#the main problem is placing a definite design for each

[feral-aether]

Debated for a long while making physical feather refs for my own wings and how they look, but the thing is that they aren't always the same. They tend to shift day to day depending on a variety of things, not last of which are my interests at that time lol. A usual trigger for change is also music 'cause it's just so deeply part of me so it makes sense; as well as some emotions lol

Anyways, here's a list I drew up with the most common bases at the top and some others that have stronger visualizations towards the bottom lol

Fully aware I maybe should have shifted the Eagle and Owl as Hawks and Owls tend to be my default birds, but it's already been written in pen lol

Also, that bit in quotations is often how the visualizations come through in my head. That one in particular is for my Matron and Patron deities, of which I'm gonna do a pair for 'cause that feels better than doing just one. Plus then, I can add little elements from both into the other, largely with colours and little design bits but yeah lol. I have already drawn up bases for the first several here

And props to anyone who can guess the Matron and Patron deity from the colours and description alone lol

[noideabutsims]

Add on set! <3

🌟 Introducing Donut Co. Preschool Play Set - Add-On Nesting Block Set! 🌟

Elevate your Sims' playtime with Donut Co.'s Preschool Play Set - Add-On Nesting Block Set! This delightful addition to your game features a set of versatile and engaging nesting blocks, crafted from the same beloved blocks as our main Preschool Play Set. Perfect for infants and toddlers, these nesting blocks promise endless hours of fun and learning for your little Sims!

🧩 Stack, Nest, and Build!

These functional nesting blocks are more than just toys – they're a gateway to a world of creativity and discovery. Watch as your Sims' infants and toddlers stack, nest, and build towers, castles, and anything their imaginations can conjure. These blocks fit perfectly together, encouraging spatial awareness and fine motor skills in the most playful way possible.

👶 Perfect for Little Hands

Designed with the tiniest Simmers in mind, our nesting blocks are easy to grasp, hold, and manipulate. Infants and toddlers will delight in the tactile experience of stacking and nesting, all while developing crucial hand-eye coordination. These blocks are a fantastic addition to any nursery or playroom, providing endless opportunities for exploration and growth.

🌈 Colorful and Captivating

Each block in this mini set is bursting with vibrant colors, making playtime visually stimulating and irresistibly fun. The cheerful hues and whimsical designs will capture the attention of your youngest Sims, turning every play session into a joyful adventure.

🕒 Hours of Engaging Play

With Donut Co.'s Preschool Play Set - Add-On Nesting Block Set, your Sims' infants and toddlers can spend hours immersed in imaginative play. Whether they're building the tallest tower or nesting blocks into neat, satisfying stacks, the possibilities are endless. This add-on set ensures that playtime is always fresh, exciting, and full of wonder.

🎁 Enhance Your Game

Donut Co.'s Preschool Play Set - Add-On Nesting Block Set is the perfect complement to our Preschool Play Set, adding a new dimension of play to your game. Whether you're expanding your Sims' toy collection or introducing new activities to their daily routines, this set is a must-have for any family-focused gameplay.

Ready to add a touch of magic to your Sims' lives? Bring home Donut Co.'s Preschool Play Set - Add-On Nesting Block Set and watch as your little ones' imaginations soar! Order now and let the stacking, nesting, and building fun begin! 🌟 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Disclaimer: Please note that some clipping issues may occur in-game, as depicted in the photos. This is why the Nesting Block Set is separated and treated as an add-on set. We are working to resolve these minor visual glitches to ensure the best possible experience for your Sims. Thank you for your understanding and continued support! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ HUGE thank you goes out to@TaurusDesigns because they truly saved the day on this set. They worked with me alot to help me fix countless meshing errors, shadow problems, in game errors, ect. Taurus went out of their way to help me make sure this could be published, and it would mean alot if you could go check out their stuff because they definitely deserve it! @NicAtNite88 helped me out with testing these items in game so i wanna give them a shoutout as well! They grabbed some of the photos attached in the previews! <3 (All of our CC can be found by typing " Donut " into the search bar! All 8 items are New meshes, and have all shadows and LODs. There is a slight glitch in the shadows on a few objects, but it only occurs BEFORE placing them down in game. Once they are placed, they are perfectly fine! you can find examples in images! <3

Infants that can sit up can play with all block items, toddlers can play too! Most of my images have my reshade on - it changes the color minimally, so white may look a little off in photos, but in game it will look white/normal!! In images you can find the non-reshade example! <3 You can size them up and down using the bracket keys. [ ] <- these ones.  I personally, use the tool mod to size my items up and down, and specifically with these if you are wanting them to be "perfectly sized" i would recommend you grab the tool mod by twistedmexi! If you would like to use it in build-buy mode, you'll need BBB!)Re-colors, and using this item as a mesh/base is fully allowed! you can include the mesh, and do what you please with the item, as long as you link back to the original. There are posts for all of our cc on our main 3 platforms (Tumblr, curseforge, patreon. ), So there is no reason not to link back!

Will be releasing more content soon! stay tuned! ❤️ (NOT affiliated with EA or Maxis in any way! We just make CC! ) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Main set: https://www.tumblr.com/noideabutsims/754032309525774336/its-heeereeeeee-introducing-donut-cos?source=share ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ DOWNLOAD: Curseforge: https://legacy.curseforge.com/sims4/build-buy/donut-co-preschool-play-set-add-on-nesting-block Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/106703964?pr=true Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G2-xxqEz7y-ymMQ_mslu2m84iThOxXy6/view?usp=sharing

@alwaysfreecc @taurusdesign

[paper-mario-wiki]

"no art is good bc it's a misconfiguration of the natural world to suit man's vanity" Is an extremely misanthropic take on art. Is humanity not part of "the natural world"? Can one not make pigments from flowers or minerals? You say that the universe would never align so that a piece of art is made without human intervention, but the universe did align so that it could be made, you just assume humans aren't part of it. I understand that this is some faux-deep shit I'm on, but I love art and while I think good is kind of useless adjective when talking about art in general, to compare the concept of art to a tumor is a pretty bad faith take. Sorry if that was like, ironic or something and I just sent a rant into your inbox for nothing.

your faux-deep shit could never reach the faux-depths of my even shallower faux-deepness.

i think the main problem when establishing this argument in the first place was saying "all art is bad" because someone asked me if i liked any bad art, and i answered using "bad" as a shorthand for "not good". if i had known i'd be getting into this pedantic of an argument about it i definitely would have changed my wording, because things that are "not good" are not inherently "bad", which seems to be where the majority of the misunderstandings of my stance come from.

i'd ask you this: what could be considered "good" outside of something that affects humanity in some capacity? to be clear, you're absolutely right, humans ARE natural, humans ARE part of the world. but the idea of something being "good" didn't exist until humans came up with it.

100,000,000,000,000,000 light years away, two planets crash into each other, each with their own forms of biological life so different from earth's that we would find it difficult to even classify it as life if we were given the chance to observe it, but that doesn't matter because we would have never been given the opportunity to reach those planets anyway under any circumstances. is this a good thing? is it a bad thing? i don't think it's either, it's just something that happened.

because "good" and "bad" are code words used to reflect the societal values of the person using them, they cannot exist in a vacuum.

so if that's the case, and "good" and "bad" only exist to us, what does it mean to us?

well, something "good" is something with objective benefit or subjective enjoyment-- but subjective enjoyment of something can also contradict the nature of its objectivity. soup can be considered "good" because it sustains us and is therefore beneficial. soup can be considered to "taste good" because someone might enjoy the flavor. but "torture" can only be seen as "enjoyable", but it benefits nobody-- even if the person doing it enjoys it. that's just them subjectively enjoying it.

conversely, something can be objectively good but still subjectively unenjoyable, like having a soup that's healthy in a way you think tastes bad! you'd still benefit from it, even if you didn't enjoy the experience. but regardless of whether or not you enjoyed it, what has the greatest bearing on something being considered "good" is its objectivity, as it's something fewer people can debate.

now, all of that being considered, what can "art" do that is objectively good, without it serving some secondary purpose? something that is objectively good can be artistically created, like a children's hospital designed by a genius architect-- but its goodness in that case would be derived from its benefit, with the subjectivity of it being something that only enhances its good.

a piece of fabric, stretched across a wooden frame and painted using colorful oils, creates no benefit objectively, it exists solely in the world of subjectivity. how can something be "good" if the only thing it does is hold the potential (not the guarantee) for a person to look at it, and enjoy looking at it?

more importantly though, is that bad? it's not.

but it is superfluous.

^ please forgive me for typing all of this. im so sorry. it's just so easy to be pedantic. i promise im not a stick in the mud and i love art, i just also happen to be someone who is personally deeply concerned with rhetorically whittling communication down to the bare knob of its meaning (XRA style).

because it is something i find subjectively enjoyable.

[alexanderwales]

I've started playing Persona 5 Royal, my first Persona game, because it was ridiculously cheap on Steam. Back when I had GamePass, I installed it but never played past the opening, which I think is a bit weak. I'm about 20 hours in, through the first two palaces, and I'm not sure that my opinion is going to change too much, but I'm registering it now just in case (with some spoilers for the first fourth of the game):

I think having a division between the physical world and the mental world, which is physically represented, is super cool. I used it in Dark Wizard of Donkerk, and am overdue for using it in something else. Psychonauts did it too. Inside Out as well. I will always love this concept.

I don't think I like the gameplay. The last major JRPG I played was Final Fantasy VII Remake, and I thought the same there, so ... I don't know, maybe just a whole genre that I don't have that much of a taste for. It's mostly the random inventory items and pointless mob fights that I'm frowning at.

Severe lack of harmony between the battle stuff and the story. The mob fights have fuck all to do with infiltrating someone's mind. There's stupid elemental shit. The mob designs are interesting but mostly disconnected from each other and any theme.

So far, the psyche stuff has been surprisingly shallow, given that it's the main focus of the game. First palace was a gym teacher (Kamoshida) who's abusing students (physically and sexually), and sees the high school as his castle, but ... I don't know. I wanted more. We're literally walking around inside a character's mind, why is the character study so shallow? He should have layers, like an onion, each more horrible than the last. Kawakami is the other teacher we know best at the start, and there's no sense of how he views her, whether she's a sex object to him, or a non-entity, or someone he's worried about, or what, and I kept expecting that narrative beat to happen. I don't know, I think my fanfic would just radically change the entire palace concept so we get ten times the interplay between real world and mental world, and so we can turn these characters inside out and see all their gross bits.

I wish that Joker spoke more often. He's not really a blank slate protagonist, but there's very little personality there, as much as I'm trying, and that means that other characters are driving the plot and scenes and in general being more interesting than him. This is just a matter of personal preference, and a place where I definitely depart from what the average JRPG enjoyer likes.

I generally enjoy the slice-of-life elements, and to a lesser extent, the time management, though there's a part of me that's just screaming that I should be looking at a guide to maximize values. And if I do that, I'll no longer be playing the game, I'll just be watching scenes and doing inputs. I am definitely not playing this game twice, so if there's a difference in endings, or a big chunk of content I might miss, so be it.

It's relatively low on the anime shit that I hate, though there's still plenty of time for me to be disappointed. The way they're handling Ann is ... kind of not great. She was sexually harassed and then immediately after they have this whole "nude modeling" plot that's played for laughs and titillation, and it's possibly just a me problem here (avoiding spoilers for now), but "girl who was leered at and sexually pressured by her gym teacher being then jokingly pressured by her friends to do sexual stuff she's uncomfortable with" is ... not how I would write it. (The answer to "how I would write Ann" would certainly be pretty long, and I haven't finished the game yet, so maybe it gets better, or gets given more meat in the hangouts or whatever.)

There's still time, but I sort of assume that we're just never going to go into the minds of the protagonists, which is a shame. Tons of possibilities there, and I think if they were going to explore any of them, they would have done it by now. I guess I feel the palaces are underdeveloped enough that I probably wouldn't be satisfied by how they treat the protagonists anyway, but it's what I would have done. Let me see a physical manifestation of how Ryugi feels about his alcoholic father. Let me see Joker's defiance. Let me see Ann's self-image. Show me links between these characters, the differences in how they see the social web.

