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wei-ying-kexing-apologist · 2 months ago

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Well, I was tagged in this reblog (linked for context because that post is wayyyy too long already and I’m prone to run on sentences) so I am going to respond to the part of this that @doublel27 quoted me on.

I want to make some things clear before I start:

Critiquing shows does not mean I always hate those shows, few shows are perfect, and for me it is worth discussing what a show did and did not do well.

I do not care if people like the shows I do not like, and I do not care if people do not like the shows I like. It is extremely rare that people agree on everything in the same piece of media. Everyone is entitled to their own enjoyment of their preferred media and I guarantee you that Shan, Turtles, Ben, Twig, etc. etc. will say the same. Also, since you mentioned Twig’s post about We Are, please let me direct you to the episode of The Conversation where Twig, Ben, and NiNi talk together about their differing opinions on that very show. And in case you were genuinely concerned about Ben and Twig’s feelings on the quality of Thai BLs this year, you can stick around for the second half where they talk about Knock, Knock Boys! Hopefully that will assuage your fears.

Some of the issues I have with vague posting are (a) it can lead to confusion, especially in a case like this where, according to you, maybe boys do love posted a response to eight different people’s commentary simultaneously without attributing which op’s thoughts he was responding to at any point. (b) By bundling eight responses in to one post without @ ing people, it makes it seem like he has misinterpreted other people’s commentary or taken something in intentionally bad faith (c) other tumblr users in a fandom will let people know when an “unrelated post” makes commentary specific enough to be recognized as a response to someone else’s statements thus drawing them in to the conversation. It’s why I prefer to be tagged in responses to the thoughts I share. This is a public forum, whatever I post in here is able to be reblogged, tagged, or commented on. If I didn’t want people to interact with my posts…I wouldn’t post them. If you don’t feel comfortable tagging people who you are responding to, then at least acknowledge them in your writing. We love a cited source.

I don’t love policing language, but since you were more than happy doing it in your post, then I’ll say one thing here: the tone of maybe boys do love’s post does not read, to me, like it is intended to welcome people who appreciate that there is “not a single stance about what qualifies BL as good work.” It reads like it is “reminding” the supposedly eight people he is vague-posting about that they are being unreasonable in their expressed opinions. It especially does not read with the primary intention of welcoming others when Maybe Boys Do Love’s response to Turtle’s initial reblog was to comment on her “respectfulness” and Shan and Ben’s lack thereof simply because they blocked him on Tumblr. A thing which people do every day for any number of reasons. But I digress.

As for my part in your response, you referenced a statement from my tumblr post A Pause for Reflection: Part 2- Only Friends, Racism, and the Commodification of Queer Asians:

“We all need to, but white Westerners especially, be extremely careful and introspective with the ways we are engaging with queer Asian media”

On the seriousness of this statement, doublel27, you and I are agreed. I think it is valid to state that this should apply to the decisions of writers, directors, etc. of BLs. And I also agree that preventing infantilization and removal of agency from writers, directors, actors, and audiences is a good addition. That said, I do not think critiquing media is in any way shape or form an infantilizing or agency-removing act.

I do, however, think you are falling victim to the western paternalism/white saviorism you are so upset about by going on to a South East Asian woman’s post and chastising her about not speaking for a South East Asian audience when you are a white westerner?

Also, I think there I might be missing a step in your logical progression when you say “I’m of the opinion that what’s good for queer Thai television is not for foreign audiences to decide, ultimately. That’s for queer Thai people to decide.” It would amaze me greatly if this hypothetical monolith of queer people in Thailand were to be 100% in agreement about what constitutes good queer television. Personally I see your belief that no one outside of queer Thai people is allowed to critique queer Thai shows as actually undermining the legitimacy of this genre as a source of entertainment for audiences outside of just queer (in this case) Thai people. Media is frequently made with an intended audience in mind, but that does not mean people outside that target audience are barred from engaging with it. No one is saying “this is a bad queer Thai show and I am deciding that for all queer people” they are saying “here is what or why I did not like the decision they made about x,y,z."

If you are going to quote me, then I hope you also read the first half of my Pause for Reflection posts Taking Pause for Reflection- Part 1: Respectable Promiscuity and Only Friends where I talk about respectable promiscuity and discuss the ways in which respectability politics have resulted in “current LGBTQ+ political movements shifting away from highlighting sexual liberation as an aspect of queer culture, in order to make queer people more palatable to the overarching heterosexual society. And how that bleeds through in to the kinds of media that exist, the types of queer people portrayed within that media, as well as how often gay sex is shown, the type of gay sex shown, and the number of gay sex partners depicted. (Read: generally infrequently, generally vanilla, generally one).” Just so you are aware of where I stand in all of this and what people like Shan and myself are talking about when we critique the decision to remove sexual content from queer stories for the sake of storytelling or viewership.

I haven’t mentioned this one in awhile but I used to talk a lot about my perception of queer content being able to be categorized in By, For, and About Queers formatting. For example, a film like Pariah (2011) is a story about a queer person created by a queer person with a narrative that feels like it is made for the enjoyment of queer people above all others (but of course anyone can watch).

^I think this was made by abl, who I am not tagging because I do not want to drag them in to this conversation, but whose image I still want to cite.

This is obviously subjective, and I’m not saying it should always be used, but I know some people can find it nice to organize things by categories.

Again, this is subjective but I’ll give a short list of a couple of BLs that I personally would categorize as being For queer people- by which I mean it feels like a love letter to queer people, I can see something of myself and my experiences in it, and I would not be surprised if the primary intended audience was queer people:

I Told Sunset About You

The Miracle of Teddy Bear

What Did You Eat Yesterday

Koisenu Futari

Here is a short list of some BLs I would personally categorize under About queer people- that is, queer people are the main characters but the piece feels like the primary intended audience is not queer people:

Kiseki: Dear to Me

KinnPorsche

My School President

Spare Me Your Mercy

That does not mean the shows about queer people aren’t queer stories, but it does mean the intention behind the work is different. Which brings me all the way back to Spare Me Your Mercy since that’s what started all of this in the first place:

Lux Sirilux in an interview before the show came out stated:

“Having NC would steal the attention of the story because what we were going to talk about was dark drama and euthanasia.”

She also says:

“The characters are gay, but we don’t offer [fan]service in every episode or include NC (explicit) scenes."

(I got these statements above from this post by clariredaring who I am not tagging in this because I do not want to pull them in to this whole ordeal any more than they already have been).

Lux is absolutely allowed to make the decision to remove NC scenes from SMYM if she believes that it will detract from the vibe and the overarching theme. Sammon is absolutely allowed to approve and accept the removal of NC content from the Spare Me Your Mercy television show. No one is arguing that. (And I feel comfortable speaking for Shan here at the very least because we talk about shows a lot and I know what her post was actually saying as it relates to viewership). I already wrote a post about my feelings on this matter where I discussed why I feel that choice went wrong in this case. That does not mean anyone else has to feel that way, and I’m not forcing anyone to agree with me. And if people disagree with me, fine, they are welcome to discuss with me why they feel like the story worked as is if they want to and ignore me if they don't. (And literally as I was writing this a great example of someone disagreeing with me came through in this post by elimstillnotgarak who I will not be tagging in this simply because I don't want to drag someone who is not involved in this in to a very different discussion). But there is a level of disingenuousness that comes with the statement 'you should not say anything negative ever about the stories you have watched from cultures outside of your own.' I'm not saying this is the belief you hold, but I am saying that is how I interpret your statements about not speaking for a queer Thai audience.

And, as someone who has written multiple essays breaking down sex scenes in BLs, let me just say that I believe there is a fundamental difference between NC scenes and fanservice. I think there are instances where fanservice can result in positive changes (The Magnus Archives, for example, updated their ending after seeing how much fans were shipping Jon and Martin together and I think the ending was better for it) but I think there are a lot of times when fanservice actually does undermine the narrative. As for NC scenes, there are definitely ones that detract from the story at hand, and there are ones that I think people throw in as a bandaid in the hopes that they can get higher viewership (Playboyy and Battle of the Writers are examples of that imo) but I think there are a lot of times when NC scenes actually improve the narratives they are a part of expressly because they can tell you a whole hell of a lot about a character’s relationship and feelings to another person in a very short period of time.

For me, I think Sammon and Lux here engaged in respectability politics operating under a belief that NC scenes between these queer characters would take away from the larger story they were trying to tell. And I think that the believability of the romantic relationship between Kan and Tew suffered for it. This is a show that already was written for a larger general audience because most of Sammon’s work places some medical mystery narrative at the front and center (which makes sense because she’s a doctor).

And personally doublel27 I feel you are drawing a false equivalency between critique and infantilization and I would appreciate it if next time you quote me, you make sure you read the entirety of the post so that you can better understand that I will continue to be critical of people who submit to respectable promiscuity and make the choice to tone down the queerness in their story because they are worried it will distract the audience at large.

#fandom drama #this is all i am going to say on this matter #spare me your mercy #smym #for by about

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nausikaaa · 2 months ago

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Six Sentence Sunday

happy solstice, last day of saturnalia, and not-quite-almost christmas! i hope you're all having a nice holiday season. i'm at work pretty much every day until January, because pubs do well at christmas, which is why i've fallen so behind on reading other people's wip shares.

plus i've been keeping a close eye on my goats, since the girls, Juno, Lucy and Mina, are in with the billy, Hadrian. so far he has gotten lucky plenty, but the girls have come back round in season all the same. i know he can do the job because he did it last year, so it's just bad luck and i've got to keep my fingers crossed it will hold the second or third time.

anyhoo. thanks for the tags today and on wednesday @forabeatofadrum @that-disabled-princess @bookish-bogwitch and @artsyunderstudy!

today i have some more of my post-trojan war wip, with a preamble:

so basically, part of my story follows Briseis, Achilles' war bride, after the events of the Iliad, but there are no sources as far as i can find that say what happens to her. so, i had to plot out what reasonably could have happened, and i eventually figured that if she was legally considered his wife (which is complicated in and of itself- Achilles was already married, but bigamy was sometimes practised by Greek kings, and Patroclus promises Briseis in the Iliad to make Achilles marry her. my Briseis is pregnant, which makes these things simultaneously more and less complicated) she would travel with Neoptolemus, Achilles' son by that aforementioned other wife, and Phoenix, Achilles' old mentor, either of whom would likely have become her male guardian upon his death, to Phthia, Achilles' homeland, where she would become a ward of Peleus, Achilles' father and the patriarch of the child(ren) she is carrying.

so with that sorted: it's mentioned in some sources that after the war, Neoptolemus walked his army from Troy back to Greece, which was honestly a good call because the moment the Greeks set sail, they hit a storm, which sank Ajax's ship and killed him as punishment for him raping Cassandra in a temple, blew Helen and Menelaus off course to Egypt, and blew Odysseus off course too, and we all know that didn't go well for him. we know Phoenix took this journey too because it's noted he died and was buried along the way.

so, walking an entire army from Turkey to Greece. it's doable, it won't even take you that long, but you'll need to stop for supplies such as food. and that got me wondering, what the hell would an army have to buy food with? sure, they would probably be willing to part with some stolen booty, but it was a status symbol, they would want to hold onto the best stuff.

the answer is obvious, but unfortunate.

To some it was a relief to reach a town, but those of us who knew how the world worked were not so sure.

If the people were amenable, there would be trade for food and wine. And what did the Achaeans have in surplus to offer in exchange for such things?

If they were not so welcoming, the soldiers would simply attack, taking what they wanted, and the numbers of their one export would grow.

Women, always women, trading hands, pulled this way and that. Even the war that started it all was over a woman; who could own her, who could bed her.

tags/hellos/holiday well wishes: @cutestkilla @run-for-chamo-miles @roomwithanopenfire @prettygoododds @ic3-que3n @blackberrysummerblog @j-nipper-95 @youarenevertooold @larkral @orange-peony @aristocratic-otter @thewholelemon @alexalexinii @confused-bi-queer @shrekgogurt @comesitintheclover @raenestee @hushed-chorus @you-remind-me-of-the-babe @noblecorgi @shemakesmeforget @ileadacharmedlife @supercutedinosaurs @otherpeoplesheartachept-2 @ninemagicks @otherworldsivelivedin @jasonfunderberkerthefrogexists @carryonmylovelies and @meanjeansjeans!

and for reading all this, here's Olive in her christmas outfit and the dogs in theirs!

