#someone else should write that i think

[violant-apologia]

yknow, i saw you talking about some of the church things in fl, and wanted to ask if you have any thoughts on the monks of st. stalactite, and their relationship to the fl anglican church

i'm going to be honest, my ssea lore is weak, so i don't know quite as much about godfall as i really should. and with the little i do know... i'm not sure. they seem so disconnected from anyone else that their religion has morphed into something completely unlike what it once was. (kinda similar to the starved men, if you think about it.)

if i was a different man i would write a fic detailing the meeting of the abbot-commander and the bishop of southwark, and their theological debate that would, of course, break down into the two of them having a very sexually-charged wrestling match. whilst still debating the nature of christ at each other. but i am not that man.

[wantonlywindswept]

excellent: the clones/guard slowly putting together evidence to find the sith hidden in the senate, allowing for tension and other storylines to run parallel to their search

infinitely funnier: when you're looking for something, you see it everywhere.

mas amedda? asshole. totally a sith.

orn free taa? could be a sith, certainly has the lack of morals for it. 

senator amidala? probably not. but skywalker could DEF be a sith, so maybe sith-sympathetic?

that aide on the senate floor that always burns the caf? ABSOLUTELY a sith. 

chancellor palpatine? 100% a sith, no question no notes.

palpatine starts getting paranoid that someone's found out what he is but it's just the guard and the other poor bastards working at the senate talking shit about their bosses

[dreadfuldevotee]

"The Vampire Chronicles characters are exercises in the cycle of trauma and abuse and how they are capable of complex emotions and receiving and giving love and empathy alongside all the horrible shit they do to one another" and "Anne Rice herself was a bigot and had some shitty personal beliefs and just because the genre is Gothic Horror doesn't mean you ignore the way those ideas bleed into the writing. Not all commentary is good commentary" are two sentiments that can and SHOULD co-exist, what the fuck are we doing.

[epickiya722]

Seeing someone say they hope Gege gets hit by a car and others going "good" because he's sick was just... look, hate or love the story but it's extreme to wish harm on some guy over FICTION.

You know, one reason why some people stop creating is because people do shit like that.

Imagine being someone who writes a fic and someone comments how they wish harm on you. OVER WORDS. THAT THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO READ.

Ridiculous, isn't it?

[ladylightning]

thinking about a version of supernatural in which john is never shown. his echo and looming shadow still impacts the narrative and brothers the same, but we as the audience never see him. he exists only in the winchester mythos, in stories, in legend, in scripture. the one true god of the narrative, the forever absent father, a holy ghost. he seeps into the negative space of the narrative and he haunts his children all the same, but if there was ever one thing the show should have ever held as too holy for the eyes of the audience, it should have been the face of the father god.

[claitea]

i've had these scenarios written down since volo's debut in pokemon masters and i just really wanted to scribble them down and finally release them

[cicerfics]

...Okay, stay with me on this. I'm having a Thought.

What if! James H. Bond, the infamous 007, gets dosed with love potion!

(No, I don't know how/why there is love potion in his vicinity. But it's the Bondverse. It doesn't have to make sense!)

Let's say some supervillain is trying to dose Bond with love potion to make him fall in love with them/their offspring/their henchperson/ whatever. For purposes of manipulation! The potion is supposed to kick in after a certain period and Bond is supposed to fall in love with whomever he sees first.

But!! Q accidentally foils these plans by being the first person Bond sees, instead of the villain!

And Bond sees Q and he's like, "Ah, there he is, the light of my life, my beloved, the man who is far too good for me, whose very shoes I am not fit to wipe. I adore him. I am going to pester him so much so I can get all his attention for myself ASAP!"

Except. This is Bond's normal thought process when he's around Q. So he notices no difference.

And then, three weeks later, Q-branch finally uncovers the villain's notes and figures out that Bond was dosed with love potion and forced into a sudden and mysterious infatuation with Q! And then everyone is demanding to know why Bond didn't say anything about all these weird feelings he must've suddenly been having!

And Bond is like, "...I didn't say anything because...I was still conducting my own investigation about what had happened? I was playing my cards close to my vest! I didn't want to give any indication that I was compromised until I knew who was to blame! Just spy things!!!"