The frame story for the game is an interrogation by the cops, and I am not a fan. Half the time they're just yanking me out of the story I was in the middle of to signpost "hey, this guy is important". Possibly this will all payoff later in some interesting way, like halfway through the game we reach the "present" and the frame breaks. I usually like that. I've had thoughts on the interesting ways the frame story could be used, and so far they haven't used it in those ways. (Also, there's a bit of weirdness where ... I am pretty sure that I was fighting shadows and using powers outside the Metaverse? Unless the interrogation is actually taking place within the Metaverse. Unsure whether I can register a prediction on this basis, or if there are just more mechanics/wrinkles later on. So far, the interrogation taking place within someone's Palace doesn't seem like it would comport with the rules/expectations that have been set up, but there's still time. I'd prefer not being spoiled if there is a clever payoff or twist.)

This game is apparently 100 hours long, which means it's going to take me forever to finish it. I am enjoying it in spite of any quibbles above, but I'm also feeling like it's only 80% of the game that I want it to be, partly down to execution and partly down to personal preference.

[lurkingshan]

Dead Friend Forever: Notes on the Finale

We made it! And I am... mostly, if not wholly, satisfied. That ending was both better than expected and still fell short in a few key places, and there are clear indicators of industry business interfering with the final choices (a common Thai bl problem these days).

The Good

The hallucination sequences were excellent, felt super well grounded in everything we know about these characters, and the way it connected to the real world consequences for each of them was excellent. Fluke stabbing his own eyes, Fluke and Top dying trying to fight each other while they denied their culpability to the end, Jin maiming his own hand, Phee reliving his promises to Non that he utterly failed to keep, and Tee stabbing White thinking he was Non all felt like very appropriate consequences. I am devastated that White died, but it's not an inappropriate consequence in this genre. He got involved with a bad dude and he paid for it.

New's final moments with the hallucination of Non were beautifully done. We've been building to this final breakdown for weeks, and he was too far gone to keep on living. I said last week he was already a dead man walking, and I felt that every moment in this episode. He tried his best to avenge his brother, and mostly succeeded despite Phee turning on him. Phee being the one to kill him in the end was also a good final sin for Phee and completed his descent and betrayal of the brothers over the last several weeks. I appreciated that his hallucination sequence was longer and more detailed than the rest; he had actual commitments to Non, so his betrayal was worse.

The Not So Good

A copout ending and too many loose ends. This episode was great right up until the moment they chose to air an ambiguous ending to protect a ship and attempt to please all fans. They wanted to have their cake (keep the show's main ship intact) and eat it, too (punish them as the narrative demanded). Rather than pick up the axe left on the ground last week and finish the story with Phee and Jin getting what was coming to them, they did an out of nowhere time skip, set up a happy ending for them, and then ended on an implication (but not a clear confirmation) that actually they did die back at the cabin and this last few minutes was another fantasy sequence.

This was frustrating for a few reasons: it broke the mood, tone, and rhythm of the ending, it denied the audience the catharsis of seeing Phee and Jin die, it gave a nod to a happy ending for them that didn't go at all with the narrative, and it wimped out on delivering a more definitive and fitting ending for them. Not to mention that this ending left us with no closure on Non's death, which happened offscreen, or the axe left on the ground and signaled to us as a clear threat in the penultimate episode, or who exactly was behind the mask at various moments. Even if they wanted to do this time jump and final twist, there were much better ways to do it, such as actually showing us Phee and Jin's bodies still in the woods. Leaving it this vague was a copout of a choice designed to appease fans, and it felt like one.

In The End

All that said, I read that ending as a confirmation that Phee and Jin are in fact dead back in the woods. Jin's maimed left hand was never shown in the jump forward, which would have been a crystal clear indicator that it was real. The whole tone of the sequence felt wrong and very discordant with everything that came before. And I simply can't accept that Phee would be allowed to murder New and still survive this story. It would be wrong, and the show clearly knows that, which is why they acknowledged it with that ending.

I enjoyed the experience of watching this show, and I thought the writing was truly excellent through the first nine episodes. The pacing issues and weirdness around the Phee and Jin material began in ep 10, and we can see why now that we know the ending. I wish the drama had stuck to the courage of its convictions and ended on a stronger note, but I am satisfied that most of the characters got what they deserved. It's been a pleasure clowning with you all.

[anneapocalypse]

Why I Love the Hinterlands

The Hinterlands in Dragon Age: Inquisition get kind of a bad rap, and for kind of understandable reasons. For anybody who doesn't know the story, some context. The Hinterlands are the first open world area that unlocks for the player, a vast and highly explorable map full of quests, worldbuilding, and NPCs. So what was the problem? The problem was that the Dragon Age series had set two games' worth of precedent that the player could get locked out of an area and lose access to sidequests and other content—and the devs seemed not to fully realize they were fighting this precedent, or how strong it was, until the game came out and completionist players were getting exhausted and annoyed running around this huge map trying frantically to knock out all the side content before moving on. We still make jokes about devs on twitter trying to tell players that they could leave the Hinterlands. Lines were later patched in for the starting companions urging the player to go to Val Royeaux and advance the plot; you'll hear those lines if you play the game today, but they weren't there in the beginning.

The game's executive producer Mark Darrah has even spoken about this problem in his Dragon Age: Inquisition Memories and Lessons video on YouTube. From a game design perspective I do not dispute this issue. It definitely represents an oversight in the way the area is presented to players and the context they are given for what they should do next.

All that said… I love the Hinterlands, and with every replay (I have beaten the game four times at this point) my appreciation for this area and what it brings to the story has deepened. And as recent polls have raised discussion about the merits of various maps, I've felt moved to rise to their defense, so... here's why I think the Hinterlands are Good Actually.

Every map in Inquisition has its own overarching story, introduced by Scout Harding when the map unlocks and revealing itself through exploration and completing the quests within. Crestwood has the story of the flood during the Blight. The Exalted Plains have the story of the Orlesian Civil War. The Hissing Wastes have the story of Fairel and the surface thaig. And so forth. For this reason, I've come to feel that once you've progressed far enough in the main quest to have collected most or all of your companions, the most rewarding way to experience each area is at one go, as much as possible. Popping in and out of maps to complete one quest at time is, in my opinion, really detrimental to exploration and makes it harder to see the big picture. This is also one place where I really appreciate the invisible approval meter, because it discourages me from always stacking my party to game approval, the way I pretty much always play DA2.

At first glance, the story of the Hinterlands is the story of the ongoing war between the rebel mages and the renegade templars. This is one reason the Inquisitor may go there: to make contact with the rebel mages. They have been offered refuge in Redcliffe and are presently entrenched in the castle and adjoining village; the templars continue to attack the mages' position, and thus there is concentrated fighting in this region. Splinter factions of both mages and templars are also entrenched elsewhere in the area.

But this is just the setup. What the Hinterlands is about, its real story, is the common people.

The Inquisitor is first sent to the Hinterlands to make contact with Mother Giselle, in hopes of gaining some Chantry support. Seeking her out requires the Inquisitor to fight their way through the conflict to reach the Crossroads, where many refugees have gathered.

In these big, sweeping stories about heroes and villains, I think it's easy for the perspectives of common people to get kind of lost. One thing I do appreciate about the Dragon Age series is that every game does make a real effort to give voice to the commoner perspective. Origins has its city elf and casteless dwarf origin stories, and the player encounters many commoners throughout the game and gets to hear a bit of their perspective. Dragon Age 2 wouldn't be Dragon Age 2 without Darktown and Lowtown and the elven alienage and our interactions with the people who inhabit those parts of the city. Oddly enough, though, every human character we've ever had the chance to play in Dragon Age has come from a noble family; sure, Hawke starts out living as a commoner, but doesn't stay that way for long.

In Inquisition especially, we don't have the option of a commoner prologue to really drive home that perspective and carry it through the story. And while a Dalish elf, a Carta dwarf, a qunari mercenary, and a Circle mage certainly live very different lives than a human noble, they also live very different lives than Giles the farmer—not necessarily more privileged, but still different, with differing priorities and different stakes in this conflict. Bron the farmhand has no reason to be at the Conclave; he's here mucking out stalls, knowing the horses still need to be fed even if there is a rift spewing demons over there in the middle of the neighbor's pasture. Elaina the farmer is putting away cabbages for winter and hoping the barn doesn't get burned down by a stray fireball. And Elaina is one of the fortunate ones: her family's home and livelihood are still intact, for now. The Crossroads now hold many ordinary people who through no fault of their own have lost their homes, their crops, even family members.

Theirs is the perspective we get in the Hinterlands.

You don't have to stick around for all that. You can take Mother Giselle’s advice immediately, go to Val Royeaux, go deal with bigger and more important things and people. You will need 4 Power to go to Val Royeaux, but Power is easy to come by. Close a few rifts, and you’re good to go. You don’t have to care about these refugees and their problems.

But you know, something I notice is that the founders of the Inquisition spend a whole lot of breath talking about "the people." How they have to restore order for the people. How the people are looking to us—to you, Your Worship. The people need you. The people need to believe in you. That’s why we’re raising an army and building a cult around you! For the people.

Well, here are the people.

And if you talk to the people at the Crossroads, it turns out that what they actually need is less faith in Andraste’s chosen, and more blankets for the cold nights, medicine for the sick and injured, and food so they don’t starve. They need the war ended and the Breach closed so that they can return to what’s left of their homes and salvage what crops and livestock they can.

It is easy to feel a bit smothered by the Inquisition’s overwhelming Andrastian-ness, especially when playing a character who has their own religious beliefs, or none at all. We have a lot of characters trying to tell us about the importance of faith—their faith, specifically. We’re told that the people need to believe, and that’s why we have to play the role of this figurehead. And you can run with that idea and play it straight, if you want to. But there is, in fact, a different story to be found here, if you want to look for it—a story told in the world itself and the people who who inhabit it: people cannot eat faith.

And Mother Giselle, the person we are sent to the Hinterlands to find, knows this. She is certainly a devout Andrastian and deeply influenced by a life in the Chantry—but she also chooses to be on the ground helping people in need rather than arguing with her fellow clerics in Val Royeaux. After the attack on Haven, Mother Giselle and the Inquisitor have a conversation about faith, in which the Inquisitor points out, in one way or another, that faith may not be enough. Giselle may seem to disagree. Yet it is she who then leads the survivors in a song that does not mention the Maker or Andraste even once. The much-maligned “The Dawn Will Come” is so frequently assumed to be a Chantry hymn because it is Mother Giselle who starts it; even the fan wiki lists it as such. But I hear something much more akin to a folk song, a marching tune—not a high holy chorus for a cathedral choir, but a song with a simple tune and repetitive lyrics, about hope in dark times.

Perhaps she was rather more persuaded than she appeared.

When you ask your ambassador Josephine, “What do the people make of us?” she tells you how many noble allies you’ve gathered. And that’s not unimportant; this boots on the ground shit costs money, and most of that is coming out of noble coffers. But when you ask Mother Giselle, “How are the people?” she speaks of the terror and suffering of the people in the Hinterlands, and warns of mass starvation if the farmers cannot return to their fields.

This is the story of the Hinterlands.

And the density of side quests on this map reflects that. In addition to aiding the refugees with food, blankets, and medicine, there are so many more opportunities to help people in small but meaningful ways. An elven widower who cannot reach his wife’s grave through the fighting asks the Inquisitor to bring flowers there as is his custom. A grieving widow asks for the retrieval of her husband’s wedding ring from the templars who murdered him. A beloved ram has gone missing. A mage mourns her templar lover and the war that has come between them. A note speaks of two brothers, templar and apostate, torn apart by the war. A son has gone off to join the cult in the hills (no, not our cult in the hills, another one), and his mother needs the special remedy for her breathing problems that only he knows how to make. And so many more. Even the Winterwatch cult itself asks us to consider what it is the people truly need: the Inquisitor can enlist them as Inquisition agents, or ask them to aid the refugees.