#six sentence sunday #andromache's child #my writing #my goats

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blessedwithabadomen · 1 year ago

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in love with the mess - day zero

summary : Aubrey is going on tour and, for once, she's decided to focus on having as much fun as possible. Oli can be a little shit but he does nothing short of adore Audrey and... well, maybe Noah a little, too. Noah likes the flirting, as long as no one gets too close, emotionally. But what will happen when the three of them take it too far?

content : fluff

length : 3.2k

tags : @veronicaphoenix @cookiesupplier @lma1986 @jilliemiw86 @bngurngheart @lacktoesandtoddlerants @narcissisticbehavior81

a/n : hi everyone!! I hope you'll enjoy this, comments and reblogs and asks are always more than appreciated!!

•••

day zero

Time moved differently on tour. It always had, as long as I’d worked on them. Go away for a week and it’ll simultaneously feel like you only left home yesterday and as if you’ve been on the road for a month straight. 15 days didn’t seem too bad this time around. I’d done double that, triple that, easily. I basked in the feeling of how it fucked with time perception. Days flying by so fast I couldn’t quite grasp it, memories so fleeting and yet so fully anchored to my being. At the same time, in between, I already knew that I’d have days where this tour felt like a lifetime. Too many places in too little time, so many faces, different venues, different people, fans, the same setlists every night. And afterward, life wouldn’t be quite the same. Not this time around.

•••

“There she is!”

Oli’s voice was much too loud in the hotel lobby. Several people turned around, even if I wasn’t sure if it was because they recognised him or simply because they were questioning who was being so damn loud in this rather nice place. He crossed the room in long strides as I quickly gave the receptionist a nod while she handed over my room key.

He looked different than the last time I’d seen him in person, which, admittedly, had been… a while. There had been constant texting, a familiar voice in my ear whenever I needed it, video calls at any opportunity, all based on a friendship we’d both worked hard to grow over the last decade or so, but lately both of us had been busy on such opposing schedules that any in-person meetings got delayed and delayed again.

Whenever he was on the road, I was stuck at a job far away and when I was working on a different local tour, he was busy recording in a different country. It was why he made sure that now, when he was embarking on a massive arena tour with his band and I was miraculously free for all of January, he got me a job allowing me to tag along. It was so much more than I could ask for.

Still. It had been longer than I’d like to admit since the two of us had met in person and none of the pictures I’d been looking at or the video calls we’d been chatting through had done Oli Sykes any justice. He’d been hitting the gym, I knew that much, but the way he now filled out his frame had me giving him a once over as he approached. His hair was longer now, too. He looked healthier, I thought. Healthier and happier.

At least I wasn’t crushing on him anymore. I had spent a good few years with a special place in your heart reserved just for him, well aware that it had never been reciprocated. Nothing had ever happened, save a few harmless flirtations here and there. One of us had always been in a relationship, had someone else on their mind or simply enjoying their single life. It wasn’t like he’d be interested in me either way, I told yourself. And I was over all of that, even if both of us actually were available at the same time for once. It didn’t matter.

I greeted Oli with a smile as both of us immediately went for a hug. He’d always been a very touchy person, something that had been feeding my crush in the most unhealthy ways, but as someone who was also constantly in a state of touch starvation, I appreciated it either way. His arms held me tightly. I was convinced I could feel every individual muscle under my fingers as they traced his back and I just knew he was smiling into my hair as he rested his head on mine, his perfume engulfing me, and-

Yeah, fuck. I wasn’t over him. Like, at all.

I let go of him a little too abruptly, terrified he could feel the way my heart rate was speeding up, but he didn’t mention it. The weight of my realisation was hitting me hard.

I was going to have to spend the next two and a half weeks with him, as close as ever. And I was going to be crushing on him as much as ever. Great.

“Thank you for getting me on this tour,” I said anyway because truly, having someone basically fight to create a job for me just to make sure I could tag along and get paid for it out of pure friendship wasn’t something I was taking for granted. It wasn’t Oli’s fault my feelings weren’t under control.

“I’ll have you know that I missed three meetings to convince them that I needed a personal assistant to keep me on track.”

“Damn, so I’ll actually have to interact with you and make sure you are where you need to be at all times?” I joked.

“You also get to go on burger runs after the show. You’re basically my slave now.”

I decided to ignore the way his statement makes a shiver run down my spine. He didn’t need to know how far my services would extend, if he ever asked for it.

“Everyone in the tour group chat is making fun of me by the way. They’ve all very lovingly changed my contact name to ��Oli’s slut’, so you’re not that far off.”

“Wait, there’s a groupchat I’m not part of?” Oli was halfway to pulling out his phone, apparently shocked at the idea that other people working this tour would connect without him being the centre of attention or even included at all, but he was interrupted.

The interruption came in the form of Noah Sebastian, tall, all smiles, and, somehow, even more beautiful in person than I’d gathered he would be from pictures and videos. One of his hands came to rest on Oli’s shoulder, making him look up with a bright smile, as the other reached out to me.

“Noah Sebastian,” he introduced himself, as if there was any chance I could possibly not be aware. “I sing in Bad Omens.”

“Hi! I’m Oli’s slut.” A brief pause. Panic as I gripped his hand tighter upon realising just which words had left my mouth. “No! Wait! Personal assistant! Oh my god. Aubrey. That’s my name.”

I couldn’t tell whose laughter was louder out of the two of them, but I was mortified. This was possibly the worst first impression I had ever made. And I’d made a lot of them.

“Where did you find her?” Noah laughed. “I like her already.”

Oli slung his arm around me, pressing my blushing face to his chest. I both wanted to burrow myself into the fabric of his hoodie and withdraw immediately before the heat in my cheeks got any worse.

“Oh, years ago, mate. She’s a keeper. A little socially inept though, obviously.”

“I fucking hate you,” I mumbled as I untangled myself from Oli. “I’m gonna go to my room and hide away until I’ve learned how to behave in public again.”

Grabbing my bag from off the floor and double checking that the key card I’d been handed hadn’t, somehow, vanished into the abyss, I turned to take the handle of my suitcase only to find it was already in Noah’s hand.

“I’m going to join you,” he said. I didn’t miss the way Oli raised his eyebrows. “In going upstairs, I mean, not going to your room. I’m… very jetlagged.”

“You two are a right pair,” Oli commented with a chuckle and a shake of his head. “This is going to be a great fucking tour.”

•••

“Is this the first tour you’re working on?”

I stopped at the door leading to my hotel room, Noah coming to a halt next to me and pushing my suitcase in my general direction. I was unreasonably nervous. Somehow, even though we were in a pretty public hallway in a pretty public hotel, no one else was around. I hadn’t counted on being alone with him so quickly, even if it was possibly the least conspicuous situation imaginable. Leaning back against the door, I fumbled with the keycard to keep my hands preoccupied.

“Oh no, I’ve done my fair share, actually. It’s how I met Oli, years ago, on one of the first jobs I ever had. I’ve mainly been doing merch or helping out as someone’s assistant, usually a tour manager’s. When he found out I was going to be free for this tour, he really wanted to get me on it, but they’d filled all positions already, so he convinced management that he needed a personal assistant. And here I am!”

“What’s that entail then? Your job? I might be in the business of hiring a personal assistant for myself, some time in the future.”

The way he was towering over me as he leaned against the wall, a smirk on his lips, eyes travelling over my face… was he flirting with me? I’d always been terrible at telling. Especially when it came to attractive people. There was a constant fear my interpretations could just be down to wishful thinking.

“Knowing Oli, it’s probably going to be a lot of running around to fetch him food and the most random assortments of items that he suddenly needs for no reason whatsoever. Other than that, I’m responsible for kicking his ass and keeping him on time for everything. I’m allowed to use physical force if necessary, he gave me that in writing. I’m definitely going to enjoy that part.”

“Sounds like Oli’s your slut, to be honest.”

If there had been any liquid anywhere near my mouth, I would have done a spit take. The implications of it, as well as the tone of his low voice muttering the word slut was enough to do me in. There wasn’t, though, so I simply gaped at Noah for a moment before erupting into laughter.

“You know, it really does. I’m going to remember that. Don’t tell him though. He likes to think he’s the dominant one in this situation.”

Noah pushed himself away from the wall, giving me another smile that sent shivers down my spine, before turning to walk away. “I can’t wait to see you put him in his place. I’m going to be watching.”

•••

The room was nicer than any I had ever been put in while working on a tour and, even more importantly, I wasn’t sharing it with anyone. I didn’t know what kind of strings Oli had pulled to make this happen, but I would thank him thoroughly for it. In any way he deemed acceptable.

I shook the thought from my head.

It didn’t work.

So, I did the only thing that made sense. I called my best friend.

“Lia, I’m in fucking trouble,” was the first thing I said to her. We’d never been too fond of greetings.

“Did you get arrested before tour even started again?” Her voice came through the phone, somewhere between accusatory and amused.

“That never happened! It was a case of mistaken identity and they let me go immediately. Anyway. No. My problem is that I want to fuck my boss.”

“And that’s news to you how?” she scoffed.

“Lia!”

“What! How is it any secret, or ever has been, that you want to bone Oli Sykes?”

I fell down onto my bed in defeat. It was extremely comfortable, which did ease my pain momentarily. I would get an amazing night’s sleep here.

“I thought I was over it,” I whined. “I thought I was going to be fine but he’s fit as fuck and I’m gonna have to spend every fucking day with him. Never mind Noah.”

“Noah? Okay, now you have my attention.”

“I didn’t have it before? Rude.”

“Less complaining, more talking about Noah please.”

“He’s fucking dreamy, I’ll tell you that. And a flirt. I think? I’ve yet to determine it for sure. And I’ve only seen him and Oli interact once but Oli looks at him like the sun shines from his arse so he’ll probably be around all the time, too.”

Lia didn’t say anything for a long, long moment. Long enough that I pulled the phone from my ear briefly just to check that the connection hadn’t dropped. When she finally spoke again, she sounded much more serious than I’d heard her in a while.

“Aubrey. I know I make fun of you a lot.” True. “And I know that I don’t always give the best advice.” Also true, sometimes painfully so. “But I love you and you need to listen to me for once, yeah? Have some fucking fun.”

I had to admit, that wasn’t the advice I thought I was going to hear.

“You have this weird thing about not allowing yourself to let loose and enjoy yourself but I’m giving you explicit permission. Do whatever feels right. Flirt with anyone who’s attractive to you and wants to flirt back. Make a move on Oli. Make a move on Noah. I don’t fucking care. But stop depriving yourself of happiness because you, for some unexplainable reason, think you don’t deserve it. Please, Aubrey. Have some fun on this tour. Okay?”

I was dumbstruck. For a while, I didn’t know what to say, but Lia stayed silent, waiting it out. Waiting until her words seeped into my brain. Started to make sense. And I knew. I knew she was right. I’d been focused on chasing after job opportunities, constantly trying to prove myself, travelling from one place to another, and never had I stopped and taken a moment to allow myself to really be happy. I hadn’t had a relationship since… I didn’t want to think about it. Hell, I hadn’t even touched anyone in forever. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten drunk, stayed out until sunlight, sang my heart out, let go.

And this tour… Oli had given me the job because he wanted to hang out with me. I didn’t have anything to prove. So I took a breath. And I told Lia a single word.

“Okay.”

•••

I was almost asleep, clad in a pair of shorts and an old shirt and covered under the blanket, when my phone chimed with the tell-tale jingle I’d assigned to Oli. He was my boss, after all. I felt like I should at least make an effort to make sure I’d notice his attempts to contact me, even if it only came in the form of a personalised ringtone.

Oli u up? Aubrey Is this a booty call Oli come over

I knew I didn't have a good enough reason to refuse. Double checking that I had noted down his room number, I grabbed my key card and phone and quickly padded down the hallway, thanking the lords that no one bumped into me. Oli opened the door the second I put my knuckles against it to knock. He didn't waste any time pulling me into the room and onto his bed by my hand.

“Wow, forward much? Normally I at least get dinner before jumping into bed with someone,” I joked.

“Love, I’ve taken you out for food so many times, you should get on your knees without me having to ask.”

I landed a good slap to the back of his head for his comment. It seemed better than to acknowledge the fact that I would, definitely, without question, get on my knees for him, and now my head was once again flooded with inappropriate images. Settling on the mattress next to him, I tried not to get too close to Oli, which shouldn’t have been a difficult feat on a double bed, but as soon as he had grabbed his laptop again, he shuffled so close that his thigh was touching mine.

