#so fucking funny how they went from really basic but fun concept to a full hero school that goes off the walls

[jaredthebc]

The timeline of events for the Yokai Watch series will always be the funniest thing to me at least anime wise cause like

Okay first off we got the basics. Kid ends up with magical maguffin which lets him talk to Yokai, he ends up also freeing a Yokai trapped for centuries who feels in debt to him so he’s got a “butler” following him who tells him all about Yokai, and his sidekick is a cat Yokai who is also the mascot. Monster of the week deal where they befriend a majority of the Yokai they face, or at the very least stop them from being mischievous enough to not be a conflict. Yokai are generally just pranksters and at most will cause a huge inconvenience. Very simple and goofy in tone, yet understandable and fun while also not being afraid to show moments of genuine heart

Then we got Shadowside, a timeskip where the main protag lost his memories of the Yokai world, but his daughter ended up with a maguffin of her own along with her friends. The Yokai are more faithful to how they were in myth, posing actual threats and not being something you can beat in one episode. Its a mystery type of series that has full plot threads that get resolved. Also the cat mascot is there helping the daughter and has a basically werehog forum, as do all the Yokai in this series. The butler is also there and is the only one to remember the previous series, but can’t interact with the previous protagonist anymore so he has to accept knowing he can never speaking to his old friend again. A pretty natural evolution from the routes of the series.

AND THEN THEY JUST GO OFF THE RAILS WITH Y ACADEMY

Everything you knew before changed. Aliens came to earth several decades post Shadowside and fucked everything over by changing Yokai and Human dynamics. Humans can all see and interact with Yokai without the maggufin now, and can FUCKING FUSE WITH THEM TO HAVE HERO FOURMS. This is all regulated via a hero school run by a reincarnated version of the butler guy from the previous series’s. The main protagonist is a reincarnated version of the cat mascot and every main character is also reincarnated Yokai, with no memories of their past lives. Also most characters get at most 2 transformations. The cat mascot stand in has FUCKING SEVEN over the course of a two season show. They fight villains and eventually aliens. Its fucking WILD

I’ve never seen a series jump the shark so hard while also being so glorious in the process. This is the kind of shit I live for

[tfw-no-tennis]

slawbo 3 extended authors notes

fic is HERE if you missed it!

just like last time but with much less medical information!

so! slawbo 3. FINALLY. this has actually been finished since like june UGH but summer was crazyyyy and fall has been too and editing this was a slog. but here we are! and it's even longer than the rest of the series combined!

behind the scenes stuff: so the bouncer/security guy, Smith - in the early draft he was actually a locksmith, so his name was a pun lmao. it stuck thru the changes, even tho its not a very one piece name lol (full disclosure, I'm terrible at naming stuff, both characters and places)

the original draft had sabo asking a local locksmith (Smith) to let him into his 'office'...Smith wouldn't buy it, Law would come along, and they would make out to convince smith that they really were dating

obviously all of that changed in the final draft but bits of it remain!

actually the original premise for this fic was JUST fake dating, and the handcuffed together thing was gonna be a different fic, AND the thrown in jail together fic was gonna be separate, but they all ended up being combined here.

shoutout to ruth for MANY things in this fic: i'll list all of them throughout, but the first one here is that she named the character Sangria (based on her holding a glass of sangria). THATS such a one piece name lol

so there is SOME medical talk here lol - so the bit where Sabo gives medical advice...i wanted to tie back to the last fic, so i had him talk about aortic aneurysms/dissections lol

(like the last fic, this is about AORTIC aneurysms - most of the time when people say 'aneurysm' theyre probably thinking about a brain aneurysm, which is a similar concept but with one of the blood vessels in the brain).

basically, an aneurysm is - contrary to what most people might think - just the widening of the vessel, where the dissection is the actual tearing (which usually leads to death) of the vessel

crazy enough, if the aneurysm is small enough, you just kinda monitor it 😳

so you can see that the aneurysm is alarming as fuck but not necessarily fatal, where the dissection involves the actual vessel tearing, causing blood to leak everywhere (and this is all the aorta, your body's largest vessel, so that's really bad)

TAA = thoracic aortic aneurysm; AAA = abdominal aortic aneurysm

fun(?) fact: if a AAA is large enough, you can feel it - if you press down on the midline of your abdomen, you can feel your abdominal aorta pulsating there - but if you can feel it realllllly far to either side of your midline, that could be an aneurysm!

(please dont worry if this is the case for you, your pulse can reverberate and some people have a wide pulse normally, this is very general lol)

anyways. i feel like sabo would do some hate-research after the events of the last fic, and that leaves him with some handy medical knowledge to get law all hot & bothered with lolll

what else...ah, northwood. mr captain flint northwood. in case it isnt obvious, his name is a play on clint eastwood: clint-->flint, and north instead of east lmao. s/o to ruth for LOTS of help with his character 👏

also shoutout to ruth for thinking up the whole 'multiple physical medical licenses' bit, AND the 'trafalgar leg' name lmao. it was initially a one-off gag from the first fic, but it ended up fitting well here, so we get the triumphant return of leg

law is right about the sternal rubs actually! that IS how you try to arouse a patient who's in a stupor - it's part of how you grade somebody's mental status for the glasgow coma scale

i had to hold back so many medical terms/bits for sabo's pov lmao. ruth Went Thru It while beta-ing. next fic we'll be back w/law and the medical BS will be back

northwood just kinda appeared. i think themed marines are soooo funny so i had a lot of fun writing him lmao

also, ftr, law really DID just happen to be in town lmao. that's three times these fools have run into each other by chance...maybe somebody they'll interact INTENTIONALLY (stay tuned!)

this fic actually has some ANGST in it whoaaaa. as yall can probably tell, im more of a humor writer than an angst writer, but i still had a good time with that

as yall mightve also noticed, i really love exploring sabo's amnesia (shameless sabo amnesia character study fic plug), so i really enjoyed having him reveal his amnesia to law and talk about it a little

that line where law offers to fix sabo's amnesia and asks to look at his brain - i've had that snippet written down since about 2018, when i first wrote 'make me burn the candle right down' [slawbo pilot fic], so i was REAL happy to finally have a chance to use it haha

i can sooooo picture little baby sabo hitting his head on stuff trying to see if percussive force will fix his amnesia lmaooooo

i also give ruth full credit for the exchange where the mayor says law saved him 'with his own two hands' and northwood replies '...the hands that have death tattooed on them?' ty for that genius tidbit, and also the 'pirates will steal anything these days' bit as well 🔥

i really like having law in situations where he isnt the straight man (like he usually is w/the straw hats), bc i think it's interesting to explore that side of him. plus, like we outlined in the manifesto, this is smarmy smirky pre-canon law we're dealing with!

so yeah, he gets to go full Actor Mode with sabo at the end there lol

not sure if its clear but i didnt really intend northwood to be homophobic by being vaguely uncomfortable at the PDA - more like he's just uncomfortable w/PDA no matter who's involved

i figured these two might need a little push to get to the 'making out' point in their little situationship, so here we have it

also, the kissing is SUPPOSED to be pretty awkward (especially at first), fwiw. imo, they're both pretty inexperienced, PLUS they have an audience, so there's a learning curve

will northwood return? great question. stay tuned to find out!

will sangria & the mayor of this unnamed town return? honestly, probably not, but you never know!

will slawbo return? YOU BETCHA! I have big plans for slawbo 4, and I also have two other sabo-centric fics cooking (including a sequel to the above-mentioned sabo amnesia character study fic), so expect those to come around this next year.

this past year was VERY busy for me w/grad school (sadly, becoming a medical practitioner in this world is much harder than it is in one piece), but this coming year i'll be doing rotations, so much more hands-on training and much less studying til i pass out. yippee!

that also means more time to write! I refuse to publish things until they're complete, so it might be a few months, but those sabo fics I mentioned are multi-chapter, and slawbo 4 is shaping up to be pretty long too. hope to see yall there!

thank you all, dear readers!!! enjoy!!

[argentsunshine]

have you posted about your characterization of Joker? i really like your takes about him and would love if it were explained, but understand if not

i don't think i've posted about it explicitly beyond writing fics and comics, but i do think about it a lot

i acknowledge that everyone picks different options for their akira(/ren, i'll be calling him akira here in case i have to differentiate between his real world and metaverse personas), but imo there are way more basic facts about akira that are the same regardless of what dialogue options you pick than people act like there are

he's quiet

he's not really a silent protagonist unless you're incredibly broad with the term, but he still isn't exactly the most talkative guy. you may be saying mr argent sunshine, this is obvious, why are you bothering to state this. well you see i often joke that i have a test where i back out of a fanfic if anyone describes akira as "loud", "talkative", or anything else to that effect. i have seen this so often and it drives me insane. especially when people portray him as like, a quirky hyperactive ditz constantly saying stupid shit...? people can be funny while saying very few words, guys. (sometimes it's even funnier to say less. wild concept.)

also, while the doylist purpose of his quietness is obvious - making the player pick a line every other sentence would get annoying and would force them to write and record way more dialogue to account for all the responses - i think it's interesting to examine from a watsonian perspective. was he always quiet, or is it a mask in the same way as the glasses are? i personally imagine him always being on the quiet side, but it's a space you could play in.

2. caring so deeply about everyone and everything all the time

this to me is the real core of akira's character. the defining moment of his whole deal to me is the one-two punch of him saving a woman he didn't know and losing everything for it, and, when arsene asks, him saying doing that was not a mistake, i'd do it again if i had to, even though the woman he was trying to save turned around and lied to the police, resulting in his arrest. he comforts ann when they barely know each other, he awakens to arsene in the first place while trying to protect ryuji, who he's known for all of ten minutes. yes, he loves his friends and found family dearly (and i'm sure when i started talking about things that are true no matter what option you pick someone went "oh like how akechi will still be akira's wish in maruki's reality no matter what you do", yeah, that too) but he's also ready to throw himself into harm's way for the sake of people he's never met.

(if someone wants my full rant on this point ask me about sojiro akira parallels but a side point to this is that he's deeply unselfish, to a level that may not be healthy in the long run. he just so happens to have gotten the exact magic powers to make his heroics feasible. i'm just saying, without getting persona powers he still would have managed to draw kamoshida's anger, and he would have been expelled and probably gone to juvie! but he still would have done it because he can't just look away.)

3. oh god i don't want this to turn into a whole full rant so now i have to pick one last point then shut up. oh god oh fuck. i could talk about akira forever but nobody wants to sit through that. let's talk about masks.

i don't think of joker as The Real Akira as much as his metaverse appearance is another facet of him. looking at him from another angle. i think his flair for the dramatic is fun and i love him, but i also think the concept of theatrics and illusion and trickery (ha) being built so deep into him is very important. even though it's always for the greater good, he does tell people what they want to hear a lot (off the top of my head, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of his non-PT confidants are at least somewhat based on false pretenses right from the start, even if they make him come clean in the end, and a lot of the rest involve akira being exactly who the person needs him to be.) you could argue that akira's always pretending to literally everyone fully all the time (I don't think this is true; i think he obscures parts of himself to make himself more useful or palatable to others, but i think arguing his connections are inauthentic is a) edgelord bullshit or, more commonly, shipper brain if they're arguing only one connection is authentic b) just not consistent with the way people work. i'm personally of the opinion that we're all always presenting tailored versions of ourselves to everyone around us - i'm ruder around my friends but kinder around my parents; openly ramble about my interests to my online friends but tend to keep a lid on them irl - these don't make some of my connections fake, it's just a difference in the facets people see. i don't think akira's tendecy to present different masks around different people is neccasarily the best way to go about life (in that i think it Will lead to an identity crisis inevitably) but it's definitely A Thing!

i lost track of what i was saying at the end there so i'll stop talking

[chrismcleaneatspants]

General season 2 opinions. MASSIVE TDI 2023 season 2 spoilers ahead (as well as a huge wall of text.) You've been warned.

