#then goes ���there were NO ghosts when I went to camp here wtf??” and talks to the ghost of one eliza vorez
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thepandalion · 16 days ago
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I have a fic idea and I dont know if I want to write it or not send help
#like I absolutely love the concept of it and I have yet to see anything similar in this fandom#which. I mean a lot of works are either incomplete since a month after the game came out#or theyre 400 word long oneshots. which is fine no hate towards those but my adhd cant handle reading anything shorter than 15k#but on the other hand like. the amount of research I put into my canon divergence/slight au fics#where I keep like 80% of canon the same but one thing is different? I do those a lot lately#which. might have to do with the things Im into being heavy on the “doomed by the narrative” type of narrative yknow#but ghhhh I dont wanna research this game its so bad#like unironically I cant stand to watch a singular playthrough and considering how many moving pieces there are in the game like#like ok Im doing canon divergence in like. 2 months before That night. bc I dont buy that the camp is haunted and my psychic misses it#(the plot btw is that. because canon Has ghost. the Guy can now see ghosts. enter magic world building and interpersonal history#between a character I know next to nothing about. and an OC I know actually nothing about. despite me making that OC up)#and also the game takes place in america?? I havent been in america in over a decade I can name 5 states on a good day#hhghhhhh#sooo much research. so much. and for what. for a fanfic about dylan lenivy talking to ghosts#no actual plot yet either. except that I personally decided silas is like 12 and therefore dylan adopts him like immediately#...which. happens in several fic ideas I have in brain actually. none of the others are gonna be written bc theyre spinoffs on existing fic#but like. all I know abt the psychic au is that the crew arrive in their van first day of camp#dylan immediately clocks a ghost in his general vicinity and does a spit take so hard he chokes and immediately blows his own cover#then goes “there were NO ghosts when I went to camp here wtf??” and talks to the ghost of one eliza vorez#she does the whole vengence etc etc thing obvs but then apparently. she and dylans grandma knew each other#yknow psychic moms gotta have a Network. so the vorez family does Moon Magicks of the future and die young always as is their burden#and the lenivy family does Sun Magicks of the past and live long fulfilling lives that are dedicated to others#so naturally dylan pulls whatever his grandma told him out of brain and goes “hey dont u have a kid. he ok?” and proceeds to commit adoptio#some more stuff abt the missing hikers and my headcanon that dylan straight up does not live in that state anymore ensue#and uh. idk. he helps eliza and the other ghosts fulfill unfinished business. then punches chris hackett in the face#and rescues max and laura well before anything bad happens to them bc its been like 2 days at most#and the ghosts haunt the hacketts collectively so they absolutely go “oh btw u should probably know ur boss also kidnaps ppl”#(dylan has. a Time. but thats true for every fic I write for this godawful game with terrible writing and great actors </3)
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mrslittletall · 4 years ago
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Time for my Ghost of Tsushima Review: Graphics To make it short, the game looks absolutely GORGEOUS. It goes with a realistic style. I didn’t had trouble with the character models, they looked good and unique and the facial expressions were well done. What got me, though, is the scenery. Tsushima is lush with nature and there were trees, flowers, pampas grass. You clearly could see what was a japanese settlement and what was a mongol camp, though I have to argue that they resuded a lot of assets for the buildings, like if you you knew one of them, you knew all of them, but that is nitpicking.  The water looked great, the fire effects looked great, the foxes were cute, the flowers were gorgeous. It was a joy to look at and I made some scenery screenshots which I all forgot to upload, oh well...  The last area was a bit duller though, because it was full of snow, but I like snow and we got footprints in the snow, so I was fine with it ^^ Sound/Music Sadly this game suffers from western Triple A problems... the music is generic and doesn’t stand out. I think I remember one song of the entire OST and that was in Yarikawa, when you unlock the Ghost Stance.  The music is generally played with japanese instruments which was a very nice touch though. It wasn’t there all the time also, leaving you room to listen to the atmosphere, which was nicely done. It never really was quiet in Tsushima, but it made me feel at ease. I am also amazed at the voice acting. The voice acting was really really good, though both me and my husband had one gripe with it... Ok, so I put them on english, but they are still talking japanese with each other, it’s just dubbed for our listening comfort, so why... why did so many VA’s speak with a fake japanese accent?! That didn’t make any sense at all!  It got even more hilarious when I read the names of the credits and Jin, one of the few who doesn’t sport a fake japanese accent was spoken by a japanese man! That was the only gripe I had with the voice acting though.  Gameplay  The game feels like a classic Open World game. I heard a lot of people got tired by it, but they probably have played like a hundred Open World titles already. I only played Breath of the Wild and Death Stranding (and Death Stranding is not a typical Open World title), so it felt all fresh and new enough for me. I am a person who really likes to see progress in games, so it always felt great for me when I found one of the locations in Tsushima that would give me some extra and make my Jin stronger. I loved the exploration part of the game.  The quests of the games? They were a bit generic, at least the optional quests. Lots of the same to do. The story quests were more interesting, for they sometimes forced a certain playstyle on you or gave you certain weapons to use. Like, sinking the ships with the hwacha was really cool and having to sneak out of the shogun’s castle was nerve wracking. I wasn’t bored with them though, for I liked the little stories behind the quests.  