“Can I show you some stuff?” he asked, blissfully unaware of the turmoil in my heart, as he was rapidly opening and closing tabs on his laptop. I simply nodded, waiting for him to continue. “I know you’re going to see most of it tomorrow, I made sure the sound tech people are cool with you staying at the sound desk if you want so you can get a good look at the whole show, but look, we did a whole video montage that’s going to play before the encore, and…”

Oli talked and talked and talked, about the show, about the planning of it all, about their rehearsals, showing me pictures and videos and blueprints and all I could do was sit and listen and fall in love with the sound of his voice a little bit more. He was catching me up on everything I could have possibly missed, letting me listen to everything he was expecting to happen in the next two weeks, and how he couldn’t believe I was actually there and part of it all.

“Having you and Noah here is the fucking best,” he grinned, somehow snuggling even closer into me. I let him, against my better judgement, as always.

“Someone’s a bit in love with him,” I teased.

“Everyone is a bit in love with him. You’ve met him. Prettiest dude on tour.”

“Apart from you.” It slipped out before I realised the thought was even in my brain, but Oli seemed delighted.

“You think I’m pretty?” He fluttered his eyelashes in a way that would have been purely obnoxious, usually, but all I could focus on was how fucking pretty he did indeed look. “You think I’m cute? You wanna kiss me? You wanna hold my hand?”

“Oh my god, I take it back,” I groaned, pushing him away and attempting to crawl out of his bed, but his arms grabbed onto my middle and pulled me back before I got anywhere at all. He seemed to anticipate me trying to fight his grip, because as soon as I made any further move, his fingers found the skin under my shirt and began tickling my stomach in relentless cruelty. Within seconds, I was reduced to a shouting, giggling mess, tears threatening to spill from my eyes as I wriggled underneath him, to no avail.

“Please, please, Oli!” I gasped, breathlessly. “You’re- fuck, you’re the prettiest!”

His torment stopped immediately, but our position didn’t change. I was still trapped under his broad frame, his hands still on me, his hair almost tickling my face, he was that close. My breathing was going fast, trying to calm down after his attack, but his proximity didn’t help at all. For a moment, a long moment, we simply stared at each other, all fight leaving our bodies. Then, just as I wondered if anything was actually going to happen, he sat back up, busying himself with his laptop and fixing the blanket.

I almost missed it when he muttered, “For the record, I think you’re the prettiest, too.”

#noah sebastian fic #noah sebastian x reader #oli sykes fic #oli sykes x reader #noah sebastian #oli sykes #in love with the mess

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gorgonwrites · 2 years ago

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still loving you, part 1

geto suguru x fem!reader

in which your best friend shoko takes you to the bar your ex-boyfriend is performing at tonight.

wc: 2.3k-ish

author's note: i wrote a geto fic- someone fucking sedate me. i love that man w my whole heart. ps, i swear i will learn how to write a one shot one day. i am nothing if not a slut for the buildup. this is inspired by the song still loving you by the scorpions bc it's a GOOD FUCKIN SONG

tags/ CW: sfw but will be nsfw eventually, fem!reader, second chance romance, modern AU, bassist!geto, reader broke getos heart but we'll make it right don't worry, reader/ shoko/ geto/ gojo are bffs duh, slowburn bc i can't fucking help myself, reader smokes a cigarette or two bc i like the effect SMOKING IS BAD 4 U ok??

“Was it really necessary to bring me along for this? I could be home with my cat right now.” your best friend pulled you to her favorite bar, laughing as you continued to grumble.

“You never leave your apartment, y/n. Have some fun for once!” Shoko continued to tug you along until you were at the door of The Sorcerer’s Lounge. If you were completely honest you didn’t hate this place- it was more speakeasy than dive bar, and it was one of the more peaceful places Shoko liked to bring you.

“I do leave my apartment. I work, I go grocery shopping, and I sit and read in the park across town. So there.” You stuck your tongue out at her. She was your opposite but you adored her all the same. While she liked to party and drink herself into oblivion, you liked to stay in and enjoy your own company. You finished your party phase while you were in college- thinking about it made your chest twinge. “You know this isn’t really my thing anymore. I just made an exception tonight because I like it here.” Shoko had mentioned a show happening tonight, and you generally enjoyed the entertainment that the lounge offered.

“Well you look fucking devastating, y/n, maybe we should make this your thing again?” Shoko was too hopeful, though her effort made you giggle. She took your hand and had you twirl in front of her, making the thigh-high slit of your dress threaten to show just too much. You did miss late nights like this, but it simultaneously felt foreign to you. There was something- someone- missing. You shook the thought away. As you both made your way through the crowd to the bar you saw a familiar head of white hair, and you stopped in your tracks. Shoko still had a firm grasp on your wrist, and your sudden halt nearly had her fall over.

“Shoko, who’s playing tonight? I didn’t have the time to check.” actually you hadn’t cared to check, but you didn’t think it would’ve been your ex-boyfriend’s band. You looked at her sharply and she grimaced. Please, no.

“Oh, I ah, I don’t remember!” She smiled sheepishly and tried to laugh the question off. Just as you were about to turn around and march out of the bar, you were engulfed in a tight hug.

“Y/N! No way! Shoko you didn’t say she was coming too! Fuck dude, it’s been way too long. How are you?” You were smashed into Gojo’s chest, unable to respond. He held you tightly and laughed, a familiar and bright sound that always made you smile in the past. Right now, though, you wanted to hurtle yourself into the sun. Of all the nights you agreed to join Shoko, why did it have to be tonight? You managed to wiggle your way out of Gojo’s grip and huffed in response, trying not to take your agitation out on the man. After a breath, you were able to respond.

“Gojo, it’s so good to see you.” you smiled gently and you meant it. He looked good. You weren’t sure if it was possible but he seemed even taller than when you’d seen him last, and he still had the same stupid sunglasses that he used to wear. “It’s been five years, I think? I won’t lie, I haven't really had the time to keep track.” A lie. Yes you were busy, but you knew exactly how long it had been since you had seen him and his best friend. The four of you had been inseparable during your college years, a rag-tag quartet against the rest of the world. You did everything together, until suddenly you didn’t. It hurt. It still hurts.

“Oh, shit, I have to tell Suguru you came!” Gojo spun on his heel and ran across the bar and out of sight.

“Fuck, Gojo, don’t!” you yelled after him and tried to make your way in the same direction, but it was useless. He had a habit of appearing and disappearing, and you knew you wouldn’t find him. You slowly turned to your best friend, your eyes blazing. “Care to explain this shit to me?” Shoko shrank under your gaze but seemed to recover quickly.

“Gojo reached out to me a few days ago to tell me they’d be in town and to tell me about their gig tonight. I thought it would be nice for the four of us to catch up.” you could hear the pain in her voice. “I thought you were over everything by now, y/n. You never bring Geto up anymore. I don’t even remember the last time you said his name.” you groaned at your ex-boyfriend being mentioned, and pinched the bridge of your nose to keep yourself from saying something stupid.

“You know I adore you, Shoko.” you breathed, “But why did you think this was a good idea? My breakup with Geto shattered our friend group. I’m not sure if it really will be a nice thing for us to catch up.” though you had been surprised by Gojo’s response to seeing you. “We’ve all gone our separate ways in life. I’m not sure we really need to dwell on the past.” you had built a life for yourself, and you were proud of that fact. Yes, there were lonely nights and moments that you craved a closeness that you’d only ever experienced with Geto. But you made a life nonetheless, and you weren’t willing to mess it up because Shoko wanted to live in the past. “He broke my heart, Shoko. I think a part of me is still recovering.”

“You broke his too, you know.” Shoko said firmly. “If you weren’t so fucking stubborn you would’ve seen that. Leave if you want to. I’m going to support our boys.” Our boys. She stalked off, leaving you breathless. You slumped into a chair at the bar and ordered a shot. If you were going to stay, you needed something to take the edge off.

. . .

“She’s here with Shoko! I saw! She looks fucking incredible, by the way. Damn, it was good to see her face. There’s something different about her, but she’s still y/n. I can tell.” Gojo continued to ramble on about you, giving Geto a massive fucking headache. He didn’t expect Shoko to make it, and he definitely hadn’t expected to hear that you were with her. His heart leapt in his chest, agitating him even further.

“Satoru, I swear to god if you don’t shut the fuck up I’m going to wring your neck.” he slumped back onto the sofa in their small changing room and scrubbed his hands over his face. “This has you and Shoko written all over it.” Shoko and Gojo loved plotting together, whether it was going to be messy or not. They just seemed to enjoy the ride.

“Suguru, come on. You don’t fucking shut up about her. In all the years it's been, I know you’re still crazy about her. And I know you want to see her, so get over yourself. She showed up, whether you like it or not. I don’t think she’d just abandon Shoko because you’re here.” Geto knew you wouldn’t leave her, so he was going to have to suck it up. “We’re on in thirty. Get your shit together.” Geto stared up at the ceiling and tried to remember your face. You never posted on social media, and Shoko rarely had photos of you up anymore. You had basically just disappeared one day, and it made the ache in his chest get worse.

. . .

“Two espresso martinis, please.” You had taken two shots, and after letting them take effect you were finally ready to face Shoko again. You carefully carried the drinks through the crowd and into the lounge area, carefully searching through the tables and booths to find your best friend. You found her in the front row, stress smoking her cigarettes. “Those’ll kill you, you know.” you smirked, and she angrily looked up at you.

“Hmph. The stress from how stubborn you are already has me halfway there.” she eyed the drinks in your hand. “Though, a drink might add a few more years back to my lifespan.” You placed your drinks on the table and sat down beside her, wondering when the show would start.

“I really don’t know if I can do this.” you did your best to hide the tremor in your voice but Shoko noticed, like she always did. She pushed your hair behind your ear and smiled.

“You can, though. We’re just supporting our boys. No harm in that, right?” There really was no harm in it, but it made you nervous all the same. Your breakup with Geto had been entirely underwhelming, at best. You knew you had been growing apart for some time, and your parents never approved of him to begin with. He wanted to travel and make music, free as a bird. You wanted to stay and work in the city, carving out your own little slice of paradise where you were. He wanted you to come with him, you wanted him to stay. It would never, ever work. So you called it quits one day, plain and simple. He didn’t put up a fight though, and it had solidified your suspicions of him getting bored with you. You left and had tried your best not to look back after that.

“Earth to y/n, can you hear me?” Shoko waved her hand in your face. “I said they’ll be on soon. Are you even listening to me?” you had to give yourself a shake to snap out of it. This was about to be a long fucking night if you couldn’t get a grip.

“Give me one of those.” you snatched the pack of cigarettes from Shoko and lit one, taking a long drag before you exhaled in her face. You continued to take long drags until you finished and grabbed another.

“What the fuck happened to these will kill you?” Shoko snatched the pack out of your hands and stuffed it into her purse out of reach.

“The stress from how stubborn I am already has me halfway there.” you parroted back to her and lit the second one, winking. “It’s fine, I won’t have another. I have some semblance of self control, unlike someone I know.” Shoko rolled her eyes and grumbled, but immediately perked up when the lights began to dim. You had the opposite reaction, tensing up and shrinking into your seat as you smoked. Your best friend noticed though, as always, and looped her arm through yours.

“We’re just supporting them, like I said a little while ago. No harm, no foul. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.” She gave you a reassuring smile, and you couldn’t help but lean into her touch. Shoko had been your rock through the breakup, and continued to support you even now. You could feel how excited she was, and admittedly her excitement was always contagious. You relaxed and watched as everyone came out on stage.

Gojo of course came out first, that damn show pony. His boisterous attitude and loud mouth always annoyed you, and he always did the most to get the attention he wanted. You love him half to death though, and he knows it. He got all of you into trouble so many times you had lost count. A blonde with glasses came out next, a new addition to the band it seemed. You had never seen him before. A short man with cropped black hair and a huge grin came out next, and you recognized him from school though you couldn’t remember his name. Haibara? Something like that. That left Geto for last, as usual.

You had forgotten just how beautiful he was. He walked out with a small smile on his face and waved to the crowd, and you couldn’t help the annoyance bubbling in your chest as the screaming got louder when he took his spot onstage. He had more tattoos than you remembered, and his hair was much longer. He wasn’t wearing it up in a bun, which felt unusual to you. Instead his black hair cascaded down his back and over his shoulders, framing his face. Was his bottom lip pierced now? He was too far away for you to be sure. You studied him carefully, drinking in the image in front of you. While everyone else got settled you watched as he began to scan the crowd for someone. You took another drag from your cigarette, wondering who he was so intent on finding. His eyes continued to wander until they found you. You locked eyes with him and tried not to choke as you exhaled, and leaned farther into Shoko’s embrace. He looked as shocked as you felt- your heart was about to jump up and out of your fucking throat. You could barely see the corners of his mouth turn up, and he raised his eyebrows before he finally looked away. You knew that stupid look. That was the ‘and what do we have here?’ look he always had on when he relentlessly teased you. The look was enough to make you scowl and huff, and you crossed your arms over your chest. Geto spared you another glance, and seeing you in such a state made him break out in a ridiculous grin before he laughed to himself. He loved teasing you.