Ok, so here's everything I like about the season (I can count them on my fingers)

-There were some funny jokes

-MKulia was entertaining and it's now in my top 5 favorite ships, but it's not perfect, as I'll explain later

-Hockey dudes were a joy to watch I suppose

-Bowie stole the show as usual

-There are a lot of neat challenges (The canoe, slide, and dog challenges was a particular stand outs to me)

-MK herself was really funny

-MacArthur's cameo was a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one, and she bounces off of Chris really well

-Duncney is still broken up lol

Honestly that's about it in terms of positives, cuz I have a million other negatives for this supposed sequel to (imo) the best written season of the show.

-The Relationships were the single worst aspect about this season full stop. Ripaxel and Praleb are probably the worst couples the show has ever subjected me to. For Ripaxel, they basically removed anything interesting Ripper had going on and Axel wasn't allowed to live up to any kind of hype she created because one lame ass poem turned her into Ripper's girlfriend for the remaining duration of her run, only for the both of them to be tossed aside in episode 7 in perhaps the worst double elimination in the entire show.

-Praleb started off ok. I thought it was gonna be a one-sided crush plot initially before Episode 6. They had a couple cute moments before episode 8, of which their screentime became suffocating because afterwards is was this painful back and forth where Caleb tried explaining himself and Priya would be mad at him, then ally with him, then be mad at him again like it was so tiresome. By the time they got together in the finale again, I was wishing they had just followed up on Pramien instead. Caleb by himself was funny in the first half of season 2 and Priya was great in season 1, but the two of them together were insufferable

-Speaking of Priya, she went from one of the best characters in season 1 to one of the worst in season 2. Why did she have to make it all the way to episode fucking 12 after winning season 1?? Just for some generic heterosexual romance? They also made her so dumb with shit like knowing Julia is manipulating her but then getting a surprise Pikachu face when Julia manipulated her??? You spent your entire life preparing for this show, how the fuck did you not see this coming???

-Segwayying into Julia, she's the worst antagonist full stop. I've never seen such an absolute downgrade of a character. She was a goat in season 1 who was aware of her situation and acted accordingly because the stakes were real. Here? Reality basically warps around her just to keep her in the game. She does things characters would never fall for in season 1 and they just go with it?? They insist on keeping her in the finale and do basically nothing interesting with her. She's not even as funny as Island Heather at the end of the day.

-I mentioned MKulia earlier, so I'll just get to it here: I like it in concept. Two evil sapphics causing chaos together is really fun. My main issue is that it was very sudden. They both were not fans of each other at the end of season 1 and now I'm supposed to just believe they became friends off screen? I mean, I guess, but it's kinda cheap. I would have really liked it if it was straight up enemies to lovers ngl. Also the fact MK had very little agency outside of being Julia's lackey doesn't help either. I want to point to the fake contract thing, for instance. Why did Julia do that? That sounds like an MK thing to do.

-Time to dive into other characters: Damien is an absolute fucking tragedy. At the end of season 1, Damien had one ambition: win next season. They kinda did that, sure, but they regressed Damien into being a complete coward to do so, not to mention he didn't even go all the way either. Damien didn't get a W until episode 6 and tbh that was his only W. By the end of his tenure, I was left confused on what the point of his run was. (I'll come back to this later.)

-What was the point of Nichelle? Like seriously, what did she contribute to the season at all? They didn't do the ironic underdog story with her, and considering she was getting all egotistical and aggressive, i thought she was gonna be the antagonist for sure...until Julia got rid of her in episode 5 in a way that really shouldn't make sense cuz like Nichelle is an actual celebrity that stars in blockbuster movies, I'm pretty sure she could sniff a fake contract a mile away, right?

-Hockey dudes were great, but I felt like they were very dumbed down at times? Like they were just generic dumb dudes that just meandered around a lot of the time (Wayne in particular just straight up floated away from a challenge at one point)

-Bowie was alright too. His line delivery is great as usual, but let's not kid ourselves: In a well written season, he'd be going straight for Julia the next time his team lost. Bowraj was nice to see even if the season didn't really do a whole lot with it

-Am I the only one who thinks this season is a tad bit misogynistic? Like this is the shortest them phase the show as ever had (to the point where i'd argue teams don't really matter) and 4 of the 5 team phase boots were girls. Millie and Emma in particular were really bad. Like, you could make Millie a team phase boot without like shitting on her that hard. And Emma got like fuck all closure outside of breaking up with Chase off screen like wow, way to utilize such a high potential character, Fresh. And this is saying nothing about how the girls that did make it to the merge had plots basically dominated by romance and like nothing else. And then there's MKulia which is apparently intended to be a friendship but like is written like a romantic one at times. It gives me all-stars gwourtney vibes and (as a fan of gwourtney myself) not in a good way. At least MK and Julia were somewhat in character I guess, but they had their edges really sanded off and honestly as a friendship (situationship?) it's a complete downgrade from Millie and Priya in so many ways

-And another thing: who's the protagonist this season? Outside of Praleb, who am I supposed to care for? Who am I supposed to root for? By the halfway mark, the show doesn't really make any convincing arguments to root for like anyone there outside of maybe Damien? And he went gone in episode 10, so like, hockey dudes? No one has an interesting enough narrative for me to care.

-The immunity idol stinks as usual. Like, why did Damien do THE SAME FUCKING THING HEATHER DID IN ALL-STARS?? That actually pissed me off so much holy shit. The immunity idol as it stands in the show is basically a shitty plot device made to keep characters in as there's no real strategy revolved around it.

-Oh and another minor thing: Owen's cameo sucks, and that's entirely due to him not being physically aged up at all and just being a vehicle for the same dumb jokes they always make with him. so stupid

-Anyways, I spend an entire season with two shitass straight relationships taking up screentime, a whole multiude of potential plotlines from last season (pramien) and this season (scary girl's revenge, millie being the new ripper, damien's comeback, julia having internal conflict over her friendship (feelings?) for MK) being set up and just nothing being done with them, and characters in general just being nerfed or borderline out of character (Ripper) and what am I rewarded with?

-Soar Losers. The most boring nothing finale in the entire show. The choices for finalists suck, Wayne, while being the least bad option for a winner (and i do still like him a lot), is still a mid ass winner in the grand scheme of the entire show. And more praleb drama? fuck off I hate them so much. The challenge did not feel finale worthy at all, and honestly it was the worst challenge in the whole season. On top of being a bunch of nothing, the show decides to bring back the worst trope it ever had: losing hair as karma. I almost ragequit the episode on the spot that shit makes me so irrationally mad. I think it's even worse here because Julia still had hair after the fact, which makes it seem like they were aware it's not a popular TD trope but wanted to half commit to it anyways for the sake of tradition or something. Terrible finale to an already decently sized letdown of a season, but it has some ok MKulia moments I guess. The finale was just emblematic of the entire season, where things just happen and you're just expected to go along with everything. (Also side note how come Chase wasn't the one to jump off of the cart for pizza immediately?)

TL;DR reboot season 2 imo was a step down in every conceivable way from season 1 apart of i guess comedy and it's left a very sour taste in my mouth. I'm probably missing a few points that I'll add onto later but man it feels nice putting my opinion out there.

[the-dye-stained-socialite]

Number 10 for Marigold :3c <- Guy who totally doesnt know how it ends and def isnt writing anything related to it 2 for Elias becase i always love to hear about the process... and 7!

10: What is their main character arc in the story? Where do they start and how do they develop? Do they get a happy ending or is their story a tragic one?

ohhhhh marigold ;) Their main arc is going to be them slowly coming to shake off the Princess' abuse. That they've lived through so many tragedies, and unfortunatly they must live through another. Finally finding a real bright spot in their life and feeling the warmth it emminates, and the stolen joy they get from it, and realizing their other bright spot is cold and dim in comparision, and that while neither light can sustain them forever, they must make a choice about which light they want to feed, which light they want to die with. When we first meet Marigold they are fully under her thumb, actively enjoying her torturing them without consent. Over time... well. for a long few year they're still unable to find fault in her, but in those last few months, they turn more towards "damning with faint praise". Eventually, they'll leave, but they'll never be fully rid of her influence, and they'll bear the marks of her abuse for the rest of their days, from their tattoos, to the loss of their vision and memories, to the ways they flinch when a voice is raised near them. Marigold's ending is bittersweet.

2: How long was the process before the character reached its final version? (or a version that would be clearly recognizable as the character?)

OH GOSH OKAY UH so Elias started as a vampire character with their partner, @the-insouciant-scientist's mad scientist! that is. about the only resemblance dfjvkdsjbdkvbk they were originally turn of the century edwardians, or just getting into the roaring 20s? we played around with the time period somewhat. this was back in, i believe, 2019, long before i got into TMA and heard how brits Actually pronounce 'Elias'. Elias' whole thing was they were a vampire who had turned recently, but not too recently. like a few months ago, so they're kinda used to it but also still working out a lot of the kinks ;P then i had my accident, and whenever i became a (basically) full-time wheelchair user, so did elias after that, Rye got into TMA and heard The Ad, and we decided to put our funny little victorians in the game!!! this was also whenever i started playing with elias' gender and presentation and made them very femme (as i was figuring out my own stuff) the first year/year and a half Elias was mostly a name and incredibly loose concept, i was just exploring things i thought were fun and cool! it's only within the past two and a half years that i would say elias has become Elias Leroux, chemist, dubious royal, Gonfaloniere, and sweetheart of half the city!!! once i transferred from the reddit side of the fandom to the tumblr side, and got over my anti fears, accepted that i like gothic horror, gothic romance, and gothic tropes, they really kind of bloomed into what they are now!!! my early concepts for them were a lot fluffier and sweeter which... is nice, but not so much my thing all the time, ya know? i wanted elias to go through difficult horrors and make choices from fear and i really wanted to do stuff with blood and giant monsterous bats (especially after heavily playing sskies and seeing the chiropterous hoarder <3) and that's what i've been focusing on mostly!!! a lot of it what honestly kicked off when i went "hey, i wonder what the consequences of this would be" for abandoning light fingers, and also there was a huge turning point for elias becoming their own character whenever i played the Swan Bride ES and they became gonfaloniere, and i got the chance to dive into toxins and- so... about 3 years!! 7: another favorite appearance aspect: okay, i'll finally let myself gush about it a little: ELIAS' WHEELCHAIR!!!!!! it's so fucking prtty if i say so myself!!!! the wood color is gorgeous, the heart back (based on that historical example) is inspired, the way it also kinda looks like a throne? how comfortable elias is in it? the fact that i can have their spokes decorated in flowers of ribbons, or all the scientific add-ons they can have for it? the secret compartments? it's such a fantastic chair, and every day i am so jealous that elias gets to have a HEART SHAPED wheelchair!!!!!!! i love their chair so much!!!!!! and it being a possessive and manipulative gifts from happles where it can easily control their chair? ough j'adore!!! it's a fantastic chair and it makes me so happy to draw and write about :} ask game here

[venomgender]

IM BRAVE ENOUGH unfortunately my signal is poop so no images are loading FUCK

THANK U MOE MY WARRIOR. i did not realize i made that original post 2 hours ago until i went to answer this ask WHOOPS. i was busy. n e ways. i have 2 main guys:

choi jaehui ^ Guy Whos Life Sucks. cjh is sooooo funny to me because the general concept of him (gay wizard) came to me in an incredibly vivid (at the time) dream and then he lived on just as 'gay wizard' in my head for like. a year and a half...? before i started actually developing him.

he ORIGINALLY was a like really snarky and full of himself necromancer based 100% off of typical shitty action manhwa protagonist (even his hair cut is stolen from one LOL) but 👆 hes so much more now. his life sucks now <3 LOL.

jaehui is the apprentice of one of his countries most powerful archmage's, he was originally an orphan just living on the street until one day his master happened to notice him using magic to steal food from a street vendor and, seeing his talent in magic, decided to take him in. that happened when he was around 10 or so.

