#so. that ai that I've seen a bunch of you guys using.......

[heartbeetz]

Aough...

[aihoshiino]

chapter 154 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 11

Aqua Hoshigan Status: (Still) white

man

This is one of those chapters where, technically speaking, I should probably be tearing it to bits (AND I DEFINITELY WILL) - it represents a pretty substantial break in or retcon to the series continuity as it's been presented to us thus far and the actions of certain characters in the lead up to this event don't quite make sense if they've had access to some of the information that's seemingly been in their hands for a while but… would you guys forgive me if I said I didn't really care LOL. As I've said before, I'm the sort of reader who can excuse a lot of raw Plot Bullshit so long as I feel like the hearts of the characters are intact and for all its fumbles, this is a chapter I think is unerringly dedicated to the hearts of its characters. I've made no secret of the fact that Ai is and always has been my main avenue of investment in Oshi no Ko as a series and in this chapter, we uncover the final secret in her heart in particular after having the entire series thus far dedicated to laying it bare to us.

We pick up exactly where we left off last chapter with the reveal that the HKAI breakup was indeed founded on Ai's pregnancy, as a lot of us had predicted.

This, uh, does not quite line up with previous events!

From what we'd previously been told, in terms of placement in the timeline, the death of Airi and her husband happened after the twins were born and sometime in the leadup to the Dome concert, which would put it in the ballpark of Ai's 18th to 20th birthday depending on how long it was in the works for. But based on how this flashback section is structured, it seems to place their deaths before Ai even knew she was pregnant, let alone giving birth. If it was just clashing with 15YL's retelling then I could dismiss that as an element of the movie's fictionalization that we've seen and Kamiki alludes to but this also clashes with where this event was placed temporally by Ichigo, when remembering a real life event. So… What gives!!!!

Like, at the end of the day, the exact placement of Uehara's death only matters inasmuch as it needs to be before Ai gets her new apartment, since the point Ichigo is really making is that Aqua is pinning his hopes on a dead man who was dead before he could have ever contributed to Ai's murder. But placing it that far back in the timeline - before the twins were even born! - just makes Aqua's willful ignorance in relation to it come off as a lot sillier and more difficult to swallow than if it happened closer to Ai's actual date of death.

I'm also a little disappointed that we really quickly breeze past Ai revealing she's pregnant - it's not the point of the scene overall and it would be weird to go really deep into her POV in the middle of a Kamiki flashback but one of my big issues with the Movie Arc was that it ripped past anything and everything to do with Ai's pregnancy, including how she herself felt about being pregnant. Like I said in my 145 review, skipping over the parts of it we've seen makes sense but I think there's still a bunch of really fascinating potential in exploring how Ai felt when she realized she was pregnant - how did she hide it for long enough that she was almost halfway through her pregnancy and getting fucking enormous before her first checkup? How did Ichigo and Miyako react when they first got the news? There's so much juicy character and relationship work you could mine out of that but the story fails to do so. We sort of get a crumb of this in the DVD but her feelings there are all centered on the pregnancy in relation to Hikaru and even then she breezes past it so fast it's clearly not meant to be the focus of any of what she's saying and idk. For a character whose entire hook is her struggles with motherhood, familial love and all the rest of it, that's a little disappointing.

THAT SAID!!! All that makes me sound like I didn't like what went on with Ai this chapter but I actually loved it. It's so painfully in line with everything we've been told and shown about her thus far in the manga and in this chapter, we see all her strengths, weaknesses and human contradictions laid bare in a way I find incredibly rewarding and compelling.

The HKAI breakup especially is just soooooo deliciously cringe inducing. It's an echo of the argument with Nino that 15YL portrays, where Ai's good intentions, avoidant tendencies and absolute absence of tact all snowball and end up ruining one of her most important relationships. Like… I can't believe I'm about to say this about a conversation in which Ai is one of the people talking, but she really is the reasonable one here! She's right to identify that their relationship is not working, that adding babies and marriage to the mix will only make things worse - her intentions, as they always are, are good and she's making her decisions with Kamiki in mind… her delivery is just absolutely dogshit!!! GIRL, PLEASE, YOUR WORDS!!!! USE YOUR WORDS!!!!!

For all my issues with Akasaka's writing lately, I think he portrays these kinds of two sided failures of communication so well, where you can see exactly where both characters are coming from and why they are failing to get their feelings across to each other. From an outsider's POV it's clear as day that Ai views herself and her children as the burden, one she doesn't want to put on Kamiki for the sake of a girl who doesn't even know if she can love him… but is it any wonder why Kamiki took it the way he did and why his guts were so utterly wrenched out as a result?

Kamiki's attempted proposal and Ai's immediate rejection of it are really interesting with the context of 45510 in particular. Extrapolating from her talk of marriage there, she brushed him off so quickly because she simply didn't believe he was serious… and yeah, he's pretty clearly not fully cognizant of the weight of what he's trying to propose, never mind that he's meeting "let's break up" with "LET'S GET MARRIED" lol.

Also interesting to extrapolate from both 45510 and other material surrounding Ai is that, at that point in her life, she simply didn't understand what the point of marriage was. On top of her being Literally Sixteen And A Child right now, Ai is said to have come from a deeply dysfunctional home where her mother engaged in a number of equally dysfunctional relationships, at least one of whom was with a man who was creeping on Ai even as he was working up to marry her mom. It's no wonder she doesn't really take the idea of marriage seriously, but it still hurts so see her reject Kamiki so bluntly - even more bluntly in the Japanese text somehow, simply chirping 無理! (Muri!) in response, i.e, not just "no way" but telling Kamiki to his face it's impossible.

Honestly this whole breakup scene is so darkly hilarious just in terms of how bad Ai is completely beefing it. Congrats babygirl that's the worst anyone's ever done it!!!

And we finally get the "I can't love you" drop after just shy of 25 chapters of buildup…….. And honestly, it feels a little hollow.

I talked about this a little before so forgive me for repeating myself but that line - or rather, Aqua and Ruby's implied misunderstanding of it - from Ai to Hikaru was given a huge amount of weight in the story when it was first introduced. It was implied to be the lynchpin in which everything else about the HKAI romance rested only for the story to go UH WELL ACTUALLY IT'S ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT AI FORGIVES HER KILLER which is like… fine, it just feels very jarring on a reread or when trying to sew together a plot thread like this. It especially feels strange because the emphasis is placed on them not getting it right or at least that Gotanda disagrees with their interpretation, only for the manga to whip back around and not only return this line to its previous heightened importantance but also to largely not line up with what was established about this line and its place in the narrative when it was first introduced. It's just more evidence that Akasaka's plans for the Movie Arc and its resolution changed in some way during serialisation because these inconsistencies are pretty glaring.

Not just that, but like… it's hard to feel impacted by this line when we didn't even see it in the Movie Arc. In general, it's so fucking weird that so much about the main emotional resolutions going on right now revolve around Ruby's performance in the movie when most of the big emotional moments people are reacting to are happening entirely offscreen. This would already be bad even if it wasn't taking place in a manga like OnK with its increasingly frustrating habit of offscreening more and more bits of the story that are extremely important for the characters. Before this chapter I would've said that maybe we'd see some of it after the movie released but given that Kamiki's arc and the revenge play as a whole is pretty clearly wrapping here, what would even be the point of it?

Idk. It's just increasingly obvious (and just as frustrating) to me just how much of the Movie Arc was wasted time and how much of the setup that needed to happen to make what follows really land just… didn't. This chapter's resolution for Ai and Hikaru, both separately and as a couple, is still excellent, but it could have been a lot better if its foundations weren't so meager.

We also finally get concrete proof from the horse's mouth that Kamiki was the one who deliberately leaked Ai's address and……. honestly this is kind of a wet fart too lol. OnK has previously very strongly implied that "Kamiki is Ai's killer" was a red herring or that we should at least be slightly skeptical of Aqua's assertions and conclusions but… nope, he was right all along, I guess?? Alright………………………… I certainly don't believe his insistence that gosh he totes didn't think Ryosuke would go THAT far and I'm still wondering wtf the two of them were doing at the hospital the night the twins were born but like. Honestly at this point, I don't really think it matters and I care much more about emotional resolutions than I do granular plot details - and boy do we get one hell of an emotional resolution.

I haven't shouted her out yet because I was saving it for this section but fuck, man, Mengo's expression work told chapter is killer as usual but this final stretch of pages is just gutwrenching. Ai's gentle, rueful smile on the DVD contrasted with the look of shocked, dawning understanding on Kamiki's….. Jesus Christ.

And at last, we uncover the final secret hidden at the bottom of Ai's heart. The entire manga thus far has been a process of stripping away the viewer's willful ignorance with regards to Ai's humanity but the DVDs had been an oddly ominous mystery box floating around, containing some implied dark secret that would change the entire trajectory of Ai's character as we knew it… but of course, the person who tells us that is Ai herself, a girl who hates herself, thinks of herself as dirty and impure, irresponsible and incapable of love.

