#tasteless lol

[vonkarma2]

realized recently all the wizard ocs i have made fall into 4 categories of motivation

autism

ocd

wanting to use magic to kill people, just to be mean

inanna

[qdkdraws]

This very specific visual trope where girl is dressed normally and guy looks like he just got back from part-time job at strip bar and hasn't had time to take off his uniform.

I'm here for it

[ineffableigh]

Figured I should post this one on here as well! I painted this in CSP for @voluptatiscausa's fic "God Forgive My Tasteless Tongue" for the 'sex pollen' fic/art event!.

Pretty happy with it! Aimed to push lighting/shading on this one as well as facial expression, and I think it went pretty well! Didn't have to directly reference Crowley's face either which is always nice.

[woodenela]

why yes, I am back on my bullshit ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[virgothozul]

Mantaraybryn doing songs for CJ ✨

[volitioncheck]

i think i wouldn’t hate disco elysium’s collage mode nearly as much if it weren’t for 1) the way that it was marketed in such a tasteless, soulless manner, let alone the fact that it was a last ditch distraction from a dead on its feet studio piloted by dumbass thieving execs and released on the day of the court declaration, and 2) those dumbass fucking stickers

like if it had been included with the base game from the start and had been titled something a bit more tasteful and in-line with how i would have liked the feature to be marketed as— something like “exploration mode”, something that perhaps could only be unlocked after completing the game for the first time, AND didn’t have those stupid as hell visually and tonally incongruent with the artstyle stickers, i would have applauded it as a nice little bonus for being able to study and appreciate the 3d models and environments for reference.

[op3ra]

I'm not saying I didn't like the showgirl costumes, I'm SAYING the costumers were cowards for not giving rusty the same design

[randomnameless]

tbh, I stopped caring about houses that much when I found out that it's an otome/dating sim game with srpg gameplay sprinkled on top. In other FE games, you either gather supports by pair ups or by having units standing against one another. And mechanics like cooking in Fates were done to get some more stat boosts. And even if the avatarization of the game started with New Mystery, Robin and Corrin feel more like customizable characters than an avatar for the player.

In houses, Byleth is like every typical dating sim protag, that does not speak and the few times they do is by having the player choose options that may raise heart points with a character or lower them, you have to find lost items and when you give them back you gain heart points, you have to give them gifts to gain heart points and cooking now doesn't give you any beneficts in battle and only works for, you've guessed it, getting heart points. And let's not kid ourselves, tea time is like the "dates" in otome games, in which you can spam gifts till you raise the affection to the max. The only thing that distincts those points from the otome ones, is that those are necessary for proficency and for unit classes.

Heck, we even have a ring to give to the chosen blorbo in order to get a special custom made cutscene, when in pasts games getting an S support gave you a broken unit to deploy and a little blurb of text during the credits. And of course, calendar/day systems are also common in these tipes of games too.

People complained about awakening and fates for turning the franchise into a dating sim, but 3Houses is literally one in and of itself, and yet is praised as peack FE experience and as peack srpg.

(I could also argue that is because of this otome nature why the characters are "tell don't show" with their given trauma, unlike in pasts games when it was "show don't tell" (Nino, Reison, Camilla, Leif, Soren...))

Well,

When you put it like that, it becomes obvious that the other games (FEH, Engage) mentionning Fodlan are stuck on the uwu monastery part of the part 1 and not the, y'know, events happening that will lead to part 2 because as you said, the SRPG aspect is just "sprinkled on top" lol

However, the "pair up your units and build their relationships!" has been a non gameplay mechanics for decades now (FE4's was a gameplay mechanic, it had no support convos - FE6 added the support convos and gave a small gameplay boost but it didn't commit and we had no endings, FE7/8 had endings, FE9 had convos but FE10 removed them and yet had endings depending on the pairs, etc etc) even without avatars.

Then we entered the avatar era and if it added the "my waifu and my bae" shenanigans, FE13/14 were still more centered on the story aspect that on the "dating sim" aspect, as in, even if you could raise affinity with a character by doing X or Y, it wasn't really coded in a minigame - came FE16 which you analysed perfectly : tea time, gifts, eating, S-support CG, etc etc.

That being said, FE is a RPG, meaning it has characters : you play FE for the solid gameplay but you also build characters, and imo the best way to develop and write characters is to interconnect them with other characters, and/or with the plot/lore.

Sure, Arden functions as a wall/tank. But through the 5 lines he has, you learn that he is part of a group of knights, has friends who often tease him but is relied upon by those people and takes pride in that, he'd also like to find a wife someday and has self-esteem issues.

Is he as developped as, say, Xillia's Alvin? Hell no! But they're characters from two different genres, Arden has those 5 lines that puts him above any "generic" armor.

(I find it interesting how UO and in a way, FE11, gives you the opportunity to play with generics instead of playing with named characters, in UO generics will turn out to be better since you can change their growths, but they're generics. Do you want the RPG of the Tactics/Strategy aspect?)