BECAUSE OF THIS, he went from being a commoner to a noble, which all of the nobles surrounding him & his master Obviously Didn't Like, but they backed off once they saw jaehui's inherent talent in magic because of how useful of a Tool They Could Use he would be. jaehui of course noticed that the only reason anyone tolerated him was because of the magic and this did of course give him a complex.

cut to about 20 years later, every aspect of jaehui's personality that isnt "calm and agreeable archmage" is almost completely repressed, with the only exception (kind of.) being his master. the problem is, his master has been missing for serveral months. he finally has found a lead on his whereabouts, and a tearful reunion ensues! because what he finds is his masters corpse.

in this universe, any magic realted to "life" (healing, blood magic, necromancy...) is outlawed and its genuinely believed that you will basically condemn your soul to hell if you practice it. jaehui remembers this and then immeidtly attempts to bring his master back from the dead. he fails, though, being stopped by shua because hes about to summon a demon. he gets a cool tattoo as a mark of damnation on his eyeball though, so thats fun! speaking of shua...

joshua "shua" caballero <3 he also has a funny origin story in that i had the idea of an oc whos a mexican catboy who goes ña and made him. even his name is a joke bc all my friends have a guy named joshua that we obsessed over. but hes so much more now...

shua is the son of a subsidiary family of the caballero barony (aka his dad is the brother of the baron. you understand). he is also the head captain of the imperial knights! or, he was, until he overheard a plot of the imperial family kidnapping and brainwashing nobles that dont agree with them, and betrayed by the knights he considered to be his blood brothers as they killed him to keep him silent

he only survived because not every catperson can turn into an actual cat, and the fact that he could wasn't known by anyone besides his parents. but being betrayed by the very people he considered family worked out <3 because it was only after doing so did he realize his awesome nonbinary swag and actually get to explore his sense of identity outside of "someone meant to serve as a weapon for the crown" <3 jaehui is also transgender i didnt say it in his character profile but he is

anyways, shua's attempted murder happened about a year or so before jaehui's master went missing, and he's been trying to investigate that whole brainwashing thing since. that lead him to the same warehouse jaehui's master's corpse was being kept, which in turn lead him to meeting jaehui <3 talk about a meet cute <3 guy accidentally starts summoning a demon during a mental breakdown over his masters dead body <3 you know how it is!

but they meet there, and they realize 'huh we clearly have the same goal and need to further investigate why my master is dead / why the royals are brain washing people we might as well team up' and so they do! and more suffering ensues. but so does love <3 and more suffering <3 and more love <3

despite this being like 700 words this is only a very brief summary of just their base characters but if you want to learn more (in theory. i dont post tbh.) i have an oc blog for them too @choijaehui SMILE. thank you for asking and giving me an excuse to write about my guys + start thinking about them again. in the time it took me to write all this out its now also been 3 hours since i made that origal post thats crazy. well!

[alligaytorswamp]

Bursting into the room: Please tell me about your idol OCs!! What music do they do? What fashion styles? Who are your favorites? Do they have any fun interactions? Do you have more art of them?

auauauAAUUGHHHH 😭😭😭😭😭 THANK YOU FOR THISSS

AHSJKDHASD idk how to talk about them !! in a normal way !! so ahhhh let me just try giving basic info about each group or smth

edit: this is so fucking LONG LMAOOO.... here is a link to all their TH (andromeda isn't done sorry), if u wish to skip my mad man blabbing altogether B)

Andromeda

my first idol ocs group, naturally was a llsif fan group love them with my entire heart despite the fact that i make content with them like once ten years, they live in my head all the damn time there are 9 of them, canonically they are the only ones who have the privilege of being "very fucking popular and successful" went from being school idols (SparkleS) with pretty typical cute/energetic concept, then debuted fr (Andromeda) and now their concept is more mature/elegant/cool

uhhh they are just wonderful girls who are all best friends and they are very cute and different and silleyyyyy and i am a horrible father bc i didn't make their TH profiles yet (THERE IS 9 OF THEM IT'S SO HARD) so here is their tag instead... ignore very old art tho 😔 also i have spotify playlist with songs i imagine they either would have or would cover - here

(also in my mind their concept/main vibe of their music kind of ever-changing, to me, they can do whatever they want at this point bc they are just so popular lol + they have units and such and i can get away with it) (they are overpowered yes yes)

Ishin-Denshin

5 members here,, they are my girl boy group or boy girl group <3 don't know how to explain it's just they are bg but the music inspo/concept is strictly what my fav girl groups i listen to got going on

total boys next door, just chill sweet guys, good vibes only fun fact all got like trauma/issues (tm) because i am certified sad boys maker, but they are all doing well and go to therapy LMAO

like Andromeda they all met in high school and started idol club together, but unlike the girlies they didn't mean to be proper idols, sorta got scouted later on anyways they are also besties, very tight-knit (trauma bonded?) and i also love them dearly they got their TH profiles, with bits of main lore and some info on their friendships - here their spotify playlist - eek

GRIMM parade

ah my funny crazy little theatre kids and vocaloid stans literally a combo of 3 quirky bitches who really love acting and dark dramatic stories

i think the most basic way to describe their vibes would be like Halloween + fairy tales? They are very extra and have like odd ways of speaking/interacting with people, but it's their charm (as per usual, very much full of brain issues, bc i gotta make my boys even a little sad)

their TH - here their spotify - here (way less songs bc it's stupidly hard to find smth i like for them)

cheer4U

literally fresh out of the oven i have nothing for themm asjkdhakdsda i gotta share tho: they are a co-ed group, and from what i have seen in life most groups give rap parts to men, but here it's boys being vocalists and girls being rappers(+vocalists), and idk how to explain but it is very fun to me, girls got all the swaggg

also a fun fact: one dude (michi) is hisoka's (andromeda) younger brother and one girlie (olly) is elijah's (pothos) younger sister

pothos

now that i mentioned them, even tho this is just about my idols i have to talk about everybody even a little pothos is a dance crew, so they are 4 dudes who make choreographies and despite my pattern of making best friends, these 4 are NOT asdjkhakjdhaskl, more like it’s 3 dudes who are friends with elijah but aren't close amongst each other

their TH - here

anison singers

just these two random soloists, with their own quirks they are dating LOL their TH - here

Urban Legends

my rock band heheeee they are just cool and awesome girlies, who make music about scary myths and folk stories their TH - here

__

re: fashion styles it either matches their concept, or if we are talking individually - it depends on each ocs LMAO re: my favorites andromeda are the blueprint, so they receive special treatment, but currently i am also crazy about Ishin-Denshin AND dince cheer4U are newborns i am focusing on establishing their personalities lol

re: do they have any fun interactions?

ok so idol groups all know each other for sure, pothos prolly interacted with them as well, but way less and more formal, soloists and urband legends def had only minor interactions IF they had those.

generally speaking, everyone in the company treat Andromeda like seniors/girlbosses (because they are) while cheer4U are now the youngest and newest group they are kinda babies to everyone Andromeda doesn't have very close relations to anyone (being popular doesn't help here), but they are considered like a proper sister group to Ishin-Denshin, due to some matching concept elements and being the 'foundation' of the company Andromeda and Ishin-Denshin def had their little collabs, specifically vocal-based, since both group got mad vocalists also important to point out that Ishin-Denshin are huge fans of Andromeda, like every single one of them loves them, they def have been following Andromeda since their school idol days and they are still not over the fact that they ended up in the same company

Ishin-Denshin and GRIMM parade are a bit closer, i think because they are the same age, and because Ryunosuke insisted they should be rivals LOL it didn't happen tho, because Ishin-Denshin are just sweeties, and were like "no thank you <3", so Ryunosuke settled on Ishin-Denshin being their supporters or smth anyways, they def hang out somewhat regularly, ofc each of GRIMM parade members is close to different Ishin-Denshin members i think main proper friendships i have are: Ryunosuke and Tadao (leaders and basically dads of their group... lowkey considering making them a couple ahaha...) Shouhei and Nobu+Kyo, Shouhei and Nobu are just besties who hang out a bunch, but two of them with Kyo had like a whole event of helping Shouhei deal with a nasty break up he had (Nobu had a shitty relationship too, while Kyo.. well... it's in his TH profile B) the point is Kyo and Nobu just helped Shouhei process things) Rokuro and Kyo - just hype boys who hype together

here is a fun meme you should laugh it's very funny (i have no one to share this with)

i don't think i have any other ~full group~ relations so here's random canon connections i remember tsubaki (urban legends) is a fangirl of andromeda and specifically their triplers unit, def stans hana, mieko and shiori ryunosuke (grimm parade) and kaede (urban legends) totally get along due to their 'dramatic freak' agenda, witnessing them talking to each other has to be an Experience, because they 100% use most extra phrases and words LMAO elijah (pothos) is a huge fanboy of grimm parade and ryunosuke specifically kyo (ishindenshin), rokuro (grimm parade) and elijah (pothos) are also like 3 energetic funky boys who love dancing kyo, tadao (ishindenshin), axe, elijah (pothos), michi (cheer4U), hana (andromeda) and shinobu (urban legends) all love working out so i imagine they end up together in the gym every now and then also totally exlusive info, but im gonna couple up ichigo (cheer4U) and kyo (ishindenshin), as well as michi (cheer4U) and shouhei (grimm parade) B)

FUNNY THING... THIS IS LIKE NO INFORMATION AT ALL AHAHA.. TIP OF THE ICEBERG... I HAVE SO SO SO MUCH ABOUT EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL OC, LIKE THE STUFF THAT I DIDN'T HAVE SPACE/DESIRE TO WRITE ABOUT IN THEIR TH PROFILES... AUGH

[allthingsmustfall]

I read your Charles smith/Arthur Morgan fic and i thought the Cooper family was REALLY a quality touch to the narrative. It kinda inspired me actually. So thank you.

I have a sneaking suspicion I know this asker IRL and he is giving me a sneaky compliment, BUT I will take it. I am going to be better about taking compliments!

I've been thinking about OCs in fanfic bc I get a lot of positive feedback about mine, and generally people aren't jazzed about OCs so one or two people have asked me how I go about it. Here's some thoughts.

Readers get salty about OCs bc they're anticipating a mary sue self-insert. Mary Sue's are fine, we've all got some purple-eyed mysteriously alluring archers/sorcerers/rogues hiding in our closets, best not cast stones in that glass house of yours, etc etc. So calm down, fanfic is primarily about what we as writers get out of it and it sure as hell isn't monetary gain. Without writers, there is no fanfiction, so if people wanna lovingly write about their OCs, LET THEM. Writers owe you literally nothing. AND AND, also, i know my OCs aren't 100% believable and they have annoying Sueish elements. Caroline is a bit too cool and tragic. Anri is too funny and unflappable. But the thing is, it's FICTION. if you go too hard overcorrecting for what could be perceived as Sue, you're going to end up with characters with the personality of oatmeal. So do a little flexing, let your characters be dope as hell. Flaws make characters relatable, but it's also fun to read about people being funny and sexy and interesting while being relatable. Caroline is not as good as she thinks she is, she got herself in trouble, and she winds up with a quiet little schoolgirl crush on Charles. Anri is TOO hard around the edges - she comes down on other people so she doesn't have to look too hard at herself. They're fuckups, but they're allowed to be fun too. You are allowed to like your OCs.

I usually approach OCs from a narrative need. "I need this to happen and I don't know/there isn't a canon character that will fill this need." So for ask, but gently, the thought process went like this:

There needs to be another hurdle to make the story come together. The hurdle should be Micah catching up with them. How does Micah catch up with them?

Arthur needs to get the fuck over himself and 'forgive' Charles. He needs to be reminded of Charles selflessness

The hurdle should tie into their identities, maybe racism, homophobia, etc

3. So I basically flipped all those concepts around in my head until i came up with a missing, mixed race girl and her family. Boom. Hits all the marks. Micah gets extra villain points for not only being a thorn in Charles and Arthur's sides, but also threatens this family. Boom boom boom

4. So now we have what the OC is going to be. You can just use them like that, little bricks to build the story, and that's fine. But i think it's more helpful to then zoom out from what I need from them for plot and think about them as characters. Aside from getting tangled up in my story, what are they like, what do they love/hate, how do they gel with the world. It's not all vital, but it makes writing them interacting in the plot easier and more natural.