Are all these sidequests vital to the plot? No. You can skip them if you want to. Are they relevant to the plot? Absolutely. Are they meaningful? To me, yes. Maybe they didn't change the whole world, but they changed something for these people.

It is so important to me that we get to actually meet the common people whose lives are depending on us. Whatever you think of the Inquisition itself, people actually are dying because of both the rifts and the war, and many more will die if these problems aren’t resolved. Meeting them, giving them names and faces and side quests dealing with their more mundane needs is so much more meaningful to me than standing around back at base being told “People are starving in the Hinterlands.”

It's understandable that the Hinterlands had to fight the precedent set by Lothering getting locked off, because in many ways the Hinterlands serves the same narrative purpose as Lothering: showing the effects of the present crisis on the common people and what's at stake for them.

I should note that the Hinterlands are not the only part of the game that addresses the impact on common people—far from it, in fact. The Exalted Plains give us a taste of how many have died for the Gaspard's attempted coup; Emprise du Lion shows us commoners kidnapped and tortured by Red Templars; the Winter Palace puts the bloody reality of the "Grand Game" in stark contrast to its gilded veneer with the indiscriminate murder of servants for expediency.

But it’s important that we are introduced to the suffering of the common people early in the game, when the Herald—not yet the Inquisitor—may still feel pretty shaky on their motivations for even sticking around.

While I've mostly been talking about non-mage commoners here, I do want to say a few words about the rebel mages as well, since they too are a part of the story of the Hinterlands. I hope that no one reading thinks I am blaming the rebel mages as a whole for what's happening in the Hinterlands, for what the common people here have suffered. The templars, notably, are not entrenched in the Hinterlands. Their present stronghold is Therinfal Redoubt, an old Seeker fortress, which is a significant distance from Redcliffe. The fact that the bulk of the fighting is taking place near Redcliffe, while we've no evidence of a mage offensive against Therinfal, makes it pretty clear that it is the templars who are pursuing the mages at this point, not the other way around. Certainly some in the region may not bother to make that distinction while their crops are on fire, but let's be clear about the story the map is telling us: it is the mages who are under attack here, not the templars. It is sometimes said that Inquisition deliberately draws a false equivalence between the mages and templars in this war. I would like to point to this piece of environmental storytelling as evidence that that is not entirely true.

Sometimes, it seems like pointing out that collateral damage happens is read as condemning an oppressed people for defending themselves. I want to make it clear that this is not what I am saying. I simply feel that those characters who have lost homes and livelihoods in this conflict are also worth seeing, and talking about. But I also don’t think it’s an accident that this is the map whose story is all about the suffering of ordinary people, and it is also the rebel mages who have their base on this map; the templars do not.

So, that’s why I think the Hinterlands are Good Actually! They contain an absolute wealth of worldbuilding, and their story frames the game’s central conflicts around the people suffering for them, early in the game when that perspective is most needed.

[hopelesswritergall]

His muse

A/N :So many people wanted it, so enjoy

Taglist(Comment, ask or message me to be added or removed): @daenerysapologist @howyouloveyourdragon @simp-aholic @thisaccountisrandomsstuff

Aemond would not say he is obsessed. Does he go out of his way to see you? If you count coming to the museum only on the days you work? Yes, then definitely. He once asked what days you were working, which was an innocent question. He just wanted to know when he could show you some of his own drawings.. So now every Sunday morning and Wednesday midday he is sitting at a bench looking at the paintings, holding his sketchbook tilted so you can’t see what he is drawing, which infuriates you to some degree. You were curious as to what he could be drawing, seeming to be on a new page every single day you see him. How many variations of one painting can a single man make?

It was Sunday morning and you had just taken your place in your designated room. Checking to see if the alarms were all working, getting some water and then it was a waiting game. Waiting for that usual guy, Aemond you had recently learned, to show up. You didn’t quite know what intrigued him this much about the painting, but alas, a customer is a customer after all. It was just 10 minutes after opening that you heard the oh so familiar sound of his leather boots on the floor. The way the light that was supposed to be on the paintings almost seemed to gravitate towards him, as if he was the main attraction. You gave him a quick nod and greeted him politely. “Goodmorning Aemond, coming to see the same paintings again? For the twentieth time, it must be already.”

“But of course, the art always seems to be a little different each time I visit. It’s worth it, the paintings inspire me.” he would say as he grabbed his little sketchbook and supplies.

“To everyone their own I suppose. We are hosting a competition by the way, it is about artwork inspired by paintings here! Why don’t you submit your work? You’ve been practicing so long, I’m sure you will win.”

He would’ve loved to, just to see your excitement, but the only problem is that his drawings weren’t inspired by the paintings. They were inspired by his muse. You

“Oh well I don’t think that is such a great idea….” He would mumble, almost inaudible.

“Oh come on, I’m sure it isn’t that bad! Just show me, I’m sort of the jury, I can find you some advice in advance.” You offered to him, while speaking you had ascended from your chair and started to walk over to where he was sitting. Aemond however hadn’t noticed this yet, it was only when he looked up to study you some more that he noticed you weren’t at your usual place. He then felt a presence looking over his shoulder and he quickly shut his book. But it was too late, you’d already seen it. Now you would probably get a restraining order against him, finding him a creep, a weirdo perhaps even a freak. He was preparing himself to get yelled at. But to his surprise it never came.

Instead you pointed out “My hair isn’t exactly that colour. It’s a bit off, but it was a pretty drawing!”

“You aren’t freaked out? Creeped out by it?”

“Should I be? I think it rather endearing that out of everything that we have in this museum you pick me to draw! I think of it as a compliment!”

“Well you are kinda my muse after all… I just felt this connection the first time I saw you, and then I couldn’t help but draw you, and then again and again…”

“How about we go for a drink? After I’m done working? The white stag perhaps? And after that we could discuss a perhaps more professional drawing session. Where I’d model for you. How does that sound?”

“What time do you get off?”

[fort-of-novelty]

Just held playtest #5 of my playing card Weird West Horror game! This time, the theme is REMOVING RULES FROM YOU GAME.

oooOOOoooo spooky I know!

But don't worry, you don't need to be afraid of removing rules. On the contrary, removing rules is a design tool in of itself.

How I learned this lesson was in my quest to improve The GM tools of my game. The tool I was tweaking was this:

Threats and Horrors

As a GM Move, the GM may foreshadow the presence of a Horror (supernatural) or Threat (mundane) in the narrative. When they do, The GM may put a playing card onto a index card labeled with tha Threat or Horror. Threats have their cards placed face-up, while Horrors have their cards placed face-down. When the maximum amount of cards is placed in the pile, the cards are used in my game's conflict resolution system against the Player Characters.

There are two major problems with my original approach:

1. It Takes Too Damn Long

Because each Threat or Horror is a separate pile and which can have a maximum of 3 or 4 cards, the GM found it difficult to naturally advance their presence. Often times we would end sessions with at least 1 Threat or Horror never even reaching its maximum! This would force the GM to work outside the guidelines of the game and just introduce the Threat or Horror's next step anyway.

2. It Kills The Suspense It's Trying to Develop

The main purpose of this system is to illicit suspense. As a player, watching a meter made of face-down cards slowly build up communicates that danger is brewing, but it also doesn't give you a lot of information. But I realized that by labeling each individual Threat or Horror, I was diminishing that suspense. Because.. it's labeled. The Players aren't stupid, they know exactly which Horror or Threat is going to appear when it reaches maximum card capacity.

So What Was the Solution?

Well, the premise of this GM tool definitely works, but the system is getting in the way of the tool's purpose. So something has to go. And I think now that I've written it out it's pretty clear what parts have to go.

Firstly, Threats and Horrors are just going to be a single meter of face-down cards. I'll let the GM choose what Horror or Threat they want to use when the meter hits maximum; whatever makes the most sense in that moment. No need to hand-hold there.

Secondly, let's do away with the labels. This is kinda already done by only have one, generalized meter, but it's worth saying that now the Players will have no clue what will happen when the card meter hits max. They just know that it'll be bad for them.

Conclusion

Don't be afraid to cut away parts of your game that are getting in the way of the narrative experience! But also, don't jump the gun and completely trash a tool. Instead, try to figure out what exactly that tool is supposed to be doing, and then troubleshoot from there.

Until next time!

[xinnamonbun]

*SLAMS HAND ON DESK*

OPINION ON RUDIE, GINGER, COAL, AND BOBETTE PLEASE

*SLAMS WINTER GLOVES ON YOUR HANDS*

I LOVE THEM A LOOOOOT!

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General Thoughts: Bobette!

I was definitely not expecting anyone to be a main, but it was a welcome surprise! It's also very fun that she happens to be the only toon with two five-star stats at the moment. Also I'm not completely sure if this is true but I heard that she's the new fastest twisted, which is as cool as it is scar... Her abilities, especially if the winter aura one, are very unique and very ✨❄️aesthetic❄️✨

Headcannons: Bobette!

She is pan! 💖💛💙

She's a cubby gal :) She has no problems with this fact, she loves this fact, it makes her more huggable (she is correct)

She has quite a bit of knitting experience, and unless proven otherwise, she taught Shelly how to sew during one winter :3

She is the type of person who will effortlessly lift up their humongous dog, spin around, and in a baby voice saying how cute and innocent their little baby girl is, while Coal is giving you a death stare (but Bobette is right, she is a babygirl)

She used to be a glitter ornament, but since it's been so long since they've been maintained by a human eventually most if not all of it slowly removed, she doesn't mind too much but it's a subtle reminder how long they've been forgotten by the world.

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General Thoughts: Ginger...

Oh...my...god... I LOVE HER!!!!!!! SHE'S SOSOSOSOSOS PRETTTY AHHHHH- Okay but besides that I LOVE the detail that she can make the prettiest looking pastry you've ever SEEN, and yet can't make anything that has more flavor than bread. I'M NOT TRYING TO BE MEAN TO MY BABY GIRL THAT'S JUST WHAT THE GAME SAYS- She is an artiste, not a professional baker, that's her cuz's job... SPEAKING OF COUSINS. HELLO???? I DIDN'T KNOW WE COULD GET ANY MORE CANONICAL FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS BESIDES SCRAPS AND GOOB, OMG?!?! I don't think they even have an interaction yet, but I already LOVE THEM!!! Together they are a vibe a true TRUE vibe, and they both pull it off EXPONENTIALLY WELL.

Headcannons: Ginger...

She is a demiromantic lesbian ❤️🧡🤍💝💜

She has occasionally made crafts with Scraps and Goob, and the craft siblings are still impressed with how beautifully she can make things despite the fact that she isn't here all that much...

Since the place she usually remains is so cold, she actually doesn't need to fix up her frosting all that often. She needs to touch it up once a year, usually when she's visiting the rest of the toons since that's when it starts to get a bit mushier again, but after she's touched it up, in certain years fully replaced it, she can go back to not needing to worry about it until at least next year

Ginger occasionally likes to put baking related accessories on herself, likes trying out different colors, different flavors, sometimes even different frosting shapes! Unfortunately though, like most toons, she can change up her style for a bit but there's this weird part of her that feels like she's doing something wrong by being different from what she was supposed to be at all, even if it's as harmless as an extra gumball on her dress... Weird.

Her and Cosmo Bake all the time! Er- well, when she's there. They usually end up being some of the best meals of the year, between Cosmo's excellence when it comes to flavor, texture, and understanding the balance to make everything work together, and Ginger's natural talent to flawlessly, impressively, and rapidly come up and make some absolutely delectable and gorgeous designs for each and every single food, from the turkey to each cookie, and the care that both of them have for the craft, it ends up being a delectable, delicious, and extremely desirable meals that every Toon looks forward too every year. Even Shrimpo!

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General Thoughts: Rudie?

In all honesty, I didn't like Rudie at first. The fact that he was literally just a reindeer with a very shiny nose wasn't very appealing. And my problem wasn't really that I viewed him as a Rudolph rip off, it was more so it just wasn't the same kind of creative that all the other toons were, that was just an animal. But after some consideration I think I've grown to like him a bit more, I still stand by the fact that his design could have been more creative, maybe a combination between a Rudolph and some kind of object to make him a bit closer to most toons, but ultimately his design is still cute. And as much as I found the design uncreative, I don't think this poor little guy deserve to get bullied so much :( Because ultimately he's so cute, and he's just a happy little fella :)

Headcannons: Rudie?

