#thekittenknightess

[dailyarturia]

isn't the reason why Camelot Is Fated To Fall because it *wasn't* the failings of any individual person, it was everyone striving to do the best they could and messing up along the way in the way tragedies work, so much so in a complex web that any one person doing one thing differently wouldn't have mattered and if they all did things differently they wouldn't be *them*

that's Literally it, they were people who came together because they believed in the same ideal, it is by their combined strength that camelot flourished and it eventually fell apart due to their combined human failings. the only thing to blame is the fact that they were only human but as the sixth singularity shows if you were to remove their human failings it still wouldn't have fixed things, it only would've made them lose sight of the humanity behind their ideals and play out a different tragedy. there is noone to blame that's why they can only blame themselves

[tainbocuailnge]

People like to clown on Lancer by calling him dogboy or whatever and from what I've seen he doesn't really react well to that, but I'm curious what his relationship to the name "Cu Chulainn" really *is*, like what his feelings are on the matter, and I figured I might as well ask you. Like, from what I know from the original mythos, "Cu Chulainn" is the adulthood name he was given after replacing the hound of the blacksmith, and it seems in some intent derogatory, but in a few other places in the text he seems proud of it on some level and I'm kinda confused. Could you do me a favor and elaborate on his feelings/thoughts about the name Cu Chulainn and what's the line for him between being called a dog or whatever and being called by his proper name?

that is indeed the story behind the name. his childhood name is Sétanta, and he was named Cú Chulainn after he killed the blacksmith Culann's guard dog in self defence and, seeing how upset the smith was to lose his beloved guard dog, offered to take its place until its pups were old enough to take over that duty. Cú Chulainn means "Culann's hound" and the name was given to him to honor his compassion and sense of duty in offering to take the dog's place. details vary depending on the version of the story you read of course but in the story as told in fate/hollow ataraxia culann declines the offer, saying that cu chulainn will go on to become the protector of all of ulster instead.

his name of "guard dog" is a title of honor, so it pisses him off immensely when people call him a dog in a derogatory way instead. there's a few cases of him jokingly referring to himself as a dog so he's not opposed to it altogether (when he mentions the geass that forbids him from eating dog meat he jokes that "it'd be dog eat dog"). it's just that his name is one of the things where a lot of his heroic pride comes together so it's very easy to insult his pride by insulting his name, and it's very easy to insult his name by implying that "dog" is a derogatory title, and insulting his pride is the number one surefire way to piss him off.

most of the "cu is easy to incite with mentions of dogs" jokes are from carnival phantasm so there is some discussion to be had about how much of it should even be taken seriously as characterisation but it's rooted in ubw. archer told him to "feed your meaningless pride to the dogs" and lancer gave archer a chance to backpedal by honing in on the dog part as what pissed him off, which is what carnival phantasm jumped on for the bit and what people who haven't picked up on lancer's motivations by this point will be inclined to take at face value. archer then doubles down by calling him cu chulainn instead of lancer for the first and only time in the whole game, letting him know that he very much intentionally put those exact words in that exact order to be as personally insulting to lancer as humanly possible (L + ratio + heroic pride is meaningless when all people care about is convenient results + letting yourself be used as guard dog isn't something to be proud of + your name is the first thing you killed what pride is there to take in that + I know exactly who you are and how much blood is on your hands and I'm telling you it wasn't worth it + do away with both your idea of pride as something meaningful and your idea of the title of guard dog being something meaningful in one fell swoop by feeding your pride to the dogs because that's all either of those things are good for)

so tldr it's not being called a dog per se that ticks him off but it's still notably easy to antagonise him with dog related terms because of the amount of personal meaning that's wrapped up in his name. I personally also hate when people call him dog or doggo or good boy or whatever not only because it feels varying flavours of dismissive and derogatory but also because 99% of the time it's just not fucking funny, it's the lowest hanging fruit, the cheapest bargain bin garbage material only the unfunniest hacks who don't understand lancer enough to make actually funny jokes resort to. i block people on sight over this ive been here for ages i just don't wanna put up with it anymore