The combat was really fluid and played well, though the standoffs at Act 3 got ridiculously hard. I thought it was my problem, but I wasn’t the only one failing the standoffs in Act 3, the game really just made them super hard, apparently to encourage stealth? Yeah, but I don’t want to stealth the mongol patrols...  The boss battles in the game... they kinda felt like a dance. You had to find out what your opponent does and react accordingly and if you did it right, it felt like a beautiful rythm of a sword battle. I was pretty impressed by how fluid it felt when I didn’t mess up. The stealth mechanics were good. I hate stealth in games where you normally don’t do stealth, but here the stealth was a big part of the game. You had a lot of options for stealth, you could hide in grass or behind walls, you could assassinate the foes one by one, you could hide on a roof and shoot them with your bow, you get access to poison later in the game (shooting a brute with hallucination dart was always fun) and and and. It really hammers home that your character took up the practices of a shinobi to save his home.  The early game hell was pretty bad though... you start with not much of course, and that made me almost give up on the game because I did nothing but die... only when I found out that I can run up to archers and hit them with my sword instead of having an archer battle, I had fun again. Like, the game starts you out with low health and resolve and then gets you into missions with five archers shooting at you at once? You are dead before you could even aim!  Overall, I had fun with the gameplay.  Story/Characters Ok, that will be complicated, because I like the story and I dislike the story at the same time... But let’s talk about the characters first. I loved most of them, especially Jin, Yuna, Kenji and Norio. Every main character got their own questline which you could follow and it showed a lot about them, also that none of them a honourable hero or anything, but they all had their flaws and troubles... Especially Lady Masako’s quest made me thinking... for it was extreme that her family got slaughtered like that, but after hearing that she left her sister in an abusive marriage I couldn’t hate Lady Hana for it... she must have tremendously suffered and sadly all her negative energy got channeled at innocent people... Their stories went through the whole game and were a good thing to deepen them, because in the main story they felt a bit side lined in favour of Yuna’s and Jin’s friendship as well as the storyline about Ryuzo and the relationship between Jin and Shimura.  Ok, let’s talk about the story now.  The story is set on the 13th century of the island of Tsushima with the mongol invasion. Because the mongols fight not fair, the honourable Samurai lose the battle... almost all of them. Jito Shimura gets captured and Jin gets dragged away by thief Yuna who nurses him back to health. Of course he makes the decision to save Shimura, who is his uncle, but now he hasn’t an army in his back, he’s only one man. So Yuna teaches him the tactics of stealth and dirty fighting. More and more over the span of the game, Jin takes up the practices of a shinobi, with a lot of Ghost Weapons that get unlocked and a stealth based game play.  Jin, who has been raised as honourable samurai, has trouble with this and can’t accept his new role at first. He tells himself he stops doing it once the mongols are driven out, but...  A legend is getting spun. The Legend of the Ghost. I really like how this happens, for Jin does nothing supernatural to get the mongols down, he simply changes his tactics. But the people hear about it and they rumour and soon after they call him “The Ghost” and everything gets exxegerated a LOT. That is pretty much how legends must have started, so I loved this aspect.  And I loved how we see Jin’s inner struggle and how he thinks about the land first and his honour second and that there is a friendship with Yuna which never turns into romance, which is a plus as well. Act 2 was really epic and I loved the whole Yarikawa moment, when like everything screamed “For the Ghost”, that was POWERFUL. What I dislike is the story since the end of Act 2 and in the start of Act 3.   See, there’s Ryuzo. Ryuzo is Jin’s boyfriend childhood friend and he is a ronin. Jin asked him to join his forces, but Ryuzo betrays him and joins the mongols for his men hunger and the Khan did promise him food.  And during the second act, Ryuzo and his strawhat ronin act like secondary villains... and I was very much hoping for a redemption arc for Ryuzo, but instead the story lets Ryuzo pathetically cry for his life and Jin has to kill him. Um, what was that?! You missed a GREAT opportunity for a redemption arc here and it feels like you didn’t use the potential of Ryuzo at all...  And then Act 3 happened... see in Act 2 there is a mission where Jin gets poison and it is a powerful weapon, most players will probably use it. But there is a scene where Jin uses it without player control and his uncle is like “WTF Jin?”  The issue comes when we enter act 3 and now the mongols use the poison that Jin used on them... And the story turns into a “Oh Jin used poison, how horrible that is! Now the mongols have poison! Why did you use poison, Jin? You are clearly the villain now.” Which I am like... “No? What the fuck? This guy saved thousands of people because he decided that life was more imporant than honour and the narration wants to tell us that poison is bad? What?”  In the end, I liked that Lord Shimura came to help though and the ending tale... had some very powerful lines “You have no honour.” “And you are a slave to it.” Beautifully delivered those lines. My decision in the end was to let Lord Shimura leave, but not for the reason Jin had, for he said he wouldn’t kill family. My reason was the following: “Live! See the pain and suffering of your people and help them. Live with your shame and survive, because that is what Jin does. You don’t get an easy way out, old man.” Yeah, my reason was lot more spite...  Anyway, I wish the story in the later acts would have been better... it started so strong... Overall This isn’t a perfect game of course. But I had my fun with it and I wanted to explore the map and see the end of Jin’s story. Characters were adorable and fun, gameplay is smooth once early game hell is over. I would totally rec this game if you aren’t fatigued of open world titles.