He is bi with preference for men 💖💜💙

Rudie just likes running around, he likes being fast! It is quite common to see him pacing around on the floor until you walk up to him and spark a conversation. (Just like me for real for real-)

Rudie always wished he had jingle bells on him, he really likes to play with them and he really likes the sound that they make. He figures that it's probably a good thing that they weren't a part of his design since that would have made the eventual Twisted situation much worse for him, but he's still ends up wishing a bit too often that he just had a little something to fiddle with. Especially since he can't fiddle with a lot of other fine motor stuff because of his lack of fingers, jingle bells are easy since any movement, tap, wiggle, causes them to make some sound. (Again, just like me for real for real)

Rudie isn't precisely the... Most focused. He's not brain dead he just ends up zoning out A LOT. And if he's not zoning out, then he's zoning in way to much on something specific, like the little white particles that came down anytime him and the rest of the quartet would visit, or the slightest imperfections of the wrapped presents that somehow made them even prettier, or the intricate detailing on the floor and wondering how far it goes beneath the floorboards, or if there's just dirt right below it. (At this point diagnose him... Oh wait there's a hand cannons I can diagnose him! Yeah he has ADHD.)

Rudie is actually kinda scared of the dark, and despite the fact he always had a light. He never really told anyone besides the rest of the Christmas Quartet and Toodles. He made Toodles feel better about being scared of the dark since unlike most toons that told her there was nothing to fear in the dark, he told her that the dark can be scary. Even if you have people by your side to support you, that can help guide you, it's okay to still be scared. It's just up to you if you let that being scared stop you, or if you acknowledge it and continue on anyways. He made Toodles feel less alone. She always wants to be so helpful, to prove that just because she's the only kid in gardenview that doesn't make her useless, so anytime she was scared she felt like she was doing something wrong. But Rudie made her feel less wrong... If only he could be here more often.

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General Thoughts: Coal.

Headcannons: Coal.

Her and Pebble play together a lot, even if that playing is just pebble running around her. Dandy and Bobette find this ADORABLE.

Originally Coal used to chew through Bobette's sweaters all the time, and no matter what Bobette did it seems like she'd never stopped. Then Bobette decided to gift Coal a SUPER thick blanket that she could chew on all she wanted. Coal loved it and to this day she sleeps with it still giving it little nibbles all over.

She makes a lot of grumble noises, and most of the time they sound very aggressive. However usually they're quite harmless, from her wanting food, to just being a little warm. Bobette can tell the difference between every single one. No one else knows how she does it.

If Coal stares at you for a very long time, she probably wants you to Pet her, however to most toons it just looks like she's staring you down trying to murder you with her eyes. But after some...years, of Bobette telling them that she just wants pets they started listening, and in return got some very happy grumbles. :)

Toodles was unfortunately afraid of her a little bit, even though Coal never really doesn't ment any harm. Toodles knew that Coal is a good coal dog but her grumbles and eyes scared her. Every year she slowly got better at interacting with her, but she was still a bit distant from Coal. Then one time when a blackout happened in the middle of the night and she started sniffling, it happened to be winter so coal came into her room and stayed right next to her. Toodles was scared at first but then it ended up making her feel safer because Coal could protect her from the monsters in the dark. Bobette looking for her dog and Rodger going to wake Toodles up found both of them sleeping in the bed next to each other, with Toodles hugging her (with her plushie in between). They decided to let them sleep a little longer.

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General Thoughts: Christmas Quartet :DDDD

They're all cutie patooties and all of their designs are very VERY nice to look at. I also love the fact that they seem so interconnected with other toons especially because I figured they would make them as separate as possible. They're their own special unit, and I'm going to be sad when the event is over :(

Headcannons: Christmas Quartet :DDDD

Originally after gardenview shut down all of the power to the place was cut off, and of course this was terrifying to pretty much all of the toons. Eventually Vee and Dandy were able to fix it, and produce more power, but blackouts even then we're still very common. Turns out the month-long power outage was pretty bad news for the Christmas quartet.

The company found their existence to be inappropriate any other time besides Christmas, but they ended up being so popular that they knew they still needed to add them to gardenview. So their solution was to have their toons, but make it so when it wasn't the season the Christmas quartet would get VERY sleepy and basically knock out for 10 or 11 months. They'd also be put in a cold room during this time period to keep them preserved, and at a comfortable temperature for them.

Since everything shut down the end of June, it was HOT, around the hottest time of the year! So they woke up pretty soon after the outage because they were too hot to sleep. They weren't used to being in anything that wasn't snow and when it wasn't Christmas our Christmas quartet were kept in a cold room, so they were NOT equipped to handle heat.

The toons try to help as much as they could. Giving them ice (that then melted), making cold desserts (that then melted), at one point even putting Coal in the fridge, wasn't as cold as it usually was but it still had a bit left. (That then no longer was cold, and was just room temperature which was higher than usual because again, June) eventually the power finally came back on but even then the frequent blackouts proved to be quite the issue. Eventually a bunch of the smartest toons came together and made a backup energy source that was connected to the cold room. Anytime a blackout happened, ichor powered fans would automatically turn on, and turn back off once the power was back.

Finally the Christmas quartet could be at a comfortable temperature again and go back to their practically year long sleep. In a way they were relieved but like every year, they had to leave the rest of the toons again. And unlike every year they knew that they were never going to see people again... Nothing was ever going to be normal again. And having this realization with the rest of the toons was...hard. But despite that anytime they came back for Christmas, was the time of Hope. It made everyone feel a little less alone. And they needed to feel less alone.

[danganronpasurvivoraskblog]

Dangancember 2024 - Danganronpa Top 24 Class Trials - Number 14: Danganronpa Another 2 Case 4

//Even though this may spoil the higher rankings of the list a little bit, I don't think it's a secret to anybody that in pretty much all the games in both the Danganronpa and Another series, Chapter 4 and the case that comes along with it is normally where the game absolutely peaks.

//It feels like once you get past the bullshit that Chapter 3 is, and start to slowly transition into the endgame, the trial that comes after it is designed to establish the emotional mood going into the final few chapters, and as such, it's probably the most critical point in the entire game.

//Which means 9 times out of 10, or rather, in this case, 4 times out of 5, the class trial in Chapter 4 is above and beyond the absolute best the game has to offer in terms of mystery, emotional impact, and everything else that makes the trials great.

//The reason I preface this now is because despite the fact that Case 4 of Another 2 just so happens to be the 5th time out of 5 where it really doesn't reach the same level as those other cases, it still retains its stance as a very decent trial, full of a lot of emotions. It's not nearly as emotionally impactful to me as A-2, and I definitely like the story of that trial a lot more than this one, but I like this trial more because it's a far more engaging mystery without seeming pretentious or dragged out.

//However, the short reason why Another 2's 4th trial falls so low compared to the others is that it does a few of these things wrong.

//I'll admit, I am pretty wishy-washy on this case. Originally I had it in 12th place, but upon reflection, I realized that I actually have way more problems with this trial than I do the opening and ending trial of this game, so I had to move it down.

//And trust me, I did so with a relatively heavy heart.

//Also, a quick warning, this so far is one of my longest analyses, because positive or negative, this chapter is just stacked with content, and there's so much to say about it.

//As I mentioned already, the main thing that 1-4, 2-4, V3-4, and A-4 have in common is that the emotions that they instill among the cast are CRITICAL to the final few chapters of the respective games.

//Game 1, 2, and Another 1 do this in a positive way. The sacrifices of Sakura, Gundham and Nekomaru, and Haru and Satsuki are the most important point of character development for the cast as a whole. At the time their crimes happen, its normally when the group hits rock bottom. Either because everyone is extremely tense around each other following revelations; or being trapped in a location with very limited resources that are making relations kind of tense.

//V3-4 is kind of the reverse. The mood is pretty upbeat throughout most of Chapter 4, mainly because Himiko is now starting to be more open, and it really does feel like the sense of cameraderie is starting to get somewhere, only for Trial 4, and Kokichi's Uno Reverse Card on Miu that also gets Gonta killed to completely SHATTER that.

//But in the case of Another 2's 4th chapter, the mood is already at a low point thanks to the bullshit Kanade achieved in Chapter 3, and this chapter doesn't fix it. It makes it WORSE.

//And if that's not LINUJ's way of writing in a nutshell, I don't know what is.

//Granted, I'm not AGAINST this kind of subversion of expectations. The fact that it was written this way is honestly kind of clever.

//Kanade's betrayal of the group, and the fact that even putting the VOID's aside, we cannot know the true nature of any of these people being reinforced, made it so that whatever structure there was in the group was severely fractured and on its last legs. Then Case 4 kicked those last legs out from underneath it.

//And it didn't feel forced. There were a LOT of aspects that went into how the group ultimately crumbled apart here. So ultimately, I think it was written well.

//Mostly...

//Because while I do think the progression is cool, some of the things that happen to get to that point tick me off.

//We've mentioned this before, but though I do think LINUJ is a good writer, I seriously don't think in retrospect that any of his work actually matches the greatness that Kodaka was able to achieve. At least not wholesale. But this is largely because of his personal way of belief being incorporated into his work.

//I've learned since that this may be due to the social climate in the part of the world where LINUJ is from, but the belief that LINUJ carries with him is that people don't change so easily from their way of life. Positive people can stay positive, but those who are negatively aligned don't always change their ways after inciting incidents. Which ultimately makes his character writing very negative.

//This is the point where I really want to talk about that because this is where that reaches CRITICAL MAX for this series.

//Because my overall biggest issue is that almost every character in this trial IS! A! DICK!!!!!!

//INCLUDING THE PROTAGONIST!

//Now, I need to really shed my thoughts and opinions on the way LINUJ carries this belief through his characters and how it actually affects me. In general, it does spoil my enjoyment of the Another series characters quite a bit, but at the same time, I can't really argue against it.

//There is some element of truth to the way LINUJ portrays this. There are just some people out in the world, as sad as this is to think about, who are BAD people. There are many people who just have no redeeming qualities to them, live their lives by being horrible or selfish towards others, and they don't change so easily.

//Take what I was saying about Mitch in Another 1. Mitch has almost nothing good about him. Not only is he the first killer, but his motives are insanely selfish and unsympathetic, and he seemed almost genetically engineered to be a piece of shit.

//But I don't mind that because the truth is not everybody IS sympathetic. Some people are willing to take lives and do unspeakable things for their own self benefit. It's part of human nature and is a fact of life.

//The notion that we expect some of these inherently bad characters to change their ways through the experiences they go through is, to be completely honest, a little bit of wishful thinking.

//But what is also a fact of life is that people CAN change.

//If people didn't change, character development in media wouldn't be a concept, period. And it's not like LINUJ doesn't understand this, because some of his characters DO grow throughout their experiences in the Killing Game.

//The two best examples I can think of are Akane Taira and Rei Mekaru. They both start to open up more as the game progresses and have real character arcs that make them worthy members of the cast. Even Akane's Mastermind reveal doesn't change this, because she ultimately turns tail on Utsuro and her ideals and sacrifices herself to save the others.

//And that is retained when she makes some physical appearances in SDRA2. She's extremely cynical in the final trial of Another 2, but there's still elements of a sweetheart there.

//However, I feel the need to point out that the vast majority of those characters are from Another 1, not Another 2. The characters in Another 2...honestly don't really change much from how they're introduced.

//And when they do, it's usually for the worse. And as I said, this trial is where I really started to realize that these people are actually not developing, they're regressing as the game goes on.

//So I don't really know what inciting incident happened between the creation of Another 1 and 2, but whatever it was that caused LINUJ to think this way, I feel sorry for him.

//With that being said, while I don't completely disagree with the way LINUJ portrays this type of human nature, I DO disagree with the way he HANDLES it.

//Take what I was saying about Kizuna Tomori in my review of A-2. My big issue with the way that she was handled is that LINUJ spent a lot of time building up the grounds for a potential development arc, in a very similar way to how Kodaka did so with Hiyoko in Chapter 3 of DR2.