So is it really any surprise that her darkest secret, the thing she can only confess with her eyes shining with black stars is simply that she's a fallible human? That she was a lonely young girl, confused and hurt in her own ways and that she hurt someone she dearly cared for and wanted to take it back?

Is it a little convenient that she put all this in the DVD? Yes, absolutely, and I'll be the first to say that the DVDs existing at all are a pretty clear retcon in service of getting info onto Aqua's hands. But it's also perfectly in line with Ai's timid, avoidant methods of reaching out. It parallels both Viewpoint B and 45510 (moreso the latter) where she pours her heart out in words, waiting for others to read and understand her. In 45510 in particular, her leaving the blog post is an extremely clear and strong parallel to the DVD - love letters put into bottles and thrown to the ocean in desperate hope the person they're addressed to might find and understand them.

As Akane says, Ai is torn between secrecy and a desire to have her true self exposed, so she attempts to craft scenarios in which this must happen, even if her avoidance can only allow her to do so with indirect methods. With the blog and moreso the DVDs & their method of delivery, Ai attempts to create situations where the initiation confrontation and disclosure is out of her hands and she has no choice but to tell the truth.

Ai's entire speech here is just heartbreaking. If the start of the chapter didn't make it explicit enough, we see her here put her good intentions into words to better understand how they were misinterpreted.

This adds SUCH a fascinating additional layer to her death that has me gnashing my fucking teeth. One of the things I've talked about a lot in my Ai meta is that Ryosuke is essentially an agent or even an embodiment of the entertainment industry and the way it has exploited her - the misogyny, entitlement, purity culture and abuse that ruled her life went on to end it. With this additional detail, though, Ryosuke becomes an agent not just of the things that plagued Ai of B-Komachi, but Ai as a human, too. All her life, Ai is willfully misunderstood and mischaracterized by the people around her, assigned narratives and roles without her consent and punished for both living up to and failing to live up to them. Ai's death is the end result of a lifelong cascade of failure on the part of every system and individual that has had the opportunity and responsibility to care for her - and, as Aqua throws in his father's face, that includes Hikaru.

Hikaru's supposed understanding of Ai is not one based in empathy or love but projection and possessiveness - understanding in this context is ownership, exclusivity and frankly, arrogance. A claim to a piece of Ai that no one else knows. But as Aqua forces him to realize… Hikaru never understood Ai, even as she did her best to make herself understood. For all his arrogance of understanding Ai and the nature of their relationship, Kamiki is ultimately just the same as every other person who idolized and objectified her then discarded her when the image they'd created in their mind didn't match reality. Ai wasn't his pure and perfect soulbonded saviour - she was a lonely, broken kid like him, still struggling to understand love after a lifetime spent starved of it.

Once, Kamiki begged Ai to save him. And here, the bitter truth is laid out for all of us: the salvation Kamiki had wished for was waiting for him, reaching out with open arms and he not only desecrated it but irrevocably destroyed any path back towards it. In killing Ai, Hikaru Kamiki killed himself.

The imagery of this moment is so fucking gorgeous. The visual of Kamiki and Ai reaching out to each other, in mutual understanding at last but separated by time and death… the "what if" happy Hoshino family… Ai's words being framed as a 'love letter' that transcended time to reach Kamiki and Aqua's eyes blazing with white as tears pour down his face… Jesus fucking Christ Mengo I'm already dead!!!!!

Like I said up top, I make zero secret of the fact that I am primarily invested in Ai above everything else in the manga and the way her importance has been seemingly downplayed since the late 130s mark chapter wise has really bugged me. As such, this chapter was INSANELY cathartic for me. Not only do we get a really beautiful cap to Ai's post death arc (hopefully finally killing those dumbfuck Secretly Evil Ai theories for good) but it's done in a way that once again recenters her love and her wishes as the heart of everything. Even Aqua's revenge play is completely redefined in this context - no longer the childish, selfish and self destructive lashing out we've seen before but as a quest to both honor Ai and to punish the person arrogantly assuming ownership of her heart even as he so catastrophically misunderstands her.

This is a really fantastic end to Aqua's arc too… on paper, that is. I know for a fact that a certain genre of OnK readers are going to bitch and moan that Aqua didn't run his dad over with a 2003 Honda Civic but I really can't imagine Aqua's revenge quest going any other way unless OnK was intended to be a pure tragedy. Over and over, we have seen that Aqua's revenge is at odds with not just his happiness but with Ai's wish for him to live a full life with a bright future. It is self destructive, hurtful to the people around him and antithetical to any of them moving on and reclaiming what their futures. With the emphasis the story places on moving towards a happy future, in selfishly reclaiming your happiness even in the face of systems that seek to crush you and on honouring Ai's wishes and legacy, it would be flatly thematically incoherent for Aqua to choose killing.

The issue is not with this as Aqua's end point but with the path we've taken to get here. As was the issue with Ruby during the Movie Arc, we don't actually see any of the internal work that happened in service of this arc, just the big emotional end points of offscreen development. But it stings especially bad with Aqua when such a huge chunk of the last few arcs locked us out of his head, sharply contrasting the start of the story that lived and breathed his interiority - AND when this is more or less the capstone to his series long struggle to choose love or revenge. It's not that I dislike this as an emotional payoff for Aqua's revenge - this is more or less beat for beat what I'd expected - but that it lacks proper support from the rest of the story. In general, this chapter falls flatter than it should because all this heightened, dramatic emotion rests on arcs and setup that simply have not been shown to the reader, save for Ai.

Speaking of Ai, the info in the DVD here potentially represents a pretty major break in the continuity of Aqua's behaviour based on when we're told he had access to it but I'm willing to bite my tongue and see if that gets filled in, if only because this chapter review is already so fucking long. Let's just say that I Noticed and I sure hope Aka or his editors did too.

And finally… Oh, hey there, Ruby! Aren't you an interesting little snarl to this chapter. Or maybe "snarl" isn't quite right, but her presence here is potentially interesting either way. I'm not quite sure how to read both her expression and her presence - the expression on her face looks VERY displeased and it looks to me like she's outside the room, so is she maybe eavesdropping and not happy with what she hears? Or is she in on Aqua's talk with Kamiki here and just struggling with her emotions with regards to it all? I'm quiety hoping it's the latter, because it would confirm that Ruby DID recognize her dad in 147 and Akasaka wasn't expecting me to believe he was hitting her with the stupid stick quite that hard lol.

In either case, I'm actually excited to see what Ruby takes away from this. In the ways that AQRB has echoed the HKAI dynamic, Ruby has always been in Kamiki's shoes - the one desperate to be saved, clinging to her oshi and relying on him as her sole bastion of light in the world. So what will she think now after being faced with the logical endpoint of this wished-for codependence? When she sees how destructive and self destructive it can potentially be? Just as she saw Ai reflected in herself, will Ruby see her father in her own reflection - and if so, what will she do about it?

Break next week! So we'll be sitting pretty for two weeks to find out. Not that I actually mind this time because with a chapter like this on top of season 2 of the anime coming back today, a week without a break might have actually killed me… please, akamengo, i'm just a little guy!!!!

[yuseirra]

Ch 160 ..let me jot down my stream of consciousness about what I feel, my reading comprehension skills can't be that bad, it'd help if I can sit down and think through a little more.

+ Okay, I'm complete! I understand things much better now!! Upon close examination, This chapter doesn't change anything so dramatically.

IT STILL DOES NOT ANSWER JUST WHAT THE DAD'S MOTIVES ARE, but... the conclusion I have after having reread it thoroughly??

It's that my interpretation of him as a mild guy still stands—it enhances it, even. He's still really kind, which is a pretty surprising conclusion compared to what I felt about it at first glance.

He's.. really kind and considerate. I'm serious. wow.

well, analysis/interpretation below!

I was spoiled about chapter way back sometime last Friday, right? and it was pretty accurate in sense, with it being just some bunch of sentences and that one really creepy panel.. it does help to see the actual art and the expressions that are associated with the dialogues.

Now that I sit down a bit, there are two different interpretations of the same story: Kamiki's testimonies on what's happened (I believe these are all truths. They perfectly match up with how I've interpreted his character all along.) and Aqua's takes on them.

I'm not reading things off the english version btw, so the dialogues may differ.

According to what Kamiki says,

-he considered Ryosuke and Nino as good people and as friends. But they approached him because they were obsessed with Ai, so he didn't know about their true colors.

-so he was able to talk about his breakup with her and talked about whether if he should visit her having children at the hospital where Gorou was. They went and killed Gorou, but Kamiki had no idea about that.

-on the day Ai died, he was still unsure about meeting her because he lacked the courage to see her face (god he's timid) so he asked Ryosuke to give her his bouquet on his behalf

I KEPT SAYING THIS GUY NEVER HAS IT IN HIM TO "SCARE AI!!!!!!!!!" HE LIED IN 154 OUT OF GUILT BECAUSE HE THOUGHT AI AND AQUA WANTED REVENGE ON HIM!!! SEE!!! I'VE BEEN!!! RIGHT!!!! I'VE BEEN!!!!!!!!!!