“He seems really happy to see you.” Shoko whispered in your ear. She huddled close to you, letting you lean into her as much as you needed.

“Yeah, well, no one said I was happy to see him.” your best friend let out a huff, letting you know you weren’t fooling her. You were hardly fooling yourself. Truthfully, seeing him after all this time made you feel like you were floating. You could only remember his face glassed over and uninterested, so seeing him happy made your heart leap. He loved being on stage and performing, and you loved watching him do it. The show began and, as always, you couldn’t take your eyes off of him.

#geto suguru #geto x reader #geto smut #satosugu #getou suguru x reader #jjk x reader #geto x y/n #jujutsu kaisen #geto drabble #jjk geto

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everydayautism · 11 months ago

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Clothing Sorting Guide (how to clean/purge your closet)

subtitle: as a person with autism, ADHD, or similar executive function struggles.

For my first guide, in the spirit of spring cleaning, I’d like to offer a streamlined way to sort clothes into 2 piles for purging: keep it or toss it.

I have struggled with knowing which clothes I want and which I want to get rid of. This leads to a big pileup of clothes that I don’t want or need anymore, but I have trouble parsing which ones are keepable and which aren’t if I don’t have a clear thinking process in it. These questions help me get my head in the game.

If you're in a similar predicament with a closet overflowing w/ clothes that you don't actually wear, give this a try, and let me know if it helped you.

Here’s how it works:

Make sure you dedicate enough time to this exercise, because it might be hard to start again once you take a break.

There will be 2 piles of clothes. One will be keep, and one toss. (You can also just leave your ‘keep’ clothes hanging up, if you want to. Will probably save a lot of mess, but won’t be so visually clear/divisive).

Based on the prompts below, you’ll sort the clothes into the 2 piles. Of course, it’s always ok to re-sort clothes or realize ‘you know what, maybe I do want to keep this’ regardless of the guide. This is just a simple “get you started” type of deal.

And when you're done, consider donating your clothes to your local Goodwill or homeless shelter. You can de-clutter and make a good change in the world simultaneously.

Here we go!

---

Have you worn it in the last year? > If no, TOSS IT.

Do you feel ugly in this article of clothing? > If yes, TOSS IT.

Do you feel uncomfortable in this article of clothing due to sensory reasons? > If yes, TOSS IT.

Did you buy this, but never wear it? Does it still have the tag on it? > If yes, TOSS IT.

Do you associate this piece of clothing will bad memories, and thus aren't getting any use out of it? > If yes, TOSS IT.

Do you only still own this because it's associated with good memories, but you don't wear it/like it? > If yes, TOSS IT.

Does this item fit you? > If no, TOSS IT.

Does it have large stains, visible holes, or other damage? > If yes, TOSS IT.

Has your personal style changed? If it has, does this item still fit into your style? > If no, TOSS IT.

---

Those are our tosses; how do we know if we really want to keep it?

Once you've ran through these options in your mind, consider those pieces who have not yet met the 'toss it' criteria. These may be definitive items that you're set on keeping, or they may be a gray area, where you're not sure if you want them gone or not.

Tips for determining if you really want to keep them, or are just delaying the inevitable:

1. try them on. Are you comfortable? Do you feel confident wearing this? Does it fit you properly, with no excessive cutting or squeezing? Do you feel the need to suck your stomach in while wearing this?

2. look back on times you wore this item. What did you pair it with? Were you confident wearing this, or did you feel insecure for one reason or another? How did you feel wearing this?

3. ignore the sunken cost fallacy. If this an expensive item, don't consider its monetary value in the elimination process--if you haven't worn it, chances are you won't again. Resell it, if you want to earn some money back from an expensive purchase. Otherwise, donate it.

4. consider the opportunities you will have to wear this item. Is it a daring shirt perfect for a party? Is it formalwear? If you can think of times it would be appropriate to wear, perfect. If you can't, reevaluate keeping it. (for example, if you previously worked as a clown but don't anymore, don't keep your clown suit for shits and giggles).

I hope this helps, and feel free to submit asks or comments to this blog for other autism accommodation tips that anyone can make happen in their daily life.

#autism #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #disability #decluttering #closet purge #autistic things #audhd #audhd problems #neurodiverse stuff #disability hack #disability help #autism acceptance #asd #tips #home & lifestyle

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roxannepolice · 4 months ago

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Rant 3/phantom pains of Schrödinger's lore in ChibnallWho/"the history between" doesn't mean much to the author. that is, it does. but it doesn't. but it does. but not really. but./can someone in the group chat please read my time sensitive questions I posted 25 hours ago?

Between bracing myself to finally open the advisors reviewed thesis, waiting for anyone at work to give a newbie a hint, and reading a fairly good criticism of the political stance in ChibnallWho, I guess it's a good time to let go off some steam about this era. Now, an important clarification for tumblr: when I criticize the show, I am not in any way bashing on people who enjoy it! Good for you, and that's why I try to tag these appropriately.

But yeah, this is going to go deep into what I mean when I say the writing in this era is just bad, something even its defenders sometimes concede. This often turns into dicussions of political/social messaging in seasons 11-13, which is as fair criticism as any. Yes, it often veered into confusing to downright appalling. But for me, that's not what "bad writing" means. You can make an excellent story about a likeable rapist and murderer. You can make compelling propaganda of pretty much any economic stance (well, maybe except for "the solution to problems with Amazon is to blow up their trucks so now everything has to be delivered on foot I guess", that's something straight from Monty Python). And of course, the "too woke" "criticisms" aren't anything valid like at all.

No, for me the bad writing in ChibnallWho lies in the general sense of confusion as to who exactly is the target audience here: someone who's very well acquaintanced with the lore(s), or someone who's completely new to the show. Now, this is also inspired by some criticisms of RTD2 is that it is too expository, leading into the show-within-a-show theorizing. And of course, exposition can be done well or not-so-well, and there's good argument some parts of exposition in s14 were on the nose. But the thing about a television series, especially one as long as Doctor Who, is that any episode can be someone's first - and the writer's job is to make it so it won't be their last. What this means is that the audience needs to be provided the information necessary to grasp at least the emotional level of the story, if not every bit of earlier lore logic. In the case of Doctor Who there's also a part of establishing which part of the lore is valid to the story at hand, considering that both within the show itself, but also the huge multimedia lore, there are bound to be contradictions. And that's ok! You have a good story idea that will require a retcon for a better pay off, go for it! Like, if you really think the Doctor should get to save Gallifrey for their 50th birthday, then go ahead, just reduce the Time War to a local conflict between Time Lords and Daleks instead of underlining just how widespread across time and space it was, and logistically impossible to contain by removing one party (this is one of the many cases of "I don't like what Moffat did, but I agree the execution is functional").

Basically, Lancelot having an affair with Guinevre isn't relevant to him storming a wedding and killing mortally wounding giving a fleshwound to the bride's father.

So, essentially my issue with ChibnallWho writing is simultaneously trying to cut itself off from lore/earlier seasons, while relying on it for any emotional pay off. To give a counterexample from this very era's one of best written episodes: when the Doctor goes on about what being turned into a Cyberman means and that she won't lose anyone else to that, that's bloody powerful! And it's powerful regardless of whether you know it's specifically about Bill, or just go on the information provided within the episode - that the Doctor lost someone to this. Unfortunately, The Haunting of Villa Diodati is an honourable exception in this and many other aspects.

So, to start from the beginning. There's a frequent criticism that team TARDIS was overcrowded in seasons 11 and 12 with three companions, to which an immediate defense is that it's not the first time there were three companions at once. Fine. But combine this with the following: it's not just three companions introduced at once, it's three companions introduced at once, plus a brand new Doctor, plus a brand new sonic, plus a brand new TARDIS interior (that's absent for nearly full two first episodes). So you're basically left with four strangers and no point of reference in your getting to know them. And by no point of reference, I mean something that I haven't noticed anyone else pointing out: Thirteen is literally the first Doctor since One to have no established elements in their first season, at all (barring the TARDIS and sonic, again, completely redesigned).

It's a bit hard to discuss One to Two regeneration relying only on stills and audio, but Polly and Ben are there to act as audience proxies for this Beatle-hairstyled guy with a recorder being the old man he was a moment ago. Three's first season all revolves around UNIT, established in Two's era. Four inherits UNIT and Sarah Jane. Five inherits Adric, Nyssa, Tegan and the Master for his welcome. Six has Peri. Seven has Mel, the Master and the Rani. Eight's movie is all about the Master. Even the reboot for Nine has the Nastene consciousness as a hello and the whole season revolving around the Daleks. Ten gets Rose and Tylers, and Cybermen, and Daleks, and Sarah Jane, and K-9. Eleven gets the previously established River Song and a Classic Who villain reunion in the season finale. Twelve gets Clara. Thirteen gets.... Twelve's suit that she should have stayed in and Daleks, nearly three months from her first episode.

And the thing is, I understand how this would have appeared to be a good idea on paper! Complaints about the show getting lost up it's own self-referential ass have been around for years by this point, and even Moffat tried to go for a soft reboot in s10. Chibs literally asking him to set the TARDIS on fire is as symbolic a new beginning as they get. A bold, intriguing idea. As is trying to explore Titanic with nothing but a snorkel.

Because in practice it had two fundamental flaws, one more general and one specific to the story as it unfolded. The general one has been hinted at: this is basically why there's the sense of overcrowding on the TARDIS, while also leaving the audience feeling they don't really know anyone on board. Are we getting to know the new Doctor from the companions' perspective? The companions from the Doctor's? The new villain (and a really unfamiliar one, Toothboy isn't a familiar threat like plastic pollution metaphor or pshysically inevitable end of the world) from an alien's or humans' perspective? The new worlds from all of theirs? We sort of end up relating most to Grace, except she dies in the first episode. The thing is, it is in confrontation with the established that we learn most about the characters. Nothing characterizes Nine more than his interactions with the Daleks, going from torturing one to deciding he can't commit another planetary destruction to stop them. Basically, between a kind straight Black navy officer and a White lesbian strangling her wife in a jealous rage, you're likelier to recognize Othello in the latter. Something tells me this is why RTD had Fifteen interact with another Doctor, Donna, Mel, Kate, UNIT, the Toymaker and even toothied Master before sending him on his own merry way.

The second problem has more to do with the direction the story actually went in. Because just from the above, and indeed after s11 it was a frequent praise of the era, it would look like Chibs is going for something easily accessible to new audiences. Great. But then comes s12 and basically all of the emotional pay off comes from the audience's attitude to the the lore! Or, maybe I'll put it this way: all charitable interpretations of it are rooted in not only lore literacy, but specific readings of established lore. And not only is the lore hardly established for the newcomers, but it's also not established which parts are to be cherry picked for the returning audience. Nowhere is it better visible than in Fugitive!Doctor's TARDIS being a police box. This was clearly meant to tell the audience yes, this is indeed the Doctor's TARDIS, but if you know how much of a deal pre-Hartnell Doctors would be, you'd also know the TARDIS doesn't just look like a police box, it was stuck looking like one in 1963. And so we end up with secret third Doctor theories between classic series 6 and 7.

And this is the fundamental problem with the timeless child. It shakes the lore to the core, but without establishing what this lore is, and how the audience is supposed to feel about it. Oh, you can go for post-colonial criticisms, but that relies on you reading the Time Lords as the british empire, a reading not clear to all of the audience, as exhibited by an actual academic article (because yes, I spent my hard earned money on a collection of academic articles about ChibnallWho and no I absolutely won't share a pdf should anyone dm me) written by an author more rooted in feminist than post-colonial critical theories seeing the new origin of Time Lords as replacing a masculine creatio ex nihilo ethos by that of a feminine explorer-scientist [appreciative]. You're basically supposed to get a phantom pain of a lore that's both alive and dead until observed, the presumed intention being that you will have a positive or negative feelings about the cat, without considering most people will be either abstractly impressed by the metaphor, or equally abstractly disturbed by animal abuse. It's criticising the roman empire by debunking it being founded by Mars's children raised by a she-wolf.