[pleuvoire]

looking through this tag what i get so far is "fandom erroneously calls him a himbo, which is deeply untrue because he's not nearly buff enough and has a little too much inner emotional turmoil. is stupid and hot though"

cackling at this because fandom WOULD totally call shinji a himbo if there were more than like 10 of us. idk if i'd go so far as to call him hot but he's definitely handsome in his own way and men love to seduce him so. absolute yes to the rest though

[versegm]

Based on your posts I think you've finished the event so this isn't spoilers, but if not please disregard this ask until you do.

With that warning in mind: "...No. I refuse to let you take my mistakes away from me/What I need is to live with that grief" and "You have been so battered you believe you ARE your wounds" feel like lines that the event writer wrote specifically with you in mind and I'm still boggling at them.

I AM RIGHT. I AM ALWAYS RIGHT WHEN IT COMES TO GUDA. GOD IS REAL AND HE LOVES ME.

[shuttershocky]

I could not get past the first two chapters of Arknights because while I enjoyed the gameplay and aesthetic greatly how much they hammered home “Oh the protestors were fine until peaceful protest stopped working and so they turned to violence” messages just got too much considering the times we’re living in. I have to ask, does it get any better about that because considering. Everything. It’s just especially... I guess oof is the word for it.

Yeah, over time they built up the reveal that the Reunion movement was sabotaged from inside by different world powers who realized they had an easy scapegoat for the poverty they’ve created by turning their middle class / uninfected against the infected. 

I’d say Arknights overall has a very subversive edge to it? They spend a lot of time setting up institutions, characters, and ideas just to criticize them, when most media would give them a free pass since they're on the side of the law. For example, Chapter 2(it starts from Chapter 0) introduces Ch’en as one of the story’s main characters. She’s the chief of police of Lungmen (known as the Lungmen Guard Department or L.G.D), and as Amiya spends time with her it becomes quickly apparent that they and the Lungmen government are nowhere near as open-minded nor tolerant as they say they are, nor is their treatment of the infected anything but acceptable. You see how the Reunion movement was virtually an inevitability with how they are oppressed by every government in the world, and how police forces are instruments of that oppression. Eventually, even Ch’en quits the police and rebels against her own government after witnessing the infected’s oppression turn into state-sanctioned genocide ordered by Lungmen’s head of state. 

Arknights in general tackles a lot. There is a ton of things it wants to say about war, territorial struggles, how armed groups are actually the creations of nations looking to create bogeymen to keep their people in line, how governments will willingly turn a blind eye to science and endanger their own people if it means losing money, even stories about how Indigenous peoples are pushed out of their own lands and are erased by settlers and their “culture”, the indigenous cultures becoming nothing more than ghost stories and the indigenous people as easy scapegoats for misfortune.

it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely way more complex and fascinatingly written than the opening chapters will have you believe. Unfortunately, a lot of its really strong story points are locked behind events, and some of those are even necessary to fully appreciate the main plot. If you ever do decide to continue, I greatly recommend looking up the cutscenes for “Operational Intelligence” after finishing Chapter 3, as well as “Children of Ursus” and “Darknights Memoirs” after Chapter 6 (although really, all the events barring Ancient Forge range from good fun and worldbuilding to some truly fantastic stuff).

[deepsealiveblog]

Happy to report that the Umineko stageplay is absolutely fucking impeccable, and if you're fine with some blink and you'll miss it small nods to later episodes (no earth-shattering clues!) I'd highly recommend it once you're done with Ep1.

yoooo!! i'm actually really excited to see how the story is translated onto the stage. i feel like it's always an interesting way to tell a story yanno? also, natsuhi with a gun irl. it's what we deserve. i'll be sure to see if i can find it once i'm done going through episode 1!