This was already in the leaks last Fri, I basically felt the same way about these back then

and I got every part of these right except for the part that Kamiki befriended them. I just couldn't picture the people who killed Ai or would actively go hunt their daughter down being his friend..

but seeing how.. much he seems to trust people, he used to be that way as a child, it actually all ties so nicely together.

I predicted that it was Nino and Ryosuke who went to the hospital and killed Gorou.

I predicted that Kamiki just wanted to send the bouquet to congratulate Ai but he couldn't go because he was nervous/sad from the phone call. I said that ever since I started drawing hikaai fanarts, you would have seen me going on and on about that, I drew them with this as the base!!!! The guy Ai chose wouldn't do such a thing as trying to get back at her!!! See??

I couldn't be more right!!! I am a prophet!! I should trust myself!!!! why am I so unsure of myself, really. I really, really did get everything right.

These must be all true. He's not lying about any of this. I've been analyzing this guy very very thoroughly so I know what I'm talking about.

I guess what's confused me was the latter bits, since Fri and even after I see the full images.

Kamiki smiles and says he never wanted to hurt anyone<this is really how I view him as well, this guy can't hurt people out of his own will...

However, Aqua dismisses Kamiki's statements as lies on the spot, and accuses him of having been unable to protect his own daughter. That he's been intentionally manipulated people to get what he wants. That would involve him causing people to kill each other without dirtying his hands.

Upon hearing Aqua stating "You wanted to kill your own daughter", Kamiki makes this really eerie smile (I kind of wish this is redrawn hshsh.. it looks like he's a demon spawn from hell, but this could REALLY be him being distressed yet AGAIN. this guy SMILES when he's that way. That's his coping mechanism. It's kind of hard to stare at that expression but that smile certainly ISN'T a happy one like the one we saw in 159. This is a really confusing habit he has. People are going to take him the wrong way but; sadly, it's become a habit of his...)

The scenes then shifts to visions of him manipulating nino and Ryosuke into doing what they've done with a smile. If this is really what's happened, then he IS someone pretty evil-

but now that I read it over I think that's just based on Aqua's interpretations about the guy.

Is what's being portrayed in those pages ACTUALLY how he is? Just yesterday, I theorized that Kamiki loves his children and has been doing whatever he's been doing for his children. I did have my reasons for making that claim.

We still don't know what his motives are!! Aqua doesn't state anything about why Kamiki would do such a thing if he's done so. Does he know anything about this??? Just what reason would make it.. enough to have someone kill the love of their life and their very daughter? What good would it do for Kamiki? For one thing, does he have ANY good reason to kill Ai at all? For having felt betrayed?? Then why wait out that long????? Killing their daughter? After having her live for, how long now? how old are they now? 15?? 16? Why now? Why would he??

The important thing would be just WHY he'd be doing all those things if he's really been so, so WHAT IS IT AQUA?? WHAT??

Forgot to mention this but in the beginning of the chapter, we have kamiki saying, Hm, but what did I do? Did I "stab someone?" did I "push someone off a cliff?" I never "did" "anything".

Then we have Nino going "Kamiki-san didn't do anything. He just talked about Ai. He talked about her so we(her and Ryosuke) wouldn't forget about her. That was enough to make us break."

OH come on. COME ON. HUH. I feel like he's never told them anything bad about Ai, he probably let out how much he loved and misses her, because he thought they were her fan and coworkers as a fellow member, I bet he was happy to befriend people who knew about Ai because they share a common interest together. With it being his favorite person in the world even while he was dumped.

What a stupid reason, Nino. You brought everything upon yourself. I can see that now.

I do think.. kamiki has some sort of power that causes people to grow insane or act out, that could have had some influence on ryosuke and nino in a way...

but again, why would he try to kill his lover and his daughter even if he can use it with his own accord??? Even if he's using those powers now?? Would he use it to do those respective things?

Even if he has those, that shouldn't be all there is to it. According to Kamiki, they were already obsessed with Ai when they approached him and YEAH! Makes sense?? They came to him first, probably already aware that he was Ai's lover?? He isn't responsible for them hoarding those kinds of feelings!!

Coming to think of it, I find it really strange that he still hung with nino being the complete wreck she is. Oh wait, I guess he still could. Ryosuke killed Ai and Nino doesn't seem to have played a part with that. Nino was there with Ryosuke when Gorou died but she's not the one who's pushed him off a cliff. Ryosuke's the really...horrible one. He had a pretty gf like nino JUST WHY. Then again, nino was obsessed w Ai too so they were a match. I guess Kamiki hanged with Nino thinking she's just another victim who wants Ai back or whatever. He still hangs with her when she says that are super creepy like she can't forgive Ruby if she surpasses Ai though.. Perhaps he's really bad at letting people go.. OH, YEAH. He was always pretty attached to people as a child. Okay, I got that part cleared up on my own. Stream of consciousness is like this. It can happen.

Continuing on!! Aqua says Kamiki is a "despicable, selfish liar, worse than a murderer". Even Kamiki can't smile hearing that. If he ISN'T one, then that'd hurt.

Well, he responds again, saying:

"Ah, yes. You're the same way as I am. You share those same eyes I have. The type of eyes that grant the power to persuade others into believing you. The eyes that grant you charisma, befitting that of a star." Then we see a panel with Ai, "The eyes of liars, that fool, and make others submit to you"

he must be thinking of what Ai's told him when she talked to him about having the same eyes. (CH 140)

"You've been inciting people just like I have, right? Just how many people did you fool to fulfill your goal?"

"It must have felt good to use your talents to impact the lives of others, right?"

I'm not sure if this is a taunt/mockery or just him stating the facts as a liar/a black star user himself.

If he's thinking about Ai... then it can be the latter. She approached him saying "they are the same". He could be thinking about that.

Actually, he's strangely calm. His emotions are a bit hard to read on this one, I'd say it actually feels collected compared to what he's heard.

This could actually be sympathy or empathy...

I didn't take it that way when I first encountered it, so I felt.. Kamiki could be lashing out a bit but no. That doesn't seem to be it.

Hey, he really never gets angry. He actually looks a bit sad depending on how you look at it, I think he may be feeling a sense of guilt in that particular panel where he says "Just how many people did you fool to fulfill your goal?", the one where he glances down,

just like how he talked to Aqua in 152, "It's a lie, isn't it? it's because they're important that you keep your distance from them. why would you go that far to bottle yourself up?"

This guy understands his son really well. In fact, I think he may be trying to say, "we're the same=I understand the way you are, we're on the same track" the way Ai's done for him. That's what was his salvation.

Aqua does not take this well.

He says yeah, we're both terrible beings, but Ruby is "different".

Oh, and the rest.. what's stood out to me is the panel where Aqua goes,

"sending love to the one who desires for love" as he describes what Ruby is doing. Kamiki shows up in that panel.. This is what Ai wanted to do for him.

and there's a panel that comes up that shows Ai with the twins that follows right after saying:

"it's the eyes of the one who desires to love someone"

This is really sad. I think that page actually indicates Ai desired to love him while he desired to be loved from Ai. That happened both ways. It was a nice page.

Yeah, and Aqua points his knife to his dad like a toy gun saying

"You must disappear right here and now, for Ruby's sake."

I don't think Aqua's actually up to stabbing him, actually? If he's pointing the knife at him like that, I think it's more like he's warning him to stay out of their way forever, scram, or just go die off on his own.

Both of his eyes are white, he's not going to kill him with his own hands, rather, he's going to make him go away.

So I don't think next chapter would start on a fierce note? Kamiki does not seem like a guy that gets agitated so easily. He STILL never once got angry in this chapter as well. He's still pretty sweet to his son. I'm not being biased on this, the way he talks has always been really soft. If this were to be an anime, you'd hear how he'd talk and see whether if he has thorns in them but I don't think it's that way at least, I think he's trying to be understanding??

This guy is soft. He will not put up a fight. I don't know, he may jump off that bridge and try to die maybe. If that's what his son wants? Move out of the way? He doesn't seem.. angry about it all. He's not even protesting.

In the end, the only thing that got proven in this chapter was that Kamiki DID NOT DO ANYTHING IN A PHYSICAL SENSE, AND HE DIDN'T TRY TO SCARE AI.

the fact about him manipulating people and lying to get his way, I think there's low chance of it being applied for Ruby and Ai's case.

I think he really didn't have a clue Nino would attack Ruby? If he's considered her as a friend?

what are the basis of Aqua picturing him that way? He must really hate his dad. There is no way he could have seen such things happen. Unless Tsukuyomi told him about it?? there is no proof that it's what's actually been taken place. Kamiki could have incited people, or influenced others, yeah, but I don't think he did anything to Ai or his daughter. Again, I think he loves his family. Why wouldn't he??

Until things get cleared up more, I???? I ACTUALLY?? think Kamiki's taking it in a really calm manner despite all the things he's being accused of??

This is very long, but that is all for now!!

Oh, this was worth revisiting and analyzing. There's a lot more I see when I scrutinize it like this!!