And this is also visible in the Doctor's own reaction to the revelation, which I guess you might argue is complex, but I would say it's more shifting from establishing moment to establishing moment. She goes from being shocked by it (again, no part of the text informed me I shouldn't cherry pick her characterization as including calling Time Lords the most rotten civilization in the universe, also is it even established that's the second time Gallifrey was destroyed?), to describing it as empowering, to apparently not thinking about it for 100 years, to having an identity crisis, to stating her identity is about what she does, to bemoaning the could-have-beens, to deciding she doesn't want to know, to her deepest desire being wanting to know it after all (the vision of ttc in potd). Like, come on, not finding your glasses means your room is messy, not complex. The effect is infantilizing more than anything else, I mean it's been what, three months since the last time a villain informed a heroine she has an epic origin that's also very horrible in The rise of Skywalker? Which impression is amplified by the only clue as to the Doctor's personal, not performed, attitude being that she apparently finds the cliche chosen one story of a boy abused by his adoptive family turning out to be a wizard, and a special wizard at that, comforting. Probably not the intended reading that wouldn't even be available if Rowling got cancelled earlier, but there as things are.

And of course, this has a lot of bearing on how thoschei dynamic is executed. On the one hand we have the entire emotional pay off rooted in the "history between them", on the other vague references to Classic Who and expanded universe, on the third characterization of the Master that is rooted more in fanon Freud-for-dummies woobification than anything this character's motivations have ever been established as. Like, between the charitable reading "Thirteen is hostile to the Master because of the events of s10" and the anti-charitable reading of "Missy's development was retconned in the Master's hostility", the answer is, it doesn't bloody matter to the story at hand, or else it's the writer's job to point to it as meaningful (again, as Maxine Alderton did with cybermenification in THOVD). Another case of "I don't agree with Moffat, but I agree the execution was functional", but you can juxtapose this with the way Simm!Master was presented in s10 - yeah, he got cured and kicked out of Gallifrey; that's really all you need to know, because his role in this story is being an unrepentant asshole and no amount of gifs slowing down John Simm turning his eyes down before saying "Eh, you wouldn't understand" will change that. The same goes for "see, the Master didn't destroy Gallifrey over everything that's been done to them, but over Theta being hurt uwu" interpretation - neither the reading this was the motivation, nor anything relating to the Master suffering from the Time Lords have been established in the text, neither as it unfolded nor as a pay off reveal! This basically relies on the attitude that the most charitable reading is by default the intended one, which is how you end up with "op means that Taylor Swift being gay shouldn't make you ignore all other gay women musicians".

A little bit of an aside, but people remember O was an actual person the Doctor met in unknown circumstances, not just a creation of the Master from the beginning, right? Like, this is taken into account in all "he's so desperate to be friends again uwu" readings, right?

So this is why "if the history between means anything" quote falls flat to me. The meaning is rooted in lore that's brushed aside in the same breath. The author relies on it being meaningful for the audience, while providing only the bare bones of "we were friends, but took completely different paths" background, and that by the end of the first act. Just as he relies on the audience having an emotional attachment to the lore without doing anything to create that attachment.

#roxanne's degree pursuit therapy #as always very welcoming discussions!#dw meta #doctor who meta #chibnall critical #tw: negativity

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independent-variables · 11 months ago

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HELLO !!!

Having now finished binging all of your star wars fics, I come here asking for some recs. Just any of your favourites, bonus points if it will cause emotions (and tears).

Also can't stress enough how much I love your writing, it's so so brilliant <3

(this is neptunesenceladus btw, tumblr hates me and won't let me send asks with a side blog so you get this one)

HI!!! Good to see you, good to see you <3 Always happy to provide recs <3 <3 <3

I want you to know I went through my bookmarks and pulled like sixty fics and had a brief moment of panic, so this is not all of my recs just the first... thirty, or so. If none of these are appealing, oh boy, do I have more!

This list is not in any order other than bookmark order, most are on the shorter side, most are Gen and I am pretty sure all are complete. I tried to warn for stuff that could be a squick when I remembered.

False Dichotomy by nsmorig

Starting off strong with my favorite Cody fic of all time. If you read nothing else on this list I encourage you to read this (if the tags are not a squick) because it will re-shape your brain and shatter your heart into tiny pieces. Basic premise is Force Sensitive Cody gets captured by Dooku and survives torture, experimentation, and imprisonment while trying to figure out his relationship to the Force and to his personhood, and the ways those things are connected.

What's in a Name by Sankt

This is about Fordo post war and it’s phenomenal characterization.

The Last Poem of Jedha by schweinsty

How Bohdi Rook becomes a rebel and writes a poem.

you're like a loaded gun by kazhan

Ok this is E and also Underage, so maybe it’s a skip, but it’s teen Boba/Cal trying to navigate sex and love and secret identities and it’s so fucked up and so good.

chicken, cattle and cat by deniigiq

Obi-Wan and Maul living in domestic dis-harmony on Tatooine. What more could you ask.

Little things [are the reason to live] by i_will_bite

Clone medics navigating a slightly hostile working environment and trying to make it less hostile T-T

Two brothers (and a kid) by meerlicht

What if. Waxer and Boil just stayed on Ryloth, with Numa. What then?

with poise, with grace by andeemae

Stone falls through a hole in a roof and falls in love. Beautiful clone/OC romance and very cute kids, doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of being a clone in love with a civilian. Very much an inspiration for me.

second time around by This_world_of_beautiful_monsters

This is another one I wasn’t sure I wanted to put on here because it deals briefly with rape, but it’s such a wonderfully fucked up take on Anakin and Rex’s relationship. Or, how Vader views Rex.

The Desert Storm by Blue_Sunshine

If you are looking for an epically long series to get invested in I highly recommend checking this one out. This series and its sister-series are some of the best characterization and worldbuilding for Jedi I have ever had the pleasure of reading and it is a fix-it in all the messy, hard, terrible ways people don’t usually write fix-its.

Shape-Changer by Fialleril

This is a foundational fic for me. Incredible Tatooine worldbuilding. Inspired me to write the way I write.

The Sun Is Bright, The Sun Is Blue by ambiguously

CUT AND SU ORIGIN STORY!!!

most things may never happen: this one will by jaigeye

This is brutal but what if you were a droid and you had to dissect a person.

Bad Deal by FettsOnTop (GTFF)

Boba/Lando my beloved. A brief look into their relationship and into Lando’s thoughts leading up to Han and them’s arrival.

and the Force is with me by sauntering_down

Rex and Ahsoka and the way the war changed them, and what they can and cannot do in the aftermath.

Twilight on Owl Creek Bridge by yellow_caballero

The Fox fic of all time. What if you were trapped in a time-loop with a ghost from the future but your life is so monotonous and simultaneously bizarre you don’t even notice.

Fishhooks by yellow_caballero

The Boba fic of all time. This author does not write much for SW but every time they do it’s iconic. What if you were a teenager running away from home but also a perfect clone of your father created to be him but better but also his because you will never escape his body and his ownership and his love. What then.

Staring into open flame by SLWalker

This is such a beautiful and heartbreaking read, it’s basically exploring what would have to happen for Maul and Obi-Wan to have a genuinely healthy and happy relationship post murder and bisection.

Energy Drink Fox by carrinth

The crack comic of all time. What if Fox had space Monster.

lost cause by catboydogma

The foundational Dogma fic. The fic that got me wondering about how clones spend their time on Coruscant.

the married au by dharmaavocado

Clone rebellion my beloved. Basic premise is the clones took over Kamino and then went out into the galaxy as a mercenary army of sorts. Rex and Cody are finding their place in the world, creating business partnerships, falling in love, manipulating public perception of clones. (Background clonecest, not between Rex and Cody.)

#cordelia answers asks #i am so incredibly flattered you enjoyed my fic #hopefully some of these fics give context for why i write what i write and can get you started with new authors #thank you again <3 #fic recs #star wars fic

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veebs-hates-video-games · 2 months ago

Text

It's that time again where I make an entirely too long summary of every game I played this year. There were far too many of them this time around (well over 100, but some of them I only played long enough to know they're not my thing, and a bunch are weird short little things), so I'll try to keep it to a sentence or two for most of them. On the off chance anyone's interested in more of my thoughts they should nearly all have at least one other more detailed post on here somewhere, hopefully all properly tagged at this point and everything.

Also hopefully the formatting makes it easy to skim through, broken into categories and with each individual game bolded, because I would be astonished if anyone actually reads the entire thing. It's over 180 games and 7500 words, so, uh...good luck?

I think I'll just stick with the same categories I've used in the past couple years. On average the categories further down the list have things I liked more, but there are things in one category that I might've liked more or less than some things in the categories next to them, and they're mostly not really ordered within each category.

So with that said, let's start with the worst gaming experiences I had in 2024:

Bomb Dolls: Probably more fun with other people, but it was borderline unplayable for me so I didn't want to subject anyone else to it.

Sayonara Wild Hearts: Anything that feels like it was designed in a lab to give me seizures and migraines simultaneously isn't allowed to place higher than this.

Gwenblade: It tries to do something interesting, but it has a pretty profound lack of polish that makes it just not work.

Survivors of the Dawn: It must get better later on, but it felt so sluggish and unsatisfying at the beginning that I couldn't be bothered to find out.

Neverwinter Nights 2: I guess I still really don't get along with RTwP and most CRPGs.

Persona 5 Strikers: This finally convinced me to give up for good on the SMT/Persona games, because I clearly do not click with their pacing or storytelling conventions in general.

Mouthwashing: The most profound sensation of boredom I experienced all year. Extremely not my thing, but I'm pretty picky when it comes to horror.

On to games that weren't the worst but still completely failed to live up to whatever (possibly incorrect) expectations I had of them:

Strawberry Vinegar: Weird miss for ebi-hime, with characters that felt awkwardly written and like they didn't suit their ages.

Scanner Sombre: Incredible tech demo, frustrating game.

CrossCode: I liked most things about it except for the actual gameplay, which was really not my jam.

Nier: Automata: Somehow feels substantially worse to play than any other Platinum game I've ever played, and the story and characters completely failed to grab me in the first half dozen hours.

Death end re;Quest 2: Huge let down after how surprisingly interesting but flawed the first was. They dropped almost everything I liked about the original, and even though they thankfully toned down the visual fanservice, the character writing was enough worse to counter that.

Dead Cells: Seems like probably a pretty good game, but having pretty obvious influences from Dark Souls in your gameplay mechanics is usually a good way to make me not have a good time.

Owlboy: It's pretty? Not much else going for it.

Night in the Woods: I did genuinely like a lot of stuff about it, but it just felt like it wasn't really going anywhere, and some of the night scenes were impossible for me to see with my weird/bad vision without turning the screen brightness to retina-searing levels.

Her Name Was Fire: What if 20 Minutes Till Dawn except everything was slightly worse?

Final Fantasy XIII-2: The first half was great and felt like a weird hybrid of Radiant Historia and Pokemon with a Final Fantasy skin, but the closer I got to the end the worse everything about it got until I quit in the final area. A contributing part of why the entire FF series is now banished.

Muse Dash: It's alright? The UI is a nightmare about a trainwreck though.

Final Fantasy VII Remake: I love the metanarrative of the story commenting on itself and how much more fleshed out the characters are, but as a game I didn't have a very good time playing it, and I continue to not vibe with the way Nomura/Nojima tell stories. The other main reason FF is now banished.

God of War: I was pretty hopeful about Dad of Boy, but I just don't like how it feels to play. A contributor to why I'm increasingly skeptical of giving most AAA games a shot.

It gets so lonely here: Second person is not a valid POV (for me personally).

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor: The mining mechanic is pretty neat, but otherwise it's one of the less interesting/satisfying things I've played in the genre.

Spider-Man: Most stuff about it is...fine? But aside from the great movement nothing else really makes it above fine other than the typical stuff that comes with throwing lots of money at making a game. Another major reason why I'm increasingly wary of buying or playing most AAA games.

Vampire Survivors: Ode to Castlevania: The least fun I've ever had playing Vampire Survivors, almost entirely due to it not having its own separate adventure mode to introduce stuff on its own terms in more digestible chunks.

Neva: Not bad, but basically everything about it that's different from Gris is different in a way I don't personally like as much.

Once on a windswept night: see: It gets so lonely here

Stray: I only lasted a couple hours before getting bored. I don't even mind that it's mostly a walking simulator since I've enjoyed plenty of those since they were first a thing, but aside from the novelty of being a cat nothing about it really clicked with me.

Next we have games that I liked what they were doing overall but they're just not really my thing:

Gorogoa: Good art and a clever way to structure the puzzles and how you navigate them/between them, but it's not really my kind of puzzle game.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights: Probably the closest I've come to liking a game with Souls-like influences. Well put together metroidvania that feels good to play, but the combat got exhausting the further I went.

Snakebird: The addition of gravity and puzzles make Snake a lot more interesting, but I wasn't into the flow of it enough to want to finish it.