And most of MI6 (including Q) is like, "Of course! Perfectly legitimate approach. Well done, 007. Carry on with your usual daily business while we figure out an antidote!!"

Except Moneypenny is squinting at Bond like, "...You didn't notice any difference, did you?"

And Bond is just like 🙃🙃🙃

[divorcedfiddleford]

it is friday my dudes (little hearts added by @tazmiilly)

[add1ctedt0you]

Me, with the unpopular opinion that, in a wq lives au, where wq marries jc, novel canon wwx is not taking well the news about chengqing marriage

[puppyeared]

its so hard to watch time pass when things like careers and assignments exist. what do you mean im supposed to take that seriously

[wantonlywindswept]

*stares contemplatively up at the ceiling*

assassin's creed subject 17 desmond miles reincarnating/genetic memory fuckery rebirthing as star wars alpha 17 tho

[frogonamelon]

Donnie and Leo as Night Watcher and Nobody :]

First time around, I wasn't particularly happy with Nobody's design and wanted to take a crack at this concept again. He looks like Spoiler and that similarity is not unwarranted, he's generally more approachable than Night Watcher.

While I don't think Leo would've read The Odyssey, I could totally see him (and Donnie for that matter) reading Percy Jackson or listening to Epic the Musical and picking his name from there.

Since I made Othello's eyes Ninpo purple, I like the idea that the tinted lenses of his glasses help hide his eye color.

Original Idea

1st Attempt

[aftgphoenix]

So you guys know how sometimes teams will do team-building exercises like pouring buckets of water into a bucket behind you while blindfolded or something like that? Imagine Jean not realizing what’s happening until it’s too late.

Jeremy knows he doesn’t like pools but I don’t think he realizes the depths of Jean’s fear of water (and definitely doesn’t know about the water boarding). Add a blindfold and you have a recipe for disaster!

[northern-passage]

i've shared some of Alex Freed's narrative writing advice before and i recently read another article on his website that i really liked. particularly in branching/choice-based games, a lot of people often bring up the idea of the author "punishing" the player for certain choices. i agree that this is a thing that happens, but i disagree that it's always a bad thing. i think Freed makes a good case for it here.

...acting as the player’s judge (and jury, and executioner) is in some respects the primary job of a game’s developers. Moreover, surely all art emerges from the artist’s own experiences and worldview to convey a particular set of ideas. How does all that square with avoiding being judgmental?

[...]

Let’s first dispel–briefly–the idea that any game can avoid espousing a particular worldview or moral philosophy. Say we’re developing an open world action-adventure game set in a modern-day city. The player is able to engage any non-player character in combat at any time, and now we’re forced to determine what should occur if the player kills a civilian somewhere isolated and out of sight.

Most games either:

allow this heinous act and let the player character depart without further consequence, relying on the player’s own conscience to determine the morality of the situation.

immediately send police officers after the player character, despite the lack of any in-world way for the police to be aware of the crime.

But of course neither of these results is in any way realistic. The problems in the latter example are obvious, but no less substantial than in the former case where one must wonder:

Why don’t the police investigate the murder at a later date and track down the player then?

Why doesn’t the neighborhood change, knowing there’s a vicious murderer around who’s never been caught? Why aren’t there candlelight vigils and impromptu memorials?

Why doesn’t the victim’s son grow up to become Batman?

We construct our game worlds in a way that suits the genre and moral dimensions of the story we want to tell. There’s no right answer here, but the consequences we build into a game are inherently a judgment on the player’s actions. Attempting to simulate “reality” will always fail–we must instead build a caricature of truth that suggests a broader, more realized world. Declaring “in a modern city, murderous predators can escape any and all consequences” is as bold a statement on civilization and humanity as deciding “in the long run, vengeance and justice will always be served up by the victims of crime (metaphorically by means of a bat-costumed hero).”

Knowing that, what’s the world we want to build? What are the themes and moral compass points we use to align our game?

This is a relatively easy task when working with a licensed intellectual property. In Star Trek, we know that creativity, diplomacy, and compassion are privileged above all else, and that greed and prejudice always lead to a bad end. A Star Trek story in which the protagonist freely lies, cheats, and steals without any comeuppance probably stopped being a Star Trek story somewhere along the line. Game of Thrones, on the other hand, takes a more laissez-faire approach to personal morality while emphasizing the large-scale harm done by men and women who strive for power. (No one comes away from watching Game of Thrones believing that the titular “game” is a reasonable way to run a country.)

