#this is open for discussion btw

[wizardpigeon]

Ruin DLC spoilers

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I'm pretty sure that Eclipse is the daycare attendants safemode? Like

In the main security breach game, Freddy is on safe mode and that's why he's not infected by the burntrap virus like everyone else,

So the daycare attendant gets infected, and therefore their safemode is unreachable,

The safemode being eclipse makes a lot of sense because eclipse seems to be a more balanced character between sunny and moon,

Moon exists to help the kids sleep during naptime N stuff, sunny is for awake time fun, but in the event of an emergency, or even just mild accidents, injury or what have you, neither of them seem equipped to deal with it,

as evidenced by how sunny behaves in security breach with Gregory, never actually harming him but not helping him either

Instead, when something goes wrong, sunny and moon combine into Eclipse, the soft spoken, gentle, lower energy attendant, who keeps everyone calm and safe and makes sure they get back to their parents (but quite possibly still can't leave the daycare outside of emergencies involving danger within the daycare itself, since he just dropped Cassie gently outside I presume he's set to do that so that one of the security guards, bots, or another animatronic can collect her and take her to her parents, while he reverts back into sun or moon and continues working)

It also makes a ton of sense to have a reboot automatically restart the animatronic on safemode, considering how big these things are, how much more powerful they are than a human, if they're recalibrating then they're unlikely to be able to accurately control their strength, unless they start on a preselected controlled program that prohibits them from doing certain things

Anyway I just finished marks daycare part of the ruin playthrough so I had some thoughts

[cosmossystem]

what i feel like is lacking from conversations about plurality is how genuinely, fundamentally cool it is to be plural. doesnt it fascinate you how our brains can create entirely new selves, inner worlds, inner structures to keep itself afloat? doesnt it make you so curious? especially with regards to atypical plural experiences. i dont hate people for having entire systems full of fragments or fictives or subsystems. in fact, i find it wonderful, a miracle of the mind. you have a complicated inner world with unique lore? incredible, how did that develop? your entire system is full of fictives from the same source? thats amazing, hows that going? your system has entire layers on itself, with several systems running in tandem? wow, thats fascinating, how did you know? you believe you came from different worlds? tell me about them. please, tell me more about yourselves. id love to hear it. i do not fear the potential of the human brain.

[brother-emperors]

I got. thoughts. about valens and voices in imperial roman history. but I also got a lot of thoughts about uhhhhhh choosing your brother for co ruling the Fratricide Foundation Story Empire. many thoughts about themistius' oration too

Brotherly Love, Themistius (trans. Peter Heather & David Moncur)

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / insta

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bingqiu ponies (Happy Birthday @Piosplayhouse!)

[commandermahariel]

actually i really don't fucking get the whole ''anders was better in awakening" circlejerk. "sealene you have posted about this several times already isn't it enough" NO IT IS NOT

anders in awakening is a cliche funnyman guy whose motivations aren't particularly interesting or compelling. oh he likes cats and doesn't like templars and wants a pretty girl. truly revolutionized writing. it doesn't help, of course, that awakening is only like 15 hours long if you do all the side content, and really none of the companions are that fleshed out.

idk man i don't have any screenshots or long professional essays about character analysis i'm not that kind of blogger. i'm just some guy who finds the da2 version of anders much, much more interesting and compelling as a character. "oh they ruined him in da2" it's called fucking character development?????????????

anders in dragon age II is far from being a flawless person. some might even say he is a bad person, and while i don't really agree to that, i do see where those people are coming from. but he is an interesting character, one that provokes heated discussion even 13 years after the game's release. how often is there any meaningful discussion regarding awakening anders that isn't just "hur dur he was better back then"?

i don't even dislike awakening anders he's a fun little guy wish he wasn't voiced by fucking greg ellis tho but come on man would this man really be an interesting companion in something longer than a 15 hours long dlc with very little companion interactions

edit: i have a feeling this post might breach containment so in case it does -- i wrote this while being kinda sleep deprived and without thinking too deep, i was just pissed at dragon age reddit being stuck in 2016. i could have articulated my point better and with less generalization towards daa anders but i won't bother rewriting the post now because most people likely won't see the new version anyway

[k-atsukibakugou]

which of your f/o’s is fucking you until the bed breaks when your boyfriend suggests opening the relationship?