[caw-oticdork]

Since my previous podcast recommendation list was pretty popular, I've decided to make another, with another bunch of excellent podcasts:

13 Minutes or Less - Short podcast with very short episodes, about a pizza chef who doesn't like dealing to people but has to do some deliveries due to short staffing. Very much not her thing, but she does her best. As it turns out, her clients are quite a bit stranger and spookier than expected...

Additional Postage Required - Sci-Fi adventure about a nonbinary courier who gains the ability (or curse...) to get visions about the contents, past, and sender of packages they touch. They get roped into a rebellion. There's hoverboard racing. It's awesome.

Among the Stars and Bones - A team of xenoarcheologists search a distant world for traces of a long-vanished aliens. It's been a while since I watched this one, so I don't remember it very well, but I know that I enjoyed it. Very good sci-fi horror.

Dark Ages - Fantasy workplace comedy about a supernatural museum. Quite a lot of fun.

Dragon Shanty - Fantasy story about two bards traveling the high seas. There's dragons aplenty. Very queer. Excellent songs.

Falling Forward - Hacker story loosely based on the myth of Icarus and the Labyrinth, about getting back at a terrible corporation. Kinda experimental, this one has the shortest episodes I've ever seen.

Hotel Daydream - Podcast about the goings-on at a supernatural hotel. Very inventive, with really interesting characters.

Jar of Rebuke - Mystery about a researcher at an ominous cryptozoological organization out in the rural US. He's got no memories of his past and keeps dying and coming back. A story about cryptids, identity, queerness, neurodivergence, and community.

Light Hearts - Slice of Life podcast about turning an old, haunted building into a cafe and queer community center. The ghosts lead to some very fun shenanigans.

Lost Terminal - Mentioned in the other list but not expanded on. This is a hopepunk story set on an Earth devestated by climate change. Told from the POV of an adorable AI who watches this Earth from a space station, observing how humanity re-builds itself and finds a brighter future.

Mayfair Watchers Society - You know Trevor Henderson? The guy who drew Sirenhead, Long Horse, and other such creepypasta creatures in his found footage style? Yeah, this is a horror anthology based on his works, directed by him. Set in the rural town of Mayfair, where strange creatures are a lot more common than elsewhere... Each episode has a slightly different framing device, with some being found footage audio, others meeting recordings, phone calls, etc.

Monstrous Agonies - An advice podcast for the british creature community. Many of the advice letters are sent in by listeners - there's two by myself, one from an ant that can hear and send radio and one from a fey who is looking for curse advice. Some letters are metaphors for queerness, clashing cultures, ableism, and minority communities, others just some urban fantasy fun. Has a little bit of plot, but most episodes have an anthology style. Fast approaching the finale!

Mx Bad Luck - Slice of Life about someone who is cursed with bad luck. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny. Can recommend.

Neighbourly - Neighbourly follows the residents of Little Street, house by house. What they do, how they interact with each other, and what skeletons are hiding in their closet. Starts out as a spooky urban fantasy thing that's almost an anthology, but weaves itself into quite a mysterious plot over time...

SINKHOLE - Short-form audio podcast presented as a collection of audio posts from a member of a community of data restoration hobbyists in a sometimes-unfamiliar future. Mystery about disability, internet communities, and how things change with time.

Second Star to the Left - Scout-explorer Gwen Hartley has five years to explore and prepare her planet for settlement. With no aid but her robots and the anxious voice of her long-distance scout-minder Bell Summers in her ear, she's hoping she's ready for anything.

Someone Dies In This Elevator - Anthology where every episode, someone dies in an elevator. You wouldn't believe how creative they get with that simple concept!

Tales from the Low City - By the maker of Mistholme Museum, this podcast explores the everyday lifes of the last people on an alien world, after the surface had become uninhabitable and everyone had fled down into the last city, the subterranean Low City. This one made me cry a lot!

Tartarus - In a secret facility deep beneath Antarctica, an anxious astrobiologist, a terse station manager, and an AI keep humanity safe from the monsters they imprison.

The Attic Monologues - Queer urban fantasy story about a university student who decides to record themself practicing monologues using a collection they found in their attic. Don't forget to listen to the post-credit scenes!

The Bridge - Surreal alternate universe horror story about the keepers of a bridge over the Atlantic. Gets pretty spooky.

The Green Horizon - Sci-Fi comedy about a na'er-do-well Irish space captain and his rag-tag crew traversing a war-torn galaxy in search of fame and fortune. Very fun podcast.

The Lavender Tavern - Anthology podcast with original gay fairytales. Most are quite memorable!

The Vesta Clinic - Sci-Fi story about a clinic that helps various interesting alien lifeforms with their medical issues. Excellent worldbuilding and characters!

Tides - The story of Dr. Winifred Eurus, a xenobiologist trapped on an unfamiliar planet with hostile tidal forces and a fascinating ecosystem. She must use her wits, sarcasm, and intellectual curiosity to survive long enough to be rescued. But there might be more to life on this planet than she expected...

Hope this list is as helpful as the last!

@boombox-fuckboy @marvelousmawn @sapphireclaw @ashes-in-a-jar @frogmomentsfrombeyondtime @time-is-restored @emmy-noethers-rings

You folk seemed the most interested in the other list, so I'm being bold and @ing you all.

[springlock-suits]

Hey there followers and friends passing by! I made a dtiys!

This isn't really a celebration of anything, I'm just a fan of draw this in your style challenges, and I haven't really seen any in awhile! Though I guess if I was celebrating anything it'd be over 60 followers on here and 220+ on my Insta! I'm glad so many like to stick around for my silly little aus and art :]

The Draw This In Your Style v

You can change the perspective, lighting, background, etc! You don't have to go for the camera filter like on the first image, and while I did use my Dave design for the drawing, you don't have to make it my version specifically ^v^

Rules, prizes, and extra versions of the art (base colors and maskless) v

Rules and Prizes v

@ this blog,( @springlock-suits ) with your finished drawing! If I don't reblog it in a day, feel free to hit me with a dm, or try some other way to contact me to make sure I see your entry!

This will be cross-posted on my insta, @ darling.dolly.darlene so you could also post your entry there instead!

No stealing art that isn't yours, tracing, ai, or anything along those lines

The deadline for this DTIYS is November 15th! But I am willing to extend it if enough ask for extra time

You can change pretty much anything in your redraw; scene, outfit, lighting, pose, perspective, etc. But you gotta make sure it's still recognizable! I'd say keeping purple guy tied up to a chair in some Freddy's location with the Springbonnie mask somehow included is all you need

And not a rule, but feel free to ask as many questions as you may need! I will answer as best I can, my asks and anon asks on here should be open ^v^

I did a poll earlier about whether or not this should have prizes, and the answer was overwhelmingly yes! How many people joining will affect how many winners, but right now I'm thinking there will only be one

As I can't offer much else, the prize will simply be digital art by me! If you win and don't want the prize, just tell me and I'll ask a runner up instead ^v^

Since my art requests are always open anyway, to make the prize special for DTIYS winners I've decided they can request I draw things I don't usually do for art requests, like their Ocs, their own designs, added backgrounds, and/or I design a character or fusion that they can own and use

Extras v

Since I did a bunch with the lighting and bluring, here's versions that show it without! This was my first time doing such strong perspective, so I did try to hide it a bit, but I think it turned out pretty alright :>

And here's a maskless version! Mostly I made this for fun at the last second, but I imagine some artists out there would prefer to draw a human over an animatronic, so feel free to do a version like this instead! It includes Springbonnie simply in the form of some shadowy ears

This was vaguely based on a panel from the tse graphic novel! I'm a big fan of the "I am one of them" scene

[perfectlysanexd]

So, what have I been up to...? Since I was in Tumblr's spam-bot prison for more than 5 months, I thought I would create a little ICYMI post. (That's "In-Case-You-Missed-It" for the old folks like myself that have to look up all these new acronyms.) Basically, I'm gonna highlight/link to some of the posts I made this year, and you can check them out if you like. :) I didn't want to necessarily do a bunch of reblogs of my own content and clog up the system or something...

I finished posting up my 100's of edited screenshots from Advent Children Complete! You can view the archive of 53 different posts, separated by character, here. It also includes a fun side post about the Mysterious Case of Sephiroth's Missing Straps. :3

I confess, I haven't made too many wallpapers this year. But it's September now, and I have a thought rolling around in my head. We'll see. The archive of wallpapers is here.

Speaking of, so many cool wallpapers came out for Ever Crisis, and I've posted them all! Find them here, at the bottom of this archive post. I swear I'll eventually beat TFS season 1, but...they sure made it difficult for people who don't purchase their packs.

Did you know that Tumblr is feeding your posts(including reblogs) to theird party AI? Well, they are, and you can set it to be prevented in your settings. I talked about it here.

Rebirth coming out was the biggest thing this year, and I made my first manipulation for it back in March! You can see the post here, as well as a simple tutorial for it using GIMP(GNU Image Manipulation Program, free at gimp.org) here.

I also made a second manipulation for Rebirth! If you want to see the additional dialogue that goes with it, that's here.

When I played the demo for Rebirth, I noticed that they had changed Sephiroth's eyes, and it reminded me of something...