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taylorswiftreadmydiary13 · 5 years ago
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It all started with Tim McGraw
This is how many years ago y’all?
Take me back!
I was maybe 19 years old. Playing soccer at my local community college. Had just gone through my worst break up with the rudest shallow Hal ever. This guy, literally would break my chips out at chilies because “it was going to make me fat.” These were MySpace days. Everyone is just getting use to the influence social media had on your lives. Changing of your top 8, or 16. The importance of your rank on each persons profile. This ex, was my first encounter with a narcissist. His parents tried to pressure me to go to their church... where they were being told California’s money issues were the fault of the gays! Anyone with a tattoo was going to hell (As I covered my left food with my right to hide my tattoo that everyone had already seen & was glaring at) good thing my best friend was going to hell too, she could pick me up! I broke it off with him decided that I was done with boys and relationships and was going to be single for a year!
I was working for the San Jose earthquakes at the time as a blue crew girl. Focusing on soccer and school, family and friends. At work, the other girls and I were to lead the longgggg line of kids and camp coaches onto and around the field before the game. Behind us was a pack of European guys, mostly from the 🇬🇧 UK with all their amazing accents (I was insistent on not melting for them, it was so hard). About 5 of them stepped forward toward me and asked if I was single. I looked at them, smiled and rolled my eyes. My friends spoke up and admitted “she actually just broke up with her boyfriend!” I was blushing so bad...
One boy stepped forward, he looked like an hollister model. Tall, tan, handsome... a little skinnier than my taste in guys but he had a smile that was so infectious... his name was Iwan. He followed me around the entire shift. As an employee, we are there for hours before and after the game. I told him that I wasn’t looking for anything, and actually wanted to be single. He wouldn’t leave me alone insisting that he wouldn’t stop asking for my number. I remember one of the guys, Simon, saying in the best accent “you have very nice teeth and gums.” (Wtf LoL) it made me cover my mouth, Iwan stepped up and said “don’t hide your smile, you have the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen!” He gave me these bracelets he had on his arm. I eventually caved in because no one had ever worked so hard for my phone number, and because I didn’t want to get in trouble at work for having another employee from a different department shadowing me the entire game/time. I figured he’d leave me alone and I can figure it out later by either going ghost or engaging.
My friends and I are all giddy over their accents, and how fun they made that shift. They convince me to entertain it and just see where it goes. So we agree to all meet up with all of them the next week. I find out that he is staying with 2-3 other coaches with a local host family. They come here for work as coaches and stay together in hotels, coach these teams and kids and the pitch to the kids/families to “host a coach” for the season. When we get to this families house in Santa Clara... Iwan introduces me to the family... and another coach named Jimmy he was tan, hairy, and the funniest person I had ever met, & another guy named Nick he was totally opposite of Iwan and Jimmy. He was tall like them... but blonde & had the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever seen. He looked at me silently for what was awkward amount of time before he said Hi but just walked right out the door.
Everyone commented on it. Wondering why Nick didn’t have much to say, how unlike him it was. Jimmy mentioned Nick was probably going out with his stripper girlfriend. (What?!) come to find out she was really a stripper. She, like him, was 22 (older than I was) and apparently it was pretty serious. Ever since they met, nick spent all his time with her. Well... as gorgeous as he was, as beautiful as those eyes were... and as awkwardly long as our stare may have been.... I knew I was “cute,” but I was no where near confident enough to be a stripper. That was so opposite me, so my “feeling” I had about nick was turned into “I’m totally opposite of what he likes...” maybe we won’t get along.