So, TL;DR:

Identify a narrative need

Come up with a character in a situation that fills that narrative need

Forget about the purpose they're going to solve in the plot and focus on what put them there, who they are, what makes them a full human outside the bounds of your story

[zeravmeta]

🖊

Aye, let me regale you all of my FFXIV OC who technically doesn't exist because I don't play FFXIV and have only had the lore explained to me by mutuals

So imagine a guy, right? John 'Warrior of Light' Fantasy from FFXIV is whoever you need them to be, and she's also full of a bunch of different versions of themself like Fray and the John Fantasies of Fantasies past and also haunted by Zenos' own shadow self (maybe).

WOL is just Built Different as per the events of the game, surviving things they shouldn't, getting body snatched, soul split apart, the whole nine yards of anime things that happen to people to hurt them. However, they don't ever actually die, because they are the aforementioned super badass hero who ends the cycle of shit once and for all, as Hydaelyn says herself "Now all of you will Walk to your Ends after the Warrior of Light Brings the Shadows."

Having been explained that, I took all the bits of the lore and went "What if my WOL was a zombie?" and thus, we have Z.M., otherwise known as Zombie Mailman (Note: I suck at naming my OC's so I always just have tagline code names for them, but Zombie Mailman is actually called Z.M. because it's funny that he has an actual tagline name of his initials without knowing how on the nose it is)

The basic idea for this guy is that FFXIV is full of guys who don't die: Emmet-Selch, Zenos, the Primals, Niddhog, etc, all these dudes who persist out of spite and willpower for all their various reasons. However, despite all the noble/terrible goals they each try to sell you on, they all share a pretty important distinction: They're super unhappy. All of them are immortals but they also fucking HATE being alive for one reason or another, so I took this concept and went:

"What if the Warrior of Light was sent from Hell to deliver these immortals their last rites? After an eternity of suffering, they've clearly forgotten how to die, so the emissary of hell isn't here to drag them back but to help them pass along." And thus, my WOL OC is a literal zombie mailman who runs around working as a mail delivery man and moonlighting as a world saving hero because Someone needs to help these poor saps fucking die already.

Furthermore, all WOL's in canon just kind of appear one day, so the way my John Fantasy gets Fantasy'd is that he literally just crawls out of the ground naked in true zombie fashion, gets found by the Delivery Moogles and the Lalafel Post Office and is offered a job, and now everyone stares awkwardly as the cute little woodland creature guys have this 8ft intimidating dragon-pangolin guy whose clearly dead helping them in the office and backhanding any and all rude customers through a wall.

He has blue skin and wears the standard mailman fit (colored white because I like it but also the white medical towel doctors put on corpses), uses her pronouns interchangeably (corpse who has no identity except what they make), and they're actually very sweet but always kind of nippy and frustrated because all these guys who keep postulating about the nature of humanity are just trying to dodge the fact that, no they really have just forgotten how to die, like IDIOTS. Also a fun little wrinkle to his design (in my head) is that even though he's this ancient corpse, ZM is actually very youthful in appearance because it's a nice juxtaposition to all these older characters who are literally melting but still alive vs a young person who is very much dead.

Anyways heres a few fun little snippits of ZM from my discord in DM talks

Might I share more about ZM? Maybe some day....

[metalandmagi]

Winter 2021 Anime Worth Watching!

Since 2020 basically sacrificed itself to give us the most stacked anime season of all time, I’m currently buried under the weight of almost 20 shows airing per week. So for anyone who’s looking for some anime to watch this winter, here’s some first impressions! I’m speed running my list this time by only talking about the new shows...because otherwise this would be my great American novel. 

If anyone’s interested, I have master lists for both 2020 anime and 2019 anime, because there’s no shortage of fun things to find. 

New Shows!

And before anyone asks, So I’m A Spider, So What? isn’t on here, because CG spiders freak me out.

Cells At Work Code Black: This...less comedic spin off of Cells At Work (made by a different studio) takes the wholesome concept of Osmosis Jones meets cute anime girls and turns it on its head. In this much more depressing version, we follow a rookie red blood cell who works in the body of an overly stressed, alcoholic smoker who puts every strain on the body imaginable. I love Red Blood Cell AA2153 and his co-workers, but man am I glad we get the regular Cells At Work airing this season too, because I need something fun and uplifting after seeing my sweet son go through hell every episode. 

*Heaven’s Design Team: Have you ever wondered how God came up with some of the weird ass animals that live on this planet? Like, what’s the deal with giraffes? And why can’t we have dragons and flying horses? Well this is a comedy about the engineers and designers in heaven creating the new animals that are going to inhabit the Earth. That’s it, that’s the show. It’s kind of in the same vein as Cells At Work, having comedy blend with a surprising amount of educational information. If you want something light and funny, this is the show for you (though I don’t think it needs to have full length episodes). I’m just hoping there’s an episode about how the hell the platypus was created. Also it’s the only new one available on Crunchyroll.

Horimiya: A romantic comedy about a girl named Hori who fits the image of a perfect queen bee and a quiet bespectacled boy named Miyamura who never makes an impression at school. When the two meet by chance outside of the classroom, we see that Hori is practically raising a younger brother by herself, and Miyamura is actually a sweet guy who happens to be covered in tattoos and piercings. This show is an exercise in breaking down the images people have of others in their minds, and it’s a concept that really hits home in a fun and meaningful way. Honestly, this has become one of my immediate favorites. The characters have great chemistry, and I can’t wait to see more of them!

Monster Incidents (Kemono Jihen): When big shot Tokyo detective Inugami is called to a rural town to investigate a series of strange animal deaths, he finds a mysterious boy with the nickname Dorotabo who has been shunned by the other children in town. As the detective gets closer to Dorotabo, he discovers that there may be more...inhuman secrets to the boy than he realizes...and Dorotabo discovers that Inugami has some secrets of his own. This is a hard show to sell without spoiling the first episode, but it had twists and turns that kept me engaged from start to finish. I’m really interested to see where the plot goes, because I thought this was going to be something totally different just from the PV and series summary. If it plays its cards right, this could be a great paranormal detective show!

Wonder Egg Priority: A psychological drama about a girl named Ai who starts having dreams about a mysterious egg that promises to give her what she wants most in the world...a true friend. Before long, she begins to see how the dream world and reality are tied together, and trippy antics ensue. It’s hard to say more without spoiling anything, but I had to go back and add this one in because I made the mistake of thinking it was an OVA when it’s actually a full series. And what a series it’s starting out to be. This anime has all the psychological discomfort of a Satoshi Kon product with the beauty and style of something from Kyoani (even though it’s made by Clover Works). It’s really one of those anime you just have to see to understand.

Sk8-∞ (Skate the infinity): An original skateboarding anime from Bones, featuring a typical sports anime protagonist who takes a new transfer student who has never skateboarded in his life under his wing. Together they compete in dangerous races and take the skating community by storm. The character designs rival Appare Ranman’s in outlandish creativity, and I can smell the main characters’ ship dynamic a mile away (considering they’re exactly the same as the protagonists from Robihachi). If you’re looking for some wild and crazy fun with top notch skateboarding animation, don’t skip this!

2.43: Seiin Koukou Danshi Volley-bu (Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Club): Yes, it’s another volleyball anime. And no, it’s not just a clone of Haikyu. This story follows Yuni Kuroba, a physically built but emotionally weak teenager who finds out his childhood friend Hajime is moving back to their hometown for high school. Yuni discovers Hajime has become an exceptional volleyball player and they join their school’s volleyball club hoping to turn the unknown team into a rising star. If anything, this anime is much more like Stars Align or Free, where the sport is a backdrop for letting the characters explore their personal problems. Or at least it seems that way after the first episode. I went into this show ready to throw it in the trash because how could anything compete against my beloved Haikyu, but I found myself really enjoying the dynamics of the main duo and I’m curious to see what the rest of the team is like.

And speaking of sports anime rip-offs…..I can’t believe I’m including this but…

Skate Leading Stars: The show where the animators clearly wanted to design another throw away idol anime but saw how popular Yuri On Ice was so they decided to make whatever the hell this show is instead. It revolves around a fictional team sport called skate leading, and we follow the world’s most insufferable main character, a former figure skater named Kensei who wants to return to the ice and join his school’s skate leading team after he finds out his childhood rival is going to compete in the sport. Look, this show is just trashy enough to get a certain type of audience hooked, and it mainly has to do with the best boy of the winter season, Hayato Sasugai, the aspiring team “coach” who pulled most of us into watching this show with his punk appearance, snide comments and smug personality. He’s basically the lovechild of Izaya Orihara and Shizuo Heiwajima in a high school sports anime setting. The show treats itself with the perfect amount of sincerity to get away with being absolutely ridiculous most of the time without making you feel like you’re watching it from a dumpster...like Try Knights. You will know after one episode whether this show is for you. All I can say is, Hayato is worth the watch, and I haven’t seen any 3D animation used for the skating scenes (yet) so that’s a win for me. 

Honorable mention:

Jobless Reincarnation ( Mushoku Tensei): Yet another isekai where the main character is hit by a car (big surprise) and gets reincarnated into a fantasy world...but he happens to remember his previous life and narrates himself growing up as a jaded adult. I’m only including this because it looked amazing animation wise, and I love the opening where getting hit by a car and dying is actually traumatic. And I love the protagonist’s parents (who are retired adventurers who just want to bang all the time). But honestly...the main character is the fucking worst, and I don’t know if I want to keep watching it because of how creepy and weird he is. Like...he’s the hit on your fantasy mom as a baby kind of creepy and weird. But for anyone who wants a cool looking isekai that had an amazing PV, it’s worth checking out. 

Continuing Series!

Because the real gold of the season is in all the established anime getting their next seasons, I’m just going to list some of the things that are also amazing and definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already (because I’ve already talked about most of them at some point and don’t know what else to say).

Attack On Titan season 4

The Promised Neverland season 2

Beastars season 2

Log Horizon season 3

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime season 2

Re: Zero season 2 (second cour)

Dr. Stone season 2

Cells at Work season 2

Osomatsu-san season 3 (second cour)

Higurashi New (second cour)

Jujutsu Kaisen (second cour) 

Not to mention all the shows I don’t watch that everyone else loves...like World Trigger (which I have seen quite a bit of, but long shounen shows are too much for me now) Quintessential Quintuplets, and Non Non Biyori. 

So there’s just some of all the anime airing this season. Hopefully, someone can find something they like. Here’s to a great year...well, of anime at least...