[ruelpsen]

Fuck it, I'm going to go out and say it: while I often enjoy being teased on here, a fair portion of what I receive irritates me as it's misguided at best and reeks deeply of unlearned, malicious fatphobia at its worst. Yes I want to be fatter but I'm not fat. I am a 140-lbs/63.5-kg twink despite all my efforts to gain weight. I'm not stick thin, sure, but I'm sure as hell not fat either. So why are some people insistent on calling me fat/huge/big? Are actual fat people too much for you (perhaps even in spite of you being a self-professed FA)? Is your idea of fatness grounded in equating 'not even that chubby' with 'fat' while not even being attracted to people who are actually fat? Do you solely find bloated skinny guys hot while still saying you like fat people? Or are you not attracted to fat people at all and here simply to take your fatphobia out on the people closest to your image of ideal thinness, who you'd be more openly attracted to if they lost 10-20 pounds, all while still scoffing at or ignoring the fat people at the heart of these communities?

Some of y'all really need to do better. Either own up to your love of people who are actually fat (which may entail adjusting your understanding of what fatness is), clean up your nomenclature, or don't be here. Yes unlearning biases like fatphobia takes time and effort, but your choices really are more or less that simple.

[bireggiemantle]

Would Transitioning Save Her: A Sliding Scale of the Impact of MTF Transition on Riverdale Character

(Ranked from Best impact to Worst Impact)

1. Archie - should've been a dyke from the get go. I could write a billion essays about this

2. Reggie - being freed from toxic masculinity would fix her

3. Moose - considering how deeply repressed she is I think seeing the tv glow would save her.

4. FP - transitioning could save her marriage. this would not improve her alcoholism. BUT ! it might help her stop bottling so many of her issues up

5. Munroe - transitioning just fits into her plot of self acceptance to me. wlw prison archie + munroe would fuck crazy

6. Sweet Pea - this is solely based on vibes

7. Original/50s Dilton - big cock t girl representation for the win!

8. Hiram - this would make veronica leagues worse. could you imagine if her daddy issues became mommy issues

9. Clay - relatively unaffected by transition. I think she's already pretty open and honest about who she is, and it wouldn't take much for her to admit this about herself

10. Fangs - no impact. already a lesbian in my eyes

11. Jughead - canonically transgender but also it would absolutely make her worse and more insufferable. this could save s1 jughead (and briefly s5 jughead) but s2 jughead on is the queen of repression and it would take a lot of force to get her to come out. if she's repressing something after all

12. Chic - win for weird girls everywhere. would drastically improve her relationship with betty

13. Bret - stonewall prep plotline but it's toxic lesbians bret and jughead. she would try to fuck donna but donna would NEVER stoop so low

14. Kevin - considering how much of her sense of self is reliant on her identity, transitioning could either really help her or force her further into a world of identity politics. she'd be the world's worst kind of white feminist for sure though

15. Charles

16. Dilton - also vibes

17. Hal - sorry betty

18. Fred - not saving her marriage but would allow her to connect better with archie and I believe she'd be a better parent to her

19. Uncle Frank - could free her but would probably do irreparable damage instead

20. Sheriff Keller - this is a cisgender man

21. Jason - I don't even want to imagine what his relationship with cheryl would have looked like if he was a woman. huge win for incest freaks I guess

22. Julian - five steps back for lgbt rights

[inoghmia]

Heya, Im just confused so im gonna ask in hope u can clear this up for me, do you actually hate hate Jax or is it more of a hate-hate Jax in an affectionate way? I see you draw him being tortured a lot(which I love actually, he deserves it and its funny) but because ive seen many others artists saying they hate him and then actually loving him too(love-hate kind of situation lol) I was wondering if that would be your case or you just really hate him

Anyway, in any case, as an Jax stan, please torture him more /lh

I have mixed feelings about him tbh haha, it’s a “I love to hate him” type of deal, he isn’t a completely horrible person that I genuinely despise, but whenever he was on screen I was mostly like “WHAT AN ASSHOLE”