I met a few other friends of theirs. We always hung out in groups. We went bowling. To the movies. Out to eat. Mini golfing. But mostly we just hung out and learned the differences between what we called different things. One time Sam was driving going to turn left, and he turned onto the wrong side of the road! I swore we were going to die. They’d say “merry buns...” and I’d ask if they were talking about Cinnabon... they were apparently talking about Barry bonds ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ suffice it to say we spent most of the time just laughing so hard we almost peed our pants. We would always invite Nick... but he never came.
Iwan finally just decided that I was his girlfriend. I resisted. Insistent that we were friends, but no no no... I wasn’t ready to be in a relationship yet. He grabbed my hand and never let it go. I guess I had a new boyfriend. He was sweet... it was all fun. And part of me was flattered that he liked me that much. I think the most we ever did was kiss. He waited and worked so hard for that kiss too.
& then one weekend they all had to go down to LA for another MLS camp. So off they went. Iwan didn’t have his own cell phone, so we would text and talk through Nicks when Nick was home. I can’t remember if nick went on that trip or not, but I remember getting a text from him saying that Iwan and Jimmy got fired and were being sent back home. I had no way of getting in touch with him, to this day we still never officially broke up 😂 it wasn’t that serious. But I remember thinking “I now have a boyfriend on the other side of the world... with no way of breaking up with him... I’m offially a player from this moment on!” I thanked nick for letting me know and apologized for ever making him feel awkward.
He asked what I meant... well, every time we ALL went out, he always said no. He never ever wanted to hang out with them whenever I was around. On top of that, my self proclaimed boyfriend used his phone to talk to me, that couldn’t have been comfortable. He replied “I never hung out with you because I didn’t want to talk to you.” Damn. So it was me. Harsh Nick, harsh. So I apologized again and said “have a great life.” Like, wtf am I suppose to say to that? Then my phone goes off again and he asks if I want to go watch a game together? Wtf!!!! So I call him... bc wtf sort of message are you sending rn?! He tells me “I liked you, I didn’t want to see you talking to anyone else, so I stayed away. Let’s go grab some lunch and we will just watch the game.”
It was weird. It was spur of the moment. It was everything in the world pushing and pointing me to yes. So I went. Picked him up. We went to a local pub to watch the Man U game. We sat and talked. I don’t even remember what we said... but it felt like a movie. We just got along, as friends. I asked about his stripper gf. He said “she wasn’t my gf, she wanted to be. But with you coming and taking all my friends out with yours who else was I suppose to hang out with? She was cool, but she’s just a friend.” Mmmmhmmm
The group of his friends, and mine dwindled down to just he and I hanging out. We didn’t do anything but enjoy each other’s company. I remember playing soccer 1v1 with him for hours. Laughing so hard that I had to lay down and keep my arms above my head just to catch my breath. He made me laugh like no one else ever had. We were friends. I wanted to make him feel more at home, so I played spice girls and the Beatles every time he got in my car. I remember he said “we don’t have to listen to British singers... let’s listen to your favorites!” I had just got my hands on Tim McGraw’s Live Like You Were Dying Album.
Every now and again, you get your hands on an album that just changes you. It consumes you. And you put it on repeat day in and out for entirely way too long. That was this album for me. So... Nick, meet Mr. Tim McGraw! My favorite song: can’t tell me nothing. We spent the entire spring together, playing and watching soccer, listening to Tim. I decided to take him to a party with my teammates & some other athletes from our college. He went to get me a drink, and somewhere between us walking in and the drink a group of girls heard him and his accent talk. He was cornered and surrounded by all these gorgeous flirtatious girls. And out of nowhere, I felt it burning from the pit of my stomach up to the top of my head. I was jealous!!! I knew I had liked him from the very first time our eyes locked. But I also doubted he would ever like me 1) I’m not stripper confident. 2) I’m young... he was 22. I was just 19. He couldn’t take me to any of the bars or anything. But here I was feeling like he was mine, when he wasn’t. So I went up to him with both drinks in hand (one for me) grabbed it from it and walked away to the group of guys I knew from soccer. Not intentionally to make him jealous, but because they were the closest people to me that I actually knew and I needed to feel like I wasn’t there alone in that moment in time. I don’t know where the girls were, outside I think.
Next thing I know Nick is interjecting himself into the conversation and telling them that I was there with him so they should stop flirting. 😲 fucking speechless!! excuse me... but weren’t you just backed into the corner surrounded and flirting with girls who were saying “isn’t his accent just the cutest?” And “are you single?” To which he said he was! I don’t think so! So we went outside to hash this shit out bc who the hell do you think you are?! I didn’t want to admit that I was jealous. I didn’t want to admit that I even had feelings. I basically put him in his place and said we are here as friends, you don’t get to do that or act that way with me when you’re single. I marched back inside and tried to push it all out of my mind. As soon as he walked back inside, he was surrounded by girls, being nice to them and answering questions. But he kept his eyes on me the entire time. It was making me incredibly uncomfortable in every way possible. So I decided it was time to go. Because I drove him there, I offered to take him home right then or said he could get a ride from one of them. The line of eager girls offering themselves up as taxi tribute was long... but he said goodbye and went with me.