[happycricketbox]

i think people typically praise the ep8 manga because of confession, and tbf confession is REALLY good. also agree on kei natsumi's artstyle something about it is weirdly offputting

Im still not sure how i feel about confession. While it clarifies a lot of things, i feel like the whole backstory during ep7 was more than sufficient. But i guess it confirms a lot of things people probably was unsure about so i get why people like it

oh yeah, one thing i also appreciate abt the ep8 manga is how they added the interaction between ange and rudolf+kyrie in the golden land, something i wish they had added in the VN

[prokopetz]

I checked the notes of that magical girl TTRPG post and couldn't find anything, but I may have missed it so I apologize if this question is redundant: what are the best magical girl TTRPGs *without* grimdark elements baked into the mechanics and/or lore that you can think of? I adore the genre, but I think it's best used for telling hopeful-if-nuanced stories rather than grimdark ones; it takes a deft authorial hand to pull off PMMM-alikes and even then it's hit or miss due to oversaturation.

(With reference to this post here.)

Depends on what you’re looking for rules-wise.

If you prefer your rules ultra-light, you could have a look at Love & Justice; it’s a hack of Lasers & Feelings, so the actual mechanics basically fit on an index card. Really nice production values for such a lightweight game.

If you’d prefer something crunchy but reasonably conventional (and you don’t mind the Apocalypse Engine), consider Super Destiny High School Rumble!!. Strictly speaking it’s a magical-girl-flavoured teen superhero game rather than a pure example of the type, but being a classical magical girl is an available option.

If you’re willing to delve into The Weird Stuff, you might check out Spell: The RPG. It’s a game about magic where players improvise spells on the fly by literally spelling them out with Scrabble-style letter tiles. It’s great for emulating the sort of magical girl media where the heroes are just discovering their powers, and the first supplement includes a magical girl setting hack.

As for games that only maybe qualify, one interesting edge case is Sparks of Light, which comes at the “grimdark magical girls” thing from a totally different angle than the various PMMM pastiches. This one’s premise is a. magical girls are effectively immortal, and b. over-use of your powers can cause your friends and loved ones to forget that you exist. It’s basically taking Vampire: The Masquerade style immortality-angst and applying it to magical girls, which is still pretty bleak, but it’s a different sort of bleak than you usually get.

Finally, in terms of forthcoming titles, you might keep an eye on either of Domina Magica or Girl By Moonlight. In spite of the nod to PMMM in its title, the former insists that it default tone is going to be very lighthearted; the latter, meanwhile, is aiming to be multi-genre, and while PMMM-style Inevitable Doom(tm) is supported (unsurprisingly, being as the game is a Blades in the Dark hack!), it claims it’s going to support lighter tones as well. Time will tell!

(There’s also Erika Chappell’s 5 Across the Heart, which I believe is currently on hiatus, but if that ever changes, her Patreon would probably be the best place to hear about it. She’s posted a short semi-preview about magical girls in space called Sparklefleet Adventures, which you can check out here.)

[klug]

I would personally love to see your theory document!

Here's a link to it!

PLEASE forgive how messy it is :"D I'm still working on filling some things out but I wrote some notes on my epitaph theory last night :-)

(I'll also add this to my pinned now)

[utopianparadoxist]

One question. Why did you have to put That Lanque Sprite on the thumbnail.

when i tried to use a decent one lanque physically manifested in my house and negged me until i changed it

[tainbocuailnge]

Do you have any tips for writing Oberon? I'm struggling getting a handle on him for my fic.

i don't know about writing him because I don't write fic but I can tell you some things I personally find important about his characterisation

oberon may be suicidal but he's not defeatist. in fact he's extremely stubborn and will get back up as many times as it takes until his goal is realized. he wants to die but he absolutely refuses to die on anything but his own terms. oberon doesn't break, not because he was broken from the start or anything but because he's simply too stubborn to have a breaking point. he doesn't stay down, he doesn't get demoralised, he relentlessly keeps working towards his goals. by all means he should be broken from the start what with being a corpse puppeteered by bugs and his very existence being meant to bring an end to all things, he just refuses. he's terrible at staying down because he embodies the will of a land that wants to die but kept on trucking for 14.000 years.