I appreciate his character greatly from a writing perspective cause it’s fun to have a character that is actually just that, an asshole, there’s no “he’s sarcastic”, “he doesn’t mean it”, this mf literally does not have a shred of empathy it seems and imo acts like a 14 year old edge lord who just read death note for the first time (“ouuu violence 😈🤓☝️”). He gives off the vibe of being the guy who says “look at this funny video I found” and it’s a live leak video, which makes me feel absolutely no guilt at all when I draw him trip down a flight of stairs

I do think some people romanticize his actions to a delusional degree which doesn’t personally bother me, you do you, but I just hope they keep his character in Tadc the way he is now and don’t change him up to seem sympathetic for audiences sake

[curapicas]

the reveal that Laios learned to see ghosts and why he kept quiet for so long...

oh, you mean like. what you saw happening to Falin throughout her whole childhood? Even though you stuck to her side and encouraged her into not hating her own powers? Even though you accepted her relationship with ghosts as benign and trusts her to give you their message?

(and no, there's NO dunking on Laios here... he saw this happening in his village and he hated it. but still,) well well if it isn't something he sees as worthy in his sister yet in him is just another one for the list of "offputting things people see in Laios"

[innocentartery]

carol's relationship with star sapphire is so thematically enriching in context of the discordance between power and agency in green lantern comics. the power that she (and hal!) possesses is a) contingent upon her ability to fulfill a given role within the hierarchical establishment and b) thrust upon her without her consent!!!! her position at ferris air is a condition of her father's approval, while star sapphire exists as a violation of her personal autonomy—which is why it's so fascinating to unpack her motives when she does choose to pursue its power. carol's worst offenses are consistently a reaction to the destabilization of her environment: predator manifested in response to carl's belittlement and jason bloch's attack; star sapphire only targeted green lantern after the zamarons abandoned her. it's the revelation of her true lack of agency that drives her to lash out. power is illusory as long as someone else controls it—this was carol ferris' mantra long before it ever became parallax's

[kingofpuppets]

elden ring dlc spoilers

here's my 2 cents about the dlc and the reactions i'm seeing

i have no intention of writing a post analyzing in-depth the lore of the dlc since i've yet to go through every dialogue and item description as i did for base game – anything i were to write now would be incomplete at best – so this is not it. i just wanted to address the overall dissatisfaction i'm seeing from a lot of people. like, as someone who spent weeks after playing the base game reading every single line of text in the game, analyzing each environment, enemy placement and design, seeing the reaction people are having to the dlc lore is quite funny. i get being disappointed a character isn't what you thought they'd be but going so far as to scream "bad writing!" is a bit excessive. i even saw people claiming miyazaki changed the writing to pander to the fans and, seriously? fromsoftware never came close to doing that and there's absolutely no reason for them to start now. but anyways, as i mentioned before i'm a huge lore nerd, the kind with a huge mind map containing nearly all relevant item descriptions, there's nothing in the base game i haven't read, so i think it's safe to say i have a somewhat good understanding of what new lore piece in the dlc contradicts what lore piece in the base game. i'm in no way an authority on the matter – there isn't one – nor am i pointing fingers saying "i'm right, you're wrong" – i just don't understand. i've been through countless different theories before i settled on the ones i entered the dlc with and obviously i wasn't right about everything – especially because a lot of it is speculation not to mention there's not really a right or wrong, only different interpretations of the same materials – but nothing new i encountered contradicted the base game lore i had put together. if anything, it strengthened even more some of my theories. so many people are upset about miquella being the main antagonist or that he's evil (which i completely disagree with, especially some posts portraying miquella as some kind of cartoon villain which is more speculation than anything with actual support from in-game lore), but everything was leading up to it if not in the base game in the dlc (the moment i found miquella's discarded love i figured who the final boss might be, when i found st. trina i was sure). "but the radahn fight comes out of nowhere" maybe there's no direct mentions of it in the base game but it is hinted quite well albeit very subtlety what miquella wanted to do with him in one of the dlc quests – not to mention radahn makes the most obvious sense when you think of miquella/radahn as a parallel to marika/godfrey. and miquella using mohg is not even worth mentioning – i hope my fellow mohg enthusiasts are feeling vindicated, as am i. in short, nothing seemed out of place for me at all. so i was really taken aback when i went into the tags and saw the overall mood. everyone can have different opinions regarding their enjoyment of the dlc nor are there right and wrong theories in a fromsoftware game where the lore is so vague but it's quite upsetting seeing people talk about how "the dlc ruined miquella's character" or "the dlc lore has no connection to the base game" when that's simply not true. if anything, the dlc only added more depth to miquella and even if i was heartbroken at the death of my favorite elden ring character, it made sense thematically. if anything i'm more upset about the fight itself but that's a gameplay problem which is not the focus of the post.