I remember being drama drama drama and putting on wanna be 😂 because I’m a brat like that. Just blasting it so loud that all he could do was laugh the drive back to his house. I remember pulling up to his house and just being over it. I was so jealous but I wouldn’t and couldn’t even admit it to myself. I just wanted him to go. But he stayed, and talked. He accused me of being jealous but could see my stubbornness. So instead he said he wanted to show me something. He made me promise I wouldn’t leave. He said he wouldn’t get out of my car unless I swore. So I did. Intrigued as to what was so important that couldn’t wait. He ran inside and ran back out carrying a cd case. He wanted to talk about each and every cd in that case. Every song. I don’t know that he even had anything important to say about any of them... he just kept talking. Rambling.
He was slowly breaking down my wall. He was breaking down my anger. That was his entire motive the entire time. It was almost 3 am at this point. We had pulled up at 1230! I told him that I should go, but he said he wanted to show me something else. He asked me to go inside. He said we would be looking at pictures, but we had to be quiet bc of the family and his roommates. I was hesitant, but he promised he wanted to show me his family. So... off we went. He pulled out a picture album. I thought he said the pictures were online. He could’ve brought these pictures out. But we sat there together, on that oversized couch looking at pictures of his mum & dad, his gran, & I listened. Looking at every picture. Just hearing him tell me all about his life back home. Then he turned on the computer to show me more. By time time it was after 4 and the sun was going to be coming up soon! I did not want to be doing that awkward “walk of shame” out in front of everyone when we literally didn’t do anything. So I begged him to walk me out. He jumped back in my car.
What are you doing?! I asked. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want us to end like this. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I got so jealous when I saw all those guys talking to you. I shouldn’t have said you were there with me, but then tell those girls I was single. I know you’re mad at me, I just can’t lose you. I’ve never had a better friend, & I can’t let you leave and it never be the same between us. The truth is... is I was jealous. I do like you, more than a friend. I don’t know if you feel the same way, but I think you do. I think you were jealous too... I love you. I’ve known it from the first time you came to the house with Iwan. From the moment I ever laid my eyes on you. You were mine. I just didn’t know if you felt the same way. But tonight we were both jealous. And I don’t want to waste any more time that I have here with anyone other than you.” He leaned in and kissed me
I can still feel him lean in and kiss me when I think about it. The intensity of the truth spilling out of his mouth, almost like he couldn’t control it. The sun was rising and we decided to go to McDonald’s on Stevens creek to get breakfast, we cuddled while we ate. It’s been almost 16 years and every time a I drive by that McDonald’s I still think of him.
We were inseparable all summer long. Doing all the same things we did before, only now it was accompanied with hand holding, cuddles, hugs that lasted forever, and the sweetest kisses. Listening to music out by the lake on CD players... dancing in the moonlite. Laying for hours just resting my head on his chest.
I knew he was flying back home the day after thanksgiving. We spent every single day together, every moment just living in love. We didnt do anything more than hugging and kissing until that last night. It was all life changing. Honestly, the very first love of my life was this man name Nick Day. And that last night, that last moment together, we got out of my car and just laughed and held each other. He looked at me and said “I’m going to come back for you. Idk when. I don’t care if you have a boyfriend, or engaged, I’m going to come back to your parents house and steal you back and love you for the rest of my life. I’m going to come back for you, and I’m never going to let you go.” I remember the stars that night, I’m not lying when he said my eyes shined brighter than them, and that was one of the things he loved most about me. We had our last kiss. I believed him... he’d be back.
Wikipedia says Tim McGraw was released in 2006 by Taylor and BMR but I swear it was 2005 when I first heard it on the radio 95.3 KRTY. The very first time I heard this song, was way before it was a hit on the radio. They would release 3-5 new songs during a lunch hour every week and everyone would vote on which would be the biggest hit. From the second I heard it, TEARS were streaming down my face. I felt like this girl singing had read my diary & ripped the page out, wrote my life story with Nick, changed my eye color to blue... & released it to radio. I was driving over the dumbaron bridge, just in ugly crying hysterics. I remember speeding home to add this song to my myspace and to look up this girl named Taylor Swift. She was younger than I was... and all I could do after that was message her on MySpace and just thank her for writing this song and telling her all about the first love of my life name Nick. To my surprise she replied back to me! We eventually became pen pals on MySpace and talked frequently enough that anytime she came to San Jose or the Bay Area on a radio tour, I’d get to see her. Never for very long... but oh how she felt like one of my best friends. Our last phone call was nick reminding me how I had introduced him to Tim McGraw and how he said anytime he hears him or spice girls or the Beatles how he would forever think of me.