Did you know that in Advent Children, Sephiroth's gloves are not as tight as in Remake and you can see his wrists? 😏Check it out! What? Of course this is important!

I took a look at Sephiroth and all his forms over the years. Then I did the same for Cloud.

My AO3 sefikura work In Death was finished on April 26th, and came with a special manipulation. That was also the first story where I was accused of writing non-con, when it obviously wasn't, so that was fun. If you need to hydrate, you can go drink that tea in the comments of, I think, chapter 16 and after. Several people have asked about a sequel, and I do have eventual plans. Hang in there.

I made my first(of many) Rebirth memes, which also came with a blank template.

A peek under Sephiroth's jacket, courtesy of Rebirth. 😏Yes, this is important, obviously.

Another Rebirth meme, featuring Sephiroth being badass.

I put my design for Lucrecia's locket onto my edited EC Sephiroth artwork! This one actually got a lot of notes thanks to reblogging. 💕I also put the locket on Sephiroth's EC in-game model.

I wrote a long one-shot as a thank you for 400+ followers! It's based on my most popular sefikura manipulation of all time—a very indulgent work, and my first time writing for Rebirth. Thanks, guys!

Another meme, haha...oops, and another one. Damn, another one? AND a Sephiroth/Cloud arms-crossed companion meme set?

I did another Rebirth manipulation, this time of the famous sefikura hug scene. I added a second part to it here. AND a third part to it here! This set has quickly become one of my favorites. I also gave it some Japanese dialogue+translation here.

I did a little PSA because I've seen a lot of awfully suspicious digital paintings lately...

I made an account on Twitter/X, just in case they never fixed my blog, so if you're over there, follow me @ perfectlysane77 and say hi. :)

The FF7 crew have super hearing, confirmed??

Do you play Ever Crisis and want to join a sefikura guild? Check here. All skill levels are welcome, and you don't have to talk to anyone if you don't want to.

My first ever edited Rebirth video: "Fill your hollow heart...with me-ow."

And now I've been released from Tumblr spam-bot prison, so I'm sure you've seen even more silly memes from me. So what now? I hope to release the rewrite of Stranger Inside very soon, maybe by the end of the month if possible? The sequel will follow, for real this time. At that point, we'll be back to voting, so you guys will be able to choose what comes after that. I'm really focused on writing now, which is probably why I'm mostly making memes and silly things. Still, if it makes you laugh, I'm happy. 🥰

If you read this to the end, you're amazing.💕

[redtail-lol]

Hey guys I need advice. My dad wants to buy me a laptop and it would be really helpful for me to have one but I don't know how to choose shit. I need advice on what laptop model to get, and what OS I should get.

What will I use it for? I'm not sure. Writing, desktop versions of social media, non-intense gaming most likely, apply for jobs, general personal use.

My only for sure requirements are, it needs decent RAM (more than 4 GB), it has to be compatible with regular USB ports because I have a thumb drive with stuff from my school Chromebook and I have another thumb drive that I lost because it didn't work on my stupid motorola but if I ever find it again I think will work on my laptop, and it has to have more than 5 hours of battery life when used with low brightness levels. I don't care about weight or thin designs. I would like the color accuracy to be good but it needn't be perfect and I'll get what I can get. Even with my dad having a job we're still not really rich so either a.) this laptop needs to be affordable (under $500) or b.) this laptop needs to be old enough to buy a used one.

In terms of OS: I am most familiar with chrome but I am becoming ideologically opposed to Google. I absolutely will not use Windows - Windows 10 is going to go away soon and Windows 11 has built in AI. It also costs money. I am considering Linux, but I've heard conflicting information on if it would be good for me. My only knowledge of code is from not even a full semester of an HTML class (but the teacher did say I picked up coding pretty fast). Some people say I have to have some knowledge of computer science to use Linux, others say it's actually really beginner friendly nowadays. Some people say it's extremely limited in what it can run and others say more and more things are able to be run on linux with or without an additional program to make it run. There's also a bunch of "distros" that can be chosen from, though I've seen a source say ubuntu is the only one that can be run on a laptop. What's true and what's not? Should I use Linux at all if I don't know shit about code or Computer Science? Are certain distros better for beginners?

Please help if you can help in any way, whether it's recommending brands, exact models, or linux/linux distros..

[alelelesimz]

recommend youtube videos to us 🤲

GLADLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is the video i mentioned in that post! lindsay nikole talks about science and evolution and stuff and she's SO GOOD at explaining complicated stuff in a way that i understand easily and she really shows how cool and interesting the world is i'm OBSESSED with her and this video is so interesting i love it

i talked about this video a few days ago but i swear it's so good any austin talks a lot about shit that nobody cares about EXCEPT FOR ME i care about where the rivers in hyrule go and the unemployment rates in skyrim and you should too

i know contrapoints got a lot of hate bc of this video but idk i think it's a banger just like all of her videos!

yes this is drew gooden the guy from that one vine anyways veRY interesting video about AI!!!

i love claire and her recipes always look incredible and she's recreating store bought treats again WHICH I LOVE

i love capt astro so fucking much he just yaps about different topics in video games. i found him bc of splatoon but he talks about many other games, this is probably his longest video but also it's the ONLY good opinion about TOTK i've seen on youtube im so serious

if you like dnd at all you NEED!!!! to watch pointy hat's videos oh my god he talks about different things in the game and how to give them a twist and he's made a bunch of subclasses and gameplay mechanics it's CRAZY and it's really inspiring me to make more interesting characters even outside of dnd

fatbrett usually makes character analysis in video games but this one is about storytelling through environment in unpacking which is very interesting!!!!

okay bear with me on this one, i know it's about splatoon and i know it's almost five hours long BUT splatoon has some of the best lore and world building in any game ever and this video explains the entire storyline of the game which is VERY LONG AND COMPLICATED so even if you dont know about splatoon but do like world building then you should watch this video im serious

alright i cant link any more videos come back again if you want me to share more vids i'm nothing if not a youtube junkie 🙏

[kogo-dogo]

Fun fact about JSRF: I have played hundreds upon hundreds of hours of it by virtue of not being able to afford many games as a kid, so I'd just play the same three over and over. I'm not as good as I used to be, but I'm still capable of beating it in an afternoon.

Other fun fact: I accidentally discovered when I was 20-ish that I beat the speedrun record for 100% completion, non-TSA, because my ex was really into speedrunning at the time. This was about fifteen years ago so the record has since been destroyed, but I remember my ex looking incredulously at a save file I had on my Xbox and loudly bemoaning that I didn't record it because she would have had bragging rights. I don't really remember much of the game breaking stuff aside from a place in 99th Street where you can skate through a wall and end up outside of the map, and vaguely that there's a way to get outside of the map in Highway Zero, but I haven't been able to replicate the results from what I remember. There's a weak corner in the street market on a building. I remember that. You can also hop the fence at the future site of Rokkaku Expo Stadium to look at the final boss tower but like... it's fickle.

OTHER other fact: The Doomsday Clock does nothing, my guys. Every time you enter Kibogaoka Hill, it resets and does the little dance. I've seen it a bunch of times. It likely won't do it more than once per map entrance because the game isn't programmed amazingly in a lot of places.

OTHER OTHER other fact: You can break the AI super easy to beat tag battles and shit. If you knock a Noise Tank off of a rail at Sky Dinosaurian, they'll respawn in certain places and you can time yourself to be behind them. Poison Jam will stop in the sewers and just start going in circles. You can quite literally make The Immortals kill themselves. You can win death ball by boosting so many times in the beginning that the AI will make your competition go in reverse.

OTHER OTHER OTHER other fact: There's all kinds of fun little details people miss, like the simulated NPC blow job in an alley, the fact there's wanted posters with concept art on it, the statue giving a speech to a roaring crowd in the demilitarized zone. The cat room. THE CAT ROOM.

[ryuichirou]

Hey Ryu! (I hope it's ok to call u that (⁠´⁠；⁠ω⁠；⁠｀⁠)) I've been looking at ur art and fanfics for a while and I rlly support Shroudsect! \(⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)/ I was thinking abt this for a while and was wondering if u would like to share sum Yandere Ortho fic! U can share them with any scenario, any characters, and any place! I'm just curious what u will create out of this (ofc if u have the time.) Thanks for reading this and thank u for ur glorious artwork! Have a great day/night! (⁠*⁠＾⁠3⁠＾⁠)⁠/⁠～⁠♡

Hi Anon! Of course you can call me Ryu <3 Thank you so much for enjoying our art and posts and for liking the way we portray Shroudcest!

Yandere Ortho is one of our favourite themes, we really like how dangerous he can get whenever he feels the need to protect Idia (so pretty much always). Despite his disposition and attitude + the fact that he likes to push Idia to live a healthier life and socialize, both of them are dependent on each other. So I’ll share a couple of OruIde headcanons with yandere!Ortho, if this is what you’d like to read!