//The difference though is that Hiyoko's arc was cut short by the fact that she died, which is something that she didn't have control over in-universe. Kizuna's was cut short because she straight up didn't want to go through with it, and chose to remain a horrible person.

//It just feels really unrealistic to me that there could be so much stimuli to better Kizuna's mindset, and maybe make her think twice about what was going on, and yet it all just gets wasted.

//But Kizuna is a very minor bad because this ultimately blows up in her face in a catastrophic way, and the way that she tries to protect Akane in the end...KIND of makes it better.

//I cannot say the same...about Nikei...

//I don't ever talk about Nikei Yomiuri on this blog. Like, I actively AVOID talking about him, largely because he's never actually appeared here.

//But in the past, when I have mentioned him, all of you who read those messages probably know this...But my God...

//I

//DESPISE!

//This man!

//Largely the reason why I dislike Nikei mainly has to be because of his fanbase, which is...frighteningly large, actually.

//He's one of the highest-rated Danganronpa Another characters, and his fanbase is among the biggest group of people than most of the others, full of people constantly trying to psychoanalyse him or even defend his actions.

//Guys, trust me, he's NOT that deep. He's JUST a PIECE OF SHIT, and that's clearly all LINUJ ever wanted him to be, and all he will ever be.

//I'm 95% sure that if you asked LINUJ himself to confirm that, he would agree with me.

//Even post-trial when we first see Nikei in VOID theater, he's so unsympathetic and cruel to even his own teammates, despite the fact that Emma and Hajime still treat him nicely. He's just a conniving d-bag, and little more than that.

//He goes through an entire character arc in this chapter, making it seem like he's betraying Mikado and VOID, and goes on to reveal so many important info bits about what's actually going on, and you think this might be the point where things start to turn around.

//Nikei would have been the PERFECT catalyst for not only the tide of change, but a survivor of the Killing Game in that instance, but...

//No. No, LINUJ just doesn't allow it.

//And not only does Nikei turn out to be disingenuous, doing everything he did for his own benefit and no one else's, but he's probably the most disingenuous and nasty character in this game barring only Mikado.

//Also...why are some of you guys out here shipping those two again? Do you...have a working brain?

//Okay, sorry, that's a bit mean, but please 'splain yoselves...

//In general, this rampant character regression that's apparent in a lot of LINUJ's modern characters like Nikei, and the fact that he retains the stance that they can't change from being absolute pieces of shit, is proof enough that he doesn't quite understand what kind of people the Danganronpa audience are.

//What's even more unfortunate is that the negative character development doesn't stop at Nikei. The other characters overall recieve it to the point that the only character in this chapter that I found...somewhat redeemable, was Yoruko, and Yoruko alone.

//And even then, she still didn't get off scot-free.

//But I kind of already mentioned that one of the other characters who suffers from this is Sora, and that really pains me to admit, because as you guys already know...

//I REALLY LIKE Sora!

//My feelings on the way Sora is handled here are...generally mixed. However, for now, I want to go over the parts I find negative, because I want to save the positive parts for after this rant.

//To make it quick though, because I really don't like badmouthing Sora, I do agree with people that this is definitely her lowest point, even if it does make sense upon reflection.

//Basically, the point that I'm talking about here is that this whole thing starts off when Yuki accidentally cuts Shinji's throat, and had Shinji died from that, it would have made Yuki the blackened.

//Sora manages to prevent this by slitting Shinji's throat herself, but doing so with Nikei's hand so that HE becomes the killer...kind of.

//I'm just gonna call bullshit on this, because this is actually the single only point in the whole game where I actually agree with Nikei. Nikei was unconscious, and Sora used his hand as a weapon. And yet somehow, that makes NIKEI the fucking killer.

//I think it's really scummy of Sora to do this, as well as the fact that she SEEMS to be guilty over it, but...let's be real, she's not even slightly broken up over it afterwards. The only way this comes back to bite her afterwards is this REALLY hurts her established relationship with Yoruko.

//She doesn't ever show any real empathy for the situation she put Nikei in, but more to the point, she doesn't show much sympathy for Shinji OR Yuki either, despite the fact that this whole operation of hers was for his sake.

//And I want to point one thing out before people start having a go at me here. Yes, I know that this whole case was ultimately set up by Nikei, and that the trial ends with him dying anyway. I KNOW that he's the scumbag responsible for everything that went down here; so this was just well-deserved karma.

//But the fact is that Sora DIDN'T! Not at the time she actually made Nikei a scapegoat at least. She knew he was a VOID, but as far as she was concerned, Nikei was betraying his own organization.

//Also, we find out later that the reason why Sora did this is because her AI is specifically programmed to keep Yuki alive, in the same vein that Akane Taira would have sacrificed herself for Utsuro. It's why Sora takes Syobai's stab in the prologue when it was specifically aimed at Yuki.

//However, while that was a self-sacrifice that Sora did in the moment, it still proves that she's willing to lay down her own life and safety to protect Yuki's.

//She made the consciensous decision to sacrifice Nikei here. So it's very hard to defend her actions.

//Sad as it is to say, Nikei makes a great point when Sora tries to apologize for her actions, and justify them as her making a worthy sacrifice. If she had honestly believed Nikei's words that dying in the game means they don't die for real, why didn't she just take the shard of glass and cut Shinji's throat herself? Or alternatively, take the gun Nikei had on him and shoot him?

//Divine Luck is the only explanation I can think of.

//Had she stuck around enough to observe Nikei setting the whole thing up, tazing himself, and THEN seeing Yuki stab Shinji and run away, it would have made more sense. But as it stands, despite the fact that Sora has already proven to be more self-righteous and unsympathetic towards people than the other protagonists in the series have, this is kind of a new low.

//If anything, the way that that situation looked to Sora, it would have looked like Nikei was collateral damage. There was no reason for her to suspect that he might have had something to do with it. Which proves that if it means protecting Yuki and herself, Sora is willing to sacrifice literally anybody else's lives in this killing game.

//Which REALLY takes away from her role as a hero. Even if we attribute this to the Akane Taira side of herself, that still doesn't make sense because even Ultimate Despair Akane Taira wasn't THIS egomaniacal.

//And when I recently looked at reviews of this game online, a few standout ones did mention that this was the point where, for them, this game started to really fall off. Because Sora was just so unsympathetic and cruel in this moment.

//As one final note, and one final critique of this trial, as I've said before, the big selling point of the Another series is what it does differently than the original series. Because most of the time, when it deviates from the preconcieved points of the main series, it does so in a really good way.

//Which is why it kind of disappointed me to find out that the chapter's victim was Shinji. Not only is he the big guy, and literally the big guy dies in every fourth Chapter of these games, whether they're a killer or a victim, but he was raising so many death flags this chapter to the point that when we found his body, it was HOW he died that shocked me, not the fact that Shinji himself had died.

//Ironically, the only trademark "big guy" who didn't die in Chapter 4 is Kakeru from the previous game. But he still died a chapter earlier.

//Man, these big muscular characters really suck at living through these killing games, don't they?

//I'm a little worried because now that I think about it, a lot of what I've just talked about REALLY gives off that I have an overly negative opinion of this trial. I really went all out talking about my issues with this whole chapter. But I do still like it quite a bit, and while it's far and away the worst of the fourth cases, as I said already, it still holds up.

//If you really think about it, most of my major issues with this chapter and this trial fall under the same umbrella of LINUJ's bad characterization and writing. But the big reason I still like this is because of the story elements of this chapter, and how creative they get.

//There are ups and downs to it, obviously, as I've already made it clear, but what sets this chapter apart from the rest of the game is how full of engaging twists and turns it is.

//The only other chapter in the game that had more twists than this one was Chapter 3, and as I've already made clear, the twists that we see in that chapter are uninteresting at best, and stupid, contrived, and nonsensical at worst.

//Most of the twists that happen in this chapter are fun. It all revolves around the idea of the students being trapped in an isolated environment with very limited resources again, and unfortunately, the Tower of Babel isn't as interesting as the Ballroom in Another 1, and DEFINITELY nowhere near as fun as the Funhouse in 2. But it's still an interesting setup and lots of cool stuff happens there, and throughout the chapter itself.

//The first one is Nikei's VOID reveal.

//The only issue with this it...kind of felt obvious. Nikei was probably the most predictable member of VOID in this game compared to the others. However, predictable twists can be implimented well when they're EXECUTED in a cool way.

//I'm gonna give an example of something that I felt similarly about, but it's also major spoilers for the newer episodes of My Hero Academia, so skip to when the text stops being inverted if you don't want to be spoiled on that.

//One situation that I felt did this well was the reveal in My Hero Academia that Dabi was actually Touya Todoroki. Shoto's older brother, and Endeavor's estranged and presumed-to-be-dead son who betrayed his family and went back on society after the neglect he suffered in favor of Shoto's power.

//Quite literally from the moment that Dabi was introduced, and the fact that he didn't reveal his real name or origins to Shigaraki and the villains, everybody guessed immediately that this was going to be the case.

//It was SO OBVIOUS from beginning to end.

//However, when Dabi does finally reveal himself, the scene itself, and the Todoroki family's reaction to it is damn priceless.

//Throughout My Hero Academia, the Todoroki family’s trauma is a central theme, with Endeavor’s abusive pursuit of creating a perfect hero leaving a trail of scars on his whole family, not just Shoto. Therefore, Dabi’s identity ties these personal stakes to the larger conflict between heroes and villains. His transformation from Touya into Dabi epitomized the devastating consequences of Endeavor’s obsession with power and his failure to protect his family.

//That's why the twist ends up being so good, despite it being really obvious. This emotional weight gave the reveal significance beyond its predictability, forcing characters and viewers alike to confront the ripple effects of past mistakes and the pain they left behind.

//Moreover, the reveal was impactful because of Dabi’s theatrical, calculated delivery, which weaponized the truth for maximum devastation. Dabi didn’t just expose himself to Endeavor, Shoto, and the rest of his family; he broadcasted his identity to the WORLD, shattering Endeavor’s public image as the new Symbol of Peace INSTANTANEOUSLY.

//If that's not a power move, I don't know the definition anymore.

//By combining his personal vendetta with the League of Villains’ broader agenda to undermine hero society, Dabi turned a familial tragedy into a public reckoning. This dual-layered impact, both personal and societal, elevated the moment from a simple plot twist to a turning point that reshaped the narrative.

//Okay, spoilers are over.

//My point is that Nikei revealing himself to be a VOID, despite how much I really come to hate Nikei by the end of this, is similarly impactful and well-delivered.

//Largely because, unlike Hajime and Emma, who already managed to commit crimes before they were outed as members, Nikei outs HIMSELF!

//He does it as a means of getting back at Mikado, rightfully so given how Mikado has already manipulated his group and reigned over them with an iron fist, but frankly, it didn't make sense to me why any of the VOID's would still work with Mikado after Makunouchi got executed. Or rather, I didn't get why Nikei and Emma did, because I can believe that Iroha would swear loyalty through fear.

//To have a traitor among the members of VOID was, to be frank, a really interesting plot development and a cool idea for the story in general.

//As I said already, the very fact that Nikei's VOID reveal went like this instead of the typical way is what saves this whole moment for me, because again, personally, he was the most obvious villain in this game for me. But the fact that when he finally comes out about it, and declares that he's BETRAYING his organization, and revealing himself is strangely gratifying, and a well-deserved kick to the balls for Mikado.

//It's a really cool scene for Nikei to apologize for his actions and give all the information he had about VOID, including how he used to be the leader before Mikado usurped him. It was moving, and this is largely why it pisses me off so much that he turned out to just be full of shit and playing to everybody's emotions.

//Nikei is the worst character in Another 2 in my opinion, but the reason why that's so sad is because this could have very easily made him the absolute best. LINUJ just fumbled the bag, not just massively, but intentionally.

//Twist Number 2: Teruya's totalitarian methodology.

//The next point I want to talk about is Teruya. Because this is a similarly great moment for me, despite the negativity behind it.