I remember it like it was yesterday, the lady who’s still on it (who drives me insane) said that it was a sweet song... but that she didn’t think Taylor was going to be a big hit. I was so angry with this lady, this is when I decided she wasn’t just annoying, I hated her. Instant Taylor Swift Fan and I was going to fight this Julie lady on the radio. I called in and literally told her she was wrong and that Taylor was going to be huge, mark my words I swore.
Slowly, (like literal years) my faith in him faded. Our song slowly started to sound more and more like strawberry wine by Deana Carter. But I waited and waited. He did however, see and hear that song called Tim McGraw on my MySpace page and called me to ask if I had written it. He said it was def our song. That he does think about me and still promised to find a way to come back one day. Facebook came. He had a new girlfriend, & my God was she gorgeous. She was tall, skinny, blonde, just beautiful. It killed me, even after all those years. But he was happy. So I was happy for him. The thought of him still to this day puts a smile on my face.
Flash forward 11 years. It was 2016. I had just had my second baby, a boy, just two weeks old. I was still healing from my csection and in pain, and my phone buzzes. It’s a DM on my Twitter (which I don’t & hadn’t used in years). From a Nick, asking me if it was me and if I remembered him. We exchanged a few messages before he asks for my #. Before I even have a second to think my phone is ringing. It’s him. He’s calling me from somewhere in Asia where he teaches English. He’s still with that gorgeous girl (7 years) but he was in a bar with friends and in walked an American wearing a Taylor Swift shirt and it reminded him of me and Tim McGraw. So he tried to find me... on Facebook, on MySpace (where he’s still my #1 friend) but that there was no contact information. So he was glad I answered Twitter when I did. He asked about me and my life. I told him that I had kids, one a new born. He asked when I got married (I hadn’t), and I asked why he wasn’t engaged or married yet. He said he wasn’t sure if she was the one or not but that she was constantly dropping hints for him to take it to that next level. 11 years.... he still thinks of me when he hears Tim McGraw or Taylor Swift. 💜
Coincidence that Taylor’s hidden message in Tim McGraw lyrics is cant tell me nothing? I think not.
Oh & my favorite/lucky # is 13 too. I wasn’t born on 13, but when put together it looks like a B
So thank you @taylorswift for putting words to songs and making my first ever soundtrack to my life.
💜 Brandie
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wobblegong · 7 years ago
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I was going to squee about my space-cat but I just got shotgunned through the Chains of Harrow quest & subsequent orbiter thing so instead I’m going to spew my thoughts everywhere. I have too many emotions about this ok. WARNING: Massive story spoilers (for many quest lines), massive gameplay spoilers, massive worldbuilding spoilers, BASICALLY NOTHING BUT SPOILERS UP IN HERE. You probably don’t want to read this unless 1. you’re caught up on everything including 2. you dgaf and find me nattering about a game you don’t play interesting. (~2200 words.)
I. Gameplay/Mechanics
Chains of Harrow is VERY WELL DONE, jfc. I continue to be impressed by Warframe’s execution. Some previous quests weren’t quite ideal but this one... this one was on point.
(Shout-out to my game dev friend who does totally unrelated stuff and their ANGUISHED GROAN when I asked how they’d do the one bit with moving the audio around in their not-Warframe engine; they stared into Hell as they contemplated it. “But Unreal engine apparently lets you do it just fine.” It’s so fun to be reminded that one engine’s effortless task is another engine’s “the only thing that eclipses the suffering this would require is your hubris”.)
There were spoopy screen effects, not that I’m surprised– already seen plenty of demonstrations of what they can do when I get flashbanged or fade in/out of a menu. One section has you chasing directional audio aka heading towards wherever the sound is coming from. (This was the worst section for me, I had to pause three times to get my panic wrangled.) The talking-heads approach to story, combined with the setting, combined with a few lite-cutscenes & one interactive segment... was actually fucking perfect. I usually feel like the exposition-dumps are somewhat contrived and aggravating, but here I was SOLD.
If I had any criticism, it’d be that the spoopy starts wearing off like 1/3 of the way in and just keeps eroding until the end isn’t spoopy at all. It didn’t feel like a deliberate tone-shift, just that they ran out of jumpscare (which is what the spoopy is 100% made of) and didn’t really replace it with anything. I don’t consider it a drawback though... if it had actually been scary the whole way through I’d be a gibbering jelly. Also everything else going on is so fantastic that I prefer the lack of distraction.
I did laugh when the main combat section goes Ghostbusters: you have to trap a spoopy in a box you toss on the floor, complete with a glowy beam trapping said spoopy. Mild grumble because I wasted a dozen traps before I googled wtf to do in that section (hint: APPLY BULLETS TO BAD THING) but fine, if I hadn’t been accidentally lied to I would probably have tried that first instead of faffing around.
