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butterflies-dragons · 4 years

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Hey! There was a giant lemon cake with phallic image in alayne chapter. Do you think it some coincidence or it means something? Especially it's presented by petyr. Also Sansa and her enemies giving her lemoncakes give same vibes as Hansel&gretel story.

And best of all, Lord Nestor’s cooks prepared a splendid subtlety, a lemon cake in the shape of the Giant’s Lance, twelve feet tall and adorned with an Eyrie made of sugar.

For me, Alayne thought, as they wheeled it out. Sweetrobin loved lemon cakes too, but only after she told him that they were her favorites. The cake had required every lemon in the Vale, but Petyr had promised that he would send to Dorne for more.

—The Winds of Winter - Alayne I

Petyr Baelish is grooming Sansa, that’s the awful truth. And he has studied Sansa, he knows what she likes/wants and he will use that knowledge in his favor.

He knows she had a distant relationship with Ned, so he becomes Alayne’s father.

He knows that Ned neglected her and that she always craved for her father’s validation, so he gives her that, he praised her wits for example, and called her clever and smart.

If Sansa says something like “I can’t” or “I don’t know”, he is there to encourage and support and tell her “you can do it” & “you know it”.

He knows she loves knights and tourneys, so he allows her to organize a tournament, whose winners will belong to a kind of “Kingsguard” for Sweetrobin, based on the child’s favorite hero of the legends: The Winged Knight, Ser Artys Arryn.

He knows she loves lemon cakes, so he gives her a giant lemon cake.

The Tyrells has used the same strategy:

"Sansa," Lady Alerie broke in, "you must be very hungry. Shall we have a bite of boar together, and some lemon cakes?"

"Lemon cakes are my favorite," Sansa admitted.

"So we have been told," declared Lady Olenna, who obviously had no intention of being hushed. "That Varys creature seemed to think we should be grateful for the information. I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off. Alerie, will you have them bring the food, or do you mean to starve me to death? Here, Sansa, sit here next to me, I'm much less boring than these others. I hope that you're fond of fools."

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa I

We all know how much Sansa loves her lemon cakes, but the Tyrells and Littlefinger really treat her as if she were a child like Sweetrobin:

"Will they be lemon cakes?" Lord Robert loved lemon cakes, perhaps because Alayne did.

"Lemony lemony lemon cakes," she assured him, "and you can have as many as you like."

"A hundred?" he wanted to know. "Could I have a hundred?"

"If it please you." She sat on the bed and smoothed his long, fine hair. He does have pretty hair. Lady Lysa had brushed it herself every night, and cut it when it wanted cutting. After she had fallen Robert had suffered terrible shaking fits whenever anyone came near him with a blade, so Petyr had commanded that his hair be allowed to grow. Alayne wound a lock around her finger, and said, "Now, will you get out of bed and let us dress you?"

"I want a hundred lemon cakes and five tales!"

I'd like to give you a hundred spankings and five slaps. You would not dare behave like this if Petyr were here. The little lord had a good healthy fear of his stepfather. Alayne forced a smile. "As my lord desires. But nothing till you're washed and dressed and on your way. Come, before the morning's gone." She took him firmly by the hand, and drew him out of bed.

—A Feast for Crows - Alayne II

The lemon cake in the shape of the Giant’s Lance

The Giant's Lance is the tallest peak of the Mountains of the Moon within the Vale of Arryn, extending three and a half miles above the the valley below.

The great-grandfather of Petyr Baelish was a Braavosi sellsword that came into the Vale of Arryn at the service of Lord Corbray. His line was continued by his son, who became a hedge knight and took the head of the Titan of Braavos as his sigil.

As I mentioned in this post, a sword, Ice in particular, works as a phallic symbol in Sansa’s chapters.

So, we can also make this association:

The Titan of Braavos = A Giant

The Giant’s Lance = Tallest Peak

Lance & Peak = phallic symbols

Lemon cake in the shape of the Giant’s Lance = I don’t want to write it

We can also say that Petyr Baelish is “compensating” his “shortfalls”, after all he is a short man called Littlefinger.

Yes, I think this giant lemon cake could be seen as a phallic symbol and it makes sense with Littlefinger grooming her... yikes

¡¡¡SOMEONE SAVE HER PLEASE!!!

My friend @lostlittlesatellites has already wrote about these subjects, giant lemon cake as phallic symbol and Hansel and Gretel story:

I argued that lemon cakes in Sansa’s arc actually spell people trying to exploit Sansa’s weakness in an almost Hansel & Gretel way and a betrayal that follows.

“Interestingly Sansa’s first chapter in AGOT poses questions that will drive majority of her arc. Her desire for a courtly life in the South will not only prove to be hollow but worse a dream that turns into nightmare. Sansa asks two questions: “What could you want to see? It’s just fields and farms and holdfasts” and “Why would you want to ride a smelly old horse and get all sore and sweaty when you could recline on feather pillows and eat cakes with the queen?”

The world is larger than Sansa has been taught to believe, reclining more inward into her dreams with the strict regime that she taught to look away from the window. She doesn’t think she is prepared enough and that she needs more training. Yes, she doesn’t know enough but neither does Arya or Bran or Jon. Having Sansa finally leave her cage after completing her tutelage under Littlefinger is continuing that student-teacher dynamic she has had since Septa Mordane. People come to love the security of the cage they live in too long. This is why it takes so long to take out the fear of the outside from Sansa because the fact that she has barely any experience keeps her thinking she needs someone to rely on.

[…]

The “Feather pillows and cakes with the queen” part represents the glamour that attracts little boys and girls like Sansa. However, it is hollow as Sansa comes to realise about many things. In fact, people offering Sansa lemon cakes in Sansa’s storyline often forebodes a betrayal from the person offering it. Cersei offers her lemon cakes and a few chapters later she has Lady executed and even later, she has Ned arrested. Olenna offers Sansa lemon cakes, which Varys offers as valuable information to bring her guard down in order to lure her into her trap of marrying her to Wilas and getting hold of Winterfell and the North. They have her wear the murder weapon, which could implicate her for Joffrey’s murder even if their target is Tyrion. Littlefinger is offering her a 12 foot phallic shaped lemon cake in Sansa’s TWOW chapter. Given how happy Sansa is in this chapter that she is almost forgetting that she isn’t Alayne, the food is way too lavish when Winter is coming and along with this trend with lemon cakes, the clock is going to strike 12 and the illusion is going to break very soon. Soon Sansa will prefer riding those “smelly horses” and getting sweaty and sore in order to escape over those lemon cakes and feather beds offered by untrustworthy people. For Sansa’s arc to be fulfilling she has to experience the lives of small folk up close before she helps them. As a character whose view range is often myopic, she has to be put in the middle of the lives of the small folk to truly understand them.”

I highly recommend you to check @lostlittlesatellites blog, she’s a great ASOIAF meta writer, you can read more about these subjects here and here. She covered a lot of themes and symbolisms around Sansa in the Vale, some of them very disturbing regarding Littlefinger’s present and future actions against Sansa...

But despite all that, since GRRM is a writer that likes to give different meanings to a same thing, there are also some very interesting details that are worthy to mention about the real Giant’s Lance:

So lovely. The snow-clad summit of the Giant's Lance loomed above her, an immensity of stone and ice that dwarfed the castle perched upon its shoulder. Icicles twenty feet long draped the lip of the precipice where Alyssa's Tears fell in summer. A falcon soared above the frozen waterfall, blue wings spread wide against the morning sky. Would that I had wings as well.

—A Feast for Crows - Alayne I

The Winged Knight was Ser Artys Arryn. Legend said that he had driven the First Men from the Vale and flown to the top of the Giant's Lance on a huge falcon to slay the Griffin King.

—A Feast for Crows - Alayne II

I can see strong dragon imagery here...

I already wrote about how Sansa wishing falcon wings could be foreshadowing of her getting dragon wings.

Here I also listed all the similarities between Jon and Sweetrobin.

But the most interesting detail is that the real Giant’s Lance is Stone covered by Ice/Snow.

Sansa’s Vale arc has a lot of connections with Jon Snow, like this parallel that I called “Children of the Mountains”.

There is also the names of the waycastles Stone (Alayne) and Snow (Jon).

And one of my favorite Jon Snow reference in Sansa’s chapters, the ghost wolf, big as mountains:

All around was empty air and sky, the ground falling away sharply to either side. There was ice underfoot, and broken stones just waiting to turn an ankle, and the wind was howling fiercely. It sounds like a wolf, thought Sansa. A ghost wolf, big as mountains.

—A Feast for Crows - Alayne II

So,

The Giant’s Lance is the tallest peak of the Mountains of the Moon.

The Giant’s Lance is Stone covered by Ice/Snow.

Sansa compared those mountains with a giant Ghost Wolf.

I’m sorry Littlefinger, you can’t touch this girl!

Thanks for your message.

#anon ask #jonsa #alayne stone #lemon cakes

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slade-neko · 3 years

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Monster Hunter Rise ~ My Thoughts

Oh, man, Monster Hunter Rise, where to begin?! I guess I’ll start with the game itself in a nutshell is a BLAST! It’s not without a few issues I have with it personally, but I’ve been having a lot of fun playing it nonetheless. I want to take the time to mention I am a second generation hunter myself. Started playing Monster Hunter in 2008 with Freedom 2 on PSP at the tender age of 13. So its safe to say I’ve got a lot to say about this game! If you want to read the full thing then here it is.

This review is MOSTLY spoiler-free! There isn’t a lot you can spoil in this game... I mention some endgame stuff and there is a screenshot that contains the final boss’s armor but not focused on it. Just a friendly warning if you are a die-hard spoiler avoider.

The Weapon Types

I’ll start with the fact that the weapon types in MH Rise are all really fun to play and have very well polished movesets. I haven’t extensively played with all the weapon types, but I’d like to say a few things about the ones I have been using. Long Sword feels the best it has ever been in the entire series in my opinion, ironically this game starts you off with a Long Sword equipped too.

I went ham with Long Sword throughout the main story, but now have swapped over to maining Light Bowgun. I was a big Heavy Bowgun main in MH World, but shield spreadshot builds don't feel the same for me as they did in World, but the Light Bowgun in this game shreds. Narga Piercing LBG for distance shooting and then Magnamalo Spread LBG for getting up close and personal. Evade Extender 3 makes zipping around the battlefield a breeze and next to impossible to get hit making it a very fun and rewarding playstyle.

My brother on the other hand has been hitting hard with Long Sword and the new Hunting Horn. He misses the original note playing at times, but the damage on HH is insane and healing constantly with the Rampage Horn is a big plus too for a game with no health regen factors. He’s been building sets for nearly every weapon type, but LS and HH are his two mains. Both weapon types were introduced in 2nd Gen, where we started, so maining those two for him is a bit symbolic. Also the fact that LS has been heralded as the most used weapon-type and HH the least used as of recent games is a neat contrast to use both.

The Characters, Setting, and Story

I know Monster Hunter isn’t exactly known for it’s characters or story, heck most games hardly had a story until World came out. Typically Monster Hunter games follow the simple formula of big bad flagship monster causing problems with local village and ecosystem, hunt it, happy ending?, turns out bigger badder scarier secret boss monster was actually causing the problems, hunt it, true happy ending. Nothing wrong with that, I can roll with whatever story they make, majority of players are here for the gameplay. That said, I still enjoy and appreciate what story the devs put together no matter how it turns out. I liked what Rise offered, nothing too grand like World, more of a simple story following the old games formula.

Surprisingly I haven’t seen many people talk about the characters in this game and the little fact that this is the first time in the ENTIRE SERIES (outside of MH Stories) characters have REAL names! Hinoa, Minoto, Fugen, Yomogi, Iori, Hamon, Rondine, Hojo, Utsushi, like honest to goodness actual NAMES, not “Blacksmith,” “Village Elder,” or “Fish Mongress.” The characters are fun though, nice and memorable, not really annoying. Also following World’s fully voice-acted characters is a nice touch. I sometimes miss the days of old when characters had simple grunts and you read everything, but I doubt that will ever come back now, just something lost to the classic MH games.

Then there’s the super Asian-inspired ninja-like theme to the entire game. You’ll either love it, hate it, or maybe you don’t care about how the village is at all. I like the whole ninja aesthetic while it does work for this game in particular, but I will admit its a little bit weird in the entirety of Monster Hunter as a series.

The Hunts, Gameplay, and Everything Else

Ah yes, the gameplay, the heart of the Monster Hunter games... while yes I do think this game is a lot of fun overall, I do have a few complaints with it... I’m going to break this down into mini-sections because there is a lot to cover here.

Quest Preparations Maybe I’m just old school, but I feel like they took away a lot of the prep work for going on hunts. No cold/ hot drinks, access full inventory on quests, refill items, no longer eat for attack/ def buffs, monsters always visible on maps, no random spawning on High Rank quests, little things like that. In the old games you had to prepare for each hunt, it was part of the game. You go after a big monster, you make sure you got everything you need to win BEFORE you depart on the quest. It feels like they are double-downing more so on just the fighting itself.

Tracking Monsters Monsters aren’t even tracked anymore, they’re always visible on your map. No having to run around and look for them like classic MH games... Though to be fair maybe that’s better off in the old games with the paintball tracking system and individual loaded areas than in a game with a fully open-world setting because I got headaches tracking monsters in MH World’s open-world especially the Ancient Forest.

The Monsters The new monsters in this game a welcome addition. I don’t really have any problems with their designs or fights. Have to say Goss Horag has a very fun fight, but my favorite new monster is probably Rakna-Kadaki. A pelican spider is a dang neat idea for a monster and there aren’t a lot of Temnocerans. Would love to see the return of the Carapaceons though! This is literally the perfect game for Shen-Gaoren to come back with the new rampage system! Bring back my giant enemy crab, Capcom please!

Monster Behavior/ Minion Monsters/ Herbivores Added this subsection to talk specifically about the monsters’ behaviors in this game along with the minion monsters cause while not very important overall there are still some things to be said.

Same thing in MH World, but the monsters act more like animals now. While yes, that is more realistic and is mostly a good thing, but it honestly gives me second thoughts about hunting them. In World most boss monsters wouldn’t attack you unless you attacked them first. That made me feel terrible walking up to a calm Teostra just chilling in the dunes and then I start smacking the heck outta it with a weapon... Old games the monsters saw you, the “something’s gonna getcha music starts playing” and then it charges you and your in the fight! Now its like you’re the monster killing a bunch of animals (exaggerating a bit, but still!)

What’s not exaggerated is the minions in this game. The old games had minions that were incredibly annoying and I wanted to kill them. This game however has the sweet little bullfangos, jagras, and other minions just lazing around sleeping. My brother and I were in need of Rhenoplos scalps for some gear, set out on a quest to slay some, find them peacefully sleeping by some rocks and I ask my brother, “Okay, so you gonna bash its skull in with your hammer and pop its eyes out or am I gonna fill it full of lead with my bowgun?” Needlessly violent example, I know, but it still makes the point that it feels more like animal cruelty when they aren’t bothering anyone. I’d rather the minions just start charging me and piss me off as a player, so I wouldn’t feel bad defending myself to take them out.

Lastly, there’s the herbivores. Not a lot to say on the matter, but I feel like they could’ve given a few more herbivore types. Like no Aptonoth in this game? I thought they were kinda a staple of the series for herbivores. I also feel like the maps could feel a bit more lively with more herbivores placed around. Maybe Mosswines in the Shrine Ruins, especially when scaling the central mountain shrine with the mushroom colonies everywhere. Great spots for mushroom piggies!

The Maps/ Locales I love them! Well for the most part. They are good and I don’t dislike any in particular. My only problems is that they sometimes feel too big, too open, and too empty. I know they have a lot of stuff in them, gathering points, spiribirds, relics, and many other things, but there is an odd sense of emptiness there. Like I mentioned earlier, I think perhaps adding in more scattered monsters might’ve helped that a bit. Only other thing to mention is that the new locales rely too heavily on the Palamutes to get around effectively. I personally like bringing my kitties with me on multiplayer quests, so I am at the mercy of wirebug zipping to get around and often left behind.

Oh, last thing I will mention on maps is while its not in the base game, I pray they add back the Tower as a map. Preferably the 2nd Gen version where you start at base camp and scale the tower. A game that’s all about rising and verticality, the Tower is literally the PERFECT map to have in this game!

Spiribirds Love em or hate them, there’s the Spiribirds. Cool concept, but I don’t think it works very well in my opinion. I don’t care about roaming the map to collect my bird buffs, I just want to eat for Attack Up large like old games and be done. I definitely try to grab them when I can, but I can’t be bothered to chase down all the birds each and every hunt just to get my full Attack up buff.

Wirebugs On with the title of the game being Rise giving meaning to the new wirebugs feature. Wirebugs are fun to use, zip around the map, super attacks, and what-not, but I can’t help but feel its a little out of place in a Monster Hunter game. Feels like I’m Spider-Man or something. I know I praised this when I played the demo and I’m not dissing it now, I still enjoy using them, but I am also admitting that they do feel very outlandish for a Monster Hunter game. Still better than the slinger/ clutch claw though! Let’s never talk about those accursed items again.

Silkbinds The Silkbind attacks though are fully great! I love having access to super attacks like Hunting Arts and things like that for my weapons, so I sincerely hope they keep some kind of super attack format in future games.

Mounting The mounting system in this game is weird, but pretty cool! Its a great way to let you control a monster for a change and beat the snot out of other monsters as a monster. I saw someone describe it is as “going full on Ratatouille with the monsters” and honestly there isn’t a better way to explain it than that.

Palicoes/ Palamutes The Buddy System in this game is great! Palicoes still feel about the same as they did in World, maybe a little less powerful now since you can have two of them at once, still love them though and prefer to bring a Palico with me on my quests.

Then there is the new doggies, the Palamutes! Super cute and cuddly, but also quite powerful! I love the doggos, but I wish the maps weren’t designed around them. I like to bring my cat with me on multiplayer quests, so I don’t get a dog to ride and the maps are HUGE, very wide-opened, lots of running... Wirebugs help, but still not quite as fast as the puppies.

Oh and two little pet peeve of mine is you can’t see other players buddy names and you can’t change buddy comments! I want people to be able to see my buddies’ names and I need my Garfield cat’s comment to say “I hate Mondays.” and my Sonic dog to say “Gotta go fast!” and my Courage the Cowardly Dog dog to have “The things I do for love.” Unless there is a hidden menu somewhere where you can edit these, but alas I have yet to find it...

Voiced Hunters Hunters have always been the silent protagonists of the games with attack grunts, hurt sounds, and little to nothing more. Now they are full voiced for gestures and full hunting dialogue. I really like this, its funny to hear them shout things and stuff and having some familiar voice actors in the game is really cool to have them voice my characters. My brother rocking the Xander Mobus voice-type on his hunter is freakin’ cool and hilarious at the same time. I am tempted to make a Zentisu hunter, name him Zenitsu, give him the Zentisu voice-type, and go full Thunderclap maining a Thunder-type Long Sword just for the heck of it. Oh and also there’s the fact that CRISTINA VEE IS OFFICIALLY IN A MONSTER HUNTER GAME NOW AS A FEMALE VOICE OPTION! Still feels weird comparing it to previous games, but I’m okay with it because the fun factor in it outweighs the weird for me personally. Besides if you for some reason decided you hate fun you can just mute them in the options.

Layered Armor (or lack-of) I love Layered Armor... and there is only two sets in this game. The Deluxe Edition’s “Kamurai” samurai looking layered armor and the Magnamalo amiibo “Sinister” layered set with a few head only layered pieces as DLC in the eShop. I was honestly expecting all armor to be layered and unlockable in the base game after the huge demand for layered armor in MH World and Transmog being a thing in the side team’s last game, MHXX/ MHGU.

I think a mixed system of both Transmog and Layered Armor would be ideal. Transmog system for in-game armors and then additional bonus themed armor sets made as Layered Armors like the Kamurai set. That way players can be rewarded for crafting all the armors with use of a Transmog system even giving an incentive to make multiple sets twice to Transmog differently. While the devs could still make money off cool unique Layered sets as DLC in the eShop. Literally fixes both issues right there. Feel free to use that idea, Capcom, and you’re welcome.