[kipperlillyforpresident]

ratgrumblr ask meme

To celebrate the Rat Grinder fandom's unofficially being named, I put together this ask meme!

Some of the questions are open-ended, so that you can answer them more then once if you'd like. Or don't! I'm not the boss of you. You know the drill: reblog the post, get sent asks with the questions, answer, and profit.

Kipperlilly Copperkettle - What are you obsessed with?

Food Trucks - What do you normally have for lunch?

Ruben Hopclap - If you were a celebrity, how much would you interact with your fandom?

Puka Necklace - What were you like when you were younger? How different are you today?

Oisin Hakinvar - Do you fall in love easily?

Dragon's Hoard - Do you have any interesting family heirlooms/inheritances?

Mary Ann Skuttle - Do you enjoy any sports? If so - which ones?

Mango Soda - If you were a fandom character, what food or drink would people latch onto as your Favorite and make it a personality trait?

Ivy Embra - What's your ideal fashion sense? How close is it to how you actually dress?

Party Girl - What's your idea of a perfect Saturday night?

Buddy Dawn - Do you take pride in your hometown?

Light Domain - Do you believe in fate? Free will? Some combination of the two?

Lucy Frostblade - Are you the type of person to 'stick to your guns' on your opinions?

In Memoriam - How do you think others perceive you? How accurate is this perception?

Porter Cliffbreaker - Who was the worst teacher you ever had?

Jace Stardiamond - Which would you prefer: a fulfilling career that is difficult, or a boring career that is easy?

Henry Hopclap - If you could study anything in college, with no financial burden, what would you pick?

Shatterstar - What's something silly that makes you unreasonably mad?

Devil's Honey - Confess a lie you recently told. Optionally, share the reason you told that lie.

Bakarath - Share an inside joke - with or without context.

Quokki Pets - If you could adopt any fictional animal/creature as a pet, what would you pick?

My Clerical Gnomance - Share a favorite piece of fanart/fanfic/fanwork that somebody else made.

The Last Stand - Have you ever cheated on a test/academic assignment?

High Five Heroes - Share something that makes you happy.

[justajoshe]

About The Minecraft Movie

Okay, I get it. The trailer looks ugly. The weird mesh of Teletubby looking characters alongside real people is weird. Steve being Jack Black, a lot of folks are mad about that. Mostly because Jack Black doesn't look like Steve as we know him.

But I don't care about any of that. I can enjoy ugly, I can enjoy lack of continuity, if there's a good solid story. And that's where my concerns lie, with the story.

We have very little to go off of with this one trailer. What is happening with the other world plot? Why are these four brought into Minecraft and how? I see the portal, but who summoned them? The portal is blue like what the Hosts use in Legends. Did the Hosts summon them?

The piglins are invading and there's possibly a Hosts portal, is this based off Legends? If so, why? We got the full story in the game and the books!

What role does Steve even play? Is he even integral to the story (if there is a story)? Since Steve is there, will Alex be there also? We all love the Steve and Alex duo! But I kind of hope not. I'm not sure who would be a good cast for Alex and also mesh well with Jack Black...

Why are we seeing the Orb of Dominance again? Does this take place before Dungeons? Or is it a separate universe, a separate seed if you will?

Do these four protagonists know each other? Are they friends or family? How will they grow and change with this journey?

How did they get the Orb of D? The DOrb? The Heart of Ender?

Is there a disconnect or disagreement back home that they are able to resolve using the knowledge they learned form the other world?

Are they able to return home at any time or is there an antagonistic force keeping them trapped in the other world? Who even is the antagonist?

What kind of choices are the four protagonists going to have to make? Is the stress of the other world and its antagonistic forces going to break up the group for them to dramatically reunite at the end in order to thwart evil???