These core ideals should affect more than your game’s storytelling–they should dovetail with your gameplay loops and systems, as well. A Star Trek farming simulator might be a fun game, but using the franchise’s key ideals to guide narrative and mechanical choices probably won’t be useful. (“Maybe we reward the player for reaching an accord with the corn?”)

Know what principles drive your game world. You’re going to need that knowledge for everything that’s coming.

[...]

Teaching the player the thematic basics of your world shouldn’t be overly difficult–low-stakes choices, examples of your world and character arcs in a microcosm, gentle words of wisdom, obviously bad advice, and so forth can all help guide the player’s expectations. You can introduce theme in a game the way you would in any medium, so we won’t dwell on that here.

You can, of course, spend a great deal of time exploring the nuances of the moral philosophy of your game world across the course of the whole game. You’ll probably want to. So why is it so important to give the player the right idea from the start?

Because you need the player to buy into the kind of story that you’re telling. To some degree, this is true even in traditional, linear narratives: if I walk into a theater expecting the romcom stylings of The Taming of the Shrew and get Romeo and Juliet instead, I’m not going to be delighted by having my expectations subverted; I’m just going to be irritated.

When you give a player a measure of control over the narrative, the player’s expectations for a certain type of story become even stronger. We’ll discuss this more in the next two points, but don’t allow your player to shoot first and ask questions later in the aforementioned Star Trek game while naively expecting the story to applaud her rogue-ish cowboy ways. Interactive narrative is a collaborative process, and the player needs to be able to make an informed decision when she chooses to drive the story in a given direction. This is the pact between player and developer: “You show me how your world works, and I’ll invest myself in it to the best of my understanding.”

[...]

In order to determine the results of any given choice, you (that is, the game you’ve designed) must judge the actor according to the dictates (intended or implicit) of the game world and story. If you’re building a game inspired by 1940s comic book Crime Does Not Pay, then in your game world, crime should probably not pay.

But if you’ve set the player’s expectations correctly and made all paths narratively satisfying, then there can be no bad choices on the part of the player–only bad choices on the part of the player character which the player has decided to explore. The player is no more complicit in the (nonexistent) crimes of the player character than an author is complicit in the crimes of her characters. Therefore, there is no reason to attempt to punish or shame the player for “bad” decisions–the player made those decisions to explore the consequences with you, the designer. (Punishing the player character is just dandy, so long as it’s an engaging experience.)

[...]

It’s okay to explore difficult themes without offering up a “correct” answer. It’s okay to let players try out deeds and consequences and decide for themselves what it all means. But don’t forget that the game is rigged. [...]

Intentionally or not, a game judges and a game teaches. It shows, through a multiplicity of possibilities, what might happen if the player does X or Y, and the player learns the unseen rules that underlie your world. Embracing the didactic elements of your work doesn’t mean slapping the player’s wrist every time she’s wrong–it means building a game where the player can play and learn and experiment within the boundaries of the lesson.

[jellieland]

Cub is starting to feel like he isn’t a very popular person at the moment.

It’s odd. People give him wary looks, and step back when he steps closer, and politely end conversations with him. But everyone seems very hesitant to actually say anything about whatever it is that’s bothering them so much.

It's true that it is, on occasion, a little difficult to concentrate on what people are saying. His hearing has been a lot sharper recently, especially with the extensions of himself that he’s placed around the server to help spread the skulk. But unfortunately, given how widespread they are now, it has become quite difficult to concentrate on any specific sounds – even, on occasion, those being made right in front of him.

Still, even without any specifics, he’s been starting to get the feeling that he isn’t exactly… welcome, here.

He’d seen False, the other day, in Hermitopia. As far as he can tell, she’s appointed herself as protector of the hermits. He doesn’t think she’s consulted anyone else about this.

Not that he needs any protecting, obviously. Why would he? He can take care of himself.

But that… look that she’d given him. He’d almost turned around, at first, as though she might be looking at someone behind him.

There was no need for that, though. If there was someone behind him, he’d have heard them.

False, though. Back to False.

He’d never seen her look at him like that before. Not even in the worst moments of the Convex.