Multiplayer/ Lobbies/ Scaling Four people lobbies are back! Not necessarily a good thing. I mean hey its not bad either, but I honestly preferred the larger lobbies like World had. Having more people doesn’t make it less social. All they need is to force people to do multiplayer quests in the Gathering Hub. I prefer large lobbies and have people do whatever they want and meet up in the Hub for socials. Mainly what I dislike about 4 player lobbies is everyone will be expected to help each other on their quests within the lobby. I just want to chill and do my own thing, but see and interact with other players in the village between quests. Oh, but the ability to join quests late is seriously great! Dropping into a lobby and seeing people already on a quest and being able to jump in with them is a godsend!

Difficulty scaling is a very weird thing. It’s basically a double-edged sword. Its good to have because you can beat everything on your own, but that also defeats the purpose of multiplayer. In the past games, Hub quests were scaled higher for multiplayer, so getting more people to help only made it easier. Now, why bother with players when you could just do it yourself scaled to an easier single-player difficulty? I can usually get faster times when I solo things now. Multiplayer is there just for the social aspect to goof around with friends or if you just wanna do chill hunting with people. It’s no longer a requirement or an aid for beating the game. Like I said, its a weird thing, not bad, but not good either? I dunno, I just compare a lot of things to the classic MH games. In the past getting a second player to help makes it twice as easy compared to beating a Hub quest by yourself, while getting four players makes it where you’re effectively doing 4x more damage. Now its like you get 4-players and the monster gets 4x the health too. That might not be the exact scaling, but you get my point.

One last thing I want to touch on which a lot of people have already mentioned is the fact multiplayer can get pretty chaotic. Especially when you have 4 players with 4 palamutes all smacking away at a monster. Hit effects are EVERYWHERE! Creates quite the mess and can be hard to tell what’s happening.

Quest Difficulty/ Harder Monsters I don’t care too much about how hard the game is and I know this is a touchy subject, but I do like challenging monsters, without relying on gimmicky crap to fight them. MH World was filled with gimmicky fights like Behemoth, Leshen, even Alatreon and Fatalis to some degree. I still have Extreme Behemoth PTSD. I just want good clean fights, no damage checks, unavoidable one-hit kill moves, crap like that is not cool. I want to cart because I screwed up and made a wrong move and got punished by some wicked strong attack from a big bad boss monster. Not a stupid damage check telling me, “Oh, you not do enough damage, you die now.” To be fair, old Monster Hunter games had some gimmicky fights too though. MH4U with Apex Monsters and Wystones, MHGU with HP tank Hyper Monsters, heck even Freedom 2 was unintentionally gimmicky with outrageous hitboxes haha. Oh, that game was brutal! Deviants in MHGU were amazing though! Some really tough fights there, but incredibly rewarding to beat, that’s what I love!

The Endgame/ Secret Bosses (or lack-of) There is no Endgame, we are stuck in the Infinity War for now (or Affinity War as my brother calls it since the meta is all about those crits!) Okay, so that’s a bit harsh, all jokes aside there is an endgame, but its not exactly what I was expecting and leaves me wanting more. One of my favorite aspects of Monster Hunter games is the endgames and the secrets they hold, which this game had very few! They revealed nearly EVERY monster before this game launched. I get it, they want to sell their game, but leave some secrets please. Only monster that was secret was just the final boss. I love getting to the end of the game and unlocking new quests to fight the big scary endgame bosses. I guess World kinda suffered from that too a little bit. Mostly hanging on to old games like Freedom Unite unlocking Fatalis, MH3U getting Abyssal Lagiacrus, and Molten Tigrex in MH4U was very cool! Could just be the state of games these days like Smash Ultimate where they reveal everything before the game is out since data miners will just leak them anyways... kinda makes me sad.

Updates and Future Content

I know this game has planned updates that will add a lot of content, but I can’t help but feel those “updates” were part of the game that’s been withheld to make the updates feel like so much more. Its like they ripped out the ending of the game and are passing it of as a big huge update to be released after launch.

The real kick to this is the fact there is no Hunter Rank in the current game... I’ve done approximately 300 quests so far in my game, its going to hurt me very badly when I see the HR update come out and I don’t get any HR for the hunts I’ve done so far. I know some people could care less about HR and just see it as a number, but for me that number is a nice thing to see. I love seeing it go up as I do more quests and play more of the game. Going hard at launch has been a lot of fun, but less rewarding knowing I am quite possibly not getting any HR points for all my gameplay.

Only reason I can see they would not want to allow a buildup of HR before this update is because this update will add a bunch of new endgame monsters most likely unlocked through getting high Hunter Rank. I pray for my boy Akantor to finally shine again, I know the side team loves him, so let’s please get him into Rise! AND Please don’t show them off in videos, Capcom! Just stealth drop a bunch of Elder Dragons and Endgame bosses into the game!

Final Thoughts

I’m probably just stuck in the old days some, I guess this is just how the games will be going forward, but a bit of that makes me sad. Feels like the game series I loved so much is losing some character and personality of what made is special and unique. This review might’ve got a bit ranty, but I like to critique a game series I am very passionate about. World was very similar to this. From everything I’ve said, by no means do I hate this game. I still love MH Rise and the entire series and I’ll keep playing it having a lot of fun along the way. Best way I can describe Monster Hunter Rise is it’s the Side Team’s Monster Hunter World. Its fresh, new, and very experimental!

All in all this game is still great and I stand by what I said at the beginning of this entire post, its a blast to play! I hope everyone can enjoy it and remember, Happy Hunting!

#Monster Hunter Rise #Monster Hunter #MHRise

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thewrongexecution · 4 years

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thinkin’ ‘bout final fantasy

I go by Not The Author for exactly the reason that I ain’t no expert on any given work of fiction, but I do like to make connections what make me seem smart: an illusion, haphazardly crafted by incident accident and supplemented by precocious pretentiousness. All the same, here are some fun thoughts I had that you might also enjoy!

I do have a point, that I do get to. I feel like I should say that ahead of time, all things considered. Like, I can appreciate if you can’t appreciate a shaggy dog story? But there is a point to all this.

...Eventually.

Spoiler Warning:

Final Fantasies 1, 6, 7, 7R, 13 and 15

Content Warning:

Discussion of death

Cussin’

Length warning:

5621 words

13 sections

16 digressions

Let’s dig in.

- - - - -

Final Fantasy 1 was not my first Final Fantasy experience, but I think it was the first I ever played by myself? The remaster for the GBA, came bundled with FF2 on the same cart, which I played briefly but did not complete and do not remember, except that it had Cid.

FF1 doesn’t have a Cid, but I really loved the narrative anyway, straightforward as it was, because it was very specifically about spitting in the face of an uncaring god who would doom the world for a laugh. Take these chains that bind us to darkness and, though we be forgot to history, strangle with them that selfsame darkness to bring an end to its tyranny.

((it is a terrible curse, to love time travel. so many grand expectations, so few ever met. play ghost trick, chrono trigger, radiant historia, majora’s mask, outer wilds. have you any recs yourself, lemme know! I digress.

((I digress a lot, as I may have mentioned. they’ll be noted in parenthetical, like this.))

This is the foundation upon which Final Fantasy is built, and while any student of architecture could tell you of many and varied perfectly valid construction techniques, it resonates. Grappling with an immutable past to course-correct an uncaring future is, too, an apt description of personal growth; a theme as universal as being alive. And I, as an impressionable youth, ate that shit up.

((I assume I was young, at any rate. my love for time travel, be it era-spanning or moment-stretching, is, I suspect, not entirely coincidental to my terrible temporal memory.))

And that was the tale of the studio, too. Final Fantasy was so titled because, the story goes, the developers knew they would shutter if it didn’t make bank. Staring your imminent demise in the face, knowing your fate is doom, and giving it your all, all the same.

And then they made another twelve, plus two-and-a-half MMOs, and god knows how many mobile games and spin-offs, and now the Fantasy is that there could ever be a Final one. so say I: life parodies art.

((the half-an-MMO is FF14 1.0, which no longer exists and is a fascinating tale, a rally against bleak futures all its own. I’ll [link] Noclip’s three-part documentary covering the developer’s side of things, because that’s the one I’ve seen. there’s plenty other material to hunt down, though, if you wanna.))

- - - - -

Final Fantasy VII is a game about fate, too. Particularly Death, that most ultimate of fates. Tragic, to be sure; preventable, or at least delayable, in many cases; necessary, at times, for the growth of something new.

Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Inescapable.

Death, and the fights against it, take many forms. There are the fascist death squads that hunt down your ragtag band and any dissent against their cruel masters, but these will only truly stop by cutting off the hydra’s head and building an entirely new society; eight dudes and their dog, faced with a corporate private military, can survive but never win. There are such disasters as do slay that hydra, be they natural or man-made. There’s the space alien and the apocalypse it ushers. There’s literal illness and injury, physical or otherwise. There are the deaths of loved ones, friends and family, that lead to some subtler deaths within those that survive them. The deaths of relationships, by neglect or abandonment. The ideological deaths we inflict on ourselves, accepting ever-growing lesser evils in the name of some impossible ideal.

Every day, the person we were becomes the person we are, and soon, the person we are will give way to someone new, and this, too, is a sort of death. In this sense, we tally Cloud’s deaths at least five: failure to become a Soldier and rebirth in shame, the massacre of Nibelheim and rebirth in grief, arrival at Midgar and rebirth in delusion, his cratering at the Crater and rebirth in nihilism, and his death and rebirth in the Lifestream of Mideel.

((you could prolly hunt down another two if you wanna be cheeky, but I lack the knowledge, motive and patience. frankly, this whole thing is to create a leading line of logic and probably isn’t, uh. academically ethical? or whatever the term is. I’m not necessarily wrong, but I’m definitely scuttling nuance. oh well!))

Now, I say “rebirth,” because that’s how deaths of identity more-or-less work. There’s usually some new identity waiting in the wings to take over. And rebirth is itself a notable theme, inasmuch as it is one outcome of death. But death is oft more final than that, and what people do in its imminence and wake is key here, too. Wutai’s collapse into an insular tourist trap. Avalanche’s vengeful fervor, in general and post-plate drop. Bugenhagen trying to pass his knowledge on to Red. The whole party’s ongoing post-traumatic depressive episodes.

Ultimately, death is the inescapable fate of all things. It’s what we do, in light of that, that makes us who we are.

- - - - -

Final Fantasies 13 and 15 are the only modern Final Fantasies I’ve beaten, and I bring them up because both deal very prominently with fate and death, and as Square’s most recent mainline FF titles, Remake can’t exist without comparison to them. Here’s what I remember:

Final Fantasy 13 was a game I enjoyed. The stagger system mixed up my casual FF tradition of Get The Big Numbers by putting a prominent UI element onscreen that says You Can’t Get The Big Numbers Unless The Bar Is Full. Suddenly there’s a natural-but-enforced ebb and flow to combat built in, where you gotta juggle chip damage, survival, and crowd control while keeping resources enough to burst down a staggered foe, but maintain situational awareness to swap back into survival mode if you’re not gonna down your enemy, all in something close to real-time. Very obviously a direct precursor to the combat of Remake. I didn’t realize the depth of it, but it was still super fun.

People at the time didn’t like the linearity of the game and, I can see that in retrospect? I think it’s closer to, there weren’t breakpoints, there wasn’t variety. It was cutscenes, combat, and the stretches of land between them; the only real thing for the brain to get a workout on was the combat, and eating only one kinda food is gonna make that food taste bland.

((I didn’t mind, but I like idle games, and, also probably had depression around then. Take that how you will.))

The story, though, I loved. You got your uncaring gods forcing mortals to do their increasingly-impossible bidding, cursing them to agonized unlife if they take too long, and with blissful, beautiful death if they succeed. It sucks! And here you have a ragtag band of incidental idiots trying to rebel against a system that, actually, wants them to? Like that’s the plan? Have mortals kill god and summon the devil to destroy all life, because god, doesn’t.... like life anymore?

((The lore gets more than a little impenetrable, and I remember bouncing off it a couple times. The throughline of God Sucks And Makes Zombies was good though.))

The biblical parallels are obvious, and if they weren’t, the final boss’ design will clue you in, god that’s a good design. hang on I can add pictures and already tossed a spoiler warning, here, look at this:

(per the Final Fantasy Fandom Wiki [X])

That’s literally The Holy Trinity But A Sword The Size Of A Building. It’s perfect.

Anyway, I love this game, because the heroes win, which is what God wants, so in winning, they lose, as was fated to be, right? Fuck All That, say the lesbians from space australia, as they turn into satan and, as satan, stop God’s shitty metal moon from crashing into space australia and destroying all life.

((this awakened something in me, though, as is becoming a theme, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. actually hold up I’m gonna rewatch that sequence.

((yeah okay wow on review that was aggressively cheesy and had a whole bunch of weird emotional whiplash that just leaves a super-bad aftertaste. I don’t really like it as an experience, but big bazonga lesbian satan with arms for hair is still a look-and-a-half.))

The whole thing is not entirely unlike if meteor was also Midgar, and there’s more than a few points where I went, hang on, are they trying to evoke 7 here? “Lightning” is ex-military and bad at emotions, Sazh is a black dad w/ guns and emotional trauma and I love him, quirky pink healer girl who might be an alien is here, the game starts on a train and leads into a robot bug fight; obviously it’s not one-to-one but the connections are there for a brain like mine to make, and only more prominent for the fact that FF7 was the more satisfying game.

((I cannot speak to 13-2 or -3; 13-2 was fun up until the enemies were abruptly 30 levels higher than me, more or less a mandate by the game for me to do all the side content, which I was not on-board with. I skipped 13-3 entirely, especially when I learned the whole game is on a timer. did not and do not need that stress in my life.))

- - - - -

But okay, FF13 was “too linear” and wasn’t doing super great. Enter Final Fantasy Versus 13, by which I mean enter Final Fantasy 15 actually, we don’t need any more of this 13 crap. And once again, I enjoyed it! ...Right up until it was bad.

Final Fantasy 15 was not a finished game, and we know this for certain now, because all its DLC was to make it a finished game. At the time, though, there was uncomfortable and inconsistent story pacing, only one playable character, relatively sparse combat mechanics... but it was open-world, and hey, that’s what you wanted, right? open, non-linear environments? I picked it up because, Teleporting Swordsman With a Motorcycle Sword. I am of simple pleasures, and those are they.

Of the little I remember, one point that’s stuck with me is the sequence following the Leviathan fight. See, we’ve been talking about fate and destiny and how Final Fantasy likes to spite them. Here in 15, our main man Noctis doesn’t want the destiny he’s been burdened with, to Become The King and Save The World from the Coming Darkness, or whatever. He’d really rather be doing, anything else? like hanging out with his buddies or actually getting married or, I dunno, grieving the death of his father. Nope! You don’t get to do that. Go find the ghost armaments of your dead ancestors so you can ~saaave the wooorld!~ I would have been in college around then, so, eminently relatable.

Now, on this journey, you meet a guy called Ardyn. He’s the sort of character that was built as an attack on me personally: sleazy, charming, possessing airs of casual familiarity with people he’s never met, kinda helps you out in tight spots, and also, by the way, vizier to the empire that killed your dad and wants you and your friends dead too. But not in the “secret good guy” way, he just likes fucking with you! he’s perfect.

Right up until the Leviathan fight.

See, Lunafreya, your betrothed--

((I’m so mad about this stupid, stupid garbage. I love Lunafreya on principle, but the game doesn’t bother to give her screentime. you only ever hear about her incidentally, which can be cool if you then meet the character and get to compare/contrast what you’ve heard, but the initial release only has her show up for this one chapter, and your party doesn’t really get to interact with her that much.))

Your betrothed is here and she’s some symbol of the peoples’ hope, right? she’s got light magic or something, and can actually commune with the gods. the gods are on your side, but you can’t actually understand a word they say, but she can, and that’s sick as hell. anyway.

You lose the fight against Leviathan, because you’re a shitty emo teen who doesn’t know how to use your ghost swords, and she got beat up earlier when Levi got all pissy at being summoned. And then Ardyn shows up in his magitek dropship.

Now earlier, Ardyn had Luna as his captive, completely at his mercy, and right now, he who would be king of kings, destined to save the world from darkness, is clutching at rock in a hurricane, beaten, wounded and dying.

Of the two, which do you think he stabs to death?

if you thought, “the protagonist, which will allow him to win, and subvert Final Fantasy’s themes of defying fate by having the villain be the one to do it, forcing everyone else to scramble for some alternate solution and deal with the fallout,” congratulations! You win disappointment, because that idea’s cool as hell and they didn’t. fucking. Do it.

((Ardyn, before this, had given me major Kefka vibes, and thinking on it now, the world descending into darkness in the 15 we never had could have played with even deeper parallels to FF6... but I never played 6, and that FF15 doesn’t exist, so... I’ll leave that analysis to better scholars.))

now, with the benefit of hindsight, that was never going to happen. too long in development hell, game had to ship, had no time or budget for mid-game upheaval. but at the time? made me lose any interest I had in Ardyn, made me mad at the developers for passing up on fulfilling the themes their series had explored in past, made me almost stop playing the game. I’m still mad about it for crying out loud!

((thinking about it gets me tensed up, coiled, with that sort of full-body thrum that’s best conveyed with letters that jitter around. best I can do here is bold italics, but it doesn’t have the right energy. it’s a fleeting feeling, but when it’s here? god. given the men that wrote this scene I would fight all of them and win.

((inhale...

((exhale...

((and move on.))

We, the player, never really meet Luna, so there’s no real... impact, no substance to it. It’s sad, but impersonal. villain kills damsel to inflict manpain on hero. that’s it. we’ve seen this song and dance before.

But kill Noctis? The character the player’s been controlling all this time, who they know intimately? Now it’s personal. Now your party members’ grief is a mirror to your own. And now you get to play as Luna, maybe? give the game time to flesh her out, have her bond with your old companions over their shared grief, and maybe use her connections and public speaking skills to rally the people of the world, in a perhaps-vain attempt to resist the oncoming darkness, while simultaneously using that public-facingness to drive her to hide her own fear and hopelessness...? That’s a complex character ripe for drama and tragedy right there! And then her, at the head of a story about people coming together to solve a global calamity themselves, rather than await their appointed savior?

Even then, but especially now... You can see the appeal, right?

- - - - -

Lemme step back and zoom out for a moment, because there’s one more kind of Fate to discuss before I finalize my thesis. Yes, I promise, there is a point besides being mad at FF15, this is still ultimately about Remake. Bear with me a little longer.

See, Remake’s premise is that it’s not quite FF7, but that itself is predicated on Remake being essentially FF7. Certain things must be in the Remake series, or it will cease to be the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. The developers have gone on record saying as much, that they’ll still cover the thrust of the original, and that makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. Building on an existing framework saves loads of time, and lets them focus on details as they have in Remake.

((I think they've already set up an in-universe justification for this, too. The party may have defeated the Whispers at Midgar, but the Whispers are the will of the planet. The only way to truly defeat them would be to defeat the planet itself, which: kind of the goal of the villains!

((a bit ironic, because the villains are the Whispers’ means to keep manipulating events. Remake backends a very large portion of the plot, and I don’t think Rufus seeing the Whispers is a throwaway detail. The party chases Sephiroth by chasing Shinra in the original, so even if the party has shaken free of the direct influence of the Whispers, manipulating Shinra should in turn manipulate the party.

((on top of which, Rufus prizes power, and the power to change or control fate-- something both the party and Sephiroth have seized-- would be as enticing as anything.))

But this begs the question: How much of Final Fantasy 7 is necessary before it stops being Final Fantasy 7? Do you need all nine characters? The Weapons? Rideable chocobo? Breedable chocobo? What about locations? Can you drop the Gold Saucer? or Mount Condor? or Mideel? How many minigames am I holding up? These are necessary questions, but so is this:

“Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?”

- - - - -

Now, the phrase “emotional impact” is necessarily kind of nebulous and subjective, so lemme dig into that a little bit.

The first significant chunk of the original FF7 takes place entirely in Midgar, which is one huge city. Every screen is densely packed; movement is typically constrained to narrow corridors and industrial crawlspaces. The whole world is deeply claustrophobic and visually hostile, by design.