Or is this a very poorly written cash grab with no character arches, no hero's journey, no struggle to reach a goal and ultimately no story?

And why the Beatles?

Also who is stupid enough to use TNT as a shelf decoration!!!

[your-local-grubdog]

Pikmin 4: Heritage Theory

Warning for MAJOR Pikmin 4 spoilers, including: various end of day conversations, post-credit events, late game piklopedia and treasure hoard entries, and also the final boss.

As a sort of re-boot of the franchise, Pikmin 4 introduces a lot of new ideas to the series. Among them is the idea that the various alien species in the game are much more closely related than we first realized - and perhaps more connected to PNF-404 than we would have ever thought in the other three games. I wanted to go over the various texts in the game that touch on this idea and talk about them a little because, hoo boy, the IMPLICATIONS. I call it a theory in the title for a lack of better wording but it honestly just feels like a canon fact that's never directly stated. There's just that much evidence, much of which all but outright says what happened.

Apologies if the images are a little low quality, Tumblr crunched them up badly. I provide image descriptions so hopefully that makes up for it.

As this has many end game spoilers (which, final warning for those), I'm going to assume that anyone reading beyond this point knows the basics of the game's story, world, and characters. Thus I won't be explaining every last little thing.

Somewhat early on, Olimar makes the following observation in his Voyage Log:

[ALT ID: Olimar's Voyage Log, entry 60, "Lost Civilization": Some of the objects I call treasure seem to be more complex than they initially appear. It makes me wonder... who made these? And where are they? I don't sense their presence here at all, but I suppose they could be hiding in the shadows, secretly watching me. END ID]

This vaguely threatening entry does confirm that the characters, or at least Olimar, are aware that there was indeed a civilization on PNF-404 at some point. It should also be noted that the Japanese website includes notes from another character who is also aware of the ancient civilization, though the canonicity of it is debatable. I'll get back to that "they're in the shadows, watching" line in another post, as it presents its own can of worms. For now, what matters is that the characters are aware that this planet was once inhabited and Nintendo is drawing attention towards that.

Where this starts to get weird and interesting is with Olimar's Treasure Hoard entries on the Heroic Shield, Memory Fragment (Center Right), and Buddy Display. I can't show all of their text in just one screenshot and the pikipedia hasn't added every treasure note to the Pikmin 4 treasures as of writing, so I'll only be including the segments most related to this conversation.

[ALT ID 1: Treasure Hoard, Olimar's Notes, Heroic Shield (segment): That would mean these living beings must have looked something like us... I wonder who they were and what their faces looked like. Could they have been our ancestors who migrated through space to our planet long ago? (the treasure is a pin showing the helmet of a human-style spacesuit) END ID 1]

[ALT ID 2: Treasure Hoard, Olimar's Notes, Memory Fragment (Center Right) (segment): I'm amazed that such a similar species could exist in the far reaches of outer space. I've heard that organic components can travel through space on meteorites and comets. Could there be a connection between my planet and this one? (treasure is of a puzzle piece with part of a dog's face on it) END ID 2]

[ALT ID 3: Treasure Hoard, Olimar's Notes, Buddy Display (segment): I can't find any evidence of them in any of the existing creature databases. But there's something familiar about them. It's almost as if I've met them before... I guess I'll chalk it up to an ancient memory that's been imprinted on my genome. (treasure is a photograph of two earth dogs) END ID 3]

There is so much to unpack here alone. Olimar straight up theorizes that there may be a connection between PNF-404 and Hocotate, even going to far as to propose if maybe the people of PNF-404 (or at least the people who made the Heroic Shield) may be his ancient ancestors. He does also theorize that a meteorite may have carried "organic components", which is technically possible, but I'm not sure how that would occur in a way that carries said components from one non-destroyed planet to another and leading to creatures evolving in eerily similar ways. Honestly, I'll chalk that one up to an early theory of his, a red herring on Nintendo's part, and thus not something to think about too much. Especially sense, in the Buddy Display, he considers his ability to somewhat recognize Earth dogs as an "ancient memory... imprinted on my genome". While I'm not sure of the science behind such a claim, we also have to take this from a story telling perspective - which is that Nintendo is all but screaming "there is a connection here". Not just in relation to the aliens and the planets, but also in relation to the dogs.

