locking them behind crests, and adventure 02 requires jogress for them. arguably wargreymon and metalgarurumon also feel more special bc they're warp evolutions which gets lost in later media when megas just start evolving from ultimates

as for tamers, it's actually where i got the idea of limiting evolution from originally. it doesn't come up as much later on but evolution is much more sparse in the beginning of tamers than it is in many of the other anime, and typically it has to be worked for to accomplish, with megas requiring the tamer to fuse with their digimon to get there, which in turn makes the prior forms of digivolution more preferable in comparison. that said the way the megas are unlocked kind of has them water down ultimates, i'd argue that keeping them off-limits until the very end would've worked better for making the ultimates feel cooler, but then that would've meddled with some plot progression and that's an entirely different can of worms. idk from what i remember of tamers it treats evolution mechanics in a neat way that made evolutions feel more special when they happened

for non-anime picks i'd actually say digimon world 2 like the maniac i am because the sheer amount of grinding necessary to reach the point where you can evolve your funny guys into ultimates is intense. the game at one point even offers you a very early metalgreymon you can recruit if you know what you're doing that can obliterate some bosses and tricky encounters and it feels cool as hell. megas exist in the game yeah but with the level caps you can only raise by fusing digimon and raising them up again you feel immensely rewarded at the point where you can evolve someone into ultimate

going off a bit more on this too but here's a snippet of a helpful evolution chart for world 2

simply put the numbers indicate a stat for how many times your digimon has to have been fused before to allow it to evolve into that specific digimon, and for reference you unlock a new evolution stage every 10 regular levels (lv10 > champion, lv20 > ultimate, lv30 > mega). a few lines can't evolve into megas at all, most that can only have the option for a single mega, and if you have two options the other requires you to have fused a Ton of times prior, omnimon being one of the more ridiculous ones at 20+. and obviously since you'll be leveling up slower the higher you get, you'll end up spending a lot of time as champion and ultimate before getting even close to getting your first mega. that said with how grindy world 2 gets this stuff probably won't be appreciated by a ton of people, and if anything the digimon story games handled it in a way that was more player-friendly with cyber sleuth and hackers memory making it a ton of fun to fuck around with. i think the rewarding magic of further evo lines gets a bit lost with those however, especially when they implement evolution stages beyond megas in the case of a specific few digimon (iirc burst modes are new evo stages, and there's some "ultra" level digimon in that game too, so ya know)

uhhh tl;dr megas had a tendency to feel more special in older media i suppose

[squishosaur]

hm. i think i will ignore the last 8 episodes of arc v

[hipsofsteel]

bought some materials to make pocket shrines only to realize that i need more materials still to decorate them the way i want too... the curse

[gallusrostromegalus]

Might I inquire as to what, precisely, a Mustain't is? (Aside from a string of letters I hesitate to Google in that order.)

In October 2014 I went on a road-trip to the Driest Place In America.

I was having a rough year, very depressed from having dropped out of college for the third time. I decided a road trip was in order to re-set my brain and get a little distance. Being that it was October, and therefore all the campgrounds in the American Southwest were filled with people who have the good sense to camp in reasonable temperatures, I elected to take my parent's minivan so I could car-camp anywhere suitably isolated, and looked up some of the southwest's geographic extremes- the highest place I could drive to (Pikes Peak), the lowest place (Badwater Basin), and for fun, the Dryest Place in the continental US, which turned out to be the Pinacate Volcanic field just west of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It gets rain maybe twice a century and has no standing water, despite being less than 100 miles from the gulf of California.

It's a startlingly beautiful and alien place. The ground is a deep chocolate brown to black volcanic sand, and in mid October, the rabbit brush is turning bright yellow as it shifts to autumn, the organ pipe cacti are a dark green and stand, partially concealed in the brush at exactly human height. The air is alive with birds and insects and bats at night. The stargazing is like looking into the eyes of God.

You get there by driving down a little dirt road called "El Camino Del Diablo", or "The Devil's Road".

I drove out about three hours from Glendale, AZ to get there, arriving at sunset, and felt a profound sense of peace. I stargazed, listening to the bats hunt and sing, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.

I stayed out there for three days, sketching and painting the landscape, taking strolls through this almost alien landscape, and enjoying the light and sound and total absence of human intrusion besides myself.

On the fourth night, it was a new moon, and I awoke in the middle of the night. Something was amiss, and it took me a while to realize it was because I could NOT hear the bats. I was sleeping inside the van with the rear windows rolled halfway down rather than trying to set up the tent, so I when I sat up, I looked out of the van's reflective windows to discover what at first appeared to be A Horse.