This is FF7 for the first few hours, before a motorcycle chase deposits you outside city limits, and then... you hit the world map, and everything changes. The world is rendered in three whole dimensions, now! (Then, a technological marvel in its own right.) There’s a sky! There’s a horizon! Grass, mountains, the ocean!

Boundless, terrifying freedom.

From a mechanical standpoint, there’s only one real destination, an A-to-B with random encounters before a small enclosure with an inn and shops, no real change from what you’ve already been doing. But the mood? Everything’s fresh and new, now. Everything’s an unknown.

So, how do we do that again, two-and-a-half decades on?

Let’s say, something like this: Remake 2 starts with Cloud and Sephiroth en route to Nibelheim. For new players, this provides immediate intrigue: why are these mortal enemies hanging out in a truck? how did they get here, where are they going? For veterans, it’s familiar: oh, we’re in the flashback sequence.

For both, it provides mechanical familiarity. We just finished last game hanging out in Midgar, a bunch of town squares with shops and cutscenes connected to hazardous corridors. Well, Nibelheim’s a town with shops and cutscenes, connected to a monster-filled anthill and capped with a reactor. We know this. We’ve done this. We can do this again.

And when the flashback ends, we’re in Kalm. Another town, maybe with sidequests this time; Midgar looming in the distant skybox as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

And then you leave Kalm, and the camera zooms out, and out, and out...

Remake is essentially 7, and you can’t have the impact of 7′s world map reveal if Remake isn’t functionally open-world too. Square has plenty of experience with open environments, however successful their more recent attempts have been; I’m confident that the have the ability, at least, to craft an expansive world that feels appropriate to FF7.

((I’d like to take a moment here to talk about FF14, which mixes both compact twisty dungeons and wide-open overworld zones, and is necessarily wildly successful to still be operating as an MMO... but though I have played it briefly, I don’t claim knowledge sufficient to go in-depth. The point is, Square not only can make a game like that, they have, and are, and apparently possess non-zero competency. I have worries, but I’m not worried, if that makes sense.))

So, can you recreate a given kind of emotional impact? Yeah!

Can scenes from the original Final Fantasy 7 be rendered into a new context, more-or-less as they were? Absolutely!

Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?

- - - - -

Aerith dies.

If you opened this post and didn’t know that, well. There were spoiler warnings up at the top, the game’s more than two decades old, and the spoiler itself is basically a piece of pop-culture, up there with space dad and wizard killer. There’re probably plenty of people who know next-to-nothing about Final Fantasy 7 except that Aerith dies.

Everyone knows because, at the time, it was so big a thing. This was a title that Square hyped to heaven and back to push JRPGs into mainstream western markets, and it worked. And this was before major death was so common and arbitrary as it is today; even now, Game of Thrones and its ilk are a relative rarity. The death of a protagonist or love interest wasn’t a new thing for games, or any media really, but usually you knew it was coming, or it served some purpose. Aerith’s death was sudden, arbitrary, you’re almost immediately thrown into a boss fight so you don’t even have time to process it right away, and it’s the first stone in an avalanche of other pointless arbitrary tragedy. It’s an obvious narrative setup for the endgame confrontation with Sephiroth; instead, Cloud has a breakdown, Meteor happens, and now there’s an entire Disk 2.

Fandom has always been fandom, even before the continuous immediacy of the modern internet, but... people wrote letters to Square, and got sad on message boards. There’s an entire subset of forum signatures, back when those were a thing, that you could sort as “people fucked up over Aerith dying.” And again, this was the world. Not just Japan, or Asia, but everyone.

((Or, everyone with the finances to have a PS2 and/or an internet connection. Gaming as a pastime remains way expensive, whether played or watched. But you know how it is.))

And that’s the problem with answering that question.

See, FF7 is a lot of things, but for better or worse, it is defined by Aerith’s death. It’s one of many factors, but you can’t... leave it out, right? or it wouldn’t be FF7 anymore.

Aerith dies in FF7, and everyone knows it.

- - - - -

But Remake has promised, repeatedly, that things will be different this time. Everyone is coming together to defy fate, and Cloud in particular is here to keep Aerith from dying. Bodyguard jokes aside, Cloud repeatedly has flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Aerith’s death and the events leading to it. When he meets her in the church, when they cross into Sector 6, twice in the final battle. Hell, the very first time they meet, Sephiroth taunts him about not being able to save her. Even from a metatextual standpoint, since everyone knows Aerith dies, that’s like, The Most Obvious Fate To Change.

If, after all that, Aerith still dies? It’s not just tragedy, at that point. That’s the developers, actively lying to the player about their intent in making this game series. That’s frustrating, and immersion-breaking, and when said death is likely to still have one or more entire sequels to come after? maybe not great for sales! I know I didn’t bother buying the complete edition of FF15; I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about a game that set up this cool possibility, and then just, failed to deliver on every count.

And, Remake is being made for two audiences. I’ve said “everybody knows Aerith dies,” but that’s not really true, is it? It’s been 23 years, after all. Remake could well be someone’s very first Final Fantasy experience. That’s why they’ve been telegraphing Aerith’s death so hard. Not everyone knows, but at least everyone can guess. Is it fair, then, to this new audience, with potentially no knowledge or understanding of the legacy of this flashy new action game, to foreshadow tragedy in the future, have everyone come together to say, We’re Going To Stop This, and then... not? Is that good writing? Is that satisfying? When this is a multi-game and potentially multi-console investment of time and money, is this, as a newcomer, a story you’d want to keep playing?

And then on top of that, it’s 2020.

I don’t mean that in the current-year-fallacy, “we’re better than this now” kind of way. Rather, the way I felt about Final Fantasy 15 is even more relevant now. People, in real life, are realizing that the powers-that-be are failing them, have failed them, have been failing them for far longer than twenty-three years. The people that already knew that are actually showing up for each other, to spite what felt and feels like inescapable fate and finding that, together, they might just be able to ruin God’s day.

Game development is, of course, its own whole beast, and projects in motion tend to stay in motion; deviating from a plan takes time and money that Square may be unwilling to spend. But, under current world circumstances: is making a game where the hero sets out to save one specific person from their fated death, and following that with a game where that one specific person dies anyway, aside from everything else, a good business decision?

- - - - -

So... Aerith, shouldn’t die, right...? But, FF7 requires Meteor, and so requires the Temple of the Ancients and the Black Materia. And, Meteor can only be stopped by Holy, so FF7 requires the Forgotten City.

FF7 is a tragedy. FF7 demands blood.

...Hey, actually, hold that thought. How come Cloud can remember Aerith dying in the first place? He’s not from the future, right? He’s got a connection to Sephiroth, who is from the future... and Sephiroth can manipulate his memories...? but, why would Sephiroth let him, or make him, remember that?

Hey, how come Zack is alive, but like, in the “narrative scope” sense? Wouldn’t his presence circumvent Cloud’s delusions about the Nibelheim incident?

Hey, how come Cloud had multiple big climactic Sephiroth confrontations at what’s essentially the end of the prologue, including one that mirrors the very end of the original FF7? Shouldn’t that still come at, like, you know. the end?

Hey, how come--

- - - - -

Remake has these... Callbacks? Refrains? Like my favorite, when Sephiroth throws a train-- you know, The Fate Metaphor-- at Cloud, who absolutely shreds the thing. Or, for a more direct example:

And it frequently uses these to show that people are changing, that things can change. You know, the whole Running Theme the game has going on.

Sephiroth gets a refrain, too.

At the start of the game (give or take a reactor), in his first real appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, makes sure Cloud hates him, and tells Cloud what he wants.

At the end of the game, in his last appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, tells Cloud what he wants, and makes sure Cloud hates him.

Structurally, these encounters more-or-less bookend the game; thematically, it doesn’t exactly indicate change. Barret may or may not have come around on Cloud, and his admission that Cloud is important to him after all is, itself, important. Cloud, on the other hand, was always going to defy Sephiroth. He stands resolute, now, ready to fight rather than flee, but apathy was never on the table.

Now, Sephiroth’s whole Thing is psychologically manipulating Cloud to get what he wants, and as part of that, what Sephiroth wants is usually not what he says he wants.

All throughout the original FF7, Sephiroth riled up Cloud so that Cloud would pursue and defy him, culminating first in the Black Materia incident, and then again in the Forgotten City. None of the Sephiroth clones could survive the trip through the Northern Crater, so Sephiroth had to lure Cloud, with the Black Materia, to him, and then also convince Cloud to give up the Black Materia of his own accord. Mind control, memory manipulation and illusions were involved, but if Sephiroth could maintain those indefinitely, he probably just. Would have done that instead. Way easier,

The point is, in Remake, in addition to all the intermittent retraumitization sprinkled throughout the game, Sephiroth goes out of his way twice to directly ask Cloud, “hey, you hate me, right?” And, as part of that question, he tells Cloud, “this is what I want.” And Cloud? He hates Sephiroth, and will do his damnedest to keep Sephiroth from getting what he wants.

So. What does Sephiroth... say he wants?

- - - - -

One last aside before we cap off: This post would not exist without the valiant efforts of one Maximilian_dood. His devotion to the series kept myself and many others engaged and excited and, frankly, hopeful, in the leadup to the release of Remake, and his correlations between the rest of the FF7 series and Remake were enlightening and entertaining.

and had he not the gall to identify defying fate as a device to make aerith’s death more tragic, I would never have been angry enough to write this.

((I know, I know. Gaming and streaming and lit analysis are all hard individually, and I don’t begrudge losing one for the other two. And it was a first playthrough! I might have seen these lines sooner than some, but collating all this info was certainly not instantaneous. And Square can be hack writers at times-- see again my rant on FF15-- so even then, I can’t discount the possibility.

((but, still.

((Really?))

So, while I would like to believe that I have, by now, made my thesis on Remake’s narrative direction abundantly clear, here it is spelled out anyway:

- - - - -

At the bottom of the Forgotten City, at the shrine on the pillar in the lake, Cloud will find Aerith, who believes her fate immutable.

Sephiroth will descend, and Cloud will sacrifice himself, that Aerith should live.

This is Sephiroth’s plan.

- - - - -

Hey, thanks for reading this far! With my conversational tone and rambling tendencies, I’d have preferred to make this an audio post or, god forbid, a video essay, but I got a keyboard, and that’ll have to do. Diction is important to me, as the capitalization, italics and use of punctuation may have clued you in on, so... maybe you’ll get a dramatic reading sometime in the future? but, don’t bet on it.

Feel free to riddle me with questions, or point out inconsistencies with this big ol’ thing! I’m not exactly an expert, and I’m sure I glossed over, heavily paraphrased, completely forgot, intentionally ignored and/or aggressively misrepresented some stuff, but I love learning and teaching esoteric bullshit about The Vijigams. On that note, anything that sounds like it should be sourced is sourced from “I heard about it on social media or in a stream or youtube video one time, but if I actually had to hunt it down this whole thing would never see the light of day, and it has already been like three months,” which isn’t to excuse my lack of due diligence, but I do, lack diligence, so, tough.

Oh! but the Remake screens all come from [here]. Don’t care much for that splash screen, but, I Get It, so, whatever.

There were some other things I wanted to touch on but couldn’t really find a spot for. FF7 Remake as a metaphor for its own development, for example. Or, some of The Possibilities, like how Cloud’s death could very literally haunt Aerith, or how Remake sets up a more fleshed-out Midgar revisit that Cloud’s death specifically would make infinitely sadder.

On that note, if it was not yet obvious, I love speculation, and if they do go this direction, it’ll probably be their justification to go completely... off the rails? Remake only has to be FF7 until it doesn’t, after all. If there’s some wilder implications youall see for like... I dunno, a Jenova more fully-regenerated from also having Cloud’s cells back, getting into proper Kaiju-on-Kaiju battles with the Weapons, or anything like that? Feed me your brain juice, etc.

And, once more, for the road: this is interpretation; subjective, opinionated, and very much in denial of any kind of author-ity. Nor is this a claim on how things should be, or an assertion that this would be good or bad. Everything ultimately rests on Square's narrative design team and, we’ve touched on them already.

((but, for your consideration: I’m smart, and right))

Here’s hoping, whatever happens, we get the game we deserve.

thanks for coming to my ted talk, have a great day

#In This Essay I Will but for real this time #but hell if that's stopped me before #ff7 remake #blatant speculation #ff7 remake spoilers #ff7 spoilers #ff13 spoilers #ff15 spoilers #I dip into spoiler territory on more but these ones get a deeper dive #also if any of y'all know how to get images screen-read-able please lemme know #the screenshots are to point out that the game itself does do these things #but I don't wanna content-lock anybody out of my bad garbage #also also if the wordcount didn't clue you in:#long post #posting this right now immediately listening

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twitchesandstitches · 4 years

Text

Commission for @alt-hammer, who asked for a story centering around a fantasty-themed AU where the major troll families are nobles, and focusing on Cronus seeing his long time girlfriend Porrim in person, along with her family of fellow gravid vampires!

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The land was scarred by ancient wars long since forgotten, but the land still remembered. Sometimes the memories were bad, with some bright spots.

This was the understanding according to the sages of the Leijon tribes in the dark forests, and the blind seers of Pyrope lands rarely liked to venture out there for fear of what their mystic gaze might reveal, and the great desert was the worst of it all. A terrible scar upon the world, it lay in a region where rain should have fallen, with no mountains for a great distance, and the climate was fairC. There should have been no deserts at all.

But their land was one with a dark and troubled history; war had touched it often, no less than the recent conflicts that had produced the modern noble houses of the troll lands and their human allies, and those wars had left terrible scars. Most of the points of civilization were islands of light in a dark sea, and there monsters in the dark places inbetween. Horrors arose, seemingly from the magical miasma that pooled out from the seas, vast and terrible monsters that required great heroes to slay them, and of course some weird wizard might decided to craft some abominations for the fun of it, completely forget about them, and be inadvertently responsible for a village disappearing when his Exploding Slime Tesseract wandered there.

Cronus Ampora, scion of the wizard-kings and hopeful master of the fleets that connected them to other lands, had a duty to hunt down such dastardly fiends when he wasn’t skipping very close to being one of them. This wasn’t a bad thing, per se, in the Amporan lands. Violet tradition held that a nobleborn prince, or bard like he had become, who didn’t periodically cause some manner of wacky catastrophe was going to be too unimaginative to make a very good successor. Archmage Dualscar, father to Cronus, tried to encourage his children to do more of that.

Periodically scouring the continent to put down rogue monsters and arrest wizards of inappropriate conduct was a task assigned to the Orphaners; so named as they killed evil wizards, orphaning their creations, at which point the Big Dad energy of the Amporas would take over and they’d adopt them all. As a result, the Amporas had a truly massive army of militarized constructs, thousands of caretaker monsters of all kinds of descriptions, and many more strange beings peacefully integrated into their society. Being used to such diversity also made an Orphaner uniquely suited for diplomacy; they dealt with ‘Things Not Like Me’ on a nearly daily basis, and it helped to expand the mind.

Cronus spent a lot of time on land, therefore. He hated it. Violetbloods like him were adapted for the sea, and individuals varied on whether they were land walkers who could live underwater, or sea beings who could stand to walk on dry land for a while. Cronus was the latter. But his duties, interests, and deep fascination with land walkers of all kinds drew him to the world above, even if it was the people there he liked and the world itself was just the worst.

And the desert was the worst of all. The horror of the place clawed at him with the memory of ancient atrocities, leeching vitality out of him like the sun drying his flesh. They moved on the landships favored by the Nitram feudal lords, an assortment of their mounted knights as protection and a little bit of showing off, and even though it was comfortable and he had a big tank of water to recline in, the whole land felt wrong. He was convinced that some ancient magical catastrophe had scarred the land so badly it had burned, searing it with the energies of undeath. The hordes of the walking dead currently reduced to several tons of ash flying in the air now was proof to that.

But now, the character of the sand was changing; it was harder for the knights at their side to articulate why, though they were notably calmer, the tension loosening from their armored forms. They weren’t magic users, and weren’t able to perceive the subtle details in the sand now. Cronus didn’t doubt that they knew that something had changed, though. The threat upon the wind felt less oppressive. The teeming hordes of the undead, hoarded in this deadly place over eons and mummified by the burning sun, shied away like magical constructs warded away. By now, they had passed one of several enormous towers, of dark marbled stone and brighter patterns of magic-infused metals that all glowed like a torch against the sand, visible for many miles, and Cronus saw the wall of magic flowing through it. It was a relay point, and seen from above, perhaps on a Pyrope airship, he might have looked directly down and seen the network of barricade towers, standing guard against the sea of death.

And they were new. There were many wonders in the world, that was true. But most were ancient relics, reactivated and barely operational, their masters struggling to keep them just working consistently. Very few of them were completely new.

There was a reason the Maryam Clan of rainbow drinkers and vampires, despite being the smallest noble family, commanded so much respect. In a single generation, they were tearing the bloody heart of undeath out of their homeland, and restoring it to life again.

The caravan journeyed onwards, as as they did, Cronus noted the move of magical essence around them took on a drastically different character. The hostile desert behind them, shielded away by the mystic barrier, stank of death where it had any nature of all. Mostly it was a hollow emptiness, yawning behind them like someone physically standing behind with obvious ill intentions. But the sands blew with the hints of life beyond them. Birds flew upon the wind, flitting up to the towers to attend their nests. As they journeyed further, they saw small oasis here and there, clusters of animals standing there.

Cronus watched them. They had to be imported. Surely they couldn’t have revived the beasts that had lived here so long ago… could they? The long-legged creatures, antlers growing out into swirling patterns, stared placidly at him and continued to drink, judging him no threat. They did not look like desert dwellers, but like creatures who ran through heavily wooded forests. Just as this land must have once been.

Despite himself, as the caravan journeyed to the very center of the desert, he felt a sudden sense of joy come over him. The desert had not always been a desert. It was healing.

What wonders were the Maryams making? He was never more excited to be able to study there.

Soon enough, the distant sounds of water grew closer, and a city appeared on the horizon, even taller than the towers, hardy shrubbery cut into fanciful shapes surrounding it. “My lord!” said the cheerful voice of a bronzeblood named Chixie, cheerfully. “We are nearly there!”

She rode before him, a troll significantly shorter than average and nearly twice as wide as she was tall, praticularly at the hips and bust; they all wore light clothing for this heat, but hers had to be especially roomy for her voloptuous body. She was in a prime position to be lookout, as it were, and Cronus honestly wasn’t sure if she should be there; she wasn’t an actual knight but an honorary one, a bard inserted into the ranks to get an insider’s view.

Sure enough, they soon acquired an escort. Several human women, unusually curvaceous and beefy, bearing the flowering robes and veiled attire of the Maryam clan, though their dark skin showed no signs of vampirization; they were not inducted into the clan in particular, it seemed. They did bear the signature saw-swords of the Maryams, and these rested in a relaxed way indicating they still could be drawn if need be. “Bard of the Amporas,” one said primly. “Follow me, if you please.”

The caravan did so, and they came to the great city of the Maryams.

They came through the high gates of the city, towering doorways open wide as if to welcome all visitors. Before the shining colored stone of the domed architecture, before the staggering array of fabrics fluttering upon the thousands bartering their wares at a bazaar their path took them through, the thing Cronus was drawn to was the oasis. The city itself, he understood, had been build upon that oasis. He didn’t know if it had already existed, some remnant of bygone days, or created through a work of grand and exhausting magics. Even now, as the city grew, the oasis grew, its surface shining brightly. To his magical senses, it was incandescent, painful to look on directly. Life streamed through it, so much raw vitality that it seemed magic distilled into a liquid form, flowing its life-giving energies into the land around it, gradually wearing away the corrosion of death resonance.

The oasis was almost an inland sea; a vast and improbably deep pool of water, replenished by mysterious means, threaded throughout this whole region and emanating magic with a very specific flavor. There were a lot of resonances it split into, but the big one was… well, fertile.

It seemed to have an effect on the women, Chixie noted bluntly, as they walked through in search of their secondary escort, who had gotten a bit lost.

Those women (not all of them, but enough to be notable) were very large indeed; the average breast size began at ‘larger than your head’, and they stood notably taller than average. Even the humans were reasonably close to the heights of some of the trolls from his home fleet. And, yes, there. He could see rainbow drinkers in the crowd, shining with an eerie light as they moved, an alien grace in their robes. And human vampires as well, sheltering themselves from the harsh desert light, though it was largely unnecessary. One quirk of the oasis’ architecture was buildings were designed to bridge together, creating overhangs, walkways, balconies, launch points and other similar features. The end result was a ground level that was almost permanently shaded most hours of the day, as well as upper levels that suited trolls fond of leaping and climbing.