Final “boss” fight was indeed kind of a bear but I was warned beforehand that I was gonna get punched out like forty times so when I only got punched out thrice it was like all my namedays had come at once! HOLY FUCK DON’T DO IT BEFORE YOU’VE DONE THE GARA QUEST THO & GOTTEN AN OPERATOR AMP ON CETUS. This quest predates all that BUT THE AMP IS GOOD. EVEN A BAD AMP IS BETTER THAN NO AMP. So... hot tip, get your little shit a little piece of shit and be thrilled when you can actually kill the boss fight adds in under 12 hours.
Ok no I have one true criticism: BLOOD ISN’T RED WAX, WHY WERE THE BLOODY MESSAGES ON THE WALL THAT COLOR. Actually they were... really 3D... ... ...maybe it WAS wax? Where the fuck did the spooperson get so much red wax for writing creepy messages?
II. Story
So the story is that you get a haunted I mean hecked up transmission, it’s spooky; you go to a fucked-up empty ship and find one Red Veil chick just hanging out with her cat. She says a lot of baffling things and then forty ex-Red-Veil zombies/ghosts/possessed assholes try to murder you, ineptly. Ok maybe they’re less inept if they’re not going in ultra-slow-motion. (My god, I will never stop being happy that Frost Prime was my first frame. So good and useful when I’m going into shit blind.)
You haul RVC (Red Veil Chick) out of there and plunk her ass down in the Steel Meridian camp because I guess the factions like each other enough for casual favors like that. She says some more barely-less-confusing shit and very earnestly (there’d be dewey eyes and heaving bosoms if she wasn’t wearing a full-body-inculding-head suit) begs you to go find some relic. Off you go to another fucked-up empty ship! UNNECESSARILY CREEPY WHISPERS lead you to said relic, which was the thing Rell focused on for soothing because most sensory stimulation was too much for him. Wait, what? And then ASSHOLE MCINVINCIBLE tries to stick his hand up your ass like a puppet and if you’re me you sprint in circles for 30 seconds crying while the NPC frantically tries to get you out.
You go back to RVC and she does a seance. It works. To summarize/paraphrase including story bits revealed further into the quest line, Rell was one of the Tenno who got shunned out of the gaggle even before they all got Tenno’d. Apparently this put him in a position to discover what the fuck is in the Void, at which point he had his meatsack body killed so his mind(/soul/whatever) could be chained to his specific ‘frame, leaving him awake/conscious to keep doorstoppering the badbadnotgood, even while the other Tenno were off snoozing per the Lotus’ plans. A line of RVCs (Red Veil Chicks) were in on this and dedicated themselves to... looking after him, inasmuch as you can look after someone who shoveled themself into a robot that’s been chained up somewhere it’ll never see the light of day. They could talk to him anyways– I guess they were mostly there to keep him from going bonkers and maybe intervene if anything ever went wrong.
Anyways, that’s all fine right up until it isn’t; RVC & the Lotus determine that his transference fucked up and fragmented so you need to go Ghostbusters the creepy phantoms of this guy’s psyche. Collect them all while dodging ASSHOLE MCINVINCIBLE (and a smattering of forgettable mooks– fuck off Infested, I don’t care if it’s your ship) and RVC thanks you/tearfully asks you to take them back to where his ‘frame rests so he can die because THAT’S ENOUGH SUFFERING FOR ONE PERSON THANKS.
Nothing gets to be easy, not even that, so when you find the ‘frame and start snapping its chains it wakes up. RVC has about five seconds to go “thaT’S NOT RELL” while your little shit self scurries behind a pillar before boss fight! Red Veil operatives (except dead or mind controlled or who knows what) try to punch you out while some kind of awful red glowing tear pops in and out to fireball you. But eventually you snap all the chains and yaaaay Rell gets his eternal rest. (I’m not crying, you’re crying.)
III. Meta Story/Worldbuilding
It’s SUCH A THING to me that RVC casually knows what the Tenno are. I mean, ok, makes sense because the RVCs were so involved with Rell, buT LIKE. MAN. NOBODY ELSE KNOWS. THE “KIND OF HAVE A CLUE” PEOPLE STILL DON’T KNOW MORE THAN “IF YOU DISSECT A WARFRAME YOU WILL NOT FIND ANYTHING THAT EXPLAINS WHAT THE TENNO ARE”. Fuck, I think the RVC even dresses down the Lotus over it a la “fuck u, u say they’re ur kids but u suck and u never knew about Rell”.
They completely skate right past RVC setting up shop in the hyper-secret Steel Meridian HQ. “Yeah, no big, me and my ouija board are gonna hang out at the secret base of a completely different faction, which happens to be located like three centimeters from the balls of the genocidal maniacs they defected from. Sorry you keep seeing my kavat in the background of my transmissions.” W h a t . ?