Both regular/robot Ortho and human Ortho could easily be a yandere. Robo!Ortho has issues with empathy, since he is an AI, but human!Ortho isn’t much better. He looks much more socially adapted than Idia: he is extraverted, he has friends, he seems to be a nice guy who knows how to react when he needs to support someone, but his feeling of empathy is actually worse than Idia’s: he’s just good at mimicking it. In actuality he is so obsessed with Idia that he doesn’t actually take others’ feeling into consideration when acting.

Because of that, if someone were to mistreat Idia or say something bad about him, this person not only would stop being Ortho’s “friend” in a second, they would become an enemy to be eliminated. Obviously, we’ve seen this in canon, when Ortho wanted to shoot lasers at some random students for talking shit about Idia, so he (both in his robo!form and in his human!form) clearly isn’t opposed to harming others for Idia’s sake (even though Idia wouldn’t want him to do it…).

Depending on how dark you want to go, Ortho could’ve easily killed a guy or even a bunch of guys, despite being previously friendly with them, because he felt like they were making fun of Idia. In some extreme scenarios it’s very possible, and it makes Ortho quite scary.

That being said, he isn’t always this intense: sometimes just ruining a person socially is enough for Ortho. It’s also reflected in canon: he has a lot of dirt on others and can easily obtain blackmail material if needed, so tormenting someone and threatening them because of their sins against his precious Idia is something that Ortho does. He usually doesn’t tell Idia about it though, but not because he doesn’t want him to know what kind of horrible things he does, but because he doesn’t want Idia to get upset (mostly because of the things that these assholes are saying about him).

Despite the fact that Ortho wants Idia to make friends and even be involved with someone romantically, he is actually quite prone to jealousy, because he is so used to Idia belonging to him only. This wouldn’t be too obvious because of how supportive Ortho would be of Idia, but he would actually be upset about Idia seeing someone else. Especially if Idia is visibly happy with someone else. Ortho would obviously  be emotionally tormented, because he doesn’t want to take away Idia’s happiness, but…

… but it is for the best, isn’t it? So he would sabotage their relationship by either scaring the guy away or creating miscommunication/misunderstandings between them, to make Idia feel like the guy is avoiding him or making fun of him. It is painful to see Idia so devastated, but it’s alright, because Ortho is always there to comfort him and shower him with love. And he, unlike all the other people, would never hurt Idia!

Ortho really uses the fact that Idia would never suspect him of any wrongdoing in his advantage. Idia adores Ortho and even idealizes him a little bit, thinking that Ortho would never do anything malicious. Not only that, Idia also always expects bad things from everyone other than Ortho, so it wouldn’t be too surprising for him that a person that he liked ditched him in the weirdest way possible. He would be heartbroken about his sudden breakup with that person, but being comforted by Ortho feels nice, so…

… so Ortho is definitely going to use that to make a move on Idia and kiss him. And talk about how everything has happened for a reason and that they are destined to be together, him and Idia.

No matter how Idia replies or reacts to that statement, Ortho is never going to back down. He has decided that they’re going to be together forever, and that they don’t need anybody else, so this is how things are going to be. Ortho is really stubborn.

Ortho doesn’t categorize his adoration towards Idia as a romantic or non-romantic love: he does have romantic feelings and sexual desire towards him, but he is also super obsessed with him in general, he almost believes that this feeling is way too strong to just be considered “love”.

[ghostofacrow]

Crow plays Gubat Banwa Part 2.5: Well, this went poorly

Before I dig into this, I want to state that I was still having a lot of fun and the balance issues were (mostly) my own fault, but the battle was absolutely fucked up - to the point were I'll have to partially retcon it.

There were mainly three reasons for this:

I'm very used to ttrpgs being very hesitant to kill characters, or even put them into mortal danger that frequently. We all know how rare deaths are in 5e, but the main combat game I've been running on and off over the last few years has been Lancer, where throwing twice the suggested enemy budgets at the players is completely fine and they'll come out of it with only a few scraps. These games are generally also balanced around multiple encounters draining your resources, so I wasn't fully prepared for the hard battle actually being this hard as a single encounter, but now that I know that, I think this is good. There isn't really a reliable way to balance a game around attrition without including some fights with weak narrative justifications and forgettable or reused encounter design, and especially for how long the battles can take, I really prefer them being more meaningful.

I noticed the issues before I started the fight but just decided to do it anyway, knowing that it was probably going to be a meatgrinder, because I was curious. If I had been playing with other people who all had to clear their schedule for the evening and prepare, I would have been more careful here, but since I'm alone it really doesn't matter.

You are supposed to gain thunderbolts when you describe an action you take in battle in a really cool or stylish way. This is a GREAT rule and probably my favorite version of an inspiration/hero points-like mechanic I've seen, but since I'm alone, awarding them to myself has a bit of a

vibe to it, so I didn't do it. THIS WAS VERY BAD. I just thought of cool pictures in my head without really trying to describe them in words since I wasn't talking to anyone (and the previous post I made here was already so long that I didn't include narrative descriptions there either). It even happened a bunch of times that I thought "oh that was cool I should try drawing that later", knowing full well I wouldn't have time to actually do that. If you're playing solo and you also feel awkward about awarding yourself style points, you absolutely have to either get over yourself or take the lack of thunderbolts into account when balancing encounters.

Anyway, this was a great learning opportunity.

Other things I noticed that I liked:

Very little that takes away actions from players. "You gain three beats per riff" sounds very similar to Pf2e's "You get three actions per turn", and it is, but actions that take 2 beats are very rare and there aren't any action taxes like reloading or swapping your held items, at least none that I've seen. One of the enemies had an Aim Technique that grants Merit to their next attack, but that's offering a tradeoff between attacking twice, with the second one at demerit, or once with merit. It doesn't make "shooting a guy" take up more then one action. The Stunned condition only takes away 1 beat, which is especially comforting after playing with/against a Horus Gorgon for the last three months

And that's without accounting for thunderbolts letting you do even more things that don't cost beats, or trading thunderbolts for more beats directly. I don't think it's possible to completely loose a turn unless you get messed up by the terrain like the enemy guard in my battle or just straight up die.

I've slightly come around on the "lower damage dice also means it's less likely to hit" thing, because that also means that critical hits are more likely. It's stills something you need to keep in mind, especially with attacks that set up important effects like the Flower Balyan's fields, but this is probably fine once you get used to planing around it.

The Gambit tables/the enemy "AI" was very helpful to speed up enemy turns. I adjusted a lot of their riffs based on what made the more sense (like a ranged enemy already starting out in an advantageous position, so they have no reason to move and can spend the beat on something else like the Aim technique I mentioned before), but starting out with a random suggestion for what they would do helped a ton to shorten the time I spend thinking about enemy turns, and made it feel less like I was fighting my own reflection. I think if you follow the instructions as written directly, it's going to make the enemies act a bit stupid (ymmv on how big of a problem this is), but treating them as suggestions works well.

Anything I'd broadly classify as positioning and crowd control is really fun. You have so many ways to move enemies around, and because the terrain height, wall collisions, and ability interactions all play into it, it's mechanically very rewarding to do. Reminds me of earlier this year when everyone was playing Baldur's Gate 3 and realised how much varied intricate terrain adds to D&D combat, but once gain, making complex terrain isn't really feasible for most GMs if you have to balance around 3+ fights between every rest. But if you plan around every encounter being a meaningful step forward, it takes a lot longer to run out of ideas. Letting the players have input on the map creation also makes this a less one sided task, and there's a lot of player abilities that create terrain or objects during the fight, so the starting terrain doesn't have to be super unique.

So how did the fight actually go?

Getting into position and getting rid of the first few demons was the hardest part, and moving Haraw out into the open that early was a huge mistake I didn't fully recover from. The demon warrior applied Bleeding to her, so I didn't move out of the way during her next riff either.

She hang in there well, but it was a steady path downwards from that initial mistake, and she hit 5 Wounds (the death threshold) eventually. You can gain a second wind and ignore the fifth wound if you can justify narratively how your conviction lets you hold on to life, and that makes both for some very hype moments during the battle and having to change the conviction afterwards turns near losses into story telling impulses.

I know based on my notifications that everyone only reads these posts because Waks reblogs them (hi), so I'm assuming you've read the Posture post (this one: https://www.tumblr.com/makapatag/737233117904076801/on-posture-in-gubat-banwa) because I did and it was sitting in the back of my mind while I was playing. I think Waks is completely right that the change in terminology does influence how the fiction feels, but it also has interesting effects on the mechanical space (which in turn effects the fiction as well). Player characters going from Posture, which basically works like Hit Points mechanically, to Wounds, where every single hit brings you one step closer to death, regardless of how strong it is, means that catching stray area effects that don't normally do a lot of damage becomes really dangerous, but dueling a single foe to the death while you're bleeding out is comparatively viable because even a massive single target attack will still only cause 1 wound. It changes your threat assessment, and that is, at the very least, an interesting thing to have happen that wouldn't have occurred with a hit point system.

It's worth it to question how something as fundamental as hit points effects how a game functions, even if you ultimately come to the conclusion that hit points or a hit points-like mechanic function the best for what you're trying to accomplish. Hit points might be the single most ingrained game mechanic due to how common they are in both tabletop and video games, and seeing how the different damage systems effected the game was a really interesting experience. When people tell you to play more games then dnd this is part of why, it actually makes you understand dnd better to see how different systems work.