For a time, they wandered through the great desert city of the oasis. There was much to see, and one after another, the knights peeled away from the group. Their task, as delivered by their own lords, had been to securely bring Cronus to the city of the Maryams. True, when his business was completed here (perhaps months from now, or weeks if you were to be cynical), they were to bring him to his next destination. Perhaps to home, if need be. But for now, their task was done.

They meandered to their next destination, and this eventually took them to the markets. One by one, the knights departed, to secure their own entertainment and housing. Both would be easy to find; temporary homes had been provided for them in the fabulous hotels of the minor clans, and the oasis city was a wonder of art from all over the continent, scrolls and tomes of all matter of disciplines, and its scholars among the most learned. Whether it was art, lore or simple dialogue one craved, the oasis would provide.

Cronus, his violet courtiers, several servants attending to the more bureaucratic concerns, and a few knights who insisted on attending his person continued through the city, to where they were intended to meet up with a representative of the Maryams. They walked over canals, and admired the beautifully carved pueblo bricks set into the bridges. These canals webbed over the entire city, flowing beneath the streets that blossomed over them like forests of mushrooms, so that everywhere you went, the oasis flowed beneath. The architecture, Cronus noted, was specifically designed to make that magic flow.

As they crossed a particularly large bridge, close to the central regions of the great city, he saw that the buildings rose up at certain geomantic angles. He suspected it was to channel the magic most efficiently towards the sky, and project certainly spells into the air and wind. He said as much.

Chixie looked fascinated. “That’s very interesting, lord. What are they doing with it all?”

Cronus shrugged. “Heck if I know, dame. Part of whatever it does that’s making the desert fix itself from whatever our dumbass ancestors did here? Hell, could just be making a ward to block out whatever it is in sunlight that hurts human vampires.”

Chixie blinked. “...Okay, yeah, I can see them wanting to do that. I, uh. I DID see the human-looking vampires carrying those cute little parasols to keep the sun off. Why bother if they can’t get hurt here anyway?”

“We find that it helps to get people into the habit if they opt to leave!” said a peppy voice. It sounded perfect for a den mother, a caretaker of children, and a consort protector. It was the sort of voice you had a mental image for; probably someone quite short, wearing a lot of fluffy fabrics in warm colors, and built like the more generously fluffy plush toys.

They followed it. The voice didn’t entirely fit the mental image at first glance; the speaker was an outrageously gorgeous and stupendously stacked rainbow drinker; a jadeblood troll, who stood easily a couple feet tall than even the largest of their ground. Cronus doubted he was even as high as her broad biceps.

The escorts who had brought them bowed deferentially, and departed, symbolically passing them to her. It felt like a very big deal, indeed.

She approached, and the jade veils of the Maryam clan fluttered around her mouth, the elaborate robes of office about her body. It revealed little of her face; jewelry of high station hanging in chains off her delicately carved horns, both curving gently upwards, one zig-zagging in a brief series of sharp edges. She didn’t so much walk, honestly, as sashay dramatically, as her hips were far too wide to walk normally. It was a distinctive walk, her broad thighs swinging wide beneath a secondary dress worn over her main one, brighter shades of jade against its pale colors to indicate her social status.

Her skin, though at least the nominal black of a grown troll woman, also shimmered with the eerie light of a rainbow drinker. Long hair, with a streak of green, flowed behind to an enormously large backside shifting the flow of her dress. Swirling tattoos traced around what skin was visible, but most significantly, she was also pregnant. Extremely pregnant; her belly was a monstrously huge, distended orb projecting out so much, with so much weight, that it was more oblong. Not exactly a gut; her thick and fit body type wasn’t quite the right shape for the more extreme of big belly builds, and Cronus could see the weight of something humanoid resting there. Pregnant, in the special Maryam definition.

Her dress, as was custom for the Maryams, was cut to show off her belly, all the way to where it joined her body. Massive breasts, larger than her head and suspended over that belly, were supported by brighter bands of soft fabric, and the overall impression was of competent power, seductive appeal, and raw motherly power. It was a strange thing to have coupled with a voice that sounded more at home gently lecturing small children on the fine points of not smacking each other on the head over a toy.

Chixie swallowed nervously, gazing up at the towering jadeblood. She wasn’t the tallest of her kin Cronus had ever seen, but she was taller than most they had seen going around. “Um. Hello, ma’am. We were, ah. I was told to expect someone fitting your description…?”

Bronya clapped her gloved hands. “Ah! You must be the Ampora delegation, then?” Cronus nodded to her. “Bronya Ursama, I am. Of the Maryam Clan. I’ve been sent to bring you to the matriarchs, if you please!”

Cronus nodded, smoothly shifting into the manners Dualscar had sternly taught to them. He bowed low. “It would be my pleasure, Lady Ursama. I am Cronus Ampore, of the Ampora fleets, and I apologize for not finding you sooner.” He smiled, winningly. “We simply could not resist a bit of sightseeing.”

Chixie and the others introduced themselves to the towering vampire, increasingly awkwardly and with their faces heavily blushed at how… sexy she was. Bronya smiled sweetly, greeting them in turn, praising their lords for producing such fine stewards of honor (Chixie nearly stumbling in sheer shyness from that), and the only significant surprise was that Bronya’s belly lurched.

A human-sized figure inside her stomach turned, like a baby shifting in the womb, and a hand briefly moved against the surface of her belly.

Cronus blinked, fascinated; the knights were less calm. Chixie actually clapped her hands to her mouth: “There’s someone in you!”

Bronya nodded, looking nonplussed. “Oh yes. A charming young scholar, I actually tutored her during my residence in the ancestral library. I believe she intends to go on pilgrimage after her stay with me.” The knights stared at her, bafflement written on them. She looked bewildered. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Cronus coughed. “Eh, sorry, but these knights… eh. I don’t think they know about the particularities of the Maryam transformation. The process, I mean.” Inwardly, he cursed; he should have given them a primer on that!

Bronya inclined her head, understandingly. “Ah! Of course! Well, never fear. Come along, I shall explain.”

They moved along, the knights shying a bit away from Bronya now save Chixie, perhaps dreading visions of themselves being pulled into that belly as well. Cronus walked behind her without fear, following the slow wobble of her broad backside, and she took them across the bridge.

They came to a large castle, of sorts; it was clearly not meant for sieges, and was so open to the sky and walls, but for some fortifications, that it had only a hazy notion of ‘outside’ to begin with. It was older by far, and Cronus recognized the same kind of geomantic designs on the walls, and it was a simple thing to gaze up and see the magic in the air, vibrating around the elegant carvings on the walls.

Bronya spoke a password to the guards, who were women built on largely the same look as her though not pregnant with someone, and they passed through without incident.

Inside, it was much cooler; so much so that it had to be a work of magic, or at least very skillful air conditioning construction. Great woven tapestries hung from the walls, detailing both beautiful artworks and stylized portraits, and many doorways lined the halls. Bronya led them down a staircase carved into the floor, going underground, and as she did, she spoke at length.

First, she asked: how did they think new rainbow drinkers, or vampires, came to be? When Chixie awkwardly said that she thought their blood was drunk first, she laughed.

“It’s certainly part of the process,” Bronya said. “But it’s not the important one.”

To become a vampire was a very serious thing; it was a magical ritual of great importance, derived from some quirks of jadeblood physiology, and while it worked on non-jades and humans and some other beings, it had to be very carefully down. It took a vampire mother to make another, her fertile body literally reshape them into a new form, bringing them into the clan and giving them new life.

Vampire literature spoke often of living a new life, of being reborn, of gestation and being remade by one’s sire. Bronya assured them, there was no metaphor there.

Vampires like her literally absorbed another being (in a ritual she implied she certainly was not allowed to discuss with them at length), and contained them in their womb. The strongest could hold many; Bronya was inexperienced, and one was all she could manage for now. And for a time, perhaps years, the fledgling vampire was infused with magical energies unique to the Maryam Clan, slowly changed into another vampire with all its perks, and all the very extensive physical alterations. A vampire wasn’t just an immortal that drank blood, they were an entirely different sort of being.

Bronya paused, and for a moment looked quite tired. Her belly swelled, the figure within visibly shifting, and then stopped. She panted, her glow dimming. “It’s not something you enter into lightly, either,” She said, perhaps glad for this emphasis. “For either of us.”

Cronus nodded solemnly. The knights looked shaken, or thoughtful; with so much effort put into the transformation, no wonder the Maryam Clan was small by the standards of nobility, and so very tight knit. Plenty of them still looked uneasy at effectively being reborn in such an intimate way, and were baffled at the idea of willingly being inside a troll’s womb like that. Cronus, poker-faced, gave no indication of his feelings one way or another.

Soon, they came to a sanctuary deep underground, where once the ancestors of the Maryams had held sacred rituals. Here, it was still a private place, and when Bronya paused, giving the knights an awkward look, Cronus coughed. “I’m thinking I’m the only one technically allowed to go from here. Is that right, Lady Ursama?”

Bronya nodded, regretfully. “I apologize, dear knights. But entering here is a rather important matter. I assure you, Lord Ampora is quite safe in the grip of the matriarchs!”

Chixie winced. “You could put that a little less ominously but.” She nodded. “We understand.” She glanced aside. “Yes?” The knights nodded.

Bronya looked relieved. “Well then! If you will come with me, I shall find something diverting for you all. Lord Ampora?” She pulled on a small statue, and the vast door before them opened enough for him to pass through. “The matriarchs await you.”

Cronus entered, as the knights and Bronya departed. The door closed behind him, and considering that he was entering the lair of the most powerful vampires in the world, it was surprising he felt no particular anxiety. But then, there were few he trusted as much, and none he trusted more, than the namesake leaders of the desert nobility, the Maryam Coven.

-------

The outer chamber was as spooky as deserved for a vampire coven, the carved walls high, and torches held on the mouths of fearsome sculptures. The whole edifice looked… not fearsome exactly, but in that general area. It was certainly impressive, and would put any ancient sacrifice to vampire hungers in the appropriately awed mindset before the big moment and then the sexy, sexy recuperation afterwards.

As he approached the inner chamber, though, he heard some muttered arguing that rather spoiled the mood. “Hurry, hurry! Just, oh, mother, please! Just sit down!” That voice was very familiar to him, admittedly usually through translocational images as they spoke through magical devices. He swallowed, standing up straighter and trying to look cool.

The next voice was very similar, but deepened by age, with a cool and wry amusement at the antics of the first. “Calm yourself, dear. I am absolutely not going to hurry, not with this much weight to move.”

“Mother!” the first almost wailed. “Bronya made the signal, he’s here! I’ve put so much effort into this meeting, please, do not spoil the drama!”

The second chuckled with the distinctive sound of someone who is good natured but still used to a child being unflappable and calm, and was absolutely going to milk this for all it was worth. “Oh? Don’t want to scare him with a preview of yourself in years to come, I suppose? Imagine him coming in here, seeing all this, and immediately fleeing!”

There was a scandalized gasp. “Please don’t, you might jinx it!”

A third voice sighed, a perturbed air to it. She sounded younger than the other two, but with that distinctive Maryam accent, a lilt to the words. “Porrim… please, don’t make this so serious. I was calm when Rose was here…”

“And I’ve no idea why!” The first voice said, with an air of petulance that Cronus, intimately familiar with that voice, found truly surreal. “First in-person impressions are so important! If this goes wrong, or if one of you frightens him, I’ll… I’ll…”

There was a long pause. Cronus leaned in towards the door, fascinated despite himself for the juicy gossip.

“...Yes?” the eldest-sounding voice said, with a hint of mocking encouragement.

“...I’ll give the tailors the most abhorrent designs for your outfits, right when you’re so big it will take weeks for you to get new ones made!” The first said triumphantly.

From the sound of it, this threat wasn’t being taken too seriously. “How cruel of you, dear sister,” the younger said dryly.

Cronus leaned a little too hard on the doorway. First it creaked loud, no doubt causing those inside to turn, and then-

It opened inwards, too fast for him to stand back up. He overbalanced, having leaned on it so much, and as it turned out his first proper introduction to the love of his life and her coven was flopping into their sacred chamber in an undignified heap, his ropes splayed over him.

“Ow,” he said meekly.

Someone rushed towards him, with an outraged cry, perhaps at his loss of dignity. A genteel chuckling, from the same older voice, greeted him, and the first one scoffed indignantly; Cronus looked up into the first speaker, into the eyes of Porrim Maryam.

Quite a lot up, in fact, and fortunately she was standing at an angle that her considerable assets didn’t block his sight.

She looked gigantic as she approached him; a towering motherly titan that would have loomed over even Bronya. She could have carried Chixie about like luggage; no, she could have towed Cronus like that! The impression was reinforced by her powerful build; her shoulders were broad, packed with muscle, her arms wide from years of training with sawblades. Her body had an hourglass curviness, her small waist making her shoulders look even bigger, and her hips even larger. And her hips were massive, making Bronya’s look smaller. In every respect, she was bigger than Bronya, not just taller than her, but wider. Bronya had big hips, yes, but Porrim would have serious difficulty getting through doorways; they were almost three feet around, at least.

And then, there was her belly.

It was so large, Porrim moved with an awkward, limping gait, her body clearly not adjusted to its sheer bulk. The vast, shining orb projected out before her body almost as much as she was tall, its lower slope descending gracefully to the ground, and she wasn’t burdened with just one new vampire in there. Cronus saw several arms moving against each other, the dimple of multiple bodies seated, a bulge of several torsos…

The question blurted out before he could contain it. “How many do you have in there!?”

Porrim blinked, but at this angle it was hard to tell; her breasts were so monstrously huge they got in the way of his sight, almost individually as big as her belly, and even with the supportive bands of her bodice, there was only so much that could be done to keep them pressing down on on her stomach. Cronus could have slept between them, and the thought was badly tempting. She laughed, putting a hand to her veiled mouth, and giggled helplessly. Her whole body shook; her big belly, her massive hips, her powerful thighs. Her great mane of hair, fluttering down past her hips like a luxurious mantle, shook with her laughter.. Even the new vampires in her body trembled with laughs, though he doubted they were even aware of what was going on.

“She has rather more than was wise,” the eldest voice said dryly.

“Probably six,” said the youngest. “Porrim gets attached too easily.”

Porrim went ‘hmph,” with the lazy dignity he expected of her, and helped Cronus up. The impression of towering height didn’t end even when he was stood up; his head was still barely level with her elbows, and given just how much mass she had, he felt stick thin next to her, and when she swooped down to hug him and straighten up his robes, he was lost between her breasts, and in her arms.

“I am so, so sorry about this!” She whispered furiously. “I intended for this to be so much more, ah, inspiring, but no, Mother and Kanaya just had to spoil the mood.”

Cronus made a squeaking noise. Her breasts and belly weren’t so much pressing against him as carrying him up, pinning him, and holding him still with a delicious sort of pressure.

Porrim paused. Much as her sense of drama had been spoiled, she could still appreciate a good moment. She leaned forward, and for a moment, Cronus was in a position to appreciate the coven tattoos winding across her body in the ancient patterns of fertility, motherhood and predation; swoops and curls, winding on the arms, the legs, over her breasts and belly…

Her veil was lifted up as she pulled him close to her face. Her lips brushed against his mouth, and long fangs against his lips.

“Not to be a hypocrite, but please do control yourself, Porrim,” said the eldest voice again, a hint of dry amusement in it.

Porrim dropped Cronus, with a squeak of mingled dismay and frustration. She turned aside, almost knocking Cronus over with a belly he could have fit into (and now he wondered what it was like, whether it was warm or cool, how her belly might feel hospitable or if you would be rewired to adjust to it), and a heavy hand fell on his shoulder.

“Now,” said the voice, with an air of command different from her jovial tone earlier. “Let me see this saltdweller you have spoken so fondly of.”

Cronus was brought forward, a glimpse of extremely large chairs around him, perhaps intended to seat women that were very big indeed, and he had an impression of size before him, and a hand fell upon his face. Long claws moved against his gills, though not painfully so, and then moved his face up and down with a delicate but irresistible firm touch.

“Ah. The Ampora profile, for certain. You look very much like your ancestors; do tell me, how is your father doing these days?”

Cronus looked up into a face that was suddenly smiling, and even through the veil he saw the fangs, and the vibrant lipstick, the calm and assured competence so charismatic that she could have conquered the continent diplomatically, and more to the point-

She was nearly twice as big as Porrim, while sitting down.

The Dolorosa. The head matriarch of the Maryam Coven, mother of all living true vampires; one of the few to have successfully fought the mad pirate queen Mindfang to a standstill, to have brokered peace with the Pyropes during the years of fiery vengeance from the mountains. The first of the troll nobility on the plains to open her city gates to the carapacians, it was said, and from her wisdom great riches and discoveries had flown.

It was a little surprising that the stories about her said much about her wisdom, said a great deal about her honor, and said very little about how terrifyingly, attractively BIG she was.

Sitting on a chair that could have been designed for giants was a troll so large Cronus did not even come up to her waist now, and so outrageously curvaceous that just as Porrim’s thickness made Bronya look slender, the Dolorosa made Porrim look malnourished. Hips nearly as wide as she was tall, with a monstrously huge backside rising as high as her waist, the wides merging with her thighs evenly.

Her hair was cut short, and her horns elaborately carved; jewelry of religious significance were strung between them, green cloth shining onto her. Her face was more severe than Porrim’s, though kindly, and her tattooing was even more extreme than Porrim’s, with the curling inks brought to her face, her horns, and extremely intricate patterns on her shoulders and breasts. Cronus didn’t doubt that her entire body was a mosaic of art, though he was unclear on the meaning of the tattoos.

Her shoulders, broad and slabbed with muscle, heaved beneath her robes. She smiled indulgently. “Come, young man. Don’t tell me you left your tongue with Porrim.”

Cronus swallowed. Porrim went ‘hmph!’ again. The Dolorosa was an intimidating figure, not so much amazonian as she was an apex of the concept; her arms alone were bigger than he was, though she wasn’t at all toned. She was built like a strongwoman, really. Her robes were not especially revealing, but they still showed quite a lot of breasts that were… well. So incredibly huge, so wide and so bulky, that they were larger than a good portion of Porrim herself. Perhaps five feet high each, and wider across than that by far, they rested upon an incredibly huge and round belly that flowed over her throne onto a specially arranged dish set before her, over a dozen moving inside her stomach in expectation of vampirism.

That belly towered over Cronus, just as the rest of the imposing woman. The tattoos swirled over it, lovingly outlining its bulk. It looked bigger than a hut, or some boats he’d seen, bigger even that the Dolorosa’s entire body. How did she manage so many!?

Cronus found his voice, even as her smile grew increasingly more mischievous beneath her veil. “My father… he does well. He, erm. He asked, that…” he struggled to recall it, and found it hard to recount the unsual wistfulness that had come over his father then. “He thinks a lot about you.”

For a moment, the Dolorosa’s gaze went distant, thoughtful, wandering into the past. “I should hope so, the dear man…” She smiled fondly. She returned from whatever thoughts were on her mind, focusing on Cronus again. She raised a hand, and he flinched instinctively, but her intent was not hostile; her hand ruffled his hair, rather affectionately. “Please, do say hello, Kanaya!”

“I apologize, mother,” said the third speaker, who had been sitting to the side, on one of the smaller chairs, with an air of watching an amusement. Kanaya Maryam, youngest of the coven, and she looked a lot like a much smaller version of her mother.

Much smaller, in fact. After the overwhelming size of Porrim and her mother, Cronus was a little alarmed to see that Kanaya was much smaller than either. She was larger than him, though. Later, he would see that she was a little taller than Bronya, though not significantly so; as vampire fostering went, he learned, Kanaya was a lot more cautious. Much more than, say, Porrim was, and as a result she was a lot smaller for the moment. The growth that came with power, for the Maryams, was tied to this fostering ritual.