//I talked about this a little when I reviewed A2-5, but one thing I brought up is how Teruya's characterization in the later parts of the game really begin to reflect off of Tsurugi's attitude as we've already seen it in Another 1. This is the chapter where that really starts happening, and from what I can see, the general consensus is that people really don't like this.

//And to be honest, I don't either. I generally think being influenced by Tsurugi is a bad idea for ANYONE.

//Ultimately, the reason why Teruya went crazy with the gun is because Nikei told him to get it so he would turn out to look like the bad guy, which was a big part of his plan. However, the issue isn't that. The issue is that the gun and the change in plans came out just...super suddenly.

//It would have made more sense had Teruya gone more subtle about it. Maybe talking about his plan first, then adopting the heavy-handed approach if and when people started to disagree with it.

//Especially since it's weird to me that Teruya didn't try to argue an alternative with Nikei. Teruya's not only too kind for this, but he's had a few years to emotionally mature since Another 1, and he doesn't typically come off as this dumb in the rest of Another 2. Plus, no one had done anything to really provoke Teruya prior to this point, so it was unexpected, but not very well-handled.

//While I do generally agree with these points, I do have to defend this moment a little bit, because in a cosmic sort of way, it does make some sense. Largely because of a scene that was shown in this chapter that does explain it.

//It all comes down to one singular point in Teruya's life that stuck with him forever: Chapter 4 of Another 1.

//In the Utsuroshima killing game, Teruya had his memories sealed away like the rest of the group. However, one thing that becomes clear here is that his emotions are still there, and they resonate with him once he recieves some stimuli.

//In this particular case, he finds golden statues of Haruhiko Kobashikawa, and Satsuki Iranami. And upon seeing them, he starts crying.

//I generally cannot stress enough how goddamn TRAUMATIC Haru and Satsuki's deaths were for Teruya. When they both died, they were at odds with each other, and he never quite got the chance to make amends or show his guilt before they did.

//And what's even more vital to keep in mind is that the situation under which they were at odds is SHOCKINGLY similar to the Tower of Babel situation in SDRA2. In Another 1, Teruya and Haru were fighting each other because the other kept stealing food for themselves, and also blaming the other.

//And now they're stuck in an almost identical situation, so what does he do?

//Even if he didn't know why, Teruya would probably be freaking out, and as we've seen, he tends to take any option he can if it means that he and his friends can survive. So he adopts a very similar psychopathic stance as Tsurugi did in that chapter here.

//Twist Number 3: Sora falling off the tower, and protag switching to Syobai.

//I love protag switches in these games, since they're almost always peak moments (V3-6 notwithstanding), in any Dangan or Fangan. And this situation was super fun upon reflection.

//I'm not gonna spend too long on this one, because I can just say it was cool and be done with it. Not the biggest Syobai fan if I'm being honest, but switching to him and seeing the stuff happen from his perspective was pretty insightful and entertaining.

//Twist Number 4: Sora sacrificing Nikei.

//I already talked about this point and how I do find fault with it, but now I want to talk about why I actually do really like this twist.

//The fact that Sora DID do this is just generally super shocking, and again, as I've said many times before, it's different from anything we've seen before, and that's what makes it great.

//The characters in Danganronpa that I consider to be protagonists are Makoto, Hajime, Shuichi, Kaede, Komaru, Toko, Yuki, and Sora. And of all those people, the closest one we've ever had to one of them committing any kind of crime is Kaede.

//Yet in the end, though she was executed, it was only an attempted murder, and done out of consideration for everyone other than herself. That is not the case for Sora, and I think it is really refreshing to have a main character show this kind of weakness in a killing game.

//Hajime and Yuki did almost commit a crime in Chapter 4 of DR2 and Another 1 respectively, but Chiaki and Tsurugi ultimately stopped them, and we all knew that they would never do it anyway.

//Now, upon reflection, we know now that the reason why Sora did this is because she was programmed to protect Yuki from harm. So she likely did this without realizing it. But that doesn't stop it from being shocking in the moment.

//As I said already, Sora is never established to be an all-loving hero like how Makoto or the other DR protagonists were. But up until this point, she's still established as a morally ambiguous, yet inherently good character, someone the audience can trust to solve mysteries and navigate the group through tense situations.

//But Sora's decision to take such dramatic and deliberate action here calls into question someone's preconcieved perception of her character and causes them to reconsider her moral compass. This maneuver emphasizes the Danganronpa series' central theme of survival vs morality, demonstrating how even the protagonist can be forced to violate their ideals in order to protect someone they care about.

//And again, yeah, we already kind of saw that with Kaede, but moreover, the twist works exceptionally well because of the clever manipulation of Nikei's own scheme.

//Nikei’s initial plan to turn Yuki into the blackened and orchestrate the events of the trial to ruin Mikado's ultimate plan paints him as the quintessential schemer. So when Sora uses his unconscious hand to incriminate him, it creates poetic irony; the manipulator becomes the manipulated.

//Just in general, the fact that we see Sora’s ingenuity and resourcefulness being used to cross ethical boundaries adds an unpredictable edge to her character arc. And it's largely a reason WHY she's my favourite MC, despite the personal issues I have with this.

//The twist also heightens the stakes for the trial itself. With Sora framing Nikei, the trial becomes a battle of wits between all parties, and makes the case not just about solving a murder but also about how far each character is willing to go to achieve their goals. It transforms the trial into an emotionally charged and morally gray conflict, because hardly ANYBODY is right in this situation.

//As a quick side note, one thing I really do like that is kind of subtle and not really drawn attention to is the fact that Nikei's podium is positioned right next to Sora's. So when he was going on that tirade, she was getting full blast of it, and I think that's extremely fun.

//And the great irony is how this plays into the final twist, because it shows the only innocent one here...is the victim.

//Twist 5 is the truth behind what actually happened. Shinji's suicide.

//Now, I feel the need to bring up that this is only the second time in any of these games that we've seen someone kill themselves instead of anyone else. And in general, Fanganronpa's don't always typically bring up the suicide route other than as a possibility.

//But it's easy to see why this is. Sakura's sacrifice in Chapter 4 of DR1 was so perfect, that topping it in terms of the emotional impact and the circumstances surrounding it is near impossible.

//In fact, I'm fairly sure that's the same reason why Danganronpa's MAIN series has only done the suicide once. Sakura set a benchmark that just could not be jumped, even if they tried.

//And Shinji's case certainly doesn't, but it's still impactful in its own way.

//There are, arguably, a lot of similarities between Sakura's suicide and Shinji's suicide:

The obvious fact is that both of them are the trademark big character with a heart of gold who seemed untouchable. Their big size and big voice made them appear intimidating, but they are actually the most sweethearted student of the bunch.

Both of them fell into these situations because of suspicions surrounding them. Sakura was outed as a spy by Monokuma, while Nikei made everyone suspect Shinji might be a traitor too.

Sakura and Shinji both got attacked by two seperate people before they decided to end their own lives. Sakura was attacked by Hiro, and then Toko, while Shinji was attacked by Yuki, then Sora with Nikei's hand.

The reason they killed themselves is mainly so they could protect the relationships and the lives of the other students, particularly one student that they had formed a strong bond with (Hina and Yuki respectively)

//However, despite all these points of commonality, the case is different enough so that Shinji's actions stand on their own merits. And I am ultimately glad that LINUJ brought the suicide case idea back.

//Obviously, I'm not HAPPY that Shinji killed himself; don't get that twisted. I'm just glad that somebody else took a crack at it, and it was done in a way that was meaningful and emotional, just as Sakura's was.

//It also isn't as predictable as it might sound. Upon reflection, knowing what kind of character that Shinji was, this was probably the only way he could go out that would have been meaningful enough for him, but that doesn't make the situation any less heartbreaking.

//The difference between Shinji and Kakeru in the Another series is that Kakeru was not as integral to anybody's character arcs as Shinji was to Yuki's. Had they switched places, it wouldn't have meant as much, but as things stand out, this is what really reinforced my respect for Shinji as a character, and what really marked the end times for this game.

//Because if you think about it, Shinji was the last innocent man standing on this island.

//Mikado is, obviously, the mastermind, Nikei staged this whole crime and is a member of VOID, as is Iroha, Yuki and Sora both stabbed him, and Syobai is...well...Syobai. Yoruko is almost an exception, but she's also not as sweet as one might think, as shown in Chapter 5.

//The last twist I want to go over is what happens with Nikei's death after all of this.

//Even though this was a suicide, this trial still ends with an execution, and it's the first chance we get to see a true villainous side to Mikado prior to the shit he pulls in A2-5.

//I have mixed feelings about this twist considering what it implicates, but at the same time, the killing game has already been established at this point to feel unfair, and the way Mikado does this is fucking tense and HEART-POUNDING.

//Nikei's act of defiance is a culmination of his character arc. The moment his plan backfires, it underscores the overwhelming power imbalance between Mikado and the rest of the cast, especially with how the gun destroys Nikei's right hand, which he places great importance on.

//Kind of symbolically Mikado's way of saying "I can take away everything that matters to you with a snap of my fingers." Unlike the rest of the game prior to this, it truly cements him as an omnipotent antagonist, always one step ahead of the others, making any resistance feel almost hopeless.

//The new killing game rule prohibiting betrayal of VOID is an ingenious twist that amplifies this cruelty and strategic brilliance. By adding the rule immediately after Nikei's rebellion, Mikado not only punishes Nikei but also sends a chilling message to the remaining participants: defying him will not only fail but will lead to certain death.

//Finally, Nikei’s execution is a masterstroke of dramatic irony and narrative payoff. Throughout the game, Nikei has been a manipulator, attempting to control outcomes for his benefit. His final moments, where he loses not only his hand but also his life in a gruesome, predetermined fashion, reflect the very lack of control he tried so hard to avoid.

//And...I really did just spend an entire evening of my life going on a huge analysis of a trial that I actually don't care that much about, lmfao!

//I think it's because there's largely so much to talk about with this trial regardless of whether or not you actually like it or hate it. If you want a deep analysis, these points all need to be brought up.

//Overall, I think the reason why Trial 4, despite being very problematic in some pretty major ways, still turns out to be a really good case for this game overall is because how much of an impact it had both on the emotions of a player, and on the story in general, which is far more than can be said for Chapter 3.

//It's not as long, complicated, or convoluted, but it's a rollercoaster in its own right, being completely disorganized, and chock full of arguments, emotions, and feelings in a really cool way.

[yet-another-deanw-girl]

Chapter 6: A Girl Stuck in a Bunker

||The Prophecy Series||

She knew for 15 years that this day would come. She knew her destiny had already been written. That her death had been foretold.

She knew she would have to stop him. She knew she would have to kill him. And she thought she was prepared for all of it. But the day she met him she realized how wrong she was…

Set in Season 10

Pairing: MoC!Dean x Female!OC

Warnings: the usual SPN, language, miner injury

Episode mapping: This chapter takes place during several episodes - episode 5 of season 10 "Fan Fiction", episode 6 of season 10 "Ask Jeeves", episode 7 of season 10 "Girls, Girls, Girls", episode 8 of season 10 "Hibbing 911"

Note: The events of this story are following season 10 of Supernatural and are taking place between October 2014 and July 2015. I tried to make sure that all the references to weapons, tech, etc. are accurate with the time period.

AN: This is my first time writing a fanfic but the story has been in my head for too long and it just needed to get out. I hope you like it.

AN: English is not my first language, I apologize for any mistakes.

After a half an hour argument between Dean and Sam, a couple days after we first met, I was allowed to have my phone and my laptop back. 

Another five days after that, I was granted permission to take some adapters, cables and tools from my car but Sam was with me the entire time. 

After two weeks living together in the bunker, Sam accepted the fact that he cannot follow me everywhere and watch my every move.

He is still barely talking to me and throws me measuring looks every time we pass each other in the hallway.