Please, Touch the Artwork: Good framing device and clever way to turn recognizable art styles into puzzles, but the individual puzzles didn't stay interesting enough to me after a while.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder: It does some really clever stuff, but I think I just don't really jive with how movement feels in modern 2D Mario games anymore compared to the ones from the 80s and 90s (but I still love the 3D ones). Also maybe kind of a victim of how sometimes Nintendo polishes their games almost too much, and the removal of any rough edges ends up detracting a bit from things I personally like.

Toodee and Topdee: The dimension/perspective swapping is neat, but it wasn't quite enough on its own to pull me through the entire game.

Tens!: Reasonably satisfying, and a pretty polished presentation, but this one also didn't hold my interest all the way through.

The Shape of Things: Another one with good presentation and decent (but slightly janky) puzzle mechanics that didn't quite hook me.

OscarWildeCard: Excellent name, and card battles to determine who has the gayest dinner party is a fun idea, but it's not really my style of card game in the end.

From Ashes, Bloom: I really like the creature and how it moves and interacts, but in the end it's a tower defense game, and those have never been my thing.

Cypher: I really like Matthew Brown's puzzle games in general, and I liked this too at first, but once I got to the point where I couldn't mostly hold the puzzles entirely in my head anymore I lost interest. I probably would've had a great time with it when I was younger and had more patience for taking my own notes though.

Manifold Garden: It looks good and has some good ideas, but kind of like Antichamber I feel like it'd be more interesting to me if I didn't instantly already wrap my head around the way it messes with space. The burdens of having an intuitive understanding of unusual geometry, I guess.

Burly Men at Sea: Seemed like it had potential, but the UI is awkward enough on the Switch that I didn't feel like finding out.

Railbound: Another puzzle game where I liked learning how it works but didn't feel like sticking around beyond that.

Rabi-Ribi: It seems cute enough, but I didn't click with how movement feels and the pacing was a bit off for me.

Cureocity: Has a good premise, and I liked the idea of the combat system, but I felt like I wasn't getting enough out of it for what I was putting in.

Parallax: The core puzzle concept is solid, but it gets a little tedious having to run around the map to actually put solutions into action. Also the most broken default controller layout I've seen in a long time.

Kero Blaster: Nothing really wrong with it, but it didn't hook me. Definitely not another Cave Story.

Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist: There's almost something there and the art's pretty decent, but the Switch version is Not Great, and it feels like it could use a bit more work in general.

Psychopomp: Seems like there could potentially be something interesting going on there, but it's borderline unplayable with a controller.

Press Any Button: This one also might eventually go somewhere interesting, or at least it definitely hints at it, but the gameplay segments started getting pretty tedious before I found out.

stitch.: Great presentation of the puzzles, crappy mobile game presentation for the menus, and solidly average actual puzzles.

Thumper: Pretty unusual aesthetic and music style for a rhythm game, but I don't have the reaction time to keep up with it when brain no worky like lately.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: I can appreciate what they're going for, and it definitely addresses some of the issues I had with BotW/TotK, but I'm still having a really hard time getting as into it as older games in the series.

Spitkiss: I'm into the idea, and the presentation is really fun, but I bounced off somewhere in the middle as the levels got more heavily focused on tighter timing of actions. Seems fun for someone more into that sort of thing though.

After those we have the ones that are the most "fine, I guess" of the year that I had mixed feelings about:

Townscaper: More of a toy than a game, but I got it in a game bundle and messed around with it on a Steam Deck. It's fun briefly to see what you can make with it, but that's about it.

Little Noah: Scion of Paradise: Most of my time with it wasn't actually this year, but this is the year I concluded that even though the characters are cute and the way you build combos is kinda neat, the game itself is only ok. Also the Switch version doesn't run great.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R: The first 2/3 or so of it is great. The art style used in the remake is gorgeous, and the characters and running around doing typical JRPG stuff feels like all the things that made 90s JRPGs great. Then I got to what previously would've been disc 2 and it all fell apart into what makes 90s JRPGs so hard to go back to sometimes.

Fallow: I like most stuff about it except for actually playing it, which was kind of frustrating. Her music's still great though.

Ape Out: It's alright. I'm not very good at it.

Downwell: It's fine. I get what they're going for, and it feels like they succeeded, but I didn't stick with it super long.

Looking Up I See Only a Ceiling: This one gets an award for suffering the most from a bad translation or not being written in the creator's native language. It'd probably be pretty decent if that was cleaned up.

Astronomical Club for Queers: Dialogue's a bit awkward, but overall it shows potential for making something decent in the future.

Hardcore Cottagecore: This one has serious student project/game jam vibes. With some polish and balance they could make something alright though.

A Little to the Left: Deserves an award for "game that most makes me want to go replay Unpacking instead". Fine, but I lost interest after a while.

Twilight Survivors: I've definitely played worse bullet heaven games, but at least when I tried it this one didn't have much unique about it good or bad.

Geometry Survivor: It's close to being pretty decent, but it just doesn't quite feel good enough to play to me to stick with it too long.

Ikenfell: The characters are good and the story is ok, but I could've done without the gameplay. The "instant victory" button was one of my favorite buttons I pushed this year and saved the game enough for me to actually finish.

Star Ocean: First Departure R: It probably would've been more fun if I'd played it in the 90s. Significantly less compelling than SO2R but not actually bad or anything.

Cats Organized Neatly: Presentation's alright, but the process of solving the puzzles isn't the most satisfying for me.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Fixes a lot of the issues I had with BotW, and the abilities feel a lot more polished and like they complement each other better, but I still ultimately don't love the way these recent Zelda games play and am probably done with them until the next major franchise overhaul.

The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne: It's fine. There's just only so much it can really do in like ten minutes.

Jewel Match Solitaire Summertime: It's a perfectly competent solitaire game, just like all the other Jewel Match Solitaire games. Good for when brain no worky, but it doesn't stand out in any way.

Xenogears: The first time I tried playing it was before Xenosaga was even out. I tried going back to it to finally finish it, but I forgot how rough the translation was and how janky some stuff like the camera is. At least now I remember why I've never finished it.

One Deck Dungeon: It plays out in an interesting way with the way everything is built around dice rolls, but it just didn't grab me enough to get me to keep playing.

the static speaks my name: It was just strange enough to be a little bit interesting, but not strange enough to stick with me at all for more than a day or two.

Stray Cats in Cozy Town: Might be my least favorite Devcats game I've played because the different angle makes it harder to come up with a good search pattern.

TREE: Another ten minute free one. I liked it more before replaying it to get the last achievement.

Witcheye: Pretty unique movement and fun for a while, but the difficulty increase later in the game didn't feel like it fit as well with what the controls let me do.

RYB: Some pretty good puzzles, but the more mechanics are introduced the less well it reads visually.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia: I've tried more than once to go back and finish it, and while I still like most things about it, the map design and a couple enemy types annoy me enough that I finally had to accept I'm not going to beat this one.

Graceful Explosion Machine: Surprisingly well balanced and an interesting gameplay loop swapping between weapons, but sometimes I lose track of enemies in the visual clutter. Also it's physically painful for me to play some of the later levels.

Frincess&Cnight: Good pixel art and fun interactions between the two characters' abilities, but the increasingly tight timings and need to start levels over for any mistake got a little annoying at some point.

CARS: More interactive art than a game. Fun to poke at for a bit, but probably not leaving a lasting impression.

VOYAGER: Slightly more of a game than the previous one, but mostly it's just tracing out fun patterns with your orbit while pretty good music plays.

Dragon Quest XI S: I played the demo on Steam a while ago and loved it, but having to replay the entire opening dozen hours when I got the full game on the Switch was painful enough to make me lose interest. There's so much stuff it does well, but It sure does start slow.

Project X Zone: I do enjoy a lot of stuff about it, but there are so many levels that each take so long to finish that after a while it got kind of tedious.

A Slug's Dream: Pretty good puzzles and presentation, but at some point I drifted away and never went back.

Puddle Knight: Same as above.

Please Fix the Road: Also same as above.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout: The most atrociously paced intro ever before suddenly becoming very good a few hours in, but the tediousness of needing to replace all my stuff at once toward the end of the game instead of stuff opening up more gradually killed my enthusiasm before finishing it.

Otoko Cross: Pretty Boys Mahjong Solitaire: A friend gifted me Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire years ago as a joke, so I impulsively got this on sale in memory of that. Totally fine but nothing special as a game, and if they toned down the horniness a bit some of the character designs/outfits would actually be pretty cute.

Death Becomes You: Some decent ideas and an interesting world, but some of the writting is kind of off-putting and some of the endings feel kind of abrupt and unearned.

this morning I decided to die: I get what they were going for and can appreciate it, but it didn't entirely land for me.

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age: One of my favorite mainline FF games since the 90s, and I did genuinely have a pretty good time with it a lot of the time, but every time I got back into it it would pull some annoying crap to pull me back out again.

Tales of Berseria: I liked a couple of the characters enough to keep me playing for a while and the story is fine, but I got bored of the actual gameplay eventually and gave up.

Tales of Arise: Feels better to play than Berseria, but even though it hints at something interesting going on nothing in the first couple hours hooked me enough to get me to keep going.

KarmaZoo: I love the idea, but it doesn't get to go higher than this because it requires other people to play and I couldn't find any when I tried.

Margo: Definitely a fan of the art style, but the overall experience was only ok. It was probably somewhat negatively influenced by it being a pain to get it to run on the Steam Deck and still running terribly when it did, a very rare experience for me.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk: It continues the pattern of most Musou/Warriors games that aren't affiliated with Nintendo in some way just not really being as good these days. It's ok, but it's noticeably more clunky and less polished than even the original Hyrule Warriors was and just doesn't feel as good to play.

Moving on, next we have games that were pretty good and generally met my expectations:

Luna's Fishing Garden: I didn't love either difficulty option for the fishing minigame, and it dragged a bit toward the end, but overall it's pretty cute and chill. Special mention to the "you got a fish" animation for being great.

Kuukiyomi 2: Consider It More! - New Era: I apparently never mentioned this in a post anywhere, or at least I can't find it. Anyway, it's more of the same from the first one, which is a good thing for the most part. It's basically WarioWare, except the minigames are about being considerate (or being a jerk if you'd prefer) in various situations. Cheap, short, and a decent way to be amused for a little while.

TET: Cute, funny, includes recipes. A good use of ten minutes and $0 if preparing food for Vietnamese Lunar New Year sounds like a good time. Also feels much better with a touchscreen.

Clickolding: Like I said earlier this year, it's the most about sex work anything's ever been without explicitly stating it's about sex work, and it will do its best to make you vaguely uncomfortable about that. Didn't leave quite as much of an impression on me as their other game I played last year, Can Androids Pray, but still pretty good.

An Arcade Full of Cats: Not my favorite Devcats game ever, but still enjoyable. As someone old enough to remember arcades it was fun seeing all the terrible cat puns on old games, and they did a pretty good job of capturing the general feel.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore: Most of my time with this was before this year, but I finally made it through the last third of it. I have some issues with the dungeons dragging on too long and the almost non-existent quest tracking, but the characters and story and combat are mostly fun, and it's the only SMT/Persona-adjacent game I've actually enjoyed other than BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle.

Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between: It didn't hit me as hard as the original over a decade ago, and a couple sections just didn't really land for me, but when it does work it does some interesting stuff. The train section was probably my favorite because it actually gets to expand on its ideas a bit more there.

The Fairy's Song: What if La Belle Dame sans Merci but make it yuri? Nothing revolutionary, but it does everything well enough to be enjoyable, enough that I'll probably get through the sequel one of these days too.

Bury me, my Love: Manages to capture both the surreal horror and mind-numbing mundanity of being a refugee seeking asylum and does a fairly effective job of it. The lack of typical VN QoL features kept me from going through again to see stuff I missed though.

Takorita Meets Fries: Fluffy nonsense about merpeople in search of french fries, and I mean that in a good way.

GOODBYE WORLD: The story and art were just enough to keep me going through the annoying platforming sections (which make narrative sense to be there, and even for them to be bad, but still), and the way it all came together in the end is what bumped it up as high as this.

Blackberry Honey: Yuri that's mostly cute and fluffy and fun while it lasts. I have Questions about the way the main character's boobs are drawn though. What's wrong with your boobs?

Voxelgram DLC #1: One one hand it's good because more Voxelgram is good, but on the other the larger puzzles are mostly just more tedious. Still good enough puzzles to get my poor ADHD brain to focus on something while listening to podcasts or whatever.

rat chaos: A replay of something I played many, many years ago. Not my favorite of the Twine boom back in the day, but having an "unleash rat chaos" button makes it memorable.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line DLC: Still not my favorite style of music/rhythm game so it doesn't go higher, but there's some good music in there, and it was still enjoyable enough that I had fun going through everything.