Kanaya’s tattoos were subtle, graceful curls at the edges of her robes. Her carved horns were obscured by fine rings that, Cronus noted smugly, came from the lands overseen by the Lalondes and had the distinctive unsettling artistry; her hair was short like her mothers, but her face rounder than either Porrim or the Dolorosa. She wasn’t quite as broad as her mother either, but was more powerfully built than Porrim, and definitely more heavy set at the waist. Her breasts were unusually large for a troll, bigger than her head, and rested on a belly containing a single vampire, though a fairly fierce one judging from how much her belly was wriggling. She didn’t seem to notice.

Kanaya bowed. “A pleasure to meet you at last.” she smiled faintly. “Porrim has been eager to bring you here, into our fearsome clutches.”

Porrim scoffed. “Kanaya, stop trying to convince people we are up to no good!”

The Dolorosa chuckled. “Oh, Porrim, don’t spoil the joke! After all, it’s not as if we’re going to keep him here and do terrbile things to this poor, handsome man!” She chuckled, and winked in an openly flirtatious way.

“Eep,” Cronus squeaked, blushing bright violet.

“Mother!” Porrim said, scandalized, though she’d said sentiments very much like that to Cronus before.

The Dolorosa chuckled. “Now, now. Sit him down, will you?”

Grumbling to herself, Porrim effortlessly picked him off the ground and returned to her seat, and it was specially designed so that there was enough space for him to sit comfortably on her thigh between herself and the seat, though sandwiched by her belly and one breast. He did not mind.

Porrim put one arm around him, and Cronus did the same, relaxing into her embrace as if he’d spent his life in her company. He relaxed against her, and she into him. “Awww,” Kanaya crooned mockingly.

Porrim raised an eyebrow.

Cronus said, as if to himself, “Ah, that may put me in mind of some interesting stories I heard from a certain Rose Lalonde, during her own time here?”

The Dolorosa laughed. “Oh, do tell!”

Kanaya blinked, and looked impressed. “...Hmph, not a bad move…”

In time, of course, the teasing faded, and later on, they held a proper official ceremony of presentation, as was traditional for the noble families. It cemented ties, and given that they had recently been at war, also put all their cards on the table. Officially that sort of thing wasn’t needed, but the gesture of trust was important.

Cronus felt it was more important to make it official why he was there; to learn. About their unique magic, to spread learning from his own fleets (and presenting them with a vast storehouse of scrolls, rediscovered magical artifacts, and tomes that made some of the scholarly inclined vampires at the ceremony gasp in delight, and talk ensued of entire new wings that would be built for them all), and to foster understanding between their realms.

‘Understanding’, in this case, having significant romantic undertones, as was now traditional in the other noble families, or at least the parts of them their age.

The Dolorosa smirked at that in a way that rather spoiled the whole game for Cronus, but given that he could finally have the days with Porrim he always wanted, he couldn’t complain too much.

#queued #fics #my writing #commissions #/#//#///#twitchy!homestuck #twitchy!hiveswap #twitchy!cronus #twitchy!porrim #twitchy!kanaya #twitchy!dolorosa #twitchy!chixie

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madewithonerib · 4 years

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GOD Says I Will Shake All Things: The Nations Part 1,2 | Derek Prince

Turn to Psalm 94, & it is—I trust—it will prove appropriate to the message which I’m going to be bringing.

Psalm 94:12-13 | Blessed is the man YOU discipline, O LORD, & teach from YOUR law, to grant him relief from days of trouble, until a pit is dug for the wicked.

If you don’t see the appropriateness of that, I trust you will a little more clearly after this evening is over.

Now I want to begin by reading the passage assigned to me.

And I staggered because I thought: How can I possibly teach so vast a theme.

As is contained in these words—found in—Hebrews 12:25-29,

Hebrews 12:25-29 | See to it you not refuse HIM who speaks. For if the people did not escape when they refused HIM who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject HIM who warns us from heaven? 26 At that time HIS voice shook the earth, but now HE has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth, but heaven as well.” 27 The words, “Once more,” signify the removal of what can be shaken—that is, created things— so that the unshakable may remain. 28 Therefore, since we are receiving an unshakable kingdom, let us be filled with gratitude, & so worship GOD acceptably with reverence & awe. 29 “For our GOD is a consuming fire.”

Then we need to turn briefly to the passage from which the words were quoted—which was in Haggai 2:6-9, & I read them for a special reason. He adds what is not stated:

Haggai 2:6-9 | For this is what the LORD of Hosts says: “Once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens & the earth, the sea & the dry land.

I will shake all the nations, & they will come with all their treasures, & I will fill this house with glory, says the LORD of Hosts.

The silver is MINE, & the gold is MINE, declares the LORD of Hosts.

The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former, says the LORD of Hosts. And in this place I will provide peace, declares the LORD of Hosts.”

Which is exactly what is stated in Hebrews, “I will shake all nations.”

That's a tremendous theme to contemplate.

Our imaginations can scarcely take in what is involved in the outworking of that statement.

That heaven, the earth, the sea, the dry land, & all nations, are to be shaken by the power of GOD.

1.] Before I go into the theme.

I want to ask you a question, which is based on Scripture. The question is this, “Do you believe in the judgment of GOD?”

Because in my experience, since I travel around & meet a lot of Christians, & attend a lot of conferences..very very little is said today (in most places) about the judgment of GOD.

The attitude almost seems to be, “Well it’s not nice to talk about GOD’s judgment. Let’s stay away from that painful subject.”

In fact, I think a lot of Christians, really almost have reservations about presenting GOD as a judge. It’s almost as if that will offend people, or frighten people.

We won’t be able to get them to listen to the Gospel, if we talk about the judgment of GOD.

2.] In John 16:8, JESUS said when HE, the SPIRIT of TRUTH has come, HE will convict the world sin, righteousness, & judgment.

As I see it, those are the 3 eternal unchanging realities—on which all true religion is based:

Sin, righteousness, & judgment.

And if we ask what sin is, the Scripture says “all unrighteousness is sin.”

So there are just two possibilities in every action & life; sin or righteousness.

And if a thing is not righteous, it is sinful.

It is in a way, easy to define what sin is. As if I were asked: What is crooked? All I would have to do is hold up a straight line & say that anything that departs from that—whether by by little or by much—is crooked.

And the same is true with righteousness & sin.

GOD has held up a line of righteousness. And it is JESUS, & anything that departs from HIS example (little or much) is sin.

And on the basis of how we have lived, whether by sin or by righteousness, we will face the judgment of GOD.

There is one appointment that everyone of us here will inevitably keep. It’s the judgment of GOD.

Not one of us can escape.

3.] There are two different judgments:

There’s the judgement of condemnation, &

There’s the judgment for those who’ve received JESUS & lived for HIM. Which is an assessment of reward.

But everyone of us will stand before the judgment of GOD.

I think it’s foolish to live as if that were not so.

I think in a way it is unjust, to the unconverted, not to confront them with the realities of >> GOD’s judgment.

In what I’m going to say this evening, if I succeed,

I will paint a picture of some very terrible & frightening things that are going to come quite soon—over the whole earth & all of humanity.

And I could wonder, if when these things begin to happen the unconverted will not say to you or me:

Why didn’t you ever warn us that this was going to happen?

3.1] You see the same person, who is the Saviour, is also the Judge; & HIS Name is JESUS.

It’s interesting that when the apostles presented the Gospel, to people from a non-Jewish background, they always presented JESUS as both Saviour & Judge.

For instance in Acts 10, when Peter went to the house of Cornelius, & began to tell him about JESUS. He said

Acts 10:42-43 | And HE commanded us to preach to the people & to testify that HE is the One appointed by GOD to judge the living & the dead. All the prophets testify about HIM that everyone who believes in HIM receives forgiveness of sins through HIS name.”

In actual fact, Peter put judgment before forgiveness.

He said the same one through whom you can receive forgiveness of sins, is also the one who is ordained by GOD to be the Judge of all.

Then when Paul was preaching in Athens, again he was preaching to people not from a Jewish background.

He said in Acts 17 verses 30 & following:

Acts 17:30-34 | Although GOD overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, HE now commands all men everywhere to repent.

For HE has set a day when HE will judge the world with justice by the Man HE has appointed. HE has given proof of this to all men by raising HIM from the dead.”

When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to mock him, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this topic.” At that, Paul left the Areopagus.

But some people joined him & believed, including Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, & others who were with them.

HE’s just as efficient, just as thorough & just as faithful as a judge, as HE is as a saviour.

As a saviour, HE omits nothing. And as a judge, likewise, HE omits nothing.

4.] There’s a parable in Luke 19, called the parable of the Pounds, or the minas. It’s about a wealthy ruler, who took a journey & committed to his 10 servants money to handle on his behalf.

Luke 19:12-14 | So HE said, “A man of noble birth went to a distant country to lay claim to his kingship & then return. Beforehand, he called ten of his servants & gave them ten minas. ‘Conduct business with this until I return,’ he said.

But his subjects hated him & sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We do not want this man to rule over us.’

And he gave to each of them a mina, which they say is about 3 months salary.

Then he came back after a long while & reckoned with them.

He said, “What have you done with my mina?”

The first one said: I’ve made 10 more minas. And the LORD said: Well done, good & faithful servant. You have authority over 10 cities, in MY Kingdom.

The 2nd said: I’ve made 5 minas. And HE said: Well done, but HE didn’t say good & faithful. HE said, “have authority over 5 cities.”

It’s very clear, the principle is, according to the faithfulness with which we serve the LORD in this age, we will be apportioned our share of authority in the coming age.

There will be no favourtism.

But then there was one other servant, who made nothing.

The 3rd said: “I was afraid of YOU, so I just went & hid YOUR mina & here it is; I’m giving it back to YOU.

And the LORD said: “You wicked & lazy servant.”

>> How many of you realize that laziness is also wickedness?

We have such an unbalanced scale of values, in the Church. If a man gets drunk, we think that’s awful, & certainly it’s not good. And we wouldn’t have a drunkard in Church.

But how many lazy people do we have in Church?

People who never really take time to study the BIBLE, or get down in prayer. People maybe whom, you can’t even rely on to do a thorough job anyway.

The BIBLE calls them, “Wicked”

4a] But I want you to see the end of this parable.

When this man went away to get his kingdom & return his citizens sent a message after him, saying:

We don’t want this man to rule over us. [Luke 19:14]

And when he returned, at the end of the parable, the final words are these: But bring here those enemies of mine—who did not want me to reign over them—& slay them before me.

I was shocked.

Luke 19:27 | And these enemies of MINE who were unwilling for ME to rule over them, bring them here & slay them in front of ME.

When I felt the impact of those words, because the man is the picture of JESUS.

And HE says, “Those who rejected MY rule, bring them here & slay them before ME.”

HE is just as thorough & faithful as judge, as HE is as saviour. HE is both.

The same one whom GOD has made a saviour, HE has also made a judge.

5.] Now let me come back more closely to the Scripture, which we began with. The prophesy which GOD said HE would shake all things that can be shaken.

Nothing that can be shaken, will eventually be left unshaken.

Some years ago, not very long ago, the LORD (I think) spoke to Ruth & me about HIS judgments at the close of this age. And HE said (I believe, this is my understanding) HIS judgments will come in 3 phases.

Preliminary, Intermediate, & Final.

5.1] Preliminary Judgments

Now my personal reading of the situation in the world today is the preliminary judgments have already begun.

I don’t believe we’ve come to the intermediate.

Certainly we have not come to the final judgments of GOD.

Now let’s ask ourselves: “What are some of the things that can be shaken?”

Because if they can be shaken, they will be shaken.

I’d like to turn to the famous parable of the 2 different houses. One built on sand, & the other built on the rock.

The version given in Luke 6:47-49,

Luke 6:47-49 | I will show you what he is like who comes to ME & hears MY words & acts on them:

He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep & laid his foundation on the rock.

When the flood came, the torrent crashed against that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.

But the one who hears MY words & does not act on them is like a man who built his house on ground without a foundation.

The torrent crashed against that house, & immediately it fell—& great was its destruction.”

NOTICE: There’s no difference to the tests, which each house was subjected. All was subjected to the storm.

Don’t imagine that being a believer will give you a storm-free passage through life.

If anything, rather the opposite.

There’s a kind of presentation of truth today, which is only half-truths.

Claiming that if you come to the LORD & get saved, then everything will go well—you’ll never have any problems, etc.

Most of us know by experience, if not by Scripture, that isn’t true.

Friend of mine, who is a preacher, was once asked: “What is evidence of the Baptism of the HOLY SPIRIT?”

He replied: “Trouble”

There was only one difference in what the houses went through, it was one was built on solid foundation (a rock), the other was not.

And JESUS said, “Building on the ROCK is very simple: it’s hearing what HE says & doing it.”

And I believe that is the only foundation, that will give us a building that cannot be shaken. Anything that is not built on the hearing & doing the teaching of JESUS, will be shaken.

6.] So I would like to think over with you, briefly, some things that will be shaken. This is not an impassioned emotional appeal; I’m trying to be objective & in a sense analytical.

I’m trying to say things, which everybody will agree to.

The problem is not to tell ppl something they don’t know. The problem is to remind them of something they already know but maybe something they don’t want to remember.

6.1] First of all, individual lives can be shaken.

In the ministry, I’ve dealt with hundreds of people—over the years—whose lives have been totally shaken by:

Sickness,

Poverty,

Broken marriage, in various ways.

People who say I give up, I can’t go any further.

Nothing helps, nothing works, I might as well be dead. They were people whose lives were not built on the teachings of JESUS.

But it doesn’t mean that if we build on the teachings of JESUS, we’ll have no problems—but we’ll have the strength to withstand the problems.

Then JESUS said in Matthew 12:25,

Matthew 12:25 | Knowing their thoughts, JESUS said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, & every city or household divided against itself will not stand.

Every house, or household, that is divided against itself —cannot stand. Any house where there is not unity & love, & peace—can be shaken & will be shaken.

And we see everyday, reports of households that are being shaken. In fact I think it’s probably the main cause of the problems that confront us in society today.

It’s the break up of family today.

And what it has resulted in is hordes of un-parented children.

Parents can run away from their responsibilities for their children, but it will catch up.

Maybe not in that generation, but in the next.

And one of the major social features, of the world today, is the activities of un-parented children.

6.1a] I’ll mention just 3 areas:

One is South Africa, in the black townships, where there are hordes of children—who owe no allegiance to anybody, have no respect for anything. They have no concern for human life.

They have just abandoned themselves, because they have been abandoned.

I’ve said many times, there’s no such thing as a juvenile delinquent, the delinquents are the adults.

And there’s really no one who can control them.

See police can keep order in a society, if the majority of the society are on the side of the police, & in favour of law & order.

When the majority of a society turns the other way, the police cannot possibly maintain order.

It’s not their job.

Another place where this is true is in Israel.

Amongst the younger Arabs growing up, as a result of what is called the inter-father.

Cousin marriage is allowed & often encouraged throughout the Middle East. The bint 'amm marriage, or marriage w ith one's father's brother's daughter [bint al-'amm] is especially common, especially in tribal & traditional communities.There is very little numerical evidence of rates of cousin marriage in the past.

I’m very familiar with the Arab culture, I’ve lived among them; & normally the youngsters have great respect for the old, & children have great respect for their parents.

But the inter-father has broken all that down.

And now societies are being taken over by teenagers, who have no loyalties & no commitment & no respect whatsoever.

And in a sense their society is no longer manageable.

Then a 3rd place which is an example of that is Los Angeles.

Again the root problem is children who have grown up without love, the discipline, & the care of parents.

And there is no social answer to this problem.

I personally believe it will multiply & increase. I can believe it here in Britain, there will be whole areas which will be taken over by young rebels.

And the police will simply steer clear of those areas.

In fact there are some areas in the country now.

But we need to come to the root cause of the problem, which is the parents who failed to train their children.

6.3] Then let’s think about institutions

Any institution that is not founded on the teaching of JESUS can be shaken. Banks can be shaken.

You believe that?

Believe me, in America, we are seeing a shaking of the banks.

There’s a personal debt of $500, today on every American citizen--because of the savings & loans banks which failed.

For which the government had accepted responsibility.

Actually my personal opinion is: There is no way that the US can escape bankruptcy. I’m not going to go into that. But it’s just I believe a fact.

I believe that whole nation is going to be shaken.

6.3a] Then businesses can be shaken There are many businesses (worldwide) closing down, going bankrupt--because businesses can be shaken.

6.3b] Governments can be shaken We saw that in what used to be the Soviet Union.

The whole government collapsed like a house of cards. And no one has been able to put it back together.

We need to take note of these things because we tend to look to some of these institutions for stability.

People used to say, “As safe as the Bank of England.”

That’s not very safe.

We tend to look to big corporations & firms & think well they’ve got it made. But they don’t.

There’s another kind of institution that can also be shaken.

6.3c] That is religious institutions. They have no guarantee of stability whatsoever, unless they are built on the teaching of JESUS.

I believe, many (2x), so called institutions are going to be thrown down in the shaking that’s ahead.

I would say to you: “Don’t look to a bank, business, don’t look to a government, & don’t look for religious institution for security. Because they cannot provide it.”

They are all amongst the things, which will be shaken.

6.3.d] Then material structures can be shaken. Structures like this church building in which we’re meeting.

I’ll read you just a couple of passages, from the prophet Isaiah 2:12-16

Isaiah 2:12-16 | For the Day of the LORD of Hosts will come against all the proud & lofty, against all that is exalted—it will be humbled— against all the cedars of Lebanon,lofty & lifted up, against all the oaks of Bashan, against all the tall mountains, against all the high hills, against every high tower, against every fortified wall, against every ship of Tarshish, & against every stately vessel.

6.4] GOD’s Biggest Pet Peeve: Arrogance

Now as I read some of these passages, where GOD is speaking about the things that are being shaken, I suggest that you make a mental register of what is the one thing that GOD hates the most.

The one thing that will ultimately always bring disaster.

See if you can pick out what is the one salient feature.

Isaiah 2:17-22 | So the pride of man will be brought low, & the loftiness of men will be humbled; the LORD alone will be exalted in that day, & the idols will vanish completely. Men will flee to caves in rocks & holes in the ground, away from the terror of the LORD & from the splendor of HIS majesty, when HE rises to shake earth. In that day men will cast away their idols of silver & gold —the idols they made to worship—away to the moles & bats. They will flee to caverns in the rocks & crevices in the cliffs, away from the terror of the LORD

& from the splendor of HIS majesty, when HE rises to shake the earth.

Put no more trust in man, who has only the breath in his nostrils.

Of what account is he?

6.4a] And just one verse from Isaiah 30:25,

And from every high mountain & every raised hill, streams of water will flow in the day of great slaughter, when the towers fall.

Every time I walk through a major city, such as this & I look at all the sky scrapers & all these tremendously tall buildings. I ask myself, what will it be like, in the day the towers fall?

I always think particularly of the ones that have glass walls.

It’s hard to imagine, the kind of scene that will confront us if all of them collapsed.

But the BIBLE says, they will all fall.

You may feel uncertain about that, but let me say, from my part, “It will happen exactly the way it says.”

Then the whole earth will be shaken.

In Revelation 6, this is part of the unfolding of the prophetic vision of the end times, beginning in v.12-16:

Revelation 6:12-16 | ...I saw the LAMB open the 6th seal, there was a great earthquake, & the sun became black like sackcloth of goat hair, & the whole moon turned blood red, & the stars of the sky fell to the earth like unripe figs dropping from a tree shaken by a great wind.

The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, & every mountain & island was moved from its place.

Then the kings of the earth, the nobles, the commanders, the rich, the mighty, & every slave & free man, hid in the caves & among the rocks of the mountains.

And they said to the mountains & the rocks, “Fall on us & hide us from the face of the ONE seated on the throne, & from the wrath of the LAMB.

I don’t think our minds can fully conceive when every mountain & every island, including the British Isles will be shaken.

7.] And finally, in this list the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

And you remember, GOD said I will shake not only Earth, but also the Heavens.

In Matthew 24:29-33, is part of the prophetic discourse of JESUS on the Mount of Olives, leading up to HIS return.

Matthew 24:29-33 | Immediately after the tribulation of those days: ‘The sun will be darkened, & the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, & the powers of the heavens will be shaken.’ At that time the sign of the SON of Man will appear in heaven, & all the tribes of the earth will mourn.