Tangent over - Haraw's conviction was about getting her body back from the demon that stole it, specifically she held on because she's inhabiting Pilakan's body and can't let them die. Her new conviction is to get rid of the demons. This was definitively one of the highlights of the fight, alongside the cliff maneuver from the last post and a particularly good 360 no scope roll Nasirakna got, but unfortunately Haraw still died to a crit on an enemy aoe attack later anyway (this death is the part I'm retconning, the rest is fine). Dranreb also got beaten up pretty badly and got 2 wounds but Nasirakna was relatively fine - who could have guessed that staying behind the frontline would be a good idea for a ranged attacker.

I eventually got into a pretty good rythm of letting Dranreb and Haraw soften the enemies up and knock them around while Nasirakna finished them off. Like I pointed out at the start, the fire resistance of the demons meant they didn't have a lot of options - this also contributed to the fight being as hard as it was, I'm sure - but they did still do a ton of damage. Their massive range also meant that it was impossible for the enemies to get away without fleeing the battle. Sidenote: diagonals counting as 1 range step and the 3D tiles looking fairly large compared to VTT maps meant that my eyeball estimates for ranges were often off, but it does make the counting easier then diagonal steps being 1.5.

I'll cover the story developments in another post, I just wanted to get my first thoughts on the battle experience out while they're still fresh in my mind, and then take my time to journal the story scenes.

[yunyin]

Intuition liveblog (S5 E15)

Quick note guys, please make sure you don't spoil for future episodes!

Description sounds concerning

Andre AGAIN? I was thinking this was a flashback for a second.

Oh no

Oh, interesting! The lucky charm adapts

Is this pre-Nathalie heel turn?

OH he's been using second chance a bunch and we just never knew??

Oh yikes, his arm, that looks nasty. I wonder what's actually going on in his body right now?

OH SNAP the damage keeps on going while he uses second chance??

Whoa, dude has organ damage? Man, him and Nathalie are really on borrowed time

Also this feels... idk if it's ironic but the whole thing with Adrien's use of the snake in Desperada plus the cataclysm slowly eating Gabriel away... it's something

Oh man, a few weeks?

This is unexpectedly emotional 🥺

also I wonder if there's a plan in place already or if Gabe is gonna go into denial mode or something

Oh, no, he actually seems to be trying to figure it out

I was just wondering if he was in pain but I guess that answers that

Yikes he's gonna blow up I know it I've seen a few spoilery things where he doesn't seem to have much opinion of Marinette and I would not be surprised if this is kind of the start of that

Oh, nope

Adrien's "Papa" 🥺🥺🥺 (I'm watching in French btw)

Tsurugi Space jet

How many industries are they in??

Booooo also, how?

What kind of insane mics do they have

Also, why does she know to check for that, is this a common miraculous related side-effect?

I shouldn't laugh but

So I'm guessing she probably wants a cure for her blindness but I wonder what else?

Mmmm AI... OH, he's gonna akumatize the AI like he did Markov, isn't he? Because a human might go rogue but he's got the codes for this computer

Also that shot is neat, I like it.

I... Max...

They're just flinging her out into space??

...Well, that's a choice.

Aw, Adrien walked her to the nurse

I kinda like the little filigree things going on on Cosmobug's display

DUDE, YOU CAN'T PULL OFF HER EARRINGS IN SPACE

I missed this at first! IDK how I feel about that nickname lol

It's too bad he didn't yank some rings off while he was at it

Also, this is a good ep for their space transformation refs

Well, this is interesting... kind of a callback to Tomoe earlier, too... and he's just shortening his lifespan even more in all these efforts

See???

Man... like it's hard to actually feel that bad for him because he's so awful but it's rough thinking of how hard it would be for Adrien to lose him AND Nathalie.

[hatkuu]

i really don't get why people use ai art. It costs so much money for such a poor quality product. like if you're gonna pay that much just get a commission. Then they can just say, I want a picture of blank doing blank once instead of [8K, ultima hd, blank with hair, no extra toes, blank, blank holding fish, etc.] five times. I've seen people "create" that shit live and it's just a guy typing a prompt, prompt gives a funky result because it doesn't understand reality, then he adds more buzzwords to it, repeat. I guess that's why some of them say it takes talent but like no, they just put in a bunch of random words and repeated themselves fifty times until they got something that looks vaguely coherent.

i've never actually seen any people writing word prompts for ai artwork, but i have seen the prompts people use for character ai bots and (as someone who writes as a hobby) it's so sterile?? it is exactly like the 'blank doing blank' just reworded into 'you are blank and you like blank' but yeah i definitely agree that there is NO talent present in any ai creation. wow, you wrote some word prompts and had a machine do the rest... congrats...

but with the amount of work they put in writing the amount of prompts they use (some character ai bots have PAGES of writing) you'd think that you'd use it to write fanfic or something human. i feel like there isn't enough hate surrounding ai chat bots because sadly fanfiction isn't seen to be as valuable in comparison to fanart (which is a WHOLE different problem within itself) and also ai bots give the illusion of conversation whilst ai art doesn't.

'vaguely coherant' is the perfect term for all things ai bahahaha

[canmom]

L'Aventur de Canmom à Annecy - Mercredi 4: WTF 2023

WTF (read 'what the fuck' in a heavy French accent) seems to be a kind of annual collection of weird online shit. Titmouse is involved in some capacity, although I don't think they're necessarily the ones who picked the films. And while I did recognise one selection (umami had a film) most of it was new to me and there were some crazy good ones...

... but most of all the atmosphere of the late night screening was amazing. I got in at the last minute and somehow ended up in a reserved seat for Titmouse, since I guess they didn't show? Which meant I had one of the best views in the house. The theatre was completely packed and full of excitement.

So then this guy comes out in the skintight purple vest and cape and rainbow stockings. The boss of Titmouse comes on stage and picked up one of the paper planes to invite whoever threw it to come and bite a balloon in half (which would have been a better bit if the person actually did it).

Then came the directors of the films, mostly to tell jokes ("there's too much business and not enough fucking at Annecy" declared one director, instructing us to have sex tonight). After these guys... some Gobelins instructors came out to throw shirts into the crowd, people went absolutely nuts for these shirts. Then: films.

Actually a bunch of these are available online so... here, watch along x3

To open we had this stop motion earworm, Du vélo à St-Malo, du kayak à St-Briac. By the second chorus, the audience was singing along. The images are a bit lolrandom but I can't deny it's infectious in its editing.

Next up came the debut of David by Patrick Ward, about a seriously injured footballer confronting his rival framed through the story of David and Goliath. Lots of little visual jokes that made it flow even if the overall thrust of the story remained a little opaque to me.

Umami's Safe Mode was a natural fit; if you've seen an Umami film you know what to expect. Surreal character designs and a guy with a monotone voice. Looking forward to more of this series.

The Rubbings of Trajectories by Cheng-Hsu Chung from Taiwan took things in a rather Adventure Time direction in its drawing style, full of wild perspective shifts and morphing. I was a little too caught up in the visuals to take a lot from the voiceover lol.

Insomnie by Paul Utkay leaned on Stable Diffusion interpolation for its surreal shifting visuals. This was I think the only time, besides the one after this, I've seen AI in the festival, and right now the main use of AI seems to be like this, a visual effect.

Following this came Two Gracious Uncles Smooched To The Beat (currently password locked so I can't embed it) by Jon Dunleavy, a completely frenetic sendup of the whole AI art 事件. Rather than being made by AI it's mostly deliberately janky cgi, rapidfire jokes, and wrong subtitles as an extra layer, which made for a fun watch. The thesis was maybe something like, "this is all a bit silly". As a programming move, putting this right after the AI film was kind of genius.

A Kind of Testament by Stephen Vuillemin was simply fantastic, absolutely the highlight of this collection. The framing device is that a woman stumbles on a website created by another older woman with the same name as her, consisting of incredibly elaborate animations based on her social media photos. As we watch more, we learn more about this mysterious animator, who died shortly after the protagonist contacted her. Ultimately though this framing device is just a vehicle for some really tight imaginatively grotesque shorts that gradually start to connect up more and more. I hesitate to call it ero-guro because it's not exactly ero, but it definitely put me in mind of e.g. shintaro kago. the framing device works just right, linking the shorts and providing a certain frame for interpretation - the animator is terminally ill, so jokes about foot killing parasites and regrets make sense - without being overbearing. honestly just a really great film, the perfect level of enigmatic. i hope i can show more than the trailer some day.