...ok, side thoughts out of the way: OH FUCK OH FUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK THE MAN IN THE WALL
As of this point in Warframe’s existence (out of game I mean) they have done... not the WORST job defining the Void, but of course a lot of it hasn’t been written out. (Both because good storytelling and also because the writers probably haven’t gotten that far. :p) Things we do know:
The ship of people who got stuck in there was (afaik) 100% casualties among all the adults. Fuckers all went feral apparently? But the kids lived. Although they came out weird and dangerous (understatement). People do still go into the Void atm, generally via opening a portal on another planet. People... don’t always come OUT of the Void, although presumably they come back out often enough for the major powers to feel like it’s not a waste of time to ransack that shit. I don’t know where they stuck this lore but iirc there’s some kind of horrible THING in there that basically shoves some kind of hijacking device into you, if it catches you, and then it controls you forever. (IDK if dying gets you out of it or if it can just be like HA HA NICE TRY MEATPUPPET and get you back up. With how this setting is, could go either way.) This is why all the Void tilesets have a variety of mob types: the THING has been hijacking the assortment of factions that wander in. Like I said, people don’t always come back out during those expeditions.
So the first badbadnotgood hint I personally played through was at the end of The War Within (Space Lil’ Shit 2 Electric Boogaloo, Now With More Tremors). It’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brief, but while Space Dad is congratulating you, your Operator suddenly stares into the camera, eyes turning into voids, and a creepy voice taunts you, something about “don’t forget what you owe me kid” or the like. It’s a single line, but the way the camera snaps around (complete with some fucking over-the-top visual effects) & Space Dad catches your arm while you shake it off... thaaaaaat’s not a trivial hallucination.
Anyway. Among other things, during the Chains of Harrow the RVC is very fucking explicit about how Rell was grappling with/cockblocking a specific “vast and indifferent” entity that lives in the Void. Offhandedly, The Lotus dismisses this while mentioning that basically all Tenno have mentioned or claimed similar things. (RVC keeps on insisting.) Right before Rell finally dies, he asks who’s gonna take over his job if he stops, and the RVC coos that all the other Tenno will have to help now.
I have been told by one friend– without checking around, so could be wrong, but– that once you’ve finished the Chains of Harrow you’ll periodically get jumpscared on your ship by a creepy asshole who looks identical to your Operator, but has a different (asshole) voice. Said friend randomly turned around once and what looked like their Operator was sitting on their nav console. And taunted them. Said friend sprinted down to the transference pod to make sure their Operator was in the right place– they were– but was pretty freaked out by it.
Obviously, we don’t have much more detail at this point, but uH. This is not painting a rosy picture of the shit lurking out there in the Void. To me this is pointing towards some kind of extradimensional horror that you really don’t want to draw the attention of... and we’ve gone and done that. Possibly even that the Tenno were lucky to scamper away the first time after it got to play with an entire ship of people (some guessing there, but given its asshole moves so far...) and going anywhere near the Void after that was about as wise as standing on a hilltop in a thunderstorm while double-dog-daring Zeus.
I’m so excited to find out how fucked we are.
Given what the orbiter shit involved, the answer is probably very, and also creatively. BALLAS? WHAT?? WHAT?????
IV. Further Thoughts
I really would love to hear the perspectives of autistic folk. That said, I... more or less liked how the Chains of Harrow handled Rell? The quest established that he was very different; the other kids-eventually-Tenno ignored him, while his mother loved him (I’m open to other interpretations but everything I heard pointed to sincerity). He had the intelligence and agency to deal with badbadnotgood, and while the RVC had a certain maternal vibe she was pretty damn reverent when discussing what he’d done/was doing. Also (maybe most importantly in my reckoning) he didn’t get a happy ending, but he succeeded at what he was doing. By this setting’s standards that’s a rosier conclusion than almost anyone else gets.
Now that I’m thinking of it, I’m racking my brains for any parties that have known the truth of the Tenno and been kindly disposed towards them without getting all maternal/paternal. I’m coming up blank. (The fuck is with this setting and everyone treating them like kids btw? All indications are that they stopped aging so they look like young teens, sure, but all indications are ALSO that they’ve lived awhile time, even excluding their cryosleep! I’m willing to believe a certain amount of “their brain maturity stalled along with the rest of their aging so they have the hardware of a 13yo” but that wouldn’t undo living long enough to form a small civilization. SOME parts of teenagers not being like adults are hardware, but a lot of it is pure lack of life experience, which the Tenno have in spades by now. Also, you know, THEY PSYCHICALLY POWER SPACE NINJA ROBOTS, SHOW SOME RESPECT.)
...
And now I’m going to pass out to sweet dreams of tomorrow’s fully-grown space-kitty.
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