They will see the SON of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power & great glory.

And HE will send out HIS angels with a loud trumpet call, & they will gather HIS elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.

Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its branches become tender & sprout leaves, you know that summer is near.

So also, when you see all these things, you will know that HE is near, right at the door.

I don’t think anyone fully understands, but everything to do with the Heaves will be shaken.

Which is exactly what GOD said in Isaiah. I will shake not only the earth, but also the Heavens.

And the writer of Hebrews says, “everything that can be shaken will be shaken.”

Why? Because GOD wants to reveal & demonstrate a Kingdom that cannot be shaken.

And one way to prove it is to let everything that can be shaken be shaken.

And the writer of Hebrews says we have such a kingdom.

We have something that cannot be shaken.

But it’s not in any of the things that I’ve listed.

So we need to ask ourselves: Where is our security placed in? What am I putting my trust in, that cannot be shaken?

Is my hope & citizenship in GOD’s Kingdom?

8.] I’d like to go on a little further, go back to Isaiah 24 this is a staggering chapter.

Isaiah 24:1-6 | Judgment on the Whole Earth Behold, the LORD lays waste the earth & leaves it in ruins.

HE will twist its surface & scatter its inhabitants— people & priest alike, servant & master, maid & mistress, buyer & seller, lender & borrower, creditor & debtor.

The earth will be utterly laid waste & thoroughly plundered.

The LORD has spoken this word.

The earth mourns & withers; the world languishes & fades; the exalted of the earth waste away.

The earth is defiled by its people; they have transgressed the laws; they have overstepped the decrees & broken the everlasting covenant..

Therefore a curse has consumed the earth, & its inhabitants must bear the guilt; the earth’s dwellers have been burned, & only a few survive.

GOD is very specific, nobody is exempt.

Often we tend to think that wealth & social position can provide security, but here Isaiah tells us neither will avoid this, as all will experience in the same global shaking.

No form of financial security will be effective.

Then it goes on in verse 3, the earth will be utterly plundered, for the LORD has decreed it.

The haughty people of the earth languishes. The earth is also defiled under its inhabitants, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinances, broken the everlasting covenant.

8.1] GOD gives 3 reasons, why this will happen.

And those can be interpreted in various ways. But in my thinking there are certain laws, which GOD has instituted for humanity—which will never be broken with HIS permission.

And GOD made a covenant with Noah, & all those who have descended from him. One thing HE said was:

“Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

That’s an eternal edict of the law [Genesis 9:6]

No human legal system, no government, can set aside that law.

Then it says, “they changed the ordinance.”

I believe they changed the pattern for living, which GOD has instituted for humanity. And primarily that is the family. The structure of the family, in the BIBLE is not based on culture. It’s based on the eternal nature GOD HIMSELF.

GOD is the head of CHRIST. CHRIST is the head of man, & man head of woman.

It starts with GOD HIMSELF.

And those women who feel that it’s unfair to be placed in a position of subordination, need to remember that JESUS is placed in a position of subordination to the FATHER.

And as I said earlier, the changing of that ordinance, ultimately has taken away the whole stability of society.

And there are professional sociologists, who seriously question whether society can survive when the institution of the family has broken down.

And then, the third charge against humanity: “We have broken the everlasting covenant.”

Genesis 17:7 | I will establish MY covenant as an everlasting covenant between ME & you & your descendants after you, to be your GOD & the GOD of your descendants after you.

Isaiah 54:10 | Though the mountains may be removed & the hills may be shaken, MY loving devotion will not depart from you, & MY covenant of peace will not be broken,” says the LORD, who has compassion on you.

Isaiah 61:8 | For I, the LORD, love justice; I hate robbery & iniquity; in MY faithfulness I will give them their recompense & make an everlasting covenant with them.

To me the everlasting covenant is the covenant GOD made through JESUS CHRIST & men & women.

And when we break that covenant, & depart from its requirements we must inevitably be subject to the judgment of GOD.

8.1a] As I look at the world around me, & in Britain. And I grew up in this country between the two world wars.

And I’ve had longer to observe the world than most of you, though not all of you.

I have seen everyone of these things happen before my eyes. I’ve seen the whole structure of society totally change.

If things that are done today are taken for granted & being done 60 years ago, there would have been an uproar.

The kind of thing that is presented on TV, some of the kinds of things, would have created a demonstration 60 years ago.

8.1b] You know about the parable about the frog? Which I heard from somebody. If you put a frog in a basin & pour in boiling water, the frog will jump out.

But if you pour in cool water & gradually heat it, the frog will stay there till it dies.

And that’s how the devil has been treating us.

He didn’t pour the boiling water in immediately. But he has steadily & gradually heated the water until water until we are ready to die.

9.] Now I want to go on, in Isaiah 24:17-22. I hope you will take time to study this passage for yourself.

Isaiah 24:17-22 | Terror & pit & snare await you, O dwellers of the earth. Whoever flees the sound of terror will fall into a pit, & whoever climbs from the pit will be caught in a trap.

For the windows of heaven are open, & the foundations of the earth are shaken.

The earth is utterly broken apart, the earth is split open, the earth is shaken violently.

The earth staggers like a drunkard & sways like a shack. Earth’s rebellion weighs it down, & it falls, never to rise again.

In that day the LORD will punish the host of heaven above & the kings of the earth below.

They will be gathered together like prisoners in a pit. They will be confined to a dungeon & punished after many days.

...

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Recorded in 1992 in Westminster Chapel, UK.

Part 2 is: How can the Church face these things and overcome?

#days of trouble #WARNING #Hebrews 12:25 #Do NOT reject GOD #Psalm 94:12 #disciplined by GOD

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jcmorrigan · 5 years

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Valentine’s Day F/O Letter

For the event hosted by @nougatships and @megane-shipping! I decided to write a letter to Giovanni Potage from EE because I am love him SO MUCH right now. Anyway, it got kinda long, so most of it will be under a cut.

***

Hi Gio,

This is the first time I’ve ever really written anything of length to you. To any of the ones I love this way, really. Beginnings are hard. There’s so much I want to say, and I’m not sure where to even start. So let’s get the basics out of the way: how are you doing? Successful heists lately? Epic tales of villainy I simply must know about?

I’ve been fine. Life’s boring, as usual. I would say I don’t even know how you put up with it, but I’ve seen your couch-potato side, so that’s not really a big mystery. I like that. I like that you’re equally up for breaking the mold with some adventure and just…kicking it. (Wow. That’s some old slang. When’s the last time anyone said “kicking it”? Me. Just now.)

So as for the reason I’m writing this letter…I think it’s best if I just begin in chronological order. So you and I both know you’re not the only one in my heart, and I’m glad you respect this. There’s a time, a place, and an AU for you, and it doesn’t make you any less special. But I’m always stunned when I look back at how we met. The others, it took time to realize I loved them, and how much they meant to me. But you? You broke through that fuckin’ museum wall, and I KNEW you were my type. If you want the receipts, I have the Discord chat of when I was talking to my friend while watching you and screaming about how much I wanted to cuddle you. (LISTEN. I KNOW THAT WAS FORWARD. I’M SORRY FOR BEING A CREEP. SOMETIMES I’M A STALKER.) …Actually, the exact words were when my friend, knowing you were my type, said “If he were any further up your alley, he’d be at your house” and I said “He could come to my house anytime” and I’m sorry your girlfriend is such a creep.

I haven’t felt that instant…fall that many times in my life. The last time I can remember it, it was for someone real. As in who originates in my world. I think you’ve figured out that sometimes, I compare you to him. That chase went on such a runaround…with men, my whole life after him, I’ve thought of them as goals to achieve. I got the attention of the hot one! Yay! Finally! Now he can love me and all of my little quirks, even though I’m super boring! And I’m not saying that’s incredibly wrong. I’ve made some good relationships that way, actually. (All fictional, of course.)

But you…what struck me is how much I wanted to be with you for your sake. Not mine. Not to bandy about getting you to notice me, or playing the tsundere game, or worrying I’m not good enough. Sure, I like a slowburn and a good confession, but I really just wanted to be close to you because you made me smile. You had a good sense of humor, you have that unbreakable lighthearted confidence I adore…you’re a little bit of an idiot, but in the absolute best way possible (and you have emotional smarts where I don’t). And on that note! You’re one of the nicest guys I know! Even if you are the bad guy.

Which was kind of the two-hit combo that slayed me. I have a villain problem. You know this. I know this. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Some days, I want to be a villain, myself, and have the freedom to do what I want, take revenge on those I feel wronged me, take whatever my heart desires, just not have to live by the RULES anymore. But some days, I become acutely aware of my conscience. Could I ever be a real villain? Could I actually steal? Could I KILL? I think about the people I’d hurt, and I don’t wanna do that. I now know that depending on the situation, I can laugh with the sinners and cry with the saints. (Little Billy Joel for ya.) But with you, I know I don’t really have to…pick. You let me be me, and you let me have that freedom of just…doing bad things that are against the rules. And it feels AWESOME. But then, we never really take it too far, and we still have our friendships, our standards, our moral codes, our etiquette. Basically, you’ll let me be the good guy, too, and you’re just a sweetie pie. Some days, I need to toe the line more; some days, I need to shed blood. But you let me suspend in between, getting the best of both worlds.

And all this is why I think…maybe you’re my favorite out of all of them. It makes me feel guilty to love you best when I’ve given my heart to two others, and who knows where it will stop? But it’s you I find myself thinking of most often. You who I’d have fun with. You who’d make me smile. You who I’d want to make smile.

Also, I realized lately. I don’t get jealous over you, not like I thought I would. I like seeing you depicted with other partners, the Blasters or other selfshippers/OCs. I love when I meet someone else who had the good enough taste to fall for you! If you want to invite Crusher or Spike or anyone else you like to be part of this…I know you have enough love for all of us. We can all be happy together. Just say the word!

Knowing you would support me emotionally no matter what is touching. I’ve relied on you for a lot. I’ve done scary grown-up government stuff while listening to your theme. I invited you to the crew that would go on that flight with me because I hate airplanes so much, and I knew you would give me amazing distraction-cuddles (though I suspect you, also, fear the airplane, and if I’m right about that, I admire you so much for not letting it show). There are times I…really hate myself, or feel worthless. Especially because I have so much trouble validating myself. But I know you’d just put a hand on my shoulder and tell me it’s going to be all right before inviting me to slip on some ski masks and pretty supervillain clothes so we can go hijack sugar cookies from the bakery. (Pink for you. You always have dibs on the pink ones! I haven’t forgotten! And blue for me <3)

The adventures we’ve been on in my imagination…the walks around Twilight Town (YEAH YEAH I KNOW WRONG WORK OF FICTION), snuggling up in your knitted blankets (which are SO SOFT), making my villainess dress together, the first kiss on the rooftop, dancing like idiots, THE HEISTS…it all makes me really happy. You remind me that I don’t necessarily have to “grow up” to be a grown-up. And, I mean, I knew that, but you make sure I REALLY know that. (Speaking of which, don’t you love how if you add the two of us parents’-basement-dwellers together, you probably end up with one [1] functioning adult?)

I also really have to thank you for being accepting of my asexuality. I’m always scared it will push others away. They say men only want one thing, right? And I am unfortunately attracted to men. Yaaaaay me. But there are big exceptions to the rule, and you’ve always been the one to say “Fuck gender roles!” I feel like when I’m with you, I never have to worry that you’ll be wanting something I can’t give you.

In return, I will accept you no matter your body, your identity. I’ve run into a couple different takes on you, but they’re all you.

I guess that brings me to the hard part of this. This is going public, so I don’t know how specific I want to get. But there was a very powerful force that suggested I couldn’t see you through my own eyes. That no one could do so. It almost tore us apart. I thought it was my moral obligation to let you go. I thought loving you would mean taking a stand on the wrong side and hurting my friends. I thought that what would happen is that every time I thought of you, I would be reminded of ugly truths and harsh realities.

But after two days, I missed you so much. It was a good wake-up call to know this relationship wasn’t completely baggage-free, and it reminded me that I have many characters in my life who I want to give my attention, but it also proved to me that if I tried to let you go…I would have to physically push you away instead, and in the end, I couldn’t do it. I think back all the time to how good of a brother-dad-mentor-figure you were to Molly, and how you got worried about Fred’s astigmatism, and how I was sure you’d get along with so many of the characters who already made up my world, and how this spoke to your heart. Oh, and also, I needed your dumb ass to say loitering in front of a truck was a valid crime. (Please don’t ever loiter in front of a truck. I’m begging you.) I need you to show me how easily you shift from Grandma Mode to Knife Mode with your knitting needle, to be proud of the way you season your soup attacks, to keep making your own capes, to insist on the benefits of wielding a bat with a fucking knife taped to it, to jet your friends to safety when they’re afraid of such things as fire and traitor bears.

Whatever comes of all that, I hope there can still be a space for us. You and me. And I’m confident it will happen, now. It already is happening. Because I know that you’d just want me to be happy, no matter where you fell on the issue that began it. And you love and respect my friends, too. I know you see us as our own little group of villains and co-minions and talk about us like we’re an evil team that has to take care of each other, and that’s…honestly so cute. Too bad I’m terrible at putting your words to work. Maybe one day. When I learn how to find the approval I seek without fighting it out of people. But I think that was the moment it went from a crush to actually loving you. When I saw how you would do that with Molly. With everyone. Make sure they knew how valid they were. I…feel bad that I haven’t been able to live up to this lately. Like I’ve failed you. But I can always try again, right? That’s what you’d want me to do! And I do improve on things every day. One day, the minion will surpass her villain (but still stay around with you because that’s what we do)! I hope I can support you in the same way – that when you have things that trouble your mind, that I can help you feel better and get you toward a solution to the problem.

I know I’m safe with you, and I want to keep you safe, too. I know how much you’d put on the line to defend me, and I just want to protect you from all of the bad in your world – from snooty Vice Principals who call their armies to beat you up (I’m still SO SORRY you went through that!), from the law chasing you away from all that’s familiar, from all the insults and mockery that could ever come your way. I want to stand before you like a shield. To gather the troops of the other characters I know and form a protection squad around you. To make you smile. (Even if you are really, really cute when you cry. Look, I’m not gonna beat around the bush – I do love getting to comfort you. It SUCKS that you have to go through the hard times, but I like…being there. I hope that doesn’t make a sadist of me. Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s an overreaction.)

By the way, I’m kinda sorry for not ordering the lobster bisque at the pub in the airport. I was gonna because of you! But I chickened out! And that salmon I got instead was REALLY good, okay? But it’s a double whammy because I had JUST found out the soup place in the mall closed and I need to make up for this. There will be soup!

(As of the most recent draft, I had a horrid stomachache last Sunday, and chicken soup was all I could eat for most of the day. I thought of you. Though yours would’ve been better than Campbell’s and we both know it.)

Fun fact: you are dating a silly, sappy lady. I keep thinking back to this letter – I drafted it once, then went back and added things, and here I am saying I ALMOST mailed this without talking up your looks. Which is probably a good thing because it means I’m primarily with you for your personality, but everyone deserves to feel like they look nice, so here goes: I love your silly, sly smirk. I love your cute little fangies. I love your untamed pink hair. I love when I can see just how deep-pink your eyes are. I love how much of a beanpole you are, and how much taller you are than me (even if it does mean you can’t carry me bridal-style for more than thirty seconds). I love how innocent you can look, and how you can look the absolute OPPOSITE of innocent when you want to. I love the way your face lights up when you’re happy about something, or when you’re being cocky. I love the way you wear your emotions on your sleeve, and I can always see how you feel just by looking (I’m bad at body language and reading between lines, after all). Do not ever doubt that is one handsome man looking back at you from the other side of the mirror! Because I could just watch your smile for so long, unbroken, you don’t even know.

Thank you for being you. Thank you for letting me be me. Thank you for the fact that we’re our silly selves and we can be grown-ups without growing up in the gray space between good and evil. I can’t wait to see you more – in your own story, where I’m not; in the story just for us, in our own little timeline; in the TBTCverse Twilight Town where we are hounded by complex crossover lore; in the beautiful art everyone draws of you; in any other universe that may bring us together.

And someday, the time might come that we have to part ways romantically. I’m not looking forward to that. I’m really not. I hope it doesn’t happen. But someday, we might not have the chemistry anymore, or you might find someone better, or I might have to put more focus in what I guess is the “real world.” If that day comes, I hope we can still be friends and mean something to each other. Zucchinis/QPPs, preferably. But if we have to be more distant…just so that I can think of you, and you can think of me, and we’ll both treasure those memories.

I love you, Giovanni. Or should I say “Boss”?

Sincerely, with all my heart,

Rachel “Composer” Scribere/Inlustris

(P.S. I wasn’t sure which universe’s last name I should put, seeing as I obviously am not going to write my last name in THIS world, so there, have both the ones you know me as.)

(P.P.S. “If there’s a place that I could be, then I’d be another memory. Can I be the only hope for you? Because you’re the only hope for me.” ~MCR, “The Only Hope for Me Is You,” Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys)

#selfship #i'm at soup!#valentine's day f/o event

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megashadowdragon · 5 years

Text

jaune will have a confrontation with yang when he finds out the truth

that yang was keeping raven branwen being the spring maiden a secret while before she told ozpin no secrets or half truths ( while then keeping a secret herself and that ozpin kept secrets to protect them and the world in contrast to yangs secrets

itsclydebitches . tumblr . com/post/181776207310/a-response-to-the-claim-that-yangs-secret

the-kiwi-is-not-a-pewee . tumblr . com/post/180434178440/yangs-secret-and-its-potential-risks

(edit: and this might be driven in part due to the deaths of people jaune cares about like nora or ren dies (and/or his family members if the jaune is from atlas theory is true) protecting the relic of knowledge so it will be put in the vault for the relic of creation that would give jaune even more incentive to be pissed at yang for yang didnt even try to get raven to relock the vault and the entire reason they went to atlas was to find a safe place for the relic because they didnt have the spring maiden

(

imagine how nora would react if ren died protecting the relic and then found out yangs secret ( noras based on thor who fought against the giant sea serpent Jörmungandr (the midgard serpent ) and yangs named after a chinese dragon ( which are associated with the sea/water

they have snake like bodies and in some stories like light novels eastern style dragons are mistaken for snakes/sea serpents (heck there was a story wherein eastern there is a myth about how dragons first start of as snake like creature but then they will grow and shed the skin of a snake and become a dragon In the sixteenth century of our era a Japanese author1 spoke of an old (certainly Chinese) tradition, according to which a dragon’s fetus lives during a thousand years in the sea, for a thousand years in the mountains and, after having been among men (“in a village”, says the text) for the same long period, it finally is born, becomes a dragon and ascends to the sky2. During these three thousand years the fetus lives as a very small snake within astone, the dragon’s egg, which is first lying at the bottom of the sea, then comes to the mountains (how it got there is not explained), where after a thousand years it is picked up by somebody who carries it home and preserves it on account of its beautiful colours, or uses it as an ink-stone (suzuri, 硯 ). As it invariably has the remarkable peculiarity of constantly producing water (the dragon’s element), it is a very convenient ink-stone indeed3. But woe him who possess such a stone at the end of the millennial period which the fetus must pass among mankind, for then the stone splits, and a small snake creeps out of it, which in a few moments becomes larger and larger, and with a terrible noise forces its way to the sky, smashing the roof amid thunder and lightning, and ascending in a dark cloud. The little reptile has become an enormous four-legged dragon, which leaves the narrow abodes of men and frees himself in this terrific way.” japanesemythology . wordpress . com/stories-of-dragon-eggs-a-ka-dragon-inkstones-in-japan/

. Jaune’s episode in V5 chapter 11 shows that he’ll take the deaths personally.