A Hero and a Garden: Cute, fun characters, good music (including the unlockable remixes after you finish the game), and somehow made in Ren'Py, which is not intended for this genre at all.

Hide & Dance!: I like it for similar reasons to the other games I played by hap (which will be further down this list), but it doesn't have quite as many opportunities for the silly humor that makes their games work.

Subsurface Circular: "You are a robot detective solving robot crimes by talking to other robots on the subway" is a great premise, and I was not expecting Thomas Was Alone (still my favorite Mike Bithell game I've played) to be canon.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land: It was genuinely great for a while, and they did an excellent job translating what makes Kirby fun into 3D, but I kept finding more minor annoyances the closer I got to the end, and I gave up entirely on the postgame stuff pretty quickly because it wasn't doing it for me.

Clear Skye Thinking: More cute yuri fluff that won't leave a lasting impression, but it was a good palate cleanser.

Regency Solitaire 2: Basically just Regency Solitaire again, which is fine with me. These always feel a bit more substantial and more polished than the other solitaire games Grey Alien publishes, so it's nice to have another of these after years of mostly just Jewel Match Solitaire.

Zenzizenzic: Good bullet hell game with good music, and everything is so many squares. Sadly not available anywhere anymore, and neither is the soundtrack. Also sadly I'm not very good at it.

Wedding Witch: I got it mostly as a joke after it popped up in a Steam friend's activity, but it's actually pretty competently made. I wouldn't mind seeing some of the stuff from this in a little more substantial game that's somewhat less horny.

A Park Full of Cats: More Devcats hidden cats. If you're into it you're into it, and this is more of it.

Gordy and the Monster Moon; One of the more recent entries in the Frog Fractions Cinematic Universe. A successful attempt to see what would happen if you made a traditional Zelda game without most of the things most people think of as making something a Zelda game.

Art Sqool: I've seen people complain that it's janky and gives you bad tools for drawing, but the whole point feels like that even if you only can make "bad" art you still did something creative and made an art. Fun to mess around with if you can engage with it on its own terms.

Fire Emblem Engage DLC: I played the main game last year, but I didn't get around to doing DLC stuff like the Fell Xenologue until this year. Not quite as good as the main story (which was one of my favorite games last year), but I still overall had a good time with it.

Super PSTW Action RPG: Replay of something I played years ago, so it can't go any higher, but if it didn't break my own self-imposed rules it would be GOTY every year.

A Tower Full of Cats: More Devcats? More Devcats. See every other entry for them.

Shovel Knight: Really well put together platformer inspired by old 8-bit ones on stuff like the NES and clearly made by people with a deep love for and understanding of them.

Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk: This and the next one go together. They didn't completely win me over, but I'll give them points for managing to nether glamorize nor stigmatize trauma or psychosis and avoid having an ending that's either tragic or fixes everything. Not perfect, but they at least tried to do something interesting with it.

Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk: See above

Meet Her There: Does what it's trying to do pretty well even if the writing's a bit stiff. Content warnings on this one aren't messing around. Also it's funny how many people totally missed how full of gender it is.

Florence: Effective storytelling with almost zero text or dialogue, and they actually manage to do some clever things to tie the very minimalist gameplay into that to enhance it.

Boyfriend Dungeon post-launch content: I played the game itself right when it came out and had a good time with it, but it took me until pretty recently to go back and do the additional stuff added after it came out. I probably would've liked it more if I'd been able to do it all at once, but it was still enjoyable enough to be worthwhile.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force: Definitely an improvement over SO2R (which was great in the first half but kinda fell apart in what would've originally been disc 2). This one still stumbles a bit toward the end but holds it together a bit better. Enough characters I liked and satisfying enough combat/exploration to keep me going until the end, and the nyoom button might've been my favorite button to push all year.

Be My Horde: Or at least what of it is finished up until now. I like the idea of having your only resource being dead enemies you've killed and most abilities revolving around upgrades/enhancements of your resurrection ability. The voice acting is also surprisingly good/fun. Definitely has potential if future additions to it can build on its strengths, but we'll see how that goes.

Pesticide Not Required: Possibly the most unusual premise for a bullet heaven game I've played, crossing it with a farming sim. Somehow it actually works? Builds feel kinda samey after a while unfortunately, but it's cute enough and interesting enough seeing how farming/fishing/mining manages to work simultaneously with killing hundreds of bugs at once to be enjoyable for a bit.

Golf Club Nostalgia: I'm absolutely terrible at the actual gameplay (thank you story mode), but the story and worldbuilding told through the radio broadcasts were interesting enough and kept me going. Not subtle about its politics or who it's commenting on even though it doesn't name any names.

I commissioned some bees 0: Not really anything special on its own, but I'm a big fan of the idea of commissioning multiple artists to draw whatever they want as long as they can fit a hundred bees in it somewhere.

Point of Mew: Short enough that its cuteness and charm can carry it through to the end.

Locke(d): I appreciate that someone took a hypothetical scenario from an essay, interpreted it completely literally, and then used that setup to talk about the ideas of the essay.

The Great Voyage: Not nearly as good as their second game, Vengeful Heart (which will be further down the list), but you can see how they got from here to there and how some of that stuff was already here to begin with.

CATO: Buttered Cat: Some reasonably clever puzzles, and building your game mechanics off the idea of a cat with buttered toast strapped to its back is silly enough that I can't not like it.

The Knight Witch: It didn't quite win me over enough to finish it, but what I did play of it was pretty well put together and enjoyable enough.

Peglin: It has a pretty fun loop, and turning Peggle into a roguelike is a pretty neat idea that works surprisingly well. I could see myself going back to it for a few more runs now and then.

Words Can Kill: It has a pretty fun loop, and turning Scrabble into a roguelike is a pretty neat idea that works surprisingly well. I could see myself going back to it for a few more runs now and then.

Across-Stitch: The tweaks to the typical picross/nonograms rules are just enough to keep things interesting, and I probably would've spent even more time with it if it didn't have some unfortunate color palatte choices.

memories: Another little yuri VN, this time sad. I liked the way it tied different memories to different outfits, and it's reasonably well told for what it is. It desperately needs a way to adjust the text speed though.

Next but not quite last are the ones that exceeded my expectations in some way without necessarily being better than the ones in the previous category (although some are here because they were good). I could also just have gotten more out of them than I was led to think I would:

Seraphim Slum: A VN that isn't afraid to get weird with it, and by weird I don't mean rawrxdlolrandom, I mean surrealness and strange metaphors and corruption/destruction as a form of love. I can dig it.

9th Sentinel Sisters: Seems unfortunately abandoned at this point, but what they finished of it is a fairly enjoyable bullet heaven game with a bit of a different feel and aesthetic from what I'm used to seeing. Translation's pretty awful though.

20 Minutes Till Dawn: One of the better bullet heaven games I've played, with a great monochrome-plus-one-accent-color aesthetic (the character portraits are particularly good) and different builds that genuinely feel different to play. Play on anything but the Switch if you have the option though, because it has atrocious slowdown with certain builds (although it still remains remarkably stable even then).

DoraKone: More yuri fluff about four queer girls spending the summer playing the my OC do not steal version of Pokemon GO. It's cute, and I liked the way they managed to tie the developing friendships/relationships into playing the game together in a way that actually felt like it worked.

A Time Traveller's Guide to Past Delicacies: More surreal weirdness, but this time with sock puppets too. I'm still undecided on what it's trying to say, but I really enjoyed the way it said it, and it captures both the fun and the janky parts of 90s FMV games well.

Bayonetta 2: The main reason this counts as exceeding my expectations is that the first game was full of great ideas but felt really unpolished in a lot of ways, and I wasn't expecting something that's still an entire decade old to have really fixed all that. But they did for the most part, and all the potential from the original finally came together properly.

Vectronom: Aside from pure rhythm games, this might be the first thing I've played since 140 that integrates the music and gameplay as well as it does. Bonus points to whoever decided to include some stuff with odd time signatures and rhythms later in the game.

Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting and Operation Guns: I liked both of these as much as I disliked Ode to Castlevania. They're much more interesting than the previous DLC was and experiment a bit more mechanically, and the adventure mode does a great job of introducing all the new stuff and teaching you the new mechanics and maps.

Lies as a Starting Point: A good example of how this category isn't necessarily better than "worse" categories in my list. It's pretty decent and the three storylines come together in a satisfying way in the end, but the translation is awful. I still got more out of it than I thought I would though.

Before I Forget: Ironically for a story about memory problems I forgot a lot of it because of my own memory problems. This nearly ended up in the best category though, and I appreciated how they made the story about who the character is as a person instead of just what's wrong with her.

Mom Hid My Game!: This and the next two are basically three parts of the same game, which is the offspring of a point and click adventure and WarioWare. Pretty short with lots of little bite-sized puzzles and a silly sense of humor.

Mom Hid My Game! 2: see above

My Brother Ate My Pudding!: see above

Soulstone Survivors: Another of my favorite bullet heaven games I've played. The addition of an active dodge and a lot of layered interactions between abilities makes it a bit more involved to play, but in a good way if you're looking for that sort of thing.

Bio Prototype: Not my favorite to actually play and the UI isn't great, but you can do some absolutely wild things with what basically amounts to a programmable build system to DIY your own weapons with very few restrictions.

20 Small Mazes: A great example of something that takes a simple concept, explores it thoroughly, and then ends without wasting time or energy on anything unnecessary.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe: As someone who's been playing the different variations on this since the original mod, this was a more effective story commenting on its own (re)telling and its own audience's expectations than FF7R was, at least for me.

Halls of Torment: What's this? Another of my favorite bullet heaven games? The standout for this one might be how so many of the achievements/unlocks are really well thought out to get you to approach playing the game in ways you might not have tried otherwise and are often little mini-puzzles themselves.

SeaBed: Very slow burn VN that ultimately pays off in the end even if I liked the journey a bit more than the destination.

Everything is going to be OK: On the surface it's very coping with adversity through absurdity, but if you keep digging it has more to say about trauma and depression and misogyny and the value of artists and so on.

Will The Man Get Frog: Cute little PICO-8 game/toy for creating haikus using an extremely limited set of randomly chosen words. Fun to mess around with to try to come up with anything remotely coherent.

The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place: Interactive poetry about being a willing participant in the destruction of history and trying to explain or justify it while also being aware of the sense of loss.

Luckily, My Arm Is a Shotgun: Nothing revolutionary, but it's surprisingly polished for something so small and cheap, and the titular shotgun is very satisfying.

a completely normal dating simulation that is definitely completely sweet, innnocent and normal: SOMETHINGETH ANIVERSARY EDITION: It feels like someone in high school in 2011 dumped their Tumblr into Ren'Py while also feeling like a flash animation from the 00s. I'm not sure the humor would hold up for me if I did all the different routes, but what I did play of it was the kind of thing I haven't seen in years.

And finally we have the ones I enjoyed the most or felt I got the most out of, not really in any particular order other than vaguely the order I finished them and added them to my list:

The Witcher 3: Absolutely my least favorite gameplay of anything anywhere near this high on the list, but the world and characters are so interesting and well developed that it more than makes up for it. I know they had an entire series of novels and short stories to draw on, but they've added so much more on their own, and it's only gotten bigger and better with each new game. They do a great job of making it feel like the world is much, much larger with a lot of stuff going on outside the small corner you're seeing at any given time.

Ghost Trick: It has a ridiculous premise and clever puzzles and a good sense of humor, but something else that particularly stands out about it is that despite the relatively simple art style it has some of the most fluid and expressive animations that give a ton of personality to everyone.

Vengeful Heart: Possibly my favorite retro aesthetic in anything I've played recently and definitely the best anyone's nailed the PC-98 look in a while, but even more than that the characters and story are great. They do a great job showing people from totally different backgrounds with totally different approaches working together against an oppressive power structure, and rather than everything working out perfectly there are definitely problems, but it still shows hope for overcoming them and a path toward the future.

Unicorn Overlord: Unlike Vanillaware's previous game the writing is only ok, but the art continues to be excellent, and it's easily their best iteration on their RTS ideas to date. I don't think the story will leave much of a lasting impression on me, but I had such a great time with the gameplay for the entire time I was playing that I don't mind.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong: Definitely kind of a slow burn that took me a bit to warm up to, but I really liked how things came together in the end as I got to know more about the characters and what was going on. It's also good at showing restraint though, not neatly wrapping everything up, and it left me with more to think about than when I started.