[balillee]

my unpopular dsmp opinions, some of which genuinely should be popular

c!dream has crossed the moral event horizon and is irredeemable. once you cross that threshold, you're no longer a 'morally grey' character.

pre-recorded, heavily produced lore killed the lore. it was cool, sure, but you completely misunderstand the magic that the smp had when people watched it initially. the story is improv and that's how we like it. we can tell the cc's have lost interest in it, you can admit that to us, we'll understand, just stop lying to me.

c!dream's pov isn't necessary to understand his character or his motivations. if you've watched literally any c!primeboys stream he's basically spelled it out for you.

i don't understand how fans can dislike l'manberg or have claimed to be against it since the beginning. i honestly don't get it. what's so bad about wanting your own spot where you make your own rules and skirt accountability that has been used to technically oppress you before - and, before someone who never saw the earlier streams tries to disagree with this, the og l'manberg crew were imprisoned for shit that everyone else on the server was practically encouraged to do. also, what do you have against fun and happiness?

i think some of you forget that 'hybrids' aren't a thing, discounting c!ranboo. there's no piglin hybrids, c!techno is just a pig. there's no avian hybrids, c!phil is just a man with wings. there's no creeper hybrids, c!sam is just a creeper who's indecently exposed from the hips down. canonically there's no hybrids, and therefore no hybrid discrimination. people ran with that concept too much.

the loss and the fanon rewriting of the early lore up until pogtopia has ruined fandom perception of c!dream and the og l'manberg boys. c!tommy is more morally white than you think he is, and c!dream has always been a villain - he massacres and he kills and he destroys and he schemes and he always has broken his own rules. no wonder the boys wanted their own space after how they were treated.

i think ranboo oftentimes forgets his own lore. he brings stuff up that c!ranboo may have done, such as exploding the community house to frame c!tommy, holding onto Cat, and it goes absolutely nowhere. we've gotten all of these developments in his story but they have never been expanded on, and we're nowhere closer to figuring out his relationship to c!dream and what his other side is and honestly i see no hope that we'll be any closer to knowing even by the end of the year.

your characters don't all have to be morally grey for the story itself to be morally grey. this is fiction - some people can be nothing but evil and others can be nothing but good. being purely good or evil doesn't mean that you're one dimensional, either.

c!dream apologists have ruined c!dream for me. he's not a good person. how about you let me enjoy a villain for who he actually is, rather for than your percieved woobified ragdoll you pass off as c!dream.

the story was better when there was a central writer. it was brilliant back when wilbur wrote it to be that the environment drives the characters and the story, and it was really good in early s2 up until techno's execution day when it was more character driven. since then, the amount of autonomy people have over their characters without any central 'director', as it were, has been a detriment to the story overall. there needs to still be one overarching figure or director or writer.

not everyone is a main character. just because they have a pov, doesn't mean they're a main character. some characters have such little impact on the overall plot and describing everyone as a main character oversaturates the story and makes some characters seem more important than they are.

the egg lore had so much potential up until it didn't. all that built up threat that we were expecting and we still don't even know what the egg wants really other than just controlling people. does it hatch?

genuinely, if there's no major plot developments by the end of the year (and let's be honest, it's a very big possibility at this point), a few of the more prominent members of the server should do a podcast style stream talking about where the story would have gone, because at least then we would have gotten somewhat closer to a conclusion.

c!techno is a villain and an asshole and a bad person. he stops caring for people once their interests don't align with his or if they look at him funny. he makes meta-jokes about his own tyrannical and oppressive nature. stop taking that away from him. he's a bad person. cc!techno does a fabulous job portraying that in a comedic manner and the balancing of him being a deeply flawed person with deeply flawed morals and ideas with his comedically-portrayed stubbornness and lack of willingness to hear out opposing viewpoints is incredible. i want to like characters who are arseholes for the sake of being arseholes, and who refuse to take into account the hurt they've caused either out of self-righteousness or because they don't care, so let me. he's the anti-peacemaker, LET ME HIM ENJOY HIM FOR THAT!!!!

i think tommy and wilbur's way of doing lore is my favourite. relies heavily on improv, voice acting, sprite acting and facial expressions. really shows off the acting props and they pull off the emotional moments well for the insanity of the creative medium.

i'm not a fan of fan-music. i find songs about media i'm into difficult to listen to. coincidentally i'm also not a fan of shit like slam poetry or live music/musicals/pantomimes.

the death of l'manberg killed people's motivation to go on the server casually. i've talked about it more in depth before, but destroying what was a central, driving environment for the story killed momentum and motivation. imagine in an episode of she-ra, the princess alliance just nuke the freight zone and all of the members of the horde just have to deal with it. that would be shit.

until season 3 has some momentum, i'm counting the end of the smp as january 20th. that had a conclusion. season 3 has... whores, technoblade and tommyinnit. that's about it.

i wasn't a fan of the development of c!tubbo joining las nevadas. i preferred snowchester and the walled city conflict. give c!tubbo some backbone and some badassery. also tubbo where's the fucking nuke bro if you're shelving that plotline just tell us on like an alt stream what the plan was i beg

add like 2 or 3 new people to the server so that michael mcchill has someone to talk to and so that there's something always happening on the server. it gives the og's more motivation to return if things are happening in and out of canon and it'll help with momentum, and who knows? maybe they can write their own story/stories.

i really think that c!sam is an underrated character. he's multilayered, extremely interesting, and the dichotomy of his loyalty to his job and how far down the rabbithole that's taken him versus the genuine love he has for his friends that drives him to do what he does out of wanting to do right by them is brilliant. i don't talk about c!sam enough.

STOP HAVING FUCKING VILLAIN ARCS!!! I'M FUCKIN SICK OF IT!!!! i want to see more characters who see everyone else being absolute selfish, abhorrent cunts and go 'if nobody else is going to be a good person, i fucking will'. GIVE ME SOME MORAL WHITENESS!!! IT'S INTERESTING AND MORALLY GOOD CHARACTERS ARE FUN!!!

let tommyinnit build cobblestone towers. everyone bullied him too much for how ugly they were and the one he built outside of the prison looked genuinely really nice. it gives the boy something to do.

i'm a fan of the revive book and the canon lives system. don't ask me why, but i think it might just be the morbidity of it. it adds to c!dream's god complex persona, and i think the fragility of death itself is a really fun concept. not enough fan cc's have made connections with that and c!mumza, and it could make for cool fanfic.

ranboo your house is fucking ugly. it's an eyesore

c!niki, and to some extent now c!jack and c!fundy, are boring me and ruining my mood. i think c!jack is the closest to being an actually interesting sympathetic villain, mainly because nobody else seems to realise that c!niki is a villain. not a good one imo, but she's a villain. c!jack just has the problem of starting a new project over and over and over and over again and because of the slow in momentum for the primary cast, there hasn't been a lot of recent development for him.

not really a dream smp opinion, but if philza went full geordie accent, i would love it. i want him to, in canon, say shit like 'me n ye' instead of 'me and you' and use geordie dialect. i want him to be physically unintelligible because it's funny.

i don't really know what's up with c!foolish but i think he's a dumbass. he had a while to think about c!q's proposal and then changed his mind about joining the guy to admitted to letting him die just because. moron

i wish there was more c!eret lore. i wish he was an actual king with an actual kingdom and actual subjects and royal advisors. c!eret is far too fucking cool to be the king of nothing and nobody. fatten up the kingdom and the castle with people who work with c!eret, and don't just make it tyrannical and dictator-y to prove the point of the server's 'anarchists'. make it a healthy working environment, please - if you want moral greyness, have 'anarchists' who claim to care about the welfare of the server oppose a kingdom of happy people under a fair and just ruler because their ideologies clash.

the server needs more characters who oppose anarchy in more peaceful ways, or passively wish for systems to be a part of. i think a chaos vs order conflict ending only in mutual understanding where everyone understands that they should just leave each other alone would slot nicely into the story that's been created so far.

you need to have watched all of the previous arcs to understand the story. i've seen people argue that they don't need to know about earlier lore to understand the prison, but that's the equivalent of only watching the final season of pretty little liars and expecting to understand the context of what's going on.

some characters aren't that morally grey. some characters, take c!tommy for example, are definitely on the whiter side for the morality scale, he's just an asshole. he's abrasive and rude and a dickhead but he also doesn't agree with terrorism, he's patriotic, he strives for a better world, he's apologetic, but he's also a fucking BITCH.

you can add onto this if you want, but not if you're a c!dream apologist. nobody likes your opinions

[autisticandroids]

anyway ok so lets talk about ruby SPECIFICALLY in my good s6 au. this ruby concept is almost the same as @lesbiansamwinchester‘s ruby lives au but has some key differences, mainly ruby doesn’t redeem herself in s5. lucifer raises her in sympathy for the devil because she really was the best of those sons of bitches and she deserves it but she spends all of s5 conflicted in her loyalties because while she really DOES want lucifer to win she is also In Love With Sam, Unfortunately, and gets more and more uncomfortable with sam being lucifer’s vessel and shit. and then she finally betrays lucifer in like, two minutes to midnight or swan song and he IMMEDIATELY kills her (very important: lucifer must already be possessing sam when this happens). then she’s brought back like. face down in a ditch 300 miles away. that’s how ruby ends season five.

anyway watch this video to set the mood. ruby stuff in season six:

- so at FIRST she is actually running around with a ragtag group of lucifer loyalist demons led by meg. meg kind of hates her for betraying lucifer for sam but also you know sam’s dead and ruby won’t do it again and most importantly they need EVERY pair of hands on board for this. so ruby is kissing huge amounts of ass mostly meg’s, like, meg is making her wait on her hand and foot in an apron. it’s comically villain homoerotic. you know. like ruby serves meg tea in a maid outfit for no other reason then as like. ridiculous humiliation that’s also intensely, weirdly horny. like the lucifer crowley dog stuff in s11. actually meg literally makes ruby wear a dog collar with a little tag that says like, “ruby. if found, please call 666 and return to owner (meg).” i cannot stress enough that this is just STUPID horny for NO reason. you guys know what i mean. it’s basically sorority hazing but up to eleven because demons, and also forever. also meg makes ruby kiss her hand at least once. or like no she makes her kiss her boot. i am having too much fun i’ve gotten distracted.

- ruby finds out sam is alive and immediately ditches. like she just fucks off to nowhere and they can’t figure out where she went. anyway this samruby reunion takes place like, before the first episode definitely, maybe a few months.

- i do like @lesbiansamwinchester‘s thing where ruby tries very hard to be sam’s moral compass but also imo she fucks up, very bad, and a lot. and soulless sam can’t really catch her at it so they end up doing a lot of very fucked shit actually. but she tries very hard because she cares about sam and she wants him to think well of himself y’know. and she wants to be someone who sam would think was worth following.

- re: that last point. many thoughts. head full.

- when sam and dean finally see each other again ruby is there and dean is like what the FUCK. like he did see that she betrayed lucifer for sam at the last minute but also he hates her and doesn’t trust her, and he actually kind of suspects that whatever’s wrong with sam might actually be HER fault. 

- this post is relevant.

- okay but i’ve decided that the cas/meg kiss DOES in fact happen in this au because i do kind of love it and also more importantly, with the addition of the insane meg being ruby’s shitty ex vibe that i am jamming into this au with both hands, it is just. chefkiss. ruby and dean look at each other in horror while sam is just like huh? i’m sorry but imagine being ruby and being forced to watch your horrible ex get kissed dommily by castiel. god this is funny i love this. again this is all in subtext because we are imagining cw censors and i’ve used up my one allotted gay kiss for the season by having anna make out with a random woman at an orgy to prove that all angels are degenerate pansexual hedonists, you know. (is this homophobic enough for the cw? i hope so!) also: an orgy which balthazar organized and cas refused to attend, to be clear. 

- dean is actually garbage enough about the whole ruby thing that sam and ruby fuck off by themselves for a good while like, maybe three or four episodes, leaving dean alone or sometimes with cas. during this time dean gets a little bit involved with the angel revolutionaries.

- anyway when sam gets his soul back he’s like, torn, between dean and ruby. he feels guilty for how he behaved towards and thought about dean but he would ALSO feel guilty just kicking ruby to the curb.

- HOWEVER when he gets his soulless memories back he does kick her to the curb because she has done some REALLY fucked up shit while trying to be his moral compass like she is BAD at it.

- once ruby is left all alone in the world, guess who shows up in a flutter of wings and ambiguity! it’s anna! 

- she is here to ask ruby if she wants to spy on hell for the angel revolution. ruby accepts because everyone else hates her right now. if anna wants to take her in under cas’ banner (and not tell the winchesters because they’re technically on the same side but what’s a little subterfuge between friends) ruby will take it.

- ruby and anna DO get to have some fun agent runner/agent lesbian subtext, as a treat! at least when anna isn’t busy eating food out of lisa braeden’s fridge like villanelle and other nuts things. 

- like i do wanna be clear anna just. appears in lisa braeden’s kitchen, slowly, wordlessly eats her leftovers while staring her down, and then flies away. this contributes to lisa’s impending mental breakdown. MY season six is about the madness of the suburban housewife, among many other various things.

- also i want to be clear that raphael’s side is actually like, funneling weapons to the lucifer loyalist demons to try and get them to defeat crowley but it’s all very hush hush, like, raphael would NOT want his underlings to know that he has organized this, like, they can barely stand to work with naomi. the fact that raphael had naomi organize help for DEMONS is unthinkable. anyway it’s basically celestial iran-contra.