)

as many people know I believe that jaune’s evil counterpart is salem given the many parallels and that I believe that jaune will come around to understanding ozpin and realizing the truth of the mission and that oz was right ( with oz joining team jnpr as jaunes partner the new p)

megashadowdragon . tumblr . com/post/157918109672/oscar-pine-will-join-team-jnpr-and-be-the-new-p/embed

and that jaune will realize its not ozpins fault pyrrha died remember that oz told them to leave but pyrrha chose to fight cinder despite not needing to and jaune and ozpin will become partners ( jaune realizing that oz had nothing but bad options and had no choice but to seek a replacement for the fall maiden to get the powers to keep the fall maiden powers from going into salems hands) and pyrrha was just the best option. and that ozpin gave pyrrha a choice and gave her time to think it over ( for jaune would realize that pyrrha would normally say yes immediately ) and explained all the gritty details. ozpin did his best to make pyrrha feel safe ( and that ozpin doesnt know pyrrha as well as he does so acting like it was all his fault pyrrha died just because oz’s group went to pyrrha to become the fall maiden is ridiculous just like its ridiculous to to blame the guy who gave a mission out to a team for a death on that team) oz never manipulated pyrrha megashadowdragon . tumblr . com/post/152357996242/salem-is-jaunes-evil-counterpart/embed

alexkablob . tumblr . com/post/179967541409/i-just-cannot-believe-for-years-now-ive-been

I just cannot believe

for years now I’ve been saying Arkos was classic heroic romance tropes with Pyrrha in the classical male role and Jaune in the classical female role

and this is actually true in-universe, because Pyrrha parallels Oz and Jaune parallels Salem.

Arkos is paralleling Ozpin and Salem but better and not screwing up the way they did, with Pyrrha as Ozpin and Jaune as Salem

(the multiple scenes where ozma disintegrating in the exact same fashion that pyrrha nikos had disintegrated in at the end of v3

There’s also the part where Jaune was unable to save Pyrrha and had to struggle with a death wish (seriously jaune was borderline suicidal and some may say that was until his fight with cinder but I think its still there )

alexkablob . tumblr . com/post/179997954479/ozmas-pyrrha-parallels-are-making-jaunes-current?is_liked_post=1

Ozma’s Pyrrha parallels are making Jaune’s current suicidal tendencies even more painful tbh

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT OZ AND SALEM WERE ACTUALLY GENDER-FLIPPED ARKOS “

I mean seriously Ozma is destroyed by the God of Light and darkness in the same manner that Cinder destroyed Pyrrhas body

and I forgot to add about how salem was suicidal

another post on ozpin and pyrrhas parallels

fandomsallaroundme . tumblr . com/post/180795589689/today-on-persephone-over-analyzes-everything-on

aspiringwarriorlibrarian . tumblr . com/post/179972347584/edelblume-righteousness-n-the-quality-of#notes

Righteousness n. the quality of being morally right or justifiable.

fandomsallaroundme . tumblr . com/post/180623532289/so-a-thought-occurred-to-me-ozma-x-salem-parallels#notes

sunder-the-gold . tumblr . com/post/180072404979/alexkablob-so-ozpin-interrupting-the-light

So.

Ozpin interrupting the Light God to say “I’ll do it” before he fully understood what was being asked of him.

And the Light god just taking it as assent without explaining further.

Wow I guess we know now why he looked so stricken when Pyrrha did the exact same thing before he’d finished explaining.”

note and as sunder-the-gold sid

sunder-the-gold

And then Ozpin said, “No, please, let me explain what this could do to you.”

and then he proceeded to give her time to think about it

.” basically he saw the parallels between himself and pyrrha how they said yes before they fully understood what was being asked of them and told her to think it over and explained what it could do to her and the way he described it sounded just the way he described what was happening to oscar and him .

dustypotion . tumblr . com/post/179999477247/i-got-an-interesting-ask-from-an-anon-and-wanted

“ wanted to delve deeper into the idea that jaune and pyrrha are also mirrors of ozpin and salem. but here, jaune is the reflection of salem, while pyrrha is the reflection of ozpin. pyrrha was the righteous, moral, talented soldier while jaune is the grieving person that was saved, and sought vengeance for their lost love. pyrrha also stuck to a moral code, like ozpin did, while jaune and salem both used alternative, immoral methods to reach their goals. there’s also the fact that salem’s emblem looked like jaune’s AND jaune’s semblance has the same visual look of the magic that made salem immortal “

and yang xiao long is chinese for little sun dragon and the god of lights can turn into an golden/yellow eastern dragon

not only did salem in her first meeting gets mad at the god and yell at him but later on managed to turn people against the gods and head to the god of lights domain

which makes me wonder if jaune and yang will have a confrontation and if something jaune does causes people to turn against yang like ren and nora for example ( plus the fact that jaune has a knight theme while yang is named after a dragon and how knights slay dragons / are enemies typically in fairy tales makes me wonder not to mention jaunes sword being named crocea mors which means yellow death not saying jaune will kill yang though I once made a theory for fun about yang turning evil and the thing that killed her being jaunes sword just jaune and yang will have a confrontation)

megashadowdragon . tumblr . com/post/186096788612/yang-will-lose-her-left-arm-ending-up-having/embed

Monty Oum was a huge BlazBlue fan and based Penny’s fighting style (and possibly her origin as a robot girl) on Nu and her Murakumo Unit “sisters who were made with souls like how penny is a robot girl with a soul) with those floating swords her weapon is divine radiance murakumo which starts off as a big sword it turns into 8 floating blades surrounding the user, and their armor. . and I think qrow with his giant sword that can turn into a scythe may have been inspired by ragna whose giant sword can turn into a scythe

and yang xiao long took inspiration from bullet (their weapons

who appeared before her Bullet was included in the JPN 1.0 arcade version, which came out in November 2012, while the Yellow trailer was June 2013.

So yeah, it’s impossible for Bullet to have been inspired by Yang, and there’s a greater-than-zero chance Yang was inspired by Bullet, especially considering that Namine from Dead Fantasy 6 (8?) copies moves from Nu 13 (the most obvious is Nu’s 5C).

both of them had someone disappear from their lives tager ( who lost his memories ) and raven ) and they chased after them going around trying to find info but while tager cared about bullet raven straight up abandoned yang.

the seemingly minute differences between Aura/dust and Magic is a leftover from how Ars Magus and Magic work in Blazblue.

, Qrow is basically just a color inverted, older version of Ragna the Bloodedge, down to their weapons.

the finale of Volume 6 has a LOT of similarities to the ending of Chronophantasma, what with the heroes fighting a giant artificial enemy bring about a change in the protagonist.

and yang losing arm to adam with his katana reminds me of ragna losing his arm due to terumi a psychopath with a katana and they both replaced their left arms with a artificial limb (azure grimoire in the form of an arm) and when terumi took ragnas arm he was possessing jin ( and both jin and ragna were kids when this happened ) jin would later on become an iaijutsu practicioner like adam taurus and would have some yandere tendencies // mental unstability/ax crazyness.

)

and in blazblue continuum shift ragna ended up losing his other arm ( the one that had been a real limb ) and being forced to get another artificial arm

so either when yang lose her other arm it will be a reference to how ragna lost his arm in continum shift or it will also be another reference to how ragna lost his arm to jin influenced by terumi . when jin influenced by terumi ( terumi ) meddled with his mind ) cut of ragnas arm he blamed ragna for what happeend going its your fault after he cut off ragnas arm so maybe yang will lose her other arm to someone blaming her for something (possibly someones death given that the nun who took care of ragna, jin and their sister saya died)

hakumen who started off as jin who was often called the hero of ikagura from an alternate timeline lost his love interest a red head named tsubaki who died and was sent back to the past injured where rachel offers to help him become a true hero. From here, his soul is bound to the Susano-o armor, and he becomes Hakumen the leader of the 6 heroes who is one of the strongest in the game

so jaune who has a desire to be a hero like his ancestors to the point he cheated his way into beacon and had a red haired love interest who died could be compared to hakumen/jin in that sense though their personality’s are completely different like how bullets personality is different from yangs

(also the fact that jin was adopted into the kisaragi family a noble family thats part of the 12 originator families in blazblue (and didnt care about bloodline and gathered talented people around the world) could be referenced with jaune being adopted into the arc family and is just so close to them that he doesnt care about them not being biologically related to him theyre family. and jaunes insecurities (and a possible previous event in his life given that jaune said in volume 1 that he wanted to stop being the guy stuck in a tree as his friends fought for their lives so its possible someone close to him died

so either if this is true with the jin and jaune connections and they do another blazblue reference with yang losing her other arm jaune could be the one to do it due to blaming yang for what happened . as a reference to jin going its your fault brother plus jin and hakumen had the desire to kill ragna in alot of the game series so what if jaune wants to kill yang )

another reason why I connect jin with jaune is due to how qrow rubys uncle she learnt everything from is alot like ragna and jaune and ruby are foils to each other so it fits

hawkeyedflame . tumblr . com/post/152581160728/on-rubys-elusive-character-development-or-why

“ jaune is a foil To Ruby. She’s a prodigy who quickly became a deadly warrior at a young age and is welcomed into Beacon two years early as a result while Jaune is a hard worker who progresses slowly and had to lie his way into Beacon because of his nonexistent combat background. Ruby is a strategist specialized on pre-defined team attacks and wields a self-made weapon capable of long range combat. Jaune is a tactician specialized in creating new team attacks according to his analysis on the battlefield and wields a family heirloom only capable of close range combat. Ruby has a rather broken family but they fully support her decision to become a huntress while Jaune’s family is large and united but they don’t support his choices nor have any faith on him. Ruby is a tomboy who dominates the battlefield but doesn’t enjoy dancing whereas Jaune tends to act girly and is initially terrible at fighting but also a great dancer. The more you look into them as a pair, the more contrasts that can be spotted in the details.”

jaune has a more “feminine way of dealing with emotions” while ruby has the more masculine way of dealing with emotions

aminoapps . com/c/rwby/page/blog/why-its-good-for-jaunes-semblance-to-be-a-support-type/xpp7_XQ4s2u6RGX2zboa6JwM2XMekWGZd68

“Joan of Arc is known for breaking gender stereotypes about what it meant to be a woman. And if you think about it in a lot of ways Jaune doesn’t fit into the stereotypical “man box.” We are don’t “men don’t cry.” He wears his emotions on his sleeve. While in the real world men (and in the world of RWBY BOTH men and women ARGUABLY) are told to be strong. And that many people superficially equate physical strength with heroism (Raven?) it is fitting that Jaune’s semblance doesn’t so much doesn’t so much empower himself, as it empowers others. (as well as himself but its more effective on others in the team since they are more skilled than him) The so called “Feminine” strength.” P.S. Hmm as a follow-up to my The Importance Of Foils Part 2 post. I think that Ruby, despite being a girl, fits into the “man box” better than anyone else including it’s UNHEALTHY WAYS OF DEALING WITH EMOTIONS. The only difference is on remnant, it’s not because a man doesn’t cry. But because “a hero doesn’t cry.”

ruby first activated her silver eyes leading to her to learn about them when she saw pyrrha jaunes partner impaled by cinder and burnt to ash failing to save pyrrha her awakening being in reaction to her death while jaune activated his semblance and realized what it was when he saw rubys partner weiss impaled by cinder and was able to save her life awakening his semblance to do so allowing him to learn what his semblance was ( which is a good example this is an example of them being foils and how its been shown and effected their storys )

@kali-tmblr

@darksaiyangoku

@gorillageek27

@thehtg-therealone

#rwby #rwby theory #rwby theories #jaune arc #rwby jaune #rwby yang #yang xiao long #rwby yang #yang rwby #rwby meta #ozma #rwby ozma

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borisbubbles · 5 years

Text

Eurovision 2010s: 45 - 41

45. Rasmussen - “Higher ground” Denmark 2018

youtube

[2018 Review here]

FRIZ DEE YERRO, WINDY YERRRRR

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember when Christer rejected “Higher ground” from Melfest and it was the fucking WORST Melfest ever? Remember how Denmark recycled it and let it win DMGP? Well...

OOOOOOOOOOOOOWNED SO HARD!! and not just Sweden to be honest, because “Higher ground” slaps, even a full year after the fact. It’s a paragon of righteous scandi energy, conceived in a mancave over a keg of mead, inspired by a tale of medival pacifism (which actually makes it non-toxicly masculine), imprinted on by Game of Thrones (a wonderful tv series that ended when the White Walkers melted down the ice wall and murdered everybody in Westeros ^__^)

In a nutshell, an absolutely kick ass entry.

Truth be told, it is IMPOSSIBLE to not get up from my chair, pound my chest and march along with the Old Norse (😍) post-chorus chanting. Rasmussen DELIVERS a performance so intense it rips the space/time continuum and creates a portal to the good old Viking days. 100% deserving of being 2018′s KEiiNO and the highest Danish entry on this ranking!

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44. Pasha Parfeny - “Lăutar” Moldova 2012

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THIS DRAMPET MAKES U MIME GIRL

Pasha Parfeny looks like this now:

😬

Years of being awesome clearly took their toll on poor Pasha, but I will cherish him for the fountain of fun he has always been. “Lăutar” is such an uninhibited display for Moldovan FOLK, bringing out the dulcimers, horns and “drampets” to bring a much-needed ethic palate cleanser after the musical genocide committed on the Baku Stage. It also features some of the best dance choreography found in this decade, in which Pasha and dancers hop around the stage like overexcited gerbils <3

(btw: the pink dancer SLAYS me every single time.)

Such a frivolous, playful, adorable act that radiates mirth from every pore. 😍 But wait, we aren’t done, because “ Lăutar” also features some of the more memorable, hilarious, iconic butcherings of the English language found in this decade (”You haven’t seen before the looks like drampet. 😍 Butter sound go straight to ur soul”😍). It certainly helps that Pasha is like a male Ruslana, struggling to express himself and resulting some hilarious awkward interview gold (Eurovision.tv: “Pasha, what is your secret for happiness” Pasha: “Make good sex ^__^” Eurovision.tv: “. . .” 😍)

Naturally, a Pasha write-up cannot be finished without noting how central he is to ‘Moldova in Eurovision’, almost as much as Moldova’s staging is. This little man’s (literally. He’s like 1.65m lol) musical legacy includes:

- writing and performing Lăutar in 2012 - being a former vocalist for Sunstroke Project - being the mentor of Aliona Moon and writing her 2013 song - being the original songwriter for DoReDoS before Kirkorov took over In other words, he is ~CONNECTED~ to every epic, high-tier Moldovan entry. WHAT AN ICON. Stay Safe Pavel!!

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43. Dino Merlin - “Love in rewind” Bosnia - Herzegovina 2011

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Finishing 6th place from the death slot when will ur faves...x Man I do love my narrative entries, and it doesn’t get much better than an old man reflecting back on his life’s had, satisfied with its outcome. It’s such a c00t premise and Dino Merlin plays the part of the adorable grandfather with conviction. 😍 Even manages to transform Maja Sar into a fun hume for once:

“Love in rewind” really is all about the group effort. Dino himself is of course fantastic and makes this performance, but his troupe of ragtag troubadours carry a lot of weight as well, providing a wackadoodle wonderland for Dino to project his nostalgia onto.

And then there’s the question of “Love in rewind” itself. It is easy to lump it in with all the other frivolous folk, but in reality it’s an experimental avant garde song disguised as folk 😈 (exactly like “Putnici”, in fact!). The song is made into an artform by a few unorthodox, sudden key changes. Key changes hated by the millennial wannabe pitchfork crew, but here at BorisBubbles we don’t support weakness so let’s wave them all goodbye in celebration of what is easily Bosnia’s best Eurovision entry:

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42. JOWST ft. Aleksander Wallman - “Grab the moment” Norway 2017

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[2017 Review here]

As a shameless EDM Hound, I have to admit that I am totally smitten by this piece of electronic undergroundness. A wonderful epileptic seizure of pitch black and lavender, executed to perfection by Aleksander Wallman. “Grab the moment” offers show-stopping visual effects, great vocal execution and an additctive beat. THE TRIPLE THREAT OF LIVE MUSIC!

Fortunately, there’s also a great underlying message. I haven’t really talked about the Mental Health Anthem all that much in this ranking, but that’s mostly because I haven’t ranked most of them yet. Any song that inspires people to believe in themselves, that it is okay to be imperfect and that tackles social issues such as procrastination and neurosis HEAD ON and WITH RESPECT, deserves praise.

Which is exactly what JOWST & Aleksander do, specifically by addressing young heterosexual men. 😍 (ie: the demograph that is the least likely to reach out for a support when they need it). They do this very cleverly, by using teenspeak to discuss the ever-relatable theme crippling anxiety and how to lay it aside and get shit done. 🤜🤛 so let us all

KILL k177 K!££

~ThEvOiCeInMyHeAd~

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41. Ruth Lorenzo - “Dancing in the Rain Spain 2014

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THE RAIIIIIN THE RAIIIIN THE RAIIIIIN

Ruth. Yo quiero ser Ruth. Because Ruth is emblematic of Spain’s biggest (only) strength in Eurovision: the LOUD OVERDRAMATIC SCREECHING POWERBALLAD 😍 There are so many precedents to Ruth, from “Él” to “Vuelve Conmigo” to “Bailar pegados” to “Quedate conmigo” but “Dancing in the rain” may be my favourite of the lot. In part because Ruth is a GODDESS and I was *invested* in her success the second she won the NF:

Which she then followed up by forming a backstage bitch coven with Conchita and Suzy. 😍 Excuse me for a moment, I have to lay myself down and blow myself with a fan because that alliance contains so much awesomeness it gives me palpitations.

But I mostly love “Dancing in the rain” because of the performance. It’s a great composition in its own right, providing intense screaminess, well-executed language changes and of course, literal stage rain. 😍 However, Ruth is SO intense in her delivery it becomes a moment of contemplation, of exaltation, and of stupefication as Ruth’s SONIC ENERGY washes over us like a tsunami of sound. DEJA CAER, DEJA LA LLUVIA CAER, THE RAIN THE RAIN THE RAIN

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and since this is the last update for Spain, Bosnia, Moldova and Denmark, I’ll include my overall thoughts below.

DENMARK

The only people who like Denmark in this decade are those with negative taste and no self-respect and those desperately wanting to be Swedes but never will be Swedes (ie: Danes)

MOLDOVA

Not a ‘perfect’ track record, but still an excellent showing for a country with so few resources. Moldova is one of my favourite countries in ESC and this chart should show you why.

BOSNIA - HERZEGOVINA

Bosnia - Herzegovina participated four times in this decade and were epic exactly once. Thank you for that... now I normally would add that I miss them but, nah. Bye.

SPAIN

I am honestly shocked Spain didn’t do worse on my ranking?? I don’t think they’re like.. a ‘TERRIBLE’ esc country the way Ireland and Montenegro are, but jesus fuck out of the cavalcade of incompetent countries that have no idea what the fuck they’re doing, Spain is the giantslewofincompetentcountriesthathavenoideawhatthefuckthey’redoingest. Which is puzzling given that all of their high results come from kickass female-fronted powerballads, ie: the easiest trope to nail. (case in point: Macedonia scored a top 10 with one. Macedonia.) JUST STICK TO THOSE and ditch the wannabe reggaetons.

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johnnymundano · 5 years

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Phantom of Death (1988) (AKA Off Balance)

Directed by Ruggero Deodato

Screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino and Gigliola Battaglini

Story by Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino

Music by Pino Donnagio

Country: Italy

Running Time: 90 minutes

CAST

Michael York as Robert Dominici

Donald Pleasence as Inspector Datti

Edwige Fenech as Helene Martell

Mapi Galan as Susanna

Fabio Sortar as Davide

Renato Cortesi as Agent Marchi

Antonella Ponziani as Gloria Datti

Carola Stagnaro as Dr. Carla Pesenti

Daniele Brado as Dr. Vanni

Caterina Boratto as Robert's mother

Ruggero Deodato as man at train station who lights cigarette and then gets on the back of his girlfriend’s scooter

Phantom of Death is a giddily entertaining Italian horror muddle with far more serious themes than one might reasonably expect from director Ruggero Deodato, the man known as “The Cannibal King”. My legal advisers have urged me to specify that this isn’t because Ruggero Deodato is actually the ruler of a bunch of people eaters, but because he directed Last Cannibal World (1977) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), both of which were hugely successful and are still cited today as significant influences on horror. (This doesn’t mean they are any good, mind.) Phantom of Death takes on a far more universal horror than going into a jungle and being turned into pulled long pork by cannibals; the fear of ageing and also the horror of realising you’ve run out of time to stop being a dick and actually do something worthwhile with your life.