So, I'd say that support conversations are important, I love Saias and Ralf to bits, but I'm sure I'd love them more if they had more lines. And since support through battle can be a chore (hello FE GBA and trying to get Bartre and Karla's supports when she joins 2 chapters before the end!), I initially welcome any way to grind those supports faster lol.

However, it can quickly spiral in, well, the otome mechanics we have in FE16 - if you want to build support then why not have an entire mini-game for that, and meals and chorals and whatever else?

It's all about finding balance between developping your characters without turning your game in a dating sim or what I'd call "playing the sims and pairing those dolls with those other dolls you like".

Still, let's not kid ourselves, nowadays the "dating sim" aspect of the series is, while decried by some, very popular - and FE is first and foremost, a series that has to sell.

3H is not peak SRPG not peak gaming experience or even in FE gameplay that'd be FE5 but I can't ignore the fact that its dating sim aspects might be part of the reason why it's still very popular.

[orangerosebush]

Socmed discussions about Saltburn, to me —

1) reveal that people are even more squeamish about explicit gay sexuality than they think they are

(And if this is what passes for shocking erotic excess, then we, in the anglosphere, are in a more — not making a comment about individuals here — restrained moment with mainstream American/British adult cinema than we were with mainstream adult heterosexual cinema in the 90s, eg the erotic thriller)

And

2) suggest people are increasingly making art that is in conversation with, if not explicitly nostalgic for, the 2010-16 Tumblr-era.

(I really truly suspect Saltburn is, in part, an adaptation of the tropes and aesthetics that were in certain “The Social Network” fan spaces.)

[wonder-worker]

A.J Pollard’s biography on Edward IV was so cringe lol (generic; minor but frustrating inaccuracies; intensely judgmental at times and oddly dismissive at others while never considering the broader context; entirely diminished and trivialized Elizabeth Woodville as both queen and wife of his main subject in the name of "defending" her; created a false dichotomy between Edward and Henry VII’s styles of ruling and lauded the latter at the former’s expense even though Henry literally followed Edward’s example for the very things Pollard was criticizing Edward for; had a downright nonsensical and thoroughly misleading conclusion about Edward’s legacy & Richard’s usurpation that was based entirely on hindsight, Pollard's own assumptions, and the complete downplaying Richard’s agency and actions to emphasize what Pollard wrongly and misleadingly claimed were Edward's so-called 'failings', etc, etc)

I wanted to buy his book on Henry V but after reading this shitshow and the synopsis of that book, im guessing it's going to be 10x worse, so...no thanks

[viiridiangreen]

The way I was bullied for reading HP incessantly* as a child & some of those same people refuse to let it go now that it's funding a war on trans people's basic ass human rights 💀🙃💥

[dark-ethereal-visions]

[vonkarma2]

this might be a bad opinion + it isn’t the end of the world or anything but when people have “fagdyke” in their bio I think it’s a little corny I’m sorry. Like you’re just bisexual and bigender/nonbinary but those labels are considered cringe and gay people in the 70s-90s were cool 😎 and saying slurs is edgy and cool 😎 but it’s a little pretentious bc you don’t genuinely come from that subculture or even know what it’s like. and it reminds me of how often people on here in general romanticize the aesthetics of it way too much like I get that it’s cool but also there was a lot of racism and transphobia (esp transmisogyny) embedded in them as well. but I guess that’s a very separate conversation lol

[mummer]

it’s really funny seeing people who have not seen it call oppenheimer Morally Repugnant Art that should Not Exist simply because it portrays an extremely disturbing event in any way because when my dad walked out of the theatre he thought it was actually too critical of oppenheimer and they should have talked more about axis war crimes so that we would feel like him creating nuclear weaponry was… more justified??? Lol

[blortch]

i think the guys all know jay shaving his head is going to cause a stir in the community, but theres a part of me that thinks jay just doesnt care one bit about it and doesnt read anything, but another part that thinks hes pouring over every post about it. idk. what do you think?

Depends. He used to read a ton of posts in the rlm forum, read the stream chat on prerec and on twitter he seems to be policing his replies (blocking, hiding replies, replying to some) but if I had to guess he'd be more pissed that it would matter at all rather than caring much about what people think of his appearance ykwim?

[basketcase1982]

Wait, I only know like, vaguely of the Warrens and their existence. They were traumatizing families?

hellooo sorry this has been sitting in my askbox for months BUT without scrounging for articles i can really only say that I think diagnosing troubled children with demon possession and performing exorcisms on them (and that inspiring the use of "demon possession" as an insanity defense, as in the "devil made me do it" case) is unbelievably dangerous and harmful religious bogus. this did cause a rift in the Glatzel family between the siblings that still believe in the possession vs those that saw through the manipulation and don't appreciate the intense media attention it garnered, especially when their brother was clearly struggling with meltdowns and delusions and instead of getting help, their parents called the Warrens. i also think it's disgusting to use the real & then-recent murder of 4 children as the focal point of a haunted house story, ie the amityville horror. they're well known at this point to exaggerate and falsify everything they write to make it more sensational for money, while using the real names of the people they write about. the families are generally on board but i don't blame them half as much as i blame the lifelong career grifters