Created with Microsoft Designer

The boys are on a hunt, some drama teacher went missing after rehearsal, and I'm buried in cables, gears and tools. I had connected to the bunker's mainframe and am trying to figure out what is wrong with it. The poor thing has not been upgraded since the 1940s. So… I took the drastic decision to make some improvements while I'm searching for the main problem. This is exactly how I ended up tangled in an inferno of wires. And this is how the boys find me when they come back from the case. "Wow… Is that what you did when we were gone? Are you sure you know what you are doing?" "Yes, I'm sure…" I pick my head from under the counter. "Oh my God! And those glasses! You are trying to check all the nerdy boxes or something?" "Glasses or no glasses, I can still…" I start with a cold tone but when I look at Dean, I see the sneer on his face "Oh! You think you're funny?" "I know for a fact that I am!" "You are not." I say but the smile on my face contradicts my words. "How was the case?" "It was… strange… even for us."

I'm laughing uncontrollably after Dean finished telling me about the case. Yes… I'm laughing with the man I'm going to kill… My attempts to keep him away are not going as well as expected. "There are books about you! And they did their own interpretation of your lives!? In a musical!? I… I can't… That's the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. I'll have to check those books…" "Don't you even dare!" I return my focus to my work but I keep randomly bursting into laughter in the next few hours.  This is hilarious!  Books and musicals!  I'll definitely have to find those books.  That's an interesting concept, a prophet turned author.  Did some person like this Chuck, have also written my prophecy? And if so, did they know more about how I am supposed to stop the unstoppable Knight of Hell? But even if they did… this was at least 15 years ago… and since there can be only one prophet at a time… and the boys know at least two… Another dead end…

"What the hell?" I hear Dean yelling from the kitchen. I rush through the maze of hallways and almost bump into Sam on the kitchen's doorway. "Dean? What's going on?" Sam asks. "What's going on?! What the hell is this!" He points to the countertop.

Image from Pinterest

"An espresso machine, obviously." I answer and roll my eyes with annoyance.  He scared the shit out of me!  And for what!?  He is such a drama queen.  "I can no longer drink this vomit you Americans call coffee." "But…" "I'm not forcing you to use it! Yours is still there. You can keep using it. But I can't." I turn around and head to the door.  I see Sam trying to contain his smile. He is really enjoying this situation but will never show it in front of me. "How did this appear here?" He asks instead. "Online shopping, Sam… Don't worry. I ordered just a coffee machine… No weapons… I promise…" "You ordered it here!?" "I picked it up from the delivery center in town… I'm not stupid! I know how to keep a bunker a secret, remember?"

My schedule is an infinite loop of little to no sleep, coffee in large doses, coding, debugging and searching through every corner of the bunker's system I can think about, more coffee and pizza.  And then again.  And again.  The boys had been on a couple of hunts, but the way they are searching for cases is inefficient. They go through the internet and local news sites for unusual occurrences. I thought all the bunkers have a notification system… But maybe this one is too old for that… Maybe I should write them an algorithm for this.

I notice Sam is carefully watching Dean. Again. He started to do that after their last case.  Something had happened that made Sam worried.  But he will never tell me.  All I know is that it was a case involving a shifter.  It sounded like an Agatha Christie novel. The maid turns out to be the daughter of the late rich lady and a shifter. And was planning to kill all her greedy family members. She had tricked the boys by giving them fake silverware and they were not able to identify her as the shifter until much later.  "That's why I'm always wearing my rings." I told Dean while sitting on the couch. "This one is silver, the other one - iron, and this one - steel." But something else had happened on that case that makes Sam worry about Dean. "There is still time. At least 5 months. Maybe more." I say to Sam when we happened to be in the kitchen at the same time. "I'm not going to let you kill him. I'll find another way." Is the only thing he says to me and walks out of the room. "Do you honestly believe that I want to do it?" I mutter to myself.

"Em, we are going." Dean shouts.  The boys were digging through the Men of Letters archive for the past 4 days.  When they are in the bunker, I spend a lot of time with Dean. Sometimes just sitting in the library, other times he stays with me for hours in the mainframe room, exchanging stories and talking about old cases.  And here they are going again on a hunt.  I have left the bunker a couple of times to go to town for supplies or for the next package of equipment or gear for the bunker's upgrade but for the most time I was stuck in here.

"Ok, sit here. Easy, be careful."  The boys are back. I walk in the library and see Sam sitting on the edge of the table, an arrow sticking from his right shoulder. "What happened?" "It was an accident. We were at this sheriff's retreat and there was a weapons exhibit. One of the deputies didn't know how to handle a crossbow." Dean answers me. Sam is ignoring me, like usual. "Need help with it?" "I don't need and I don't want your help." Sam declares. I'm going to leave the room and leave them to handle it themselves when I see Dean preparing to try and break the arrow. "Stop!" I yell before he can cause irreversible damage to his brother's shoulder. "It looks like you don't have an idea how to handle an arrow too..." I try to wipe my hands clean of all the grime while I walk to them. My efforts are in vain so I grab some medical gloves from the first aid kit. "I said, I do not want your help." Sam tries to protest. "Oh my god! I don't care! Now shut up!" I cut him off, frustrated. He is so unbelievably stubborn! "It's an arrow made of carbon. Unless you have a flex or a wire cutter, you are not going to break it!" I explain, seeing their confusion. "Dean, move aside! And give me your belt." "If you want me naked, you just have to say so." Dean retorts playfully. "Really?" I look at him and roll my eyes. Those boys are dancing on my nerves today. "Now! The belt!" While Dean is unbuckling his belt I start to unroll the tail of the carbon arrow. When Dean gives me his belt I make Sam bite on it.  "I'm not..." He tries to protest again but I just tilt my head to the side and look at him with a 'oh, you are' look. I had enough with his attitude for today. He seems to understand because he just does as I had told him. The younger Winchester is too tall and I can not pull out the arrow from this angle so I climb on the table. "Are you ready, big guy?" I ask Sam. He stiffens but I don't wait for his answer before swiftly pulling the arrow out. He grunts and clenches his teeth. "Затова беше коланът." I whisper. *That's what the belt was for.* I climb down from the table and see that Dean is staring at me with wide eyes. I take Sam's left hand and make him put pressure on the wound. "Now, you can treat it like a bullet wound. You know what to do with this, right?" Dean just nods, still staring at me.  I ignore him, remove the gloves and go to the kitchen to make myself a coffee. "And make sure he puts it in a sling!" I yell.

Created with Microsoft Designer

I make Sam sit on the edge of the table. We had been injured too many times but an arrow, that is something new. "What happened?" Em enters the library. "It was an accident. We were at this sheriff's retreat and there was a weapons exhibit. One of the deputies didn't know how to handle a crossbow." I explain. "Need help with it?" "I don't need and I don't want your help." Sam's distrust and animosity towards her hadn't changed with the past few weeks. It was not like him at all. I'm preparing to break the tail of the arrow like I have seen in the movies but I freeze when I hear a sharp "Stop!" Emilia is strolling through the room towards us. "It looks like you don't have an idea how to handle an arrow too..." She fails to wipe her hands in her jeans so she grabs some gloves from the first aid kit.  She is covered in grime and dust, her hair in the usual braid, her glasses perched on her nose. The bunker's mainframe must have not been cleaned like… ever. I realize she has been stuck in that small room for more than a month now. "I said, I do not want your help." Sam repeats again. "Oh my god! I don't care! Now shut up!"  This woman definitely has some sass in her, when she is not trying to hold back and act like a soldier. This is the first time I have seen her snap like that.  "It's an arrow made of carbon. Unless you have a flex or a wire cutter, you are not going to break it!" I never in a million years imagined that someone talking about power tools would turn me on so badly! "Dean, move aside! And give me your belt." "If you want me naked, you just have to say so." I retort but I'm surprised by her taking charge of the situation like that. "Really?" She glares at me through her glasses. "Now! The belt!" I just shrug and give her the belt. She unscrews the tail of the arrow. Hm, so that's how it's done? Then she makes Sam bite the belt. "I'm not.." Sam starts to protest but obviously the look on Emilia's face makes him shut up. The look on his face is one of fury.  The next second she climbs on the table which makes my jaw drop. Her left knee is on Sam's right side, her right knee… between my brother's legs. She is practically straddling his leg. Sam visibly stiffens and stares at me over her shoulder in shock. The look on my face mirrors his. "Are you ready, big guy?" Em acks and I arch my brow. Before Sam can even react, she jerks the arrow from his shoulder. Sam grunts and Em mutters something before hopping down from the table. She grabs Sam's other hand and makes him put pressure on his shoulder then she turns to me. The shock and disbelief on my face must be obvious but she completely ignores it. "Now, you can treat it like a bullet wound. You know what to do with this, right?" I nod and she turns around and leaves the room tossing the medical gloves in the bin next to the door. "And make sure he puts it in a sling!" She yells from the hallway. "Did she… Did she just climbed on you, straddled you and called you a 'big guy'?"  Sam chokes.  "Well…" I look at the doorway where she had disappeared. "She is hot when she is bossy."

Chapter 7: The Fates >>

||The Prophecy Series||

[c6jpg]

natlan 5.0 brain dump

i did this in a lot of small chunks so i already forgot all of my detailed thoughts so i'm gonna try to keep it brief

general environment/exploration:

first off music and scenery is 💯💯💯

i particularly like how much wildlife there is and i really love the saurian gameplay (for me its hydro > dendro >>>> geo)

i feel so awful every time i accidentally kill a capybara they should be immune like the rhinos

it makes sense that there isn't "one huge city" like the other nations since natlan is composed of tribes, and each tribe looks like it gets a decent amount of attention, but i was still kind of disappointed by how small the stadium of the sacred flame feels in comparison for being the "main" area. i feel like they could have done a lot more with it

archon quest:

tldr; it was... not good? or at least very underwhelming? especially coming off fontaine/sumeru which had incredibly strong opening acts

act 1 was particularly like. whatever. felt more like a kachina story quest that rolled right into a mualani (but npc-focused) story quest

like for how important the pilgrimage is it just felt so. underwhelming and anticlimatic. yes yes i know kachina is precious and everyone loves her but i wish we spent less time doing kachina support group and focused more on the pilgrimage itself like can we at LEAST see some of the other playable characters participating instead of just hearing about it in passing

literally was soooooooooo fucking annoyed with the entire atea plotline. i wrote a whole rant in my first write up but basically that entire arc only existed so that they could bring back the purification plot device which WE HAVEN'T SEEN SINCE MONDSTADT

i was just incredibly annoyed with how that was all handled lol atea is also just such a non-character how am i supposed to care about her. she didn't even die in the end!!!

also mualani's tribe's whole thing being super stereotypical hawaiian tourism left a really bad taste in my mouth i wanted to get out of there as fast as possible

act 2 was weird because like. i felt like they were saying a lot of things that were like "this is a serious national crisis" but it didn't... feel that way? and a lot of the lore itself was pretty glossed over

i think a problem with the natlan story is that you need the first acts to set up the stakes but we just spent the first act gallivanting around with kachina/mualani and then when they DID get to the "main problem" in act 2 it just info dumped so hard to the point that i. didn't care?

pacing in general just felt all over the place

the only investment they gave us is through caring about kachina and i guess hating the abyss/not wanting a nation to be destroyed on principle but idk. especially with the "nah we gotta wait for the last 2 heroes first" the stakes are Not there for me

reminded me of when nahida was like "yeah i needed you to figure this out for yourself bc if i told you directly your head would explode." but at least that one was fun/could just chalk it up to nahida being cheeky and didn't like. prolong the plot for too long

SHOW US DON'T TELL US DAMN IT. i might just have recency bias but i genuinely feel like natlan might be one of the worst cases of telling and not showing as far as archon quests are concerned

also capitano's appearance felt so random LMAO he really showed up, said some cryptic shit, got his ass beat, and then left. at least the cutscene was cool?

chasca girl i'm shaking crying throwing up somebody get that girl a full pair of pants and brown contacts PLEASE

i find it interesting how detailed/fleshed out chuychu (chasca's sister) is, both in terms of design and personality/character. it kind of felt like they originally intended for her to be playable but turned her into an NPC instead

also citlali is definitely some kind of faruzan situation where she's old but young looking

night kingdom was cool i guess nothing really to say here. i am very interested in the wayob lore though especially in regards to how it ties into the rest of teyvat/why natlan has particularly weak leylines

i feel like mavuika's younger sister might also become relevant in the future... in a bad way. like the insistence to not being forgotten/seeing mavuika again, the fact that mavuika doesn't "really" know what happened to her. also she also got a pretty unique npc model. or maybe she won't be brought up ever again idk

in general that whole reminiscence sequence with mavuika was like. fine but again you just info dumped the shit out of me i have no emotional attachment to feel anything about whats going on right now???