We Know the Devil: Another one that's good at hinting at and suggesting things without explicitly coming right out and directly telling you everything, and some scenes hit differently when replaying to see the other endings when you know enough to be able to read it as commenting on itself.

Jack Jeanne: A strong contender for my favorite thing I played this year. Definitely my favorite music/rhythm game, the best music in general, and the most gender. So many things in it can be read on multiple levels at once as being about the nature of art and performance, what gender even is, and how (or even if) to engage with an audience.

Visions of Mana: It's a shame the studio got shut down right when it released, because they definitely understood what made the old games in the series so much fun, and they finally made a new non-remake Mana game that's actually pretty great for the first time in over two decades.

1000xRESIST: I'm undecided on whether it's my favorite thing I played this past year, but it's definitely my favorite piece of media in general that came out in 2024. It's another one where everything works on like 17 levels simultaneously, like generational trauma, the nature of language and communication, the protests in Hong Kong, the experience of being an immigrant or a child of immigrants, both biological and found family, memory and what we choose to forget or to pass on, and like a dozen more things.

A Highland Song: If you're noticing that most stuff in this category is here because it has great writing/storytelling you're not wrong, and this one is no exception. The way what's going on is gradually revealed is satisfying, and the way it's structured across different paths keeps things interesting. It also does a great job of seamlessly blending realism and history with myth and legend, treating them all as equally meaningful and important to the people and world.

Ys X: Nordics: Sometimes you just need to go on a wacky adventure though, and Adol's shenanigans continue to be fun. The gameplay continues to feel tight and polished, and they also keep managing to have a large cast of interesting and likeable characters. It's just a good time.

I guess this time I'll only be tagging that last category because I played entirely too many games in 2024 and don't actually have enough tags for the top two categories like usual. There were some huge disappointments, but there were even more things that I didn't expect to like as much as I did, and there was a bunch of really great stuff in general.

#the witcher 3 #ghost trick #vengeful heart #unicorn overlord #opus: echo of starsong #we know the devil #jack jeanne #visions of mana #1000xRESIST #a highland song #ys x: nordics

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sith-shenanigans · 9 months ago

Note

For the ask game where we send you an NPC, Talos Drellik? (I am totally not jumping up and down at the thought of following up on some tags/replies you left a while ago about Ahene and Talos, not at all)

aaaa it makes me so happy that you liked the tags and were not annoyed by the tags (let me put this under a readmore because it’s going to be extremely long)

Okay! So! Bearing in mind that this is a living work and Hoth is a long way away and I don’t know all of what will change—

There is a very not-entirely-normal dynamic here because it doesn’t progress in intensity so much as progress in what, precisely, the intensity is made up of.

Ahene’s first introduction to Talos is along the lines of “do you really want to talk to that guy? He’s strange,” and this endears him to her immediately. Ahene’s second introduction to Talos is walking into a Reclamation Service camp and not feeling like she’s home.

(She does, in fact, think of the camp outside the Rakatan ruin where she largely grew up as being “home.” She also often thinks of herself as not having a home. Or of the ruin itself being home, and the camp not.)

It is important to know, here, that Ahene’s relationship to her trauma is much more in the “continues to be attracted back to it and to things that remind her of it” category rather than the “avoid all reminders forever on pain of flashbacks” category. She actively enforces these reminders on herself whenever she feels she’s acting too much like she’s free—early on, it’s because she believes she isn’t, even if she and her master are the only ones who know that. Later on, it’s because a lot of her self-image is tied up in not being a “typical Sith,” and in her mind, her ability to treat herself harshly is proof she isn’t one (isn’t Like The Others). She hasn’t forgotten who—or what—she really is.

By and large, she feels safer in unsafe situations. She understands hierarchical relationships better than equal ones. She doesn’t know how to be a person, and she’s terrified she’ll forget how to not be. Obviously, this makes her kind of hate being a Sith, but it also makes her kind of prefer being a Sith—the social dynamics are very, very easy for her, even if she doesn’t feel she deserves the loyalty she gets for it.

Back on Tatooine, she worked with a Reclamation Service crew, and it was the most familiar thing she’s done since Korriban, except that this time she was a Sith to them. Which was simultaneously awful and “hey, the terrible thing that happened to you? You’re going to exist in proximity to it forever but it can’t hurt you anymore.” (Which, to someone who keeps trying to yank on her own trauma to prove it can’t hurt her…) Then everything went terribly wrong and Silthar got very badly injured, and they were depending on her, and she has never been able to avoid feeling responsible under those circumstances.

But there’s still this given hanging over it that the responsibility is unrequited. People will be grateful to her as a Sith that helps and protects them—more grateful than she thinks she deserves for doing what she perceives as bare-minimum decency towards anyone she has power over—but if she had been below them, they wouldn’t have treated her the way she treats those below her. She wouldn’t have been one of their people. She would have been one of their tools.

(The greatest exercise in loyalty, in her mind, is to give it without caring if it’s returned. She still loathes the Empire for not returning it towards its people, almost as much or even more than she hates it for what it did to her planet, because if it took care of them then she wouldn’t have to do it—but that’s because Imperials believe they’re doing something good. She doesn’t. She just takes care of them anyway, because it may not be the right thing to do, but it still makes the galaxy a little more just.)

By the time she gets to Hoth, though, she’s just having an awful time. The inquisitor story in the game only has things get really bad at the start of Act III, and before that you’re kind of fine? But Ahene is not fine. Ahene is also aware that she’s not fine. It might have started subtly, but at this point she’s just trying to sell herself on the idea that she can handle it until Thanaton is dealt with and then she can let the ghosts go and everything will be, if not fine, relatively fixed enough that she can spend about a week curled into a little ball in the corner of her ship until she can function normally again.

But, you know, for the most part, the ways she’s Not Fine aren’t externally visible yet. There was an incident on Quesh where she used the ghosts’ power and kind of halfway lost control and partly life-drained Cineratus, but because she didn’t stop at the station to get anybody inoculated, the only one who actually saw that was Khem. And she didn’t really… explain that. She hasn’t told anyone that she feels hollow all the time and barely gets physically hungry and hears the ghosts talking to her even when she isn’t alone. She can hide it. She can handle it. She doesn’t have enough of an advantage yet. This is enough this will be enough she can still put a stop to it.

So she arrives on Hoth, and she shows up at a Reclamation Service camp expecting for it to feel normal again—enough that it’s easy to slot into the proper role, that she doesn’t have to think about it. She knows the responsibility and the resentment, the fact that something about it always seems safer than anywhere else she’s been.

It doesn’t feel normal. It feels just a little bit like she hates everyone there.

(Or, more accurately, like somebody does. Ahene hates like hell freezes over—rarely, slowly, and with a sort of cold contempt that burns mostly in how impersonal it can be. But the spirits in the back of her mind know how to hate, and they’re much too happy to share.)

Talos looks at this Sith Lord, who appears to be unusually scruffy and looks like she’s developed dark side corruption without the glowing eyes, and—unlike Andronikos, unlike Silthar, unlike Sarnova, unlike Zaril—doesn’t come to the conclusion that someone needs to parent her. She’s moved a bit past giving off that energy. Instead he comes to the conclusion that she’s about to deliver the most fascinating problem he’s encountered this year, which is (because Talos is Talos) really what he finds ideal in a Sith.

Ahene looks at this strange, mostly fearless little archaeologist, and discovers that she is not immune to being treated like a totally reasonable and decent individual who is here for the love of history despite every indication otherwise. Many people make this discovery around Talos.

Their early interactions are still… fascinating. His aura of “everyone I talk to is fundamentally a decent fellow” can only do so much, especially since his version of “rationalizing” all the terrible things about the Empire is sweeping them all into a bucket of “things I can’t do anything about” to hyperfixate on archaeology. Ahene keeps him at arm’s length like she’s learned to do with most people. Ahene gets sucked into talking shop with him. They discover, to Talos’s delight and Ahene’s pleased-despite-herself annoyance, that they share a sense of humor. He treats his probe droids better than some people treated her, and exactly the same way that other people treated her. She gets attached to them too.

Somewhere in there—either before they find Horak-Mul or after, though I’m leaning towards before—he asks about her first dig.

She tells him it was the Verios ruin. The face he makes tells her everything she would have needed to know about Darth Kelshrin’s reputation with the Service, if she hadn’t already been aware.

Delicately, like someone trying to thread a conversational needle with as few actual words as possible, Talos suggests that you hear things about that dig, and they aren’t very good. People don’t like to talk about it, if they manage to get reassigned.

She says that she’s one of the reasons that people don’t like to talk about it, and watches him struggle to reconcile that with her entire demeanor for a moment, then clarifies that she was one of the children they had—probably still have—doing probe-work.

Because of course it does, this horrifies him. She shrugs and comments that she hadn’t realized Kelshrin was that much of an outlier; haven’t there ever been slaves on any of your digs? Talos starts to protest that yes, but none of them were children, and comes to the mid-sentence conclusion that actually, she doesn’t care.

His mouth clicks shut. They sit in silence for a little bit.

When he next speaks, he tells her that he’s sorry he wasn’t there.

She says that most people would have put an ‘and’ in the middle of that sentence. They would have found it absolving, that they weren’t there. And he makes a face, and says that yes, that’s true, but still—he wishes he’d been there. That perhaps he could have done something, if he had been. That at least he could have been—better than the others.

I’m sure you would have been, she says, touching his shoulder, in a voice that would be a threat if any of the bitterness were directed at him. It isn’t a threat. It’s just that half of her doesn’t believe him, and doesn’t blame him, and the other half wants to believe him—and hates so very much that someone like him existed this whole time, and never came for her.

They don’t talk very much about that part of her background, after that. She never makes a secret of what she was—it’s the first thing anyone knows about her anyway, the trash apprentice who brought back the Dark Temple expedition—but while she’ll talk about the ruin like it’s simultaneously a deathtrap and a lost home, she doesn’t tell him about the Service camp. It’s their armistice; it wouldn’t be fair.

She doesn’t blame him for what happened to her childhood. He doesn’t look at her like he’s afraid of her when she loses control of the ghosts’ power, when he walks in on her having snapping arguments with thin air, when the ghosts’ memories and personalities start leaking in and she reacts to something he said about the Great Hyperspace War like she was there.

It’s difficult not to care deeply about someone who sees you at your absolute, utter worst—half-dead, half-possessed, still suffering from a Horror Hunger despite knowing that there are few things she needs less than other people’s life energy—and treats it like it’s simply something that’s happening, and no more terrifying than any other serious illness.

He’s the one she goes to one night, when she needs to tell someone how terrified she is to die. He’s the only member of her crew she doesn’t feel some need to be strong for.

(He is, maybe, the person she tells that she thinks she could exorcise the ghosts. That she hasn’t tried, because she’s scared that it would work.)

It’s important that—by this point—he doesn’t feel like he has to be strong with her, either. He doesn’t have to pretend that he doesn’t notice how bad things are, or keep up a cheerful front through it, the way he nearly always does. It’s not that his cheerful front is insincere—it’s not that he’s lying—but that’s how he’s always dealt with his emotions, the same as Ahene deals with them by scrunching them up into a little ball and taking another step no matter what. They aren’t people who know how to seek comfort in other people, most of the time. Talos doesn’t have childhood trauma the way she has childhood trauma, but he did very much grow up in an abusive environment that he generally dismisses as “not so bad as all that” with a wave of his hand. So it’s… something, that they can be scared together of what’s going to come.

(This could so easily be read as romantic. It is not remotely. It’s also not remotely parental on Talos’s part. It’s just a very unlikely bordering-on-queerplatonic friendship.)

When Ahene walks out of the Dark Council chambers on Korriban with Thanaton’s body (Teneb Kel’s body) in her arms and a title she didn’t ask for or want, Talos makes sure the body ends up in a cryostasis tube until it can be properly entombed. When they head for Dromund Kaas right after, because the planet is being invaded, when she makes for the Dark Temple immediately when they arrive in the aftermath—Talos waits for her at the Dark Temple approach.

When she calls him and asks him to get another stasis chamber and never breathe a word of it to anyone, he does it, because they would trust each other with anything.

Up to and including the body of the Emperor’s Voice.

(The next couple months, she barely remembers, because she was under so much pressure and so much of the same kind of pressure that her dissociative memory issues cropped up again and turned it into a soup of events that 2V had to record and summarize for her. But Talos quite frequently knew what she was doing better than she did, at least when it came to the fact that she suddenly had to run the Reclamation Service. This has always been a team effort. Between her and all her crew, but still especially between the two of them.)

[npc opinions]

#this is not the entirety of everything but i think it is quite long enough.#asks #oc: ahene coris #talos drellik

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