Internet Gaga by Reinhild Bidner slammed into a much faster pace, a pastiche of Radio Gaga by Queen with the music video consisting mainly of cutout animation and AI deepfake animation of memes. Two minutes was about the right length for this lol. But yeah, haha, the internet, what a mess amirite

Todo está perdido by Carla Pereira Docampo and Juan Francisco Jacinto Prados was a fascinating oddity though. Stop motion, with these wildly distorted models - built in forwards or backwards slants and birdlike eyes. The story concerns a suburban nuclear family where the mother lays eggs, which they mostly eat, but decide to fertilise one one day, resulting in a baby with a wrinkled head hatching. The B plot concerns their other child who gets a rat inside her skin by accident during surgery. As you can imagine it went for the squick reactions. I can't find an online video of this one but here's a previous project by the same directors.

From this point on things got pretty wild. First up we had Uncle Babysitter 2 by Tung Yin Ng aka Tungwood.

as far as toilet humour goes? This was actually great, just relentless gleeful escalation. I got to chat a bit with Tungwood and his friends after the films, and funnily enough he was very shy and would run up to people saying 'souvenir' and give them a card for the film. It was very funny talking to a group of animators, which in my eyes is like the peak of the world's professions, and have them act impressed when i say I'm a game dev.

Anyway, this was a really fun short about a baby's adventure inside a man's stomach as the man desperately tries to pull him out. The breakneck editing really makes the stupid jokes work, it's kinda Imaishi in that way.

Granny X by DD Sheahan relaxed the pace only barely, telling the story of an old lady in a nursing home having a vivid lesbian fantasy that in the waking world leads to her careening around strangling nurses and stuff. It was fun visually, although the humour seemed generally a little meaner.

Monsterfuckers by the Tohu Animation Collective led by Ori Goldberg was something like a multi animator project with loops contributed by different animators around the vague prompt of monsters having sex. So this one's like, straight up porn but weird porn so it gets to be in here lol. The editing to the music was tight and many of the clips were really creative - but no sign of it online as yet so I can't show you.

We were really on a roll at this point. The final part was the music video for Cool Party by Simon Medard for a band called Cocaine Piss, which pushed the jank factor to maximum. It didn't do a lot for me but it kept the energy going. After that we spilled out onto the lawn outside Bonlieu and everyone gathered in small groups. Not really wanting to just walk away, I inserted myself into conversations here and there, said some nice things to the showrunner, met Tungwood... and then at last time to go home, packed on the last bus like sardines.

Honestly, even if it could have been a little weirder to be truly 'what the fuck', this event was a blast. I mean you know how much I like this kind of thing lmao.

As for Thursday... haha god it's 2am. I'll write about it tomorrow... or maybe on Saturday... but the very short version is that I saw Art College 1994 (solid, donghua with a realist style and richard linklater energy), Kensuke's Kingdom (impressively elaborate adaptation of a Michael Morpurgo story, had a bit of an Iron Giant feel visually), White Plastic Sky (a very compelling scifi dystopian drama from Hungary in a rotoscoped style similar to A Scanner Darkly), stood in line for two hours for Mars Express and still didn't get in, watched a bit of Perspectives block 1 (mostly bad, it's the block for serious social issues rather than compelling storytelling) and then tried Graduation Films 3 (sadly could not live up to Graduation Films 2). So a bit of an unfortunate end to the day but that's how it be sometimes...

Tomorrow I've got another packed day so I'm gonna end up really behind on these writeups but stand by lol. Annecy is amazing, I don't want it to end...

[neon-moon-beam]

I've seen these things widely disliked in Pokemon games from SwSh onwards, and I'm hoping they'll be taken into account in the future (spoilers for SV and their DLCs):

Nobody is a fan of long intros, excessive tutorials, hand-holding throughout the intro and at other parts of the game, etc (though I haven't played SM or USUM, I've heard these games have it fairly bad too). SwSh at least allows you to skip the catching tutorial if you already have caught a Pokemon by the time Leon goes to show you, but this did not return later. Excessively long intros and tutorials can make a game hard to get into, and it's worse for returning players unless the mechanics have drastically changed. Hand-holding makes the player feel like they're playing little more than a playable cutscene.

Time travel just...isn't a good idea if it's not leading to anything. PLA didn't even resolve its time travel plotline, let alone explain how Ingo got there. SV left so many details about the time machine up in the air. And just what was the Pokemon that attacked Mabostiff? Arven would have accused Koraidon/Miraidon of doing so if the more aggressive one had done it since he doesn't know there's a second one, and you'd think he'd react to a paradox Pokemon of the same species on the way down to the Zero Lab, but he doesn't. We're just left to theorize. If a serious plot point isn't going to conclude, it's probably best not to do it at all. Being left to guess, theorize, hope for answers later, or get answers in supplementary material stops being fun fast, if it's fun at all. Time travel as a plot point just seems to cause more problems than create an interesting story.

So many people are not happy that the player was forced to lie to Kieran for the sake of the plot. You can argue that yes, Kieran's grandfather asked the player and Carmine not to tell him the truth yet, and the player, not being a member of the family, had no right to mess with what was technically not their business. However, it just doesn't sit well with so many people, especially because we're supposed to be befriending Kieran, and in the end it's something that took a lot of players out of the story. It may have been the most forced plot point of SV.

A lot of people are disappointed that at the end of the base game of SV, we weren't allowed to hug Arven, or otherwise comfort him in some way. The guy just found out that his estranged parent has been dead for years and had to meet the AI that's been impersonating his parent since then. And all this after nearly losing his Mabostiff. Instead of being able to comfort our friend in his time of need and newfound trauma, we instead decide to take a long, back road back to school like that just makes everything better. Doesn't make one feel like a good friend.

People were looking forward to Secret Bases in BDSP until they found out that instead of having a variety of decor to use as we did in DPPt, we instead got a bunch of statues. People were also hoping to decorate the dorm rooms in SV. The closest we got was changing the decor theme and music in the BB League club room, but even then the options were very limited. People enjoy being able to make a space their own, as well as being able to show it to others.

The school uniforms in SV were...not well liked. After a few games with many options for clothing, being forced into a uniform wasn't fun. The uniforms were often hard to coordinate with (particularly the Naranja Academy outfit) and even the jinbei and BB Academy uniforms often stifled creative expression. A lot of people were not happy about the complete lack of skirts and dresses in SV. Apparently this may have been due to them not wanting to upskirt people on Koraidon/Miraidon, but in SwSh all the skirts have modesty shorts built in. Not sure why, other than time constraints, this couldn't be implemented for SV.

There's probably a lot more, but this is what I've seen and heard a lot in my experience.

[secretgamergirl]

It kind of hurts to think about just how stupid nazis are, and they need to be picked on about it more often.

It's late, I'm procrastinating about going to bed, and some nazi just wandered into a Discord server I'm in and started rambling in the most breathtakingly brainless way. He's not having any sort of conversation with anyone or saying anything relevant to the purpose of the channel, just... random stupid gibberish, mostly nazi coded, but mixed in with other stuff that's just... stupid. He's rambling about people clutching pearls over "the sexism and AI" in some banner ad that's just like, one of those generic corporate art deals with a bunch of random people smiling, and then he starts rambling about spiders and viruses that "shut computers down from epilepsy" and you can just see everyone else in the server having this mental debate over whether to just start shouting "what the hell are you even talking about you deluded weirdo? Do you even know what any of these words you're using mean?" or try to be more polite and diplomatic, or just pretend this loser isn't there.

Personally I'm biting my tongue because I have this strong urge to just kinda pin this creep to the wall and start interrogating him about why he's wasting his time watching youtube videos from other braindead losers and trying to parrot the incoherent garbage that comes out of their mouths, and how he expected people were going to react to this drivel, but I know this particular crowd wouldn't appreciate such an active effort to try and restart this piece of garbage's critical thinking skills.

For real though, it's one thing to internalize all the really really stupid propaganda and invent strawmen to try to argue with and all that, but even without the incoherent mutterings about feminism, this guy's making a first impression on a crowd of strangers that his brain doesn't function, he's not going to shut up, and he's just going to keep throwing out incomprehensible word salad until people stop paying attention or kick him out. How is that your gameplan in life? What sort of setting is that going to work in as a means of integrating with some sort of community?

This isn't the only recent example I've seen of this either. Someone was just telling me the other day how the whole nazi culture war sphere wasted like a week or two moaning and rending their garments because they got the idea in their head that in TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (which is really great, and you should see it), they "made Splinter gay." And like... they didn't. They didn't do anything that would ever give anyone that sort of impression. They actually made him rather emphatically heterosexual, and there's this whole bit about him wishing he could find a date. But... some braindead nazi got this idea in his head, somehow, and ranted about it because it was the best dumb culture war thing he could think of to ramble about, and then all the rest started parroting this idiot and shouting about how much they hate this movie that clearly not a one of them has actually watched, or read a review of, or seen a trailer for, or read a vague wikipedia summary on. They're just all making complete clowns of themselves for like a straight month. It's really just beyond pathetic seeing this stuff.

And like... I dunno. Obviously some of these people are so far gone there's nothing to be done for it but justified self-defense measures, but when these idiot children are first dipping a toe in the water, someone really needs to just pull them aside and ask them why the hell they think it's a good idea to take advise from the dumbest most reviled losers on the planet and start acting in a way that's obviously going to leave them completely and utterly shunned and ridiculed by basically every single person on the planet, you know?