also we all know that was fucking ororon at the end with capitano like lmao come on. but im willing to bet both he + chasca are the last two heros bc like. who tf else do we have left LMAOOO

capitano was supposed to be cool but he's just giving goofy villain right now. sorry capitano fans they flopped so hard with him in this act

[dateamonster]

also the fact that the distinguishing features betwix the elves and fairies (besides from wings) is the fact that all the fairies are like. White and skinny to midsize old guy and the elves are like. That’s a person you’d see on the street

yeah they really used character design for evil in this one because like in isolation i think theres soo much to love about strange magics designs. i know the vaguely uncanny valley nature of the models is going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of people but ! their little clothes made out of plants and scraps of fabric and lost buttons and insect parts! sunnys ladybug hat! the way everyones hair is so Shaped in a way that suggests a stiffer fibrous texture! all the little details that make inherently unnatural fantastical creatures feel completely at home in a natural environment!

and tbh part of me still loves the definitely uncanny almost skeletally skinny base model for the fairies. that and theyre big eyes really do give them a very eerie insectoid look that i wish theyd had the guts to lean into more lol. and the contrast between the fairies who are characterized by these long thin bodies and sweeping elegant movements vs the elves who are all round and blunt and blocky shapes with this sorta low center of gravity that places them more firmly on the ground vs the wild diversity of shapes and sizes when it comes to the goblins like very clearly identifies who everyone is in this world and how they kinda relate to each other, and i maintain that a lot of the uncomfortableness that comes with how this world is laid out couldve been alleviated by just. making some of the fucking fairies brown.

like its not as if its especially unique for this brand of kids fantasy movie to have a visible class divide thats never examined, or use conventional beauty standards as a visual cue for importance if not morality. the main reason imo it feels so glaring here is specifically because all the fairies we see are very white and even aside from one of the only elves we really spend any time with being black a lot of the elves features in general read as more racialized.

and i dont think this was necessarily intentional. high fantasy in general has a consistent and historical problem with favoring whiteness, thinness, and eurocentricism. if anything, i think this is just what happens when you make something built on those existing sorta tropes and dynamics without putting any thought into what they represent.

[sleepingdeath-light]

relationship hcs ; poly jaehee & zen

requested by ; anonymous (29/06/22)

fandom(s) ; mystic messenger

fandom masterlist(s) ; here

character(s) ; zen/hyun ryu, jaehee kang

outline ; “Do you have any Zen (From MM) requests in the queue?? Also just out of curiosity thoughts on Zen x reader x Jaehee?? (Either parallel or triad dynamic)”

warning(s) ; none, just fluff!

the three of you are the ultimate power throuple — always showing up to support each other, always having each others’ backs, and having a strong foundation of communication and trust that your relationship was built upon

every problem is approached with an ‘us vs the issue’ mentality, allowing you all to discuss how to deal with the situation at hand without devolving into pointing fingers and arguing over something that should never have been an argument in the first place

zen uses calls you ‘jagiya’ and jaehee ‘gonjunim ’, whilst jaehee calls you ‘aein’ and zen ‘yeobo’ — they’re both pretty receptive to whatever pet names you use for them

jaehee is much more reserved when it comes to pda and generally limits herself to hand holding and cheek kisses (especially if you’re also out with zen and don’t want to get caught by his fans) — zen, meanwhile, is huge on pda and always seems to be touching or kissing the two of you (which never fails to leave your girlfriend red in the face and speechless)

jaehee and yourself usually call him ‘hyun’ rather than zen when you’re at home (at least when you’re not using pet names) whilst you use his state name when you’re out doing work for his productions or the rfa

zen is forever offering handy tips and tricks to jaehee as she grows her hair out again, helping her find a routine and products that suit her hair type as she adjusts to the new freedom

you and zen take up free shifts and jaehee’s coffee shop — never hesitating to put on an apron and get to work when she seems overwhelmed (or when you have a moment free), which has led to a great deal of positive press and lots of customers flocking to her place of work because zen is there so often

whenever zen is in a new production, you and jaehee are always there to support him: taking alternating shifts to be able to be with him during practise for recorded shows and films, picking up after rehearsals, showing up to every live show (front row seats, naturally) and celebrating every new accomplishment with affection and gifts and food

jaehee is the ultimate clothes thief and will end up stealing (‘borrowing’) so many of your and zen’s shirts, jumpers and hoodies to use as sleepwear — though neither of you care since she looks adorable

she’s also not afraid to put someone on their ass for trying to mess with either of her partners — ending up as a more effective deterrent than the trained security that follows zen when he’s on set

the three of you manage to move into a home with three bedrooms — one guest, one main and one spare — because you need to have space from each other sometimes and it’s nice to have the option

the main room where you all sleep was decorated by jaehee — it has a king size bed that allows zen to sleep in the middle on his back and the two of you to curl up into him

the other two rooms were designed by yourself and zen and are where each of you retreat when you need some space — zen is basically a living radiator and during the summer it’s basically unbearable to share a bed with him, but you all manage to get through by staying on call while you sleep

you and jaehee are forever receiving random selfies and gym pics from your boyfriend and neither of you would even dream of complaining about it

zen makes no effort to keep his attraction to you both a secret and it’s such an ego boost to have him looking at you and very earnestly complimenting you all of the time — the whole ‘wolf’ thing is definitely true when it comes to him but thankfully he’s pretty good at containing himself when you’re in public

you have weekly dates and you rotate who gets to choose the activity every time — so one week you could be spending a quiet afternoon talking and laughing over steaming cups of coffee/tea/hot chocolate, the next you could be learning some martial arts, and then the week after that you could be going up to zen’s hangout to stargaze (it’s a complete mixed bag and you all love it)

[asgodsfall-if]

As Gods Fall - Now on Tumblr!

In a dying world of magic and steel a god has been murdered. And it’s your job to find the killer.

You are a Peacekeeper: an officer of the law upholding order in the last city of a dying world. Along with a new partner it is your job to find the one responsible for murdering a being once considered eternal. Become part of a unique modern fantasy world shaped by over a thousand years of history and uncover parts of it never before seen by mortal eyes.

Gameplay and features:

Play as one of 5 distinct races, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Pick between smart and resourceful humans, physically unstoppable werewolves, graceful and kind fairies, elementally potent demons or shapeshifting formis.

Customize and build your character. From their looks through their skills and attributes to their personality.

Approach problems with brute force, swift hand, sharp mind or quick tongue using an attribute based stat system.

Take advantage of a unique active ability system to overcome challenges.

Investigate crime scenes, interrogate witnesses, discover the city’s secrets and sins of its creators.

Experience a city on the brink of collapse and help control the panic, or add fuel to the fire.

Find rivalries, friendships and romance as you embark on 4 unique character journeys.

Find a way to stop the ongoing apocalypse or let the decay finish its job.

The world:

The world of Etr was always driven forth by conflict. Be it the wars of its first era, the technological race of the second, or the fight for survival in its current era. Once a land full of life and wonders, it is now plagued by an unstoppable force that is the decay as it ravages all in its path. The only place safe from it: Citadel City is a boiling pot of those that remain. Full of life and dangers as the last representatives of surviving races try to live together despite centuries of bad blood between some of them. A city where magic of old coexists alongside the cold steel and concrete of modern technology.

Companions:

Coren Ashver: Coren’s life was always an uphill battle. As a demi born of human and demon parents he was always an outcast. Wishing to follow in his dead father’s footsteps he joined the force and eventually signed up for an experimental enhancement program before becoming your new partner.

Erinwehulda Drakebraid (Eri): Erinwehulda’s the smartest forensic your precinct has. Seen as eccentric by most of your colleagues she prefers to stick to herself and her inventions. Now it’s your turn to get past the aloofness and work with her as you tackle the big case.

Mesar Nemo: Mesar’s the definition of a free spirit. A werewolf born into royalty and set to take over the clan in a few years. There’s a lot resting on his shoulders which he learned to push aside by chasing the rush of adrenaline. Now that his patron deity is gone will he step up to fill the hole?

Paoni Crowelo: To Paoni information is power and a tool used to maintain balance in a world gone mad. She sees herself as a caretaker of the city and its people and as the city’s biggest information broker there is nothing that goes by her. What secrets will her intel uncover as she aids you in your case?

You can play the publicly available demo consisting of the prologue and main story of act 1 (~113.5k words) here:

For a more direct line of contact you can join the official discord server where it's easier for me to organize feedback and bug reports:

Also if you want to support the project and receive perks like access to patron only chats, early access to new chapters and exclusive filler stories you can join the Patreon, or support me through Ko-fi:

[jujumin-translates]

[A3!] ★ Main Story | Act 14 - DREAM CATCHER | Episode 18 - Young Thief

Hato: Okay, so that’ll be the extent of your work, Rurikawa-kun. Does that seem manageable?

Yuki: It won’t be any problem.

Hato: Haha, dependable as ever. Glad to have your help.

Hato: Everyone in the office got super fired up when they saw Kataoka-san’s work. When you’re exposed to top-notch work, you just can’t help but be affected by it.

Hato: I think there’s a lot to be gained from actually getting involved and not just watching, so let’s keep up the hard work.

Yuki: Yeah.

Yuki: (The work itself is the same as what I’m used to, but there are way more requests and points to take note of than usual.)

Yuki: (Each and every one of them makes sense and connects to a specific detail.)

Yuki: (I looked up Aiko Kataoka-san beforehand, but you don’t really get a good idea of what they do until you actually come into contact with their work.)

Yuki: (It’s the same old universal designs, but with a lot of attention to detail and elements with more of an edge.)

Yuki: (They’re really proud and confident in their own designs and they play into that… It really is amazing.)

Yuki: (An opportunity like this is rare, so I’ve gotta steal everything I can from it.)

· ��� —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

Yuki: …

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

*Flashback*

Review: “The costumes had that same stable feel they always have. But don’t you think that as Yuki Rurikawa’s become more established as a creator, his costumes have started to lack a bit of surprise and unexpectedness?” 

Review: “Maybe I’m just noticing it more after seeing Yua Troupe. I guess it’s just inevitable when you have the same designer do things every single time~.”

*Flashback end*

· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·

Yuki: (Unexpectedness, huh. But I…)

Yuki: (I also have confidence in my designs.)

Yuki: (Looking at them objectively, the costumes for our debut performance all fit the concept of everyone being the lead, and it’s something that definitely fits the current Summer Troupe.)

Yuki: (That’s why…)

*Knock on door and door opens*

Banri: Nice work. Omi made a chiffon cake.

Yuki: Thanks.

Banri: Busy with your part-time job, huh?

Yuki: Duh. But it’s a great learning experience, and there’s a huge difference in what I can gain from seeing how someone works up close, so it’d be a waste if I didn’t give it my all.

Banri: Ahh, I getcha. Like how there’s a huge difference in the amount of information ya can get between just watchin’ a play and actually actin’ in a play with someone.

Yuki: It’s hard not to be inspired by what kind of beliefs they have about design.

Banri: Seems like your whole “challenge” thing was a great idea.

Yuki: I’d say so.

Banri: But it’s gotta be nice havin’ a room to yourself. I wish Hyodo would just go and fly to the U.S. or wherever for a week.

Banri: Anyway, since I know you miss the guy you’re always fightin’ with, I’ll trade places with ya, Yuki.

Yuki: Haha, very funny. It’s actually nice being able to focus without him around.

Yuki: Besides, you’re the one always starting fights, so I’m sure you’d miss him if you didn’t have him around.

Banri: Good one.

Yuki: Isn’t it?

Banri: Anyway, ain’t it almost time for him to start doin’ stuff over there? Why dontcha talk to him?

Yuki: …

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