- ruby is actually one of the last people to stick by cas even when like, anna and balthazar are betraying him, because like. whomst among us has never wanted to become god a little. and also, ruby is weak to authority figures we KNOW this she might be down to accept cas as her heavenly father a little, she’s NOT a rebel. but most importantly she sticks by him because, you know, i love sam and he’s mad at me for kinda betraying him and you [REDACTED] dean and he’s mad at you for kinda betraying him like we’re all winchester derangement syndrome patients here, and also like. i get it. sometimes they don’t know what’s good for them. sometimes in order to love you have to betray a little bit.

- ruby doesn’t turn on cas until he breaks sam’s wall. but by then it’s too late and there’s nothing she can do really.

- the parallel where it was dean who stabbed ruby in lucifer rising and it’s sam who stabs cas in the man who knew too much is actually intentional this time and WAY more aggressive. actually there are tons of cas-ruby parallels. i think meg should call ruby a whore like one episode before crowley calls cas a whore just to hammer it home. i think the thing where soulless sam runs away from dean’s judgement and is running around with ruby while dean is sulking about it but also running around with cas is super aggressively obvious. god i love that ruby’s existence makes it super obvious that cas is dean’s [REDACTED]. that’s so fun. 

- this has been an intensely hypertextual romp and it’s apparently nearly fifteen hundred words, good god. anyway, special thanks to @lesbiansamwinchester, @pietacastiel, and @seragamble, all of whom brainstormed with me

[leggyre]

Can you believe I only found out now about Glassbears and I'm having so much fun with it!? Talking to one of your OC seems just great, I really missed out.

glassbears is actually! the third iteration! of that idea!

i tried to make one with lilac and got nothing due to me being no one at the time, and then later on i had one for basically ALL

glassbears was a bit of an experiment because every time i make an askblog(aside from the two mentioned above), there's at least a little bit of lore to be uncovered with questions. So I went out there and asked the dream overlords "can i have this bastard child" and they went "yeah ok" and i came back with ariel SDFGNSDJFGNKJ

im not good at making actual comics bc my brain gets lost mid production but the askblog type where it's usually 1-3 panels with one drawing + required engagement aka constant motivation boosts? its perfect AND its basically a form of roleplaying so extra fun on top. so the main idea was to present one as a webcomic and see where I could take it

the THING IS that I started it with basically nothing, not much planning or anything just my dream prophecy and the loose ends I tied together. so it wasn't much to think about -- but in the meantime i was also keeping this google doc that i just kept writing things on as questions came in and with them the ideas came up but i also kept on writing things that came independently on my head and it was eventually filled with drabbles, worldbuilding and other sorts of details that I loved to bits but I didn't know how I was going to handle. So basically. I overwhelmed myself with my ideas djfbgsdjbf

..but i guess its now the appropriate time to share the news that I have been giving the file a somewhat-thorough revamp bc i have been dying to bring it back to light. almost the entire plot and characters are complete ideas instead of vaguely scattered concepts and I Still Love It, A Lot

sometimes i share snips out of context w friends because its full of really deep quotes AND really funny comments(im funny). i dont wanna share stuff that can be easily tied to the plot but heres the good stuff

starting with the most telling line of them all;

(prior to this theres like two pages of me debating with myself about what the fuck is up with ariel that I kept adding to over the years bc there were SO MANY routes I could take I wrote down ALL of them.............then a few months ago I wrote three paragraphs and closed that book.)

anyway heres one of my fucking favorites. never gets old

heres the rawest line ive ever written in my life

this pic is like right after a very heavy conversation

(i did not follow my advice)

its frustrating that I can't share the spicier stuff bc its got some raw lines and good jokes....... but for now.. i leave u..

..with a little guy

i love him :)

[maxwell-grant]

i have been watching old (and sometimes new) gmod animations and i grew up watching enough ytps to know the general idea behind them, and i recently gained a sort of fascination for them. there's something special about them that i couldn't quite put into words, but i think you got it down perfectly in your post about grand guignol. basically, thanks a bunch for that.

Well thank you! And, yeah, I pretty much grew up watching GMOD and YTP constantly and even today I still come back to those a lot when I'm restless and taking a break from work, and I think there's genuinely a lot that can be learned or discussed from them as uniquely 21st Century art forms.

I've been rewatching a lot of Raxxo's content lately and I think it was his content in particular that kind of convinced me that the "GMOD/SFM - Grand Guignol" analogy wasn't nearly as much of deranged word salad as I assumed it was, because in all honestly, if you had to try and condense his videos into a genre or definition or something of the sort, what the hell else can you possibly call this that in any way comes close to describing what you experience?

Like, all of his videos are described as "GMOD animated in SFM", because SFM is usually associated with more straightforward dramatic content while GMOD has been cartoon madness from the start (and it's fascinating to watch just how tame even the early Rubberfruit videos are compared to the kind of stuff Eltorro64 or Dr Lalve are putting out), and Raxxo is the latter in the style of the former.

And his videos are not just a non-stop barrage of brain-breaking, because they have weirdly dramatic pauses, and moments of straightforward action, or simple sentence mixing, and there's continuity between his videos, and incredibly smooth and natural gestures following by the characters stretching and deforming like jello monsters on the next second as their screams warble to drown the soundtrack and then everything's back to normal, and then they start doing things that kinda even make some sense as a narrative, but you cannot even begin explaining properly why, and I've watched these so many times that I even kinda start to see what makes sense and what doesn't, even though literally no one other than Raxxo is ever going to guess why he made the choices he did, and god these jokes must have taken hours if not days to render, why does the scretching Soldier head saying "Sputnik!" shows up in everything he does, and oh did I mention he also makes up the soundtracks he uses himself and they don't match in the slightest most people's perception of his content?

And for the finale of the Soldier Dispenser saga he created maybe the most batshit collaborative animation effort on Youtube, which is about an hour's worth of 200 animators all creating their own little batshit mini-stories in reference to his own and, seriously, who the hell could have possibly predicted something like this existing back when computer game Team Fortress 2 was announced in 2007? Or when Youtube was created?

Who could have possibly predicted something like this existing at any point in human history? Where else could anyone possibly experience this much audiovisual chaos anywhere? I can't even bring myself to watch the video in full again, but that this exists at all, and that it's far from the only one of it's kind, and that Team Fortress 2 fan content has spiraled so hard past anything the creators could have possibly predicted that it has self-sustaining meme ecosystems (Remember when smexuals were a thing? Or the Freaks?), that it's still fucking going 15 years past the game's debut, is, it's kind of a lot, is what I'm saying.

Like, I'm speaking as someone who studies a lot of pop culture and combs through it's most obscure and weirdest recesses to find stuff to write about, I'm still just as baffled by how far these things have gotten as I was when experiencing it for the first time. And you can find a lot of stories like these digging through Youtube Poop and the specific styles of certain creators or certain developing memes for franchises that grow and grow and permutate.

Think about what has to have happened to make a video like iteachvader's What'll It Be? happen.

Long John Baldry, blues musician extraordinaire, voiced cartoon villain Dr Robotnik in a Sonic cartoon. Said Sonic cartoon and performance was lucky enough to survive through Youtube clips. People noticed one of said clips of his performance has him saying a word that sounds like penis in a funny way, so they start making jokes about it, and parodies, and then literally hundreds of parodies popularizing the concept as a source of comedy, some of which take the form of music. Said music is done by cutting, remixing and splicing audio from said performance over music beats, which can be a PAINSTAKINGLY LONG PROCESS as someone who's tried doing that several times now, all this to make something with "Poop" in it's name (which I guess isn't that different from pulp writers spending weeks and months breaking their fingers to put out a novel's worth of content every month, for newspapers and magazines that were literally going to be used as toilet paper later)

These parodies catch on a bit and die out for a bit, until iteachvader comes along, and he proceeds to build a career not just by making funny parodies of said cartoon, but also knocking out genuinely really, really good musical parodies, editing voice clips of said performance to make it sound like the villain's singing (and additionally, he also creates his own tunes, and he's shown that literally every sound he uses is taken from the show, which is just, absolutely mind-boggling effort). He's also created over the years a running joke of Tails being Dr Robotnik's son that people liked enough to ask for more, and then we come to the video above, which is a song about Dr Robotnik spoiling his son Tails asking him what he'll want, which is not at all in line with how the two characters are canonically. And said remixes would eventually get remixed even further, even with crossovers with other characters or musicians, and so forth.

And that is the story of how dozens of creators working separately, and with little intent other than goofing around, single-handedly revived a dead man's music career, as the voice of the fan reinterpretation of a animated adaptation of a videogame villain, popular to the billions if not dozens of billions of views over a decade in the making, on a broadcasting platform said man didn't even live to see being created.

I think sometimes we like to think of ourselves as advanced and jaded enough that nothing surprises us anymore, and if we went back in time and showed an iphone to our great-grandparents they'd start screaming in sheer confusion. And, maybe they would, yeah, but imagine if you were Long John Baldry at any point in his life, even after he finished recording his lines as Robotnik, and someone showed up to you and explained that all of this was going to happen to you, to your voice, to your performance. Imagine if you were one of Valve's lead developers working on Team Fortress 2 during the nine years it spent in development, and someone showed you Raxxo's work and Soldier's Dispenser Quest and just, everything that had happened to characters you hadn't even fully created yet.

I imagine Long John Baldry would have taken it well enough eventually, by all accounts he was a fun person who loved to try new things, and he was an openly gay British vocalist in the 1960s when it was literally illegal to be gay in Britain, so I imagine nothing could possibly rattle his cage that deep in the long run.

But can you honestly tell me you wouldn't freak out at least a little trying to understand just what exactly the future was showing you? Can you honestly tell me your cynicism and world-weariness would be worth anything in the face of all this knowledge about what the world was going to do with your creations and work?

Can you honestly tell me, just now, that you have any idea what the hell is your legacy or reputation as an artist, or even what your art is known for, going to look like in a decade or two from now? And that things aren't going to get weirder than they are now?

I find that fact both frightening and strangely assuring at points, and exciting above all.

[oodlyenough]

psychonauts 1!

I finished the original Psychonauts last night, by which I mean I reached the Meat Circus, instantly flounced and watched the rest on youtube.

I played the PS2 version ported to PS4 on my PS5 just like god intended for undoubtedly the smoothest possible gameplay experience :P "Press Start to begin" on a controller that no longer has a 'start' button really set the tone.

For some context, I first tried this game many years ago (on a Macbook no less), got frustrated by it quickly and quit. I've only come back years later after loving Psychonauts 2 so much. (Psychonauts 2 review over here.)

I am going to try not to make this post one big comparison -- feels kind of unfair, given how much time passed -- but it's uh hard because obviously that's my natural inclination and the context I was thinking of while I played.

Spoilers for game 1 and some nonspecific (tone/etc) spoilers for 2.

The pros:

Obviously the game is very funny. There were tons of lines I wanted to clip, or punchlines that surprised me. The script and story were surprising and full of personality. The game has a tone unlike any other game I think I've played... it honestly reminds me most of Invader Zim, lol.

I was about half-way through the game when I realized just HOW MUCH possible dialogue and NPC interaction there is, something I totally underestimated for a 2005 game. I've since been watching dialogue compilations on youtube, lol.

Because of the above I have to adjust my original opinion that the NPCs (specifically the campers) felt a bit hollow. This was my bad for not seeking them out often enough to keep track of their names and their lovelives, lol. I still struggle to remember any of their names, but I like that all of them had their own little subplots going on in the background of Raz's story, whether or not you paid attention to it.

The game is very creative. This was my favourite thing about 2, but the original gets bonus points for being, well, the original and pioneering these ideas in the first place. While I found some of the opening levels kind of bland/disappointing after seeing how grandiose stuff got in 2, Lungfishopolis was the major turning point into some really creative stuff.