It was a calculating look. As though every moment, she was considering the best way to strike, and weighing it against the danger of overextending herself. The kind of look you might give an unnervingly powerful mob, perhaps. But one he'd never seen her give to Doc, or to Cleo. The kind of look you give to something other.

“Hey, False!” He called, and smiled.

Her eyes narrowed. “Hey Cub.” Her voice was controlled and level. “What’s up?”

“Oh not much, not much. Just the usual – spread the souls, spread the skulk, you know how it is.” He held out a few skulk catalysts. “Care to join me?”

“I… No. No, I’ve got- other plans, sorry.” She took a step back, but kept her eyes fixed on him. “Why don’t you… go do that, then.”

He shrugged. “Sure. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“I won’t.” It was harsh. Sharp. After a moment, she seemed to realise this. “I mean- fine. I’ll let you know.” It was less a peace offering to a friend than it was a deliberate concession to an enemy. He knows how to tell the difference.

“Good, good. That’s good to know.” Just because she’d decided she didn’t like him anymore for some reason, didn’t mean he had to follow suit.

She watched him from a distance, eyes like ice, until he left.

She watched him like a tightly wound spring, like a coiled snake.

But she did not strike.

So, yeah. That has been a little odd.

He thinks that if it weren’t for his newfound lease on life recently, that incident would have rattled him. So it’s a good job he doesn’t have to worry about that.

It still seemed worth investigating, though, if it made people less willing to embrace the skulk as they should.

So then, there was the incident with Xisuma.

This one, he thinks, was the most confusing of the lot.

There were some more looks – some from Jevin, Oli and Sausage as well – when they fought the withers together.

He was fairly confident that Xisuma wasn’t the biggest fan of the skulk. At least – he had been fairly confident.

But it wasn’t Cub who suggested trying to spread the skulk further in the End with a sweeping edge sword and some endermen.

And even after that, he’s pretty sure Xisuma’s been removing a fair amount of the skulk around Hermitopia.

There had been Impulse, too, unnerved and wary, asking Cub to dispose of parts of himself safely, rather than taking them and doing it himself.

And with all this came a growing… not discomfort. Why would he be uncomfortable? More a curiosity. How, after all, was he supposed to change their minds if he didn’t know their minds?

Joe- Joe was his friend, he had thought. Joe would get it.

And then he did.

It felt a little like missing a step, although to be fair that wasn’t necessarily uncommon in interactions with Joe.

He hinted, and Joe nodded and went along with it and was appropriately impressed.

Later, he was sold back the parts of himself that Joe had unearthed, both of them quite clear about where they had come from, and told that he could do whatever he liked with them as long as they didn’t end up back in Pix’s area.

He shouldn’t be surprised, really. Joe did tend to enjoy seeing where the chaos went. Why would he even want to intervene?

But then there are still sometimes those looks. When Cub is adding more skulk catalysts around Hermitopia, and Joe is quickly ducking in and out of the place because it’s not one hundred percent clear whether he's still an enemy of the state at this point or not.

When they’re doing that.

Sometimes Joe looks at him like he wouldn’t mind it if none of the Hermits told Cub when they left.

Sometimes, when he forgets himself a little, Cub wonders whether any of them would, anymore.

It seems like a double standard. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, he’s sure. He hasn’t found it yet, though.

Why, if he didn’t have the skulk to keep him company, he might even be feeling a little hurt lonely irritated.

It takes Xisuma replacing the entire floor of the tower for him to start to understand.

They say they hate it. Oh they say they hate it. Not out loud to him, most of the time, but they do. But they never get the roots.

They clear it away, and they leave the surface clean and new, or they leave it unrecognizably maimed by the scars they made themselves. Some of them even dig up the catalysts. But none of them get the roots, because Cub is still here, and so it will always come back.

None of them have even tried.

So that can’t hate it that much, can they?

They just don’t want it near them.

Well, he thinks.

Too bad.

He’s not very good at giving up.

[cloudcountry]

i'm noticing that when people request things and i write it for them, sometimes the people i write for dont reblog or give me any feedback. ^^ its starting to get a bit irritating when i take the time to write something and i just get a like from the person. the twst fandom has been talking about this since forever but literally the least you can do is reblog. seriously.