Speaking of the dogs, Olimar's notes on the final boss of the game presents yet more evidence to a connection - this time focusing more on the connection between Earth dogs and space dogs.

[ALT ID 1: Piklopedia, Olimar's notes, Ancient Sirehound (segment): These results would indicate that 99.9 percent of the canine creature's DNA matches Oatchi's, and that the only difference between Oatchi and Moss may be the natural presence or absence of a leaf tail. END ID 1]

[ALT IDs 2 and 3, as one naturally leads into the other: Piklopedia, Olimar's notes, Ancient Sirehound (segment): If these two theories prove to be true, it would suggest the possibility that this ancient creature is a common ancestor to two canine species from vastly remote star systems. And that, perhaps, there are even more hidden secrets out there that could hint at a fascinating yet inconceivable truth the universe has yet to reveal... END IDs 2 AND 3]

I'm not sure what else to say here; the evidence speaks for itself. The Ancient Sirehound and Moss - both from PNF-404 - closely match the genetics of Oatchi, who is from an entirely different part of the universe. For the Sirehound to be genetically related to Oatchi, then members of the Sirehound's species would have had to leave PNF-404 and migrate to other planets. Their care takers - humans - would have had to go with them.

I also find it worth pointing out that the Sirehound's arena is filled with various human items, such as shoes and toys. It's honestly a little haunting to find them so deep in a dark cave, unused by humans for who knows how long. The ruined toys in particular really get to me. We don't know how old the Ancient Sirehound in particular is, but the idea that humans once hid in this cave from something or that their dog brought the items here for comfort is really depressing.

[ALT IDs: various hard-to-see images of the human items in question, including: pillows, pipes. gardening tools, a fork, adult sized shoes, baby sized shoes, various children's toys, and other objects I couldn't quite make out. All of them are either partly submerged in water or at the very edge of water, leaving them covered in mud. END IDs]

I think by now it's safe to say that, yes, humans left Earth with their dogs at some point in time. Yet there are still MORE pieces of evidence to suggest this idea, this time coming from Shepherd's family history. Because we really needed to be beat over the head with evidence, I suppose. All are presented in numerical order as shown in-game.

[ALT ID 1: Rescue Journal, Shepherd Family History, entry 1: Thanks to the technology that has come from space exploration, our lives have grown much easier and far safer, and on-planet rescue requests have decreased dramatically. But as migration into space continues to grow, our services continue to be needed. So I'm happy to announce we are extending our rescue services to the frontiers of space! Signed, Paniya Shepherd, 82nd Captain. END ID 1]

[ALT ID 2: Rescue Journal, Shepherd Family History, entry 2: We've done it at last! We have flown to space! Out in this great, limitless expanse, not a sound can be heard. And yet, I can still clearly hear the pounding of my own heartbeat. Space--how it overflows with possibilities! There can be no doubt. This is one giant leap forward for our kind. Signed, Ed Shepherd, 65th Captain. END ID 2]

[ALT ID 3: Rescue Journal, Shepherd Family History, entry 6: The Shepherd family has lived with dogs from the very beginning. We understand that if we love and respect these creatures as we do our own--if we pay attention and observe their behavior closely--then we can break down the walls between our species and truly understand one another. Signed, Kain Shepherd, 16th Captain. END ID 3]

[ALT ID 4: Rescue Journal, Shepherd Family History, entry 7: "Beyond the sky itself there lies a beautiful blue planet." Those words have been passed down from captain to captain, calling to each of us. I can't imagine what sort of place this blue planet might be, but it's said to be home to even more dogs and folks that we have here. One day, I hope to fly beyond the sky...and into space. Signed, Maris Shepherd, 7th Captain. END ID 4]

[ALT ID 5: Rescue Journal, Shepherd Family History, entry 8: Many years have passed since we first began to make this land our new home. Still, we need more time to complete our environmental adaptations. In the meantime, we must survive so that, one day, we can pass down this new history to our children, and pass down the ways we've learned to rescue and protect everyone. One day we will live here in peace. Signed, Mark Shepherd, 2nd Captain. END ID 5]