Even when I was getting irritated by dying or having difficulty platforming, etc, the creativity of the levels was undeniable. Every level was very unique and distinct, nothing felt like a reskin. Lungfishopolis was probably my favourite from a design standpoint -- so funny -- and Milkman Conspiracy my favourite from a dialogue standpoint, every single line from the G-Men just killed me.

I like collectathon platformers, what can I say. I am a child of the Spyro era. I'm not even a 100%er I just like finding secret passages and ledges full of Stuff.

The matador outfit for Raz in Black Velvetopia was adorable

What the fuck the random turtle at the end of the game fahklfhkl

I thought the Gloria's Theatre level was also super cool, even if I had to look up a lot of the solutions on youtube, lol. Just a really cool concept and fun change of pace.

The cons

I don't want to harp on the clunky controls too much because it's a game from 2005 that I am playing on a 3-gen-later console... so... I try to adjust my expectations accordingly. But holy shit!!! The number of awkward jumps, times double jump just seemed to not work??, wonky hitboxes, the terrible lock mechanic for psiblast attacks, TK throw being awkward af, whew. Very frustrating. That platforming section to get the musket in Waterloo World was CRAZY difficult for me and for what ?? It's basic platforming... 😭 Grab the bar Raz you asshole. I was sitting there ragegripping my controller like YOU'RE AN ACROBAT!!!!

I hated the ammo mechanic and I'm SO GLAD it went away. There was nothing more agitating than ending up in a boss fight with no mental aggression left and being like Guess I'll fuckin die.jpeg

There were lots of "What the fuck" game design moments for me. The Linda bossfight, getting sideswiped by suddenly needing a power or item that seemed optional until now and having to grind arrowheads to do it, the nightmares in the Milkman Conspiracy ?!!?!, these kinds of choices would just tank my enjoyment as soon as they came up. I ran to youtube a lot to figure out a strategy.

The script, while very funny, shows its age in a lot of places. Not "just" in the awkward use of That One Slur or the weird extended "Indian burial ground" jokes, but in other stuff too. Raz and Lili's relationship gets off on a super weird and off-puttingly heteronormative foot basically from jump -- a shame, because by the end of the game, and in 2, I'm fond enough of them, and found some of the "girlfriend" gags funny. Having Raz of all people call Milla the "mental minx" had me like 🥴.

The whole asylum plot felt just kind of icky and insensitive at times, I'd even say kind of ableist.

Also the level design of climbing that fucking tower where if you miss a jump you may have to redo the whole thing I swear to god 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪

How come the cut scenes look SO much worse than the gameplay lol? I mean, whatever, I'm not expecting majesty from a 2005 indie, but I don't think I've ever seen a game where the cut scenes look WORSE than the gameplay before.

The concluding scenes in Meat Circus and after felt kinda rushed to me. Not terrible or anything, but they gave me major vibes of "we ran outta budget and we gotta wrap this up asap", lol. In particular I felt like we needed more from Raz and Augustus than we got, and honestly I felt like the game *wanted* to give it to me but didn't really have time so we just got a handful of dialogue and now you gotta punch this giant butcher.

In conclusion

Overall I found the tone of the game more callous than 2... which took a lot of adjusting for me, since the heart and sincerity in 2 is a large part of what I loved about it. I don't think the game intends to be cruel but I also think it doesn't take its own concepts seriously enough to treat them with the kind of sensitivity they need.

A big example for me is Raz just bruteforcing his way into people's minds when they were inconveniencing him lol. Extremely happy they changed this in 2. I understand that in the end what he does in their minds helps them (mostly??? Boyd u good???), but sheesh...

Raz in general feels like he got a, uh, personality update in 2. To be honest I think this change is emblematic of the whole tone shift, as well as the changing sensibilities of 2005 vs 2021. I still liked him in 1 but I don't think I'd feel as attached without 2. It did make me really appreciate [plotline redacted] in 2 more though!

I'm happy this game exists and was able to find enough cult success to eventually lead to 2. It's creative and interesting and funny, but it definitely is showing its age. I feel like 2 took all these good ideas and expanded on them and made them better, which is exactly what you want a sequel to do. I would recommend Psychonauts 2 to anyone who enjoys platformers; I would only recommend Psychonauts 1 to someone who really liked 2 and is willing to suffer through dated gameplay as a result.

[sanstropfremir]

kingdom episode 5 review!!! lets fucking go!!!!!

 look. was i insanely hyped for this episode? yes. was my hype justified? also yes. holy FUCKING SHIT. you’ll have to forgive me for going off the rails at some points because ateez and btob directly tapped into something primal in my brain and i am obsessed. i'm obsessed. there’s no other word for it I’m obsessed. 

 ok ok ok i'll focus. i'm focused. i'll do the stage breakdown first and then do my personal ranking at the end. i might do a quick runup comparison of the self and expert rankings for funsies but i'll see how i feel when i get there. instead of going in airing order i’m gonna reverse it, since that was the order i actually watched them in and also i will run out of brains if i talk about rhythm ta first.

skz

i feel for skz. i don't think this show is going to be as much of learning curve as it needs to be for them because the fan voting skews the rankings so much. I’ve said it so many times before, but letting something flop or getting a bad ranking is actually good, because it shows you that you need to improve. because skz keeps getting validated by the fan rankings and placing first in the last two stages, they aren't actually taking the time to evaluate what about their stages is or isn't working. and besides, we’ve now seen two very similar concepts in a row from them, just one is on a grander scale than the other. what they should be doing is what both ateez and btob did for this round, which was scale up production value, but scale down concept. i know this sounds weird but i'll explain. skz has done two very abstract and ‘grand’ concepts. first round we had ghosts/good self vs evil self, and this stage they just went straight for the throat with a deal with the devil type stage. now when you combine these very abstract concepts with an unclear narrative arc, you lose clarity of intent in the performance because there are no specifics that you’re playing off of. there’s a lot more places left up to personal interpretation and this is where people can get lost. btob and ateez both narrowed down their concepts to hyperspecific scenarios where they very clearly showing the audience the arc the stage is taking. audiences can be smart but also if you can lead them by the hand they like not thinking about highly conceptual ideas, and especially not so much in a pop song competition show.

 costume

this is so rare because generally stylists are pretty careful about this, but i genuinely think they got outshone by the backup dancers, especially in the ‘heaven’ sequence. those sash and skirt combos with the strapped white tops that look like straitjackets? the fucking angel wings?! these are some thematically fun costume designs and because they’re white they stand out so much more when skz are wearing black. i also think i've seen these tops on backup dancers before? i thought it was on the last stage but i might be going insane.

i am a sucker for beaded embroidery and the combined dyework on some of their sashes is beautiful. but again, thematically irrelevant? at least you can see the greco-roman inspiration in the backup dancers’ costumes. all this is telling me is that whoever the stitchers are at jype, they are fucking incredible, but they don’t actually have a good designer because the main costumes for all their stages have been both aesthetically similar and thematically irrelevant.

again, i applaud skz for trying more experimental makeup, but boys you have to go bigger, it has no impact right now.

set

well, i did ask for them to commit to the western art bit and they sort of delivered? the first space is not planned very well and combined with the wide wide camera shots instead of making the space seem grand and sweeping it just seems bare. the ‘heaven’ side was excellent though, there was much better control of the camera and the columns and altar scaled the space down so it was more believable. also the breakable columns were fun and corny and i love it when stuff gets destroyed onstage.

the child statue transformation into actual child was a neat trick that i think landed really well. i wish they had given that concept a little more grounding other than the flashback bit but it was still very readable.

i know using rodin's gates of hell is the easiest way to shortcut saying that like, “you are now entering hell,” but them being used SO literally feels a bit blunt when the last time we saw them used in kpop was by original blasphemous catholic lee taemin, who used them with such nuance and intelligence that i'm a bit put off by skz’s literalism.

on that note, i find it very interesting the conflation that happens between greco-roman/”classical” aesthetics and catholicism, because ideologically the two are opposed (see: the bible) and historically, they didn't exist at the same time. now i'm not going to go off on a tangent about neoclassicism because you are not here for an art history lecture but i thought i would make the observation about how catholics continued appropriation of greco-roman aesthetics without complete understanding or context of those aesthetics is as pervasive as it ever has been in the last several hundred years. 

lighting

generally the lighting is pretty good, but there’s an over-reliance on projections that cheapens the look of the stage but also devalues the intentions as well. at the core of it there’s a profound statement being made about trading away your innocence, but when you underscore that with like, clock graphics and a WoW looking demon, it loses that simplicity of message.

the thing about using this particular type of projection, which are actually screens and not typical projectors, is that screens always throw light. and due to where they are situated, this basically means that if you're using the screens at full capacity with a cool colour range, we are going to be able to see everything. this is another contributing factor to why the stage looks so empty; they’re lighting up everything and it exposes where the gaps are.

now i fully acknowledge that this possibly could have been a deliberate choice, since they do actually use some spot lighting at the beginning and end. however, if it was it did not land for me. 

i loved the intro of demon felix done in blue, that was a nice switchup from what we would usually see, but i wish there was more of a coherent colour arc. like the narrative it stutters around a bit.

sound

the arrangement was a miss for me. i found it a bit dissonant again, like their last stage, since the original i'll be your man has obvious lyrics about a good christian boy being sad about a girl. this gets a bit wonky conceptually as soon as you add a child self into it. i don’t know if they changed any of the lyrics in the singing to match this a little more because i don't speak korean, so i'll have to wait for episode subs for verification. 

i really applaud them for trying, and overall they didn't actually do that bad, but skz is not a vocal group. the most i'm going to say about it is that these boys don’t have the breath support. this is likely because they're trying to do choreographically complex movements, but also it's a training thing. you can hear the difference even just between eunkwang’s ‘vocal warmup’ at the beginning of back door, he’s not projecting full voice but he still has the breath support for his voice to sound full, whereas all skz boys sound thin in comparison, even when at full volume, because they’re trying to project from the throat and not the chest. that's all i'm gonna say about that. i don't think the cracked note was bad, i didn’t really clock it on first listen.

staging

thematically they could have had something really interesting here if they stuck to a more simple narrative arc. the genesis (i’m very funny) of the idea here is good, the whole mephistopheles deal with a devil + regret/loss of innocence is clear, but the arc isn't really an arc, and the colour story doesn't help. it kind of goes earth (green/blue) -> the gates of hell are opening (red) -> oh it's heaven now (blue) -> oh just kidding it's hell/lets destroy heaven (red) -> back to earth (blue). not necessarily a bad arc, just a bit complex for four minutes.

the choreo was a lot better this time, there was a lot more intention and relevance to theme and i didn’t feel like they were flailing for the sake of flailing as much as i have in their other stages. there was also a clarity in the overall blocking and movement patterns that was missing from their other stages. this stage has a really great handoff of each member playing the ‘main’ character, especially in the beginning. i especially liked the cut from falling off the stairs to laying centre stage. 

i think I’m right in assuming that it was a choice that the members were all playing the same character and demon felix was that character possessed rather than the actual devil, but personally i think it would have been a lot more fun if they had straight up just made him be the actual devil. there’s a bit of dissonance when you have a performer with such a specialized skillset that gets used in very specific instances, but then he shows up in the regular group choreo like any ol’ guy. they always put such emphasis on felix (as they should, he’s their most charismatic performer), but they never go the distance. i would have loved it if they had committed to the bit like TOO did in their magnolia stage from rtk, where they had a member just be blinded justice. that was literally the only thing he did and it worked so well. could have done the same here with felix and it would have been fun. that being said the felix parts were SO good. love love love him getting dragging in chains.

 btob

this hit every little one of the buttons in my tiny backstage crew brain. i'm in love with this stage. there’s so many true to life little details here that on repeat viewings you're still finding new things. i know i rag on and on about narrative every week but here is a good example of what i've been trying to get at this whole time: the stage needs a shape. an a to b. you don't need a whole pirates spiel or a game of thrones theme extended universe; all you need is a clear setting and a point a to point b. this stage has both those things perfectly. we have a hyperspecific setting, (american rockstars) and a basic arc (getting ready to perform -> performing). even though back door is outside of btob’s wheelhouse, they spun it in a way that played to their strengths and did a bit braggadocio, which is rightfully earned. i'm gonna be saying it every time but the experience shows!!!