It was something between pale gray and bright white in the starlight, standing maybe a dozen feet from the van, sniffing curiously. It made sense- I was in the middle of mustang country and there was quite a bit of foliage in the area for it and it did look like a truly wild horse- lumpy where the bones were jutting out, dusty about the hooves and face.

I was instantly seized by the sort of paralytic fear Sleep paralysis is made of. I couldn't move. It wasn't quite looking at me because it couldn't quite see through the windshield into the shadowy into the shadowy interior, but I had the distinct impression that if I looked away, it would know, and get me.

I already had problems with horses. My beloved Aunt Helen's Prize mare tried to kill me on two separate occasions, and the year before I had to carry my sister-in-law backwards out of a slot canyon whilst reciting the Saint Crispin's Day Speech as loudly as possible to keep a mustang from trampling us to death.

This is approximately what it should have looked like:

Instead, it was... off. like trying to draw a horse from memory.

The waist tapered in.

The legs were slightly too long or the torso slightly too short, probably both.

The ears were Triangular.

The head wasn't quite right- Too narrow and the jaw wasn't heavy enough.

The tail was too long and arced unnaturally away from the body.

The neck arched.

The nostrils were too high and close

The mouth too long.

Whatever this is, a Mustang it Ain't.

I watched it from the back seat as it sniffed around the front of the van, curious with about the side mirrors. It moved around the van, nibbling experimentally on the front door handle. It came up to the side windows, sniffing like a dog, and it's breath didn't fog up the glass.

Finally, it came up to the rear window, which was rolled halfway down to let the fall night air in. Not even half a pane of glass and two feet of air between us, and I could clearly see it's bright blue eyes.

Horses have Elongated pupils to give them a wide field of vision, and eyes that rotate sideways in their sockets so the pupil remains parallel to the ground. Rather creepy to watch, especially the ones with blue eyes.

A real horse that was curious about the interior of the van would have come up to the window more or less sideways, and looked at me with something like this:

Instead, the damn thing walked up and faced the back window head on, staring back at me with this:

I'm not sure how long we watched each other like that, eyes locked. My eyes burned. I couldn't blink. My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow. My throat began to ache. I couldn't make a sound. My skin began to twitch, like I was severely dehydrated. I couldn't move. My lungs burned. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move.

Something was touching the side of my hand on the seat next to me. It's my water bottle.

The realization must have broken the terrible paralysis in the lower parts of my brain first, because by the time I consciously realized I could move again, I was already flinging my water bottle out the window at it.

The top was open, and splashed out the window at the Mustain't.

I've never heard such a scream out of an animal. Something halfway between the sound of unquenchable rage vibrating in someone's chest and the way rabbits cry out to God when the dogs catch them.

It jumped back, pivoting away from the van, snarling at the water bottle. I don't think you're supposed to be able to see All of a horse's teeth at once, no matter how angry it is.

I watched it run into the night for some distance, it's pale body visible against the black sand and the dark gray shadow of the ancient volcanic cone it was headed for.

When the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the bats again.

I debated leaving right then, but I didn't want to get out of the van with that thing in the area, nor litter by leaving the water bottle out there. I also had the awful idea that if I left now, it might somehow be able to follow me home. I ended up staying up three hours to watch the sunrise, shaking and trying to figure out if I'd woken up from a vivid dream, if my meds had stopped working, or if that had really happened. I didn't dare move until I actually felt the temperature rise, before stepping out of the van to grab the bottle. I had my camera ready- I was still using a DSLR back then- to take pictures of the hoofprints, to show how close it had gotten to the van.

No hoofprints.

Beetle tracks in the soft sand around the van, and the clear foot-and-wing prints of a bird that had hopped around then taken off. But no hoofprints.

I went over the entire campsite with the tent broom, to make sure I removed every scrap of evidence I had ever been there, including my footprints, grabbed my water bottle, and drove the three hours back back to Glendale, then decided to do seven more hours of driving to Moab, Utah just to put more than 500 miles, the state line and at least nine things that could be considered "running water" between me and the Mustain't.

-

I still have that water bottle. It has a dent in the bottom from hitting something, but that could have happened at any time. Strange thing though. I can't drink that bottle dry. I'll have it on me, drink whatever I've put in there- water, juice, iced coffee- and eventually feel like I've drunk the whole think and that it's empty. But I open it up and it's still at least a quarter full. I drink that. I get thirsty. I open it up again. ...and there's always a mouthful left.

Not sure what the side effects of drinking from a bottle cursed by a Mustain't to always have some left are, but it lives in the Emergency Breakdown Kit in my car now, just in case I meet another one.

---

(I'm a disabled artist and make my living telling stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Pre-order the Family Lore book on Patreon)

[sugar-free-byproducts]

I am once again astounded that they really put DeadF1sh in Side Order and did NOTHING with them. they really put them there. just cause.