[ALT ID 6: Rescue Journal, Shepherd Family History, entry 9: The surface! We made it at last! Finally, we can begin making a fresh start here on this planet. Of course, it will take many long months and years before what we've built here will be anything like what we once had. But we won't be alone. Our beloved dogs will be by our side as we walk this long, difficult road. Signed, Aral Shepherd, 1st Captain. END ID 6]

There is so much here, all confirming that ancient Giyans (and Captain Shephard's direct ancestors) 1) migrated to this new planet in search of a "fresh start" and 2) proceeded to migrate to other parts of space many generations latter. It also hints that they know of a "blue planet" - a common nickname for Earth - which is home to more people and dogs. Most certainly, it is the planet they came from - making Giyans human, or at least an evolution of humanity, and perhaps all other alien races in Pikmin 4 (from Hocotations to Koppaites to Ohrians to Conohanins to anyone else from the twenty one named planets (excluding PNF-404) in the series) are also descendent from Giyans. It would explain why they all look so similar in game - though we can safely assume that Hocotations are at least descendent from Giyans based on Olimar's notes. Further more, the leafling cure requires cells from a non-leafified individual who is genetically similar to the individual in question. We're never told how Yonny gets these cells (and, given we're talking about Yonny, I'm too afraid to even ask) but the fact that the medicine works for anyone regardless of what their home planet is suggests that they are, in fact, more or less the same species.

How different the various aliens look from Humans is easily chalked up to evolution. We know minor changes in height could, theoretically, happen within just one or two generations spent on a planet with different gravity than Earth's. It would make sense that this would be exacerbated over many many more generations, especially if the gravity is much stronger. Which, to quote the Pikipedia, "According to Brittany, the gravity on Koppai is roughly ten times stronger than on PNF-404." Given their matching heights, it's probably safe to assume similar applies to the other planets, and thus over the generations the people shrunk. Again, the exact scientific validity of this is questionable, but given the semi-fantastical nature of Pikmin I believe we can suspend our disbelief enough to let this story work. We already have to do that for how the Pikmin as a species function, after all. As for oxygen becoming toxic in the 8th history entry Mark Shephard does state that "we need more time to complete our environmental adaptations". Be these natural or artificially induced (as he is only of the second generation), it is again safe to suspend our disbelief to say that humans just adapted to these new worlds. Besides, Koppaites at the very least retained (or possibly gained back?) the ability to tolerate at least low amounts of oxygen.

The real problems come in the time frame and the loss of history. It's never stated one way or the other if people are aware of their ultimate connections back to Giya, so I won't discuss that, but it is very obvious they have forgotten their connection to Earth/PNF-404. Furthermore, it's made clear that the Giyans lost the ability to travel through space by the 7th generation and only regained it by the 65th. If they had access to space flight, they would certainly have archives of their heritage - and they do indeed seem to have some idea of what it is, given how Earth has become a legend. Yet, the Shephard family history as far back as the migration to Giya was preserved - why not anything else? The inconsistencies and questions make this part of the tale hard for me to ignore, yet we have no answers. This is pure speculation, but if I had to provide an answer I think a solar flare hit Giya and destroyed their technology, making them start over. Perhaps these early Giyain-Humans were so reliant on technology at this point that there were no books or oral traditions to preserve this heritage lost when the tech was destroyed? Though, somehow, the Shephard family would have to be one of if not the exception to this. Again, the previous is pure speculation, but it's the best we can do for the time being.

There's also the question of when and how Earth dogs changed to look like the Sirehound, which would of had to happen before the migration to space given that Oatchi has the same body plan. And then why did Moss's species become so much smaller?

Still, even with all these plot holes, I think it's pretty damn clear that Nintendo intended for our favorite little aliens to be the evolutionary decedents of humans. How and if they'll use this plot point remains to be seen, but it does open up a whole bag of opportunities for the universe of Pikmin. One that, frankly, deserves to be explored.

[kiraman]

are people aware of the fact that Mizu is not canonically in any way shape or form.............. queer....bi.....

(quick note here because reading comprehension stays dead and people may not read the tag novel: I want bi Mizu! I hc her as sapphic! I love sapphic Mizu)