oberon always lies, but his lies aren't just blatant untruths. they're lies because you can't derive meaning from them. he IS capable of saying things that are true, just not in a way where he can make it unambiguously clear that it was true so you're always left wondering just how much of it he meant. you can't believe his words so you have to trust in his actions, because that is where his actual intentions show. vortigern tells guda he killed everyone on the shadow border starting with mash, but he hands them an apple while doing so because he can tell they're tired and haven't eaten in a while. i wouldn't say he's a compulsive liar per se, it's not that he personally struggles to be honest so much as that the world itself conspires to make it impossible for his words to have meaning and he needs to dance around that. oberon chooses his words very carefully, because he is cursed so that anything he says loses meaning.

vortigern is not smooth. sorry to all the simps out there but he will never kabedon you and if he did guda wouldn't blush about it they'd just dunk on him because their whole relationship is rooted in them being able to see through his bullshit. he's not a cool evil king. he's not a hammy villain. he's not a domineering figure. vortigern is a guy in pain who is acting tough by wearing a cloak that's too big for him. his idea of being sexy and evil is unbuttoning the collar of his frilly blouse like he's genuinely just a dude the same way castoria is genuinely just a country girl.

one common misconception i've seen go around is that the welsch fairies brainwashed (?) vortigern into believing he's oberon. this is false, from the start he was both vortigern and oberon and until the end he is both oberon and vortigern. it's bad to think of it as two separate people in a body or something like that too, because all of it is traits that are his own, he just picks and chooses which to emphasize. everyone acts different in different situations, he's just more extreme about it. when he's oberon he's lying about not being vortigern. when he's vortigern he's lying about not being oberon. the guy who wants to destroy the world and the guy who wants to save the world are the same, because the reason he wants to destroy the world is that it was built on the suffering of those who weren't deemed important enough to be saved so if there's a chance to save them after all he's compelled to try it. his true personality lies between those two extremes, and the closest we get to seeing it is the rude oberon that shows up to chaldea after all is said and done. because he's way too stubborn to stay down, so in the end he will always get back up and try to be the fairy king that the bug fairies need him to be again.

[pleuvoire]

wait girlbloggers are a real thing i thought we had all collectively made up the term for shitposting reasons

hmm i think it kind of was made up for shitposting reasons but at the same time i do think there's a certain circle of like i said the alt sadgirl aesthetic type of poster that kind of jokingly uses that word for themselves

[versegm]

For the meme: Rock Parade.

... honestly, pokemon fic about whoever the fuck first argued that ground and rock types were separate, the "rock parade" being a bunch of rock types being brought at the scientist conference as evidence for their whole argument.

[shuttershocky]

Hey! Sorry to bother you, but do you know where I can find a good translation of Kara no Kyoukai? I'm super interested in reading it but everything I find is... dubious at best, and I'd like to read the books and watch the anime both if at all possible.

The Kara No Kyoukai novels only have one complete translation by Cokesakto. It’s rather controversial for a variety of reasons (namely overly flowery translation, missing passages, changed lines, etc), but if you want to read KnK you don’t really have much of a choice. There’s also the Baka-Tsuki translation if you would like a more accurate one, but unfortunately, they dropped the project halfway through Paradox Spiral.

I would recommend you watch the movies first, and then read through the translation later to find out what Ufotable changed when adapting the books. 

[deepsealiveblog]

Here's some fun information: the Umineko stage play that's coming out, which covers Episode 1, is being made digitally available to the West via both tickets and BDs. Hopefully by the time you finish Ep1, someone will have translated and subbed the full thing if you want to take a look at it.

this is quite possibly the greatest information that i’ve ever been told. i would love to see everything we’ve just witnessed acted out live in front of an audience.

also, for a second i wanted to imagine that stage play meant musical, just because the idea of any one of these characters bursting into song at any point sounds amazing. but either way. i want to see natsuhi with a gun for real irl. it’s what she deserves

[moonpaw]

WHAT please give context i am begging you