 costume

good contemporary costume is SO difficult, i want to impress that here. because it's the the time period that we are currently living and seeing every day it's so easy for the audience to spot mistakes. although yes it's easier to source/shop for, to get it good enough that it doesn't pull people out of the immersion is surprisingly more difficult than you think. their stylists did an excellent job here. the backup dancers and btob are all in monochrome plus one and it adds a very clean unity to everything without visual clutter.

each of btob’s costumes have enough to give indication of character, along with the member’s acting, which i'll get more into in the staging section. regardless, never underestimate the power of a good fitting shirt and statement belt. oh and minhyuk in the stirrup motorcycle boots with the skinny jeans and the supreme boxers and the red satin robe? good bye.

i love love love a dyed buzz this was such a good aesthetic choice for peniel, 10/10 i have no complaints about the costumes.

set

oh my god i’m gonna french kiss this set designer. this is such a simple set but it’s executed so well. there’s the ‘backstage’ area, the corridor with four dressing rooms, and then the ‘stage’ that’s pretty much just velvet ropes. so simple, but all the detail is in the set decoration and props. the road cases, the monitor, the subtle flex of the posters of them on the walls, the clothing racks, all the booze. although this is not the actual layout of any theatre (they're normally much weirder than this), there’s so many little details here that really make the experience.

there’s a very straightforward path here and it works so well. i think this might be the best use of the gates so far? it appropriately suited the drama of the moment and they didn't have to do anything to them because they're already in a theatre. bada bing bada boom.

lighting

love the setup and continuation through the amber ‘BRRRMM.’ like with sf9 it gives a smooth transition into the stage. also loved no blackout. it's a general rule in current theatrical practice that you only use blackouts when they are absolutely necessary, because they can stop the pacing of a play dead in the water. so the lack of one here at the start of the stage was a really smart choice and makes the transition feel less jarring.

i will say that actual backstage areas are very rarely lit with amber because it travels far and it's bright. it's much more common to see running lights (the lights on during a performance) to be deep red or blue.

those blasting wash lights as the gates open? the DRAMA. such a seemingly innocuous choice that really cements the atmosphere of ‘we are about to perform.’

really smart use of the projections to accentuate the already existing stage facilities. it's pretty much unnoticable because it's very well done but i appreciate it.

sound

this ARRANGEMENT!!!! it's so good!!! back door has this premise essentially built into the song so it was so smart of them to put this gimmicky spin on it. loved the literal interpretation of the knocks into the structure of the stage, it makes the blend between the sound design and the staging that much more effective.

more rock versions of everything please and thank you. 

btob is just stunting at this point and i love it. i'll have to wait for subs but judging by the hands in front of the camera bit and the ‘your super high note’ i’m pretty confident the added rap lyrics are full of shots at the other groups and honestly? valid.

staging

there's some really sharp camera control here with the one take first half. It’s up very close and personal because there’s a lack of space but it really works for the ‘intimacy’ of seeing backstage at a venue. also this is such a simple movement track but it’s so effective. it backs over a couple spots but it doesn't feel repetitive because there’s a sense of urgency and drive.

there are so many good little details in here that are true to life and unnecessary to include but sell the performance as a whole. peniel flinging water onstage, minhyuk stripping down twice and flinging his clothes around, minhyuk closing the door on the standby’s face, the backup dancer as a dresser with the laundry basket, peniel stealing the hat off her but then not going on stage with it these are all things that I’ve either had directly happen to me or something very similar has happened. but the best one and the one that sets off the tone amazingly for the whole stage is eunkwang’s intro. that ‘vocal warmup’ with the quiet okay at the end? with the little jump? i see that moment of vulnerability before the transition between person and actor every time i watch someone go onstage for the first time and there’s no way to describe it other than magic. 

the luxury of only having four members, there was actually time in this stage to establish character. it also speaks to the performing strength of btob that they can establish clear character in this short amount of time. obviously it’s pretty one dimensional; there’s serious eunkwang, typical rocker minhyuk, fuckboy peniel (how many licks does it take to make your tootsie pop, anyone?), and comedian changsub. i’ve seen and met and worked with these exact dudes many, many times. ugh i love this stage

 ateez

the utter euphoria i felt at the proof that last round’s stage wasn't a fluke. this stage is so good. it's so good. i'm obsessed with how good this stage. as an unreformed pop punk teen who played a LOT of latin jazz i am LIVING. if you’ve only seen the episode cut and not the full version here i'll make it easy and link it for you because oh my GOD mnet destroyed the pacing by cutting in a full minute and a half of reaction shots. actually mnet fucked up the pacing for all of these stages but this one was the worst. and look. i know this is the closest these boys are going to get to being real punks and this is a carefully curated and artificial facade for narrative purposes only but oh the pandering tastes so sweet. regardless of that, i am IN AWE of the level of storytelling happening here. the narrative is so clear on just the first viewing even though there is so much going on and they use every possible element they can to further enhance that narrative. repeat viewings just add more and more little details. i’ll probably miss some things because there's so much but i'll try my best.

 costume

look, hanya and i were joking that my notes for this stage were just gonna be ‘san dog collar’ for a thousand words and i was so tempted to just leave it at that because.....woof. so here is a short list of things i am the most obsessed with:

san dog collar

san smeared lipstick

wooyoung cruella deville ponytail

hongjoong terrible blond crewcut

san crushed velvet cargo pants?!

seonghwa cropped fur jacket

yunho arm sleeve

hongjoong sockless in red derbys

but in all seriousness the costumes are so good. none of these are truly authentic punk looks but they capture the spirit right and that's what matters. all the right trappings are there; safety pins, patches, plaid, leather, and a lot of diy type looks. i love the painted masks, especially as a callback to the comedy/tragedy theatre masks. it was a thematic choice to have the backup dancers in black and the tac vests are a super simple contextual device.

also hongjoong’s quickchange hat/jacket combo is super fun and i hope that’s intentionally a preview of the next stage.

set

if you weren't convinced before that whoever is designing the ateez stages is a stage designer, i don't know what to tell you. it's hard to tell because there is so much environmental storytelling happening, but there is NO large scale set here. like with their last stage, kq smartly put money into two highlight pieces; the anarchist blimp and the van/wall, and the rest of the stage atmosphere is established solely through propwork and lighting. just think about that for a bit. every other group has some kind of large scale room or wall build. ateez has a bunch of tables, flyers, and a podium. i don’t know if i can accurately communicate just how difficult this kind of coordination is to pull off but holy fucking shit this is so hard to pull off. these are theatre people i see you and i see your work and i love you!!!

they fully used the gilt mnet stage as their pseudo government building and it works. everything about this (lack of) set is so smart i wish i could be more articulate about it but there’s so only so many ways i can say the same thing over and over again. 

lighting

the laser scopes. the LASER SCOPES!!! god this lighting designer is so good. whoever you are, i'm acknowledging your effort because you deserve it. there’s some really wonderful contrast and directional lighting: the van light, the pinlights/lasers/smoke as searchlights. a lot of atmospheric red lighting but it makes sense for the theme (alarm lights) and they offset it well (unlike in the other two predominantly red stages we’ve seen) by fill lighting the faces with blue or amber; this is what actually makes us able to see what’s happening on stage

the projections are used to augment the stage action in without being overpowering, they're at relatively low tonal value so they aren't lighting up the stage at full brightness like in the skz stage. 

the big brother eye on the tv screens (it's just a projection, not actual screens) combined with the government ban notice and the broadcast has to be the record for fastest visual explanation of fascist totalitarian state. 

sound

i love it. they really successfully made rhythm ta into an ateez song and it’s cool as fuck. i love that it isn't sonically very loud. a lot of the chorus is actually quite level tone and quiet, which is a bold choice and they pull it off. this is very comfortably in their range (excluding jongho) and they went more for style than range and that's exactly what every group should be doing. singing high does not equal singing good. yes i am looking at you jongho you should have stopped at that penultimate note, it was fine!!

using rhythm ta as a pseudo protest song against a fascist government that’s banned all music and art? galaxy brain. that intro of hongjoong whispering “hey hey hey hey, this is just a song so get on the rhythm” after gunning down military police/guards? king fucking shit.

staging

i will eat all five pairs of my fluevog boots if kq hasn't hired a bunch of theatre professionals to direct and design these stages because now it's been proven that last stage wasn't a fluke. the level of execution at work here is absolutely incredible. oh the gesamtkunstwerk of it all!!!  there is SO much happening so quickly in this four minute stage and it still manages to convey exactly the correct amount of information that it needs to on the first go round, and it only gets better on repeat viewings.

they use a really classic theatre perspective trick with san climbing the rope, and they absolutely didn’t have to do that. san probably could have actually climbed that himself, but here they made a choice for aesthetic artistry over tricking/other feats of skills we’ve seen the 4th gen groups do. instead of going with the more technically difficult and ‘impressive’ option, they chose the simple way that allows for more character to shine through. there’s actually very little tricking in this stage as whole, they're putting trust in the design of the stage and the raw performance abilities of the members to carry the stage and they stick the landing again. san has some breakdancing and so do the backup dancers, but it’s window dressing in the same way that the flyers are window dressing.

there’s a lot of really good little moments of acting that really sell the performance and dedication of the group as a whole to giving their all. hongjoong overall in his cocky aspirational leader role, seonghwa’s first verse and malfunctioning earpiece bit, san’s falsetto hostage interrogation bit. also i'm obsessed with how far yunho just hucks that mask. he gets like fifteen feet of air with that thing. also props to hongjoong barehanding that glass break.

the paper props are impeccable. the first notice sets up the situation right away, and then we get some further exposition with the newspaper wooyoung is holding (which says ‘the central government has defined the black pirates as a terrorist’ but honestly you don't really need to know what it says to get the point), and then we have raining anarchist flyers from the anarchist blimp. great atmospheric touches.

the blackout crash-to-mask transition is just so good. this is an example of a good use of a blackout. nothing else to add i just thought i would point it out because it's dope.

like with btob there's some really tight camera control here, that along with the lighting and the way they've laid out the space make it easy to follow the trajectory of where they're going and also make the space seem smaller than it is. this is a really big stage and if you don't control how you want it to be seen you end up like with what happened to the first part of skz’s stage. i wish they had tracked some of the one takes a bit better, but the end of that take where the camera followed the group movement laterally and then the formation swung around to face front? sexy. surprisingly the editing is pretty ok.

there’s probably still so much i could talk about but this is already so long so if i missed something just let me know.

ok finally lets do some rankings

personal ranking

this round wasn't as tough to rank because there were two clear top tier stages for me. i actually went back and looked at my ranking from last round and this is identical except the top two spots are switched, which i find extremely funny. however in contrast to last round, these stages were all leagues better than their predecessors. all the groups are improving, just some at greater speed than others.

ateez - i'm not even gonna explain this one.

btob - i won't explain this one either since i just did that.

sf9 - this would have been first if ateez and btob hadnt blow everyone out of the water.i still think they made all the right choices and played to their strengths.

ikon - this stage is so fun to watch but the others offer me more. that’s it.

skz - i like the idea behind it and i loved felix; i'm always down for some good catholic fuckery but like last round it just wasn't played out far enough.

tbz - double ding on the moulin rouge and the continued game of thrones references for me. there were a lot of strong elements here but when compared to every other stage it just doesn't have the same gravitas.

the self rankings i thought were fairly accurate, but again, what the fuck is up with these expert rankings? who are these experts? what stages are they watching?? i won't go more into it than that because then you'll be here even longer but i don't trust these experts who consistently rank btob at the bottom, do you have eyes??? ears????

 ok i'm done for real now im so sorry this 4.6k words......if you make it this far do something nice for yourself like eat a cookie or something. this is way too long you deserve a reward for making it through my nonsense. as always if you’ve got questions or want to share your opinions feel free to send me an ask!