When the movie opens fantastic pianist Robert Dominici (Michael York) is definitely a dick. Robert revels in the adoration which comes with looking like Michael York and playing the piano by moving your shoulders and making intense faces while keeping your hands hidden. Unfortunately he revels in it to the detriment of his personal interactions. He’s a bit of a dick with the chicks, basically. Time is of the essence both in life and in Phantom of Death, so it doesn’t hang about; opening with Robert’s public tinkling of the ivories intercut with the stalking and slashing of a young woman. Yes, because this is a 1980’s Italian horror movie and so some maniac is going around slashing young women to death. Quicker than you can say “Liberace” the roster of victims expands to include Robert’s girlfriend. Unfortunately for Robert not only do the police led by Inspector Datti (Donald Pleasence) find him stood over her gory corpse, but earlier the pair had had a tiff. It seems pretty clear then that Phantom of Death will be a giallo, and Robert is odds on to be our typically ill-equipped sleuth. Yes, given the way Phantom of Death has gone thus far viewers could very well be forgiven for expecting a choppily edited, intrusively scored, minor giallo, notable mostly for the amount of blood it thinks a human neck can spurt and the presence of Michael York, Donald Pleasence and Edwige Fenech. Which would be fine by me, but Phantom of Death has other, higher ideas. If you’d rather be surprised by them then stop reading NOW.

It should be borne in mind at all times that any praise from hereonin is directed at a movie directed by someone called The Cannibal King; a movie that most normal people would dismiss as “godawful bloody nonsense” (as my Life Partner has opined of my viewing choices on numerous occasions). But if you are okay with the peculiar charms of the Italian horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s (or Christ-like in your tolerance for their failings) then Phantom of Death may be right up your (dimly lit) alley. Particularly impressive is the conviction with which it sets up the viewer to expect a giallo. The opening itself is a suave misdirection in the true giallo style; the two events, piano playing and lady slaying, are not occurring simultaneously, but you naturally assume they are. Then, and it’s quite ballsy this, Robert is given a personal reason to pursue the killer when he is found by the police at the scene of his girlfriend’s murder. He can’t possibly be the murder because it would be to obvious, you think. You think wrong. Admittedly Phantom of Death doesn’t let you think wrong for long, it soon makes it clear what’s going on, because it needs to start the real business of the movie; positioning Robert as a tragic killer, himself the victim of a killer, the disease progeria (AKA Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome).

Now, I’m not a medical professional but I’m going to assume that Phantom of Death takes a little (cough!) artist licence and that progeria itself doesn’t usually cause irresistible homicidal impulses. It’s probably hard to tell since in the real world it manifests in children, who, sadly, usually fail to reach the age of 13. As well as the symptoms required by a 1980s Italian horror movie, Robert also experiences the more usual symptoms of progeria which resemble rapid aging, with death resulting from heart ailments or strokes. Robert’s basically got the real world equivalent of Methuselah Syndrome from Blade Runner (1982) but on fast forward. No wonder he goes a bit loopy. When he isn’t killing women and playing cat and mouse with an increasingly distraught Inspector Datti, Robert indulges in the maudlin activities familiar from many serious Oscar® winning Sad Disease movies. He visits his first love for a bittersweet reminiscence, mournfully watches from afar a child afflicted with the selfsame disease, adopts a stray dog and talks to it soulfully about how tragic is his fate to be trapped in this afflicted cage of flesh. Amusingly though, this isn’t a serious Oscar® winning Sad Disease movie, no, it’s a 1980s Italian horror movie and so his first love is a hooker who he visits while dressed as The Phantom of The Opera, and the reunion is ruined by her violent death at his hands; the stricken child is obviously a fully grown dwarf in shorts playing with a ball. The fact that any soulfulness at all is evident under all this silliness is entirely thanks to Michael York.

The (doubtful) success of Phantom of Death is aided no end by Deodata’s cast being topped by two Legends; the insanely watchable Donald Pleasence and plummy voiced ‘70/’80s heart throb Michael York. York, normally cast as a bland lump, is pretty great here; obviously relishing the chance to do some acting for once. He evidently recognises it’s a gift of a role; even if it is wrapped in the ostentatiously crazed genre trappings and poor editing of a 1980s Italian horror movie. As the young, handsome Robert, York is in his element wallowing in the feminine attention but surprisingly, as Robert gets older, more scared and ever madder York’s performance keeps pace. It’s possible he might be overdoing it, but since he’s acting from inside steadily accumulating layers of 1980s prosthetic face make-up and a pair of fake brown teeth any hamminess is muted, leaving only a bizarrely touching performance.

Donald Pleasence, as Inspector Datti, gets less to do but manfully struggles to forge a character from some pretty dull dialogue. He is a charmingly concerned father to his daughter and a determined hunter of the mystery killer. When Robert’s increasingly deranged telephonic harassment of the cop expands to include his beloved daughter, Datti’s compartmentalised roles collide and Pleasence revels in the slow burn to full blown mania. One of the finest cinematic sights of my life has been seeing Donald Pleasence spinning round a shopping plaza yelling “I kill you! I kill you! Bastard! Kill you! Fucking Bastard! Bastard!” Thank you, Phantom of Death. No thanks though for under-using Edwige Fenech. Yes, gialllo regular Edwige Fenech is also here, speaking English in her own voice for once; but she is more of a niche attraction as she doesn’t have much to do. Obviously, what she does do she does with the usual effortless Fenech panache. Regally sporting terrible, shoulder padded ‘80s styles is the bulk of her role, but she’s mostly there to get pregnant with Robert’s child and so give the climax some emotional resonance among all the screaming and stumbling about. Not many movies end with a savage fight between an arthritic old man and a heavily pregnant woman, but Phantom of Death dares to go there.

Despite initially looking like a run of the mill giallo, Phantom of Death opts instead to try an allegorical rumination on the inescapable nightmare of senescence that awaits those of us who don’t die young. Fret not though, all this high mindedness is done in a relentlessly tasteless fashion. And no serious fan of 1980s Italian horror movies would want it otherwise.

#Phantom of Death #Off Balance #Movies #Giallo #Ruggero Deodato #Michael York #Edwige Fenech #Donald Pleasence #Italy #Horror #1988 #The 1980s

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captainfawful · 6 years

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With the year coming to a close, that means it’s time for me to do my “Nobody Cares Awards” thing I like to do! Check under the cut for some hot takes I may or may not have!

Hello, hello! It’s me again! Third year in a row I decided to jot my thoughts down on the years various game. I decided to change things up more from last year, kind of eliminating most of the categories in favor of writing more about the games I enjoyed. I tried to write at least something about every game in the Top 10 this time, even if it’s the bare minimum. Let’s see how it goes!

BEST MUSIC

This entire thing was first created because I wanted to write about how good Death Road To Canada’s soundtrack was. So no matter what changes with my format on this, there will always be a Best Music category. I’ll be honest though, there weren’t a whole lot of games this year with amazing soundtracks. The only real contender for most of the year was Celeste, which OST is very good, and fits perfectly with the games tone and style, but it’s not... The Best music. They aren’t songs I’ll put on loop and listen to multiple times throughout the day. They’re not the hard hitting tracks I would typically put at the top of this category, despite how great the music is. That’s how I felt until about August, when The Messenger came out. Messenger is not a game that will be in my Top 10 by any means, but it’s a pretty good game nonetheless with a couple of really weird twists. But the OST is phenomenal. Easily my number 1 favorite of this year. Just about every track in the game is a total banger. But don’t take it from me, take a listen yourself! A little later in the year I played through Just Shapes & Beats. I have a personal stigma against saying a thing with licensed music should qualify for Best Music, which is why JS&B did not make it into my top 3, but rest assured that it is sitting comfortably in the 4th place spot. Almost immediately after I played JS&B, Deltarune suddenly came out. I don’t think I have to tell you why that’s on here, right? Toby Fox cannot make bad music.

SPECIAL MENTIONS

THE MISSING:J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

It’s hard for me to talk about what makes The Missing so special without diving deep into spoilers. There’s a reason it’s in the special mentions, and not the Top 10: And that reason is because the gameplay isn’t great. The Missing is a side-scrolling puzzle game, in the same vein as Limbo or Inside. Unlike those two, however, the puzzles you have to solve are not that hard, and most of the difficulty around it revolves around how slowly and janky the movement is. However, the overall story and twist is what makes this game great. There’s not a whole lot for me to say about the themes this game presents, so if you want to play The Missing, play it. If you don’t want to play it, then maybe take a look at some writings from actual queer women who could talk about its subject matter in a way I never possibly could.

The Quiet Man

The Quiet Man is a terrible game. When I first saw the trailer during Suare Enix's E3 presentation, I was super interested. I've always wanted a game that transitions from FMV to gameplay with as few seams as possible, and The Quiet Man promised that. Not only that, it promised a compelling story told from the perspective of its' deaf protagonist. The way I saw it, this game would either accomplish what it set out to do, or fail miserably. Either way, it was a win/win scenario for me! Little did I know just HOW miserably it would fail.... Oooooh, how miserably it failed... The gameplay is absolute trash, the graphics leave much to be desired which makes the "seamless" transitions from FMV look unconvincing and bad, the story is needlessly complicated despite how generic it is, the acting ranges from decent to awful, and it requires you to play it twice in order to actually understand what's happening. And all of those problems are the LEAST offensive parts of the game. It's racist, misogynistic, somehow ableist against more than just deaf people, semi-incestual, and also kind of pro-abuse??? I mean, it doesn't take a stance to be anti-abuse, and certainly doesn't condemn abuse, so does that make it pro? Maybe? Probably? I have a headache. I've watched this entire 2-4 hour game be played 10 or 11 times, and I still don't understand how this exists. Square-Enix published this. They dropped Hitman and IO Interactive not even one year ago, yet threw money at this horrible abomination of a video game! Oh by the way, you might be wondering why I said you have to play it twice to understand, and that's because the first playthrough doesn't give you any sound. Yup, aside from the intro cutscene and the credits song, the entire games' audio is just muffled ambiance. This includes all of it's cutscenes, of which there are MANY, and they are LONG. Entire MINUTES of dialogue happening at a time that the game just doesn't want you to hear or have subtitles for. The only way to get audio is to beat the game once and replay it. Not only that, but the New Game + with sound and subtitles didn't even get patched in until a week after it's release!!! Who does that!!!!! And the version with audio has some ATROCIOUS writing. Just about every scene has at least one line of dialogue that makes no sense, almost as if the writers were only told about how humans speak, but never actually heard one themselves. I’ve heard a lot of people saying it’s The Room of video games, and I sort of agree. Much like The Room, it’s not the absolute worst of it’s form of media, the game is playable start-to-finish, extremely straight forward so you can’t get lost, no bizarre puzzles to figure out, the FMV cutscenes are at decently produced. Hell, I wouldn’t even say The Quiet Man is the worst game to come out THIS YEAR. Crying Is Not Enough released in June, and boy oh boy is that game a trash fire. But it’s just BAFFLING that this game exists. That’s the perfect word to summarize my feelings on The Quiet Man. Every single thing about it is just, baffling. I need to stop writing about this game. This whole paragraph is probably going to be longer than anything from my Top 10, which feature a few games I ADORE, but no. All my writing energy is going to how terrible this fucking video game is. Don't play The Quiet Man. Or do, fuck if I care. Maybe watch someone else play it, I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.

Ori and the Blind Forest

Back on the topic of good games, I finally got around to playing Ori and the Blind Forest! I played it for a little while after it originally came out around 2015, but it just didn’t stick with me at the time. There wasn’t any real reason why it didn’t stick, I just got bored and stopped playing, which isn’t that uncommon for me to do. But for whatever reason I decided to go back to it super late last year. It may have been the excitement for all the cool looking Metroidvanias slated to release throughout the year, I don’t know. But I played through it, and it’s fantastic! Most Metroidvanias tend to go with around a 60-40 split between platforming and combat. Different games have different splits, sure, but most of them tend to keep those somewhat even. Ori is like an 85-15, greatly favoring tight platforming over fighting enemies. Your main attack automatically locks on to nearest enemies, and boss fights are replaced with autoscrolling or stealth segments. The traversal is also super smooth and fun, making that 85-15 split much more favorable than others in its’ genre. Great controls combined with some amazing visuals and music, Ori is definitely a game I regret not playing earlier.

2019′S COMING IN HOT

Spelunky 2, Wargroove, Indivisible, Hypnospace Outlaw, Ooblets, UFO 50, Kingdom Hearts 3, Overland, Sea of Solitude, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and Get in the Car, Loser!. These are all great looking games that are supposed to be coming out in 2019. I remember last December when I last did this, I couldn't think of THAT many games I was really excited for, and despite that I ended up with a pretty damn good list of games for 2018. So who knows what next year will be like?!

And now... The Top 10!

#10: Spider-Man

It’s been a great year for Spider-Man. His best buddy Venom had a pretty good movie, his new video game is good, and he has a new movie that’s fantastic! Yep, it’s been such a good year for Spider-Man in which nothing bad has happened to him or the people who created him.

#9: Megaman 11

2 > 4 > 3 > 8 > 11 > 7 > 5 > 6 > 9 > 10 > 1. Don’t @ me.

#8: Iconoclasts

Iconoclasts has been in development for a very long time. Officially, development for it began in around 2010, but there is a seemingly earlier game by Konjak that shares many similarities. Basically, Iconoclasts began development at least 8 years ago, and it shows, for better or worse. On one hand, the game is gorgeous. Grade A sprite work all around. The characters are interesting and well written with their own morales and arcs, and the story is surprisingly deep and compelling considering the type of game it is. On the other hand, the gameplay feels very outdated now. The combat is super simplistic, the puzzles aren't terribly challenging or rewarding, and the weapon/ability upgrades are very limited. The traversal can be sluggish and boring, which is a red flag for a game where you have to backtrack a decent amount. If Iconoclasts came out 4 or 5 years ago, I feel like it would've been at least a cult classic. But in 2018, it's a decent Metroidvania in a year of great Metroidvanias. Overall, I'm glad Iconoclasts finally came out. I just wish it either came out sooner, or got more updated for modern game design.

#7: Slay the Spire

For all intents and purposes, I shouldn't like Slay the Spire. I always hated card-based RPGs, and always hated RPGs with only one party member. And for the most part, the issues I have with both of those are still very much present in Spire. So why have I sunk 50 hours into it so far? Beats me! If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the similarities it shares to Darkest Dungeon, one of my favorite games, that ultimately drives me to it. Now, you might be asking why Slay the Spire, a game that came out in 2017, and won’t be in 1.0 until probably 2019, is in my top 10 for this year, but Ori & the Blind Forest isn’t? Well, I started Ori last year, and didn’t start Spire until the middle of this year! Also, they’re my awards, and I can do whatever I want!

#6: Just Shapes & Beats

Just Shapes & Beats’ concept is simple: A rhythm bullet hell. Certainly not the first of it’s kind, and not even the first one to use simplistic shapes as the obstacles/characters. But there’s a bit more to it than that. JS&B has some good personality to go with it. It has some fun characters, all of the levels are demonstrative of the areas you’re in on the world map, it even has a couple lightly emotional moments! It’s much more than you’d expect from a game about Just Shapes & Beats. When I was younger and had vague dreams to make games, I always imagined making one that was basically “What if a Windows Visualizer was trying to kill you?” and also be themed around a world and a story, and JS&B is basically that.

#5: Pipe Push Paradise

What happens when you take Pipe Dream, an iconic puzzler which has given inspiration to countless others, and mix it with Stephen's Sausage Roll, arguably one of the greatest puzzle games of all time? You get Pipe Push Paradise, of course! That’s all I really have to say, and all I NEED to say.

#4: Dead Cells

Go play Dead Cells. Really, it’s the closest thing to a perfect Rogue-like (that isn’t Spelunky) out there right now. It’s a game so good, Filip Miucin couldn’t look away from it long enough to write his own review!

#3: Subnautica

If I had the opportunity to become a Fishman and live underwater, I’d probably take it. As long as you take out the jellyfish that can kill you .0001 seconds after stinging you, I have no qualms with open water. In fact, the isolated feeling from it is really relaxing to me. That’s what initially drew me to Subnautica. Survival games are usually hit or miss for me, but the ones I like I really dive deep into (Heh heh), and Subnautica is one of those. Also, I was rewatching the Super Mario Bros. Super Show on Netflix as I played this, so now I’ll have those two permanently linked in my mind from now on.

#2: Into The Breach

I love tactics games, especially Advance Wars. While I do still love others in the genre like Fire Emblem or X-COM, there are some intricacies of the AW series that most of the others don't have. When I first heard about Into The Breach, I thought it would be exactly what I wanted, a true successor to the series I'd been waiting for. And it was not! But it's still pretty damn good. It's not so much a tactics game as it is a puzzle game, described by Waypoint's own Austin Walker as a "tactical dance". You know at the start of each turn where each enemy is going to attack, and it's your job to navigate and attack with your 3 mech units in the exact right way to minimize or even straight up prevent any damage that would befall you or the cities you're protecting. You aren't trying to advance a map during combat, or conquer any enemy bases. You are merely trying to avoid damage for a certain amount of turns and move on to the next level. And it's all super fun! I've let the game sit for 10, 20 minutes while I try and figure out every possible option I have after being backed into a corner, and coming up with the absolute perfect solution and getting through to the other side is super satisfying. The biggest gripe I have with Into The Breach is the same one I had for FTL, the developer's last game, which is I don't think the unlockable mechs/mech teams are as fun as the default ones. I played most of them once or twice and went "Yeah, that's a thing" and migrate back to the first mech team. All in all, Into The Breach is a fantastic game, it just doesn't scratch that Advance Wars itch I've been feeling. Oh well, at least there's still Wargroove!

#1: Celeste

Celeste is a game I got 100% completion in. For those of you who might not know me well enough to know how I play games, that’s something that never happens. I think the last time I purposely got 100% on a game was in Uncharted 2, and even that was only to get a skin for multiplayer. Despite that, it’s been really difficult for me to write up a whole thing about why I love Celeste so much. It’s just a compilation of everything. I love the look of it, both the sprite work and the character portraits. The music, as mentioned before, is fantastic and perfectly fitting for all of the levels themes which deal in different forms of anxiety or self-doubt. The levels are hard, but not too hard. The secrets hidden throughout the game are so satisfying to figure out and find, very reminiscent of Braid. I feel confident in saying that Celeste has cemented itself as one of my favorite games of all time.

Well, that’s all I can handle writing for this year. Thanks to the few of you who skimmed through all this, and extra thanks to the fewer of you who read all of it! I’m not 100% sure if I’ll do this whole shpeel next year or not; maybe if 2019 turns out to be an incredible year for games, and definitely not if I have to move to Twitter in the off-chance Tumblr dies out completely. Hope you all had a fun holiday season, and have a great 2019!

#dont reblog pls #long post #very rare personal post???

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mantis-lizbian · 6 years

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An aggressive reading of Warcraft

So I fell in love with the world of Warcraft thanks to Warcraft III. And perhaps one of the biggest parts of why I loved it so much was because, even then, it was a world. Arthas, and Jaina, and Thrall, and Tyrande were cool and all, sure, but I didn’t really connect to Warcraft through them. It wasn’t thanks to them that I won my battles. I connected to Warcraft through its people They may not have had names, but I still had fondness for my huntresses, and mortar teams, and grunts. No, not individually, that would just be insane. But collectively. As a group. These were Warcraft to me, not Illidan, or the Lich King, or Sylvanas. They were a part of it, and they certainly add to it, and I had affection for them, but largely as a part of this fantastical world, not in and of themselves. It’s because of how they relate to this world that I love them, not so much because of who they are in and of themselves.

When WoW came out, it was wonderful, because I got to step into this world myself, and become a part of it. I got to be one of those knights or raiders or mages or druids. I may have done great things, but never on my own. I was one of dozens fighting back the Redridge Gnolls. I was one of five who freed Silverpine from Arugal’s influence. I was one of forty who defeated Ragnaros. Intentional or not, the structure of the Warcraft games have always emphasized community effort and spat in the face of Great Man History. And on top of that, Azeroth’s Great Men constantly end up becoming its villains, reinforcing that message. Arthas wants to be the One to save Lordaeron and ends up destroying it. Illidan wants be the One to defeat the Legion, but becomes corrupted by it. Any time he actually manages to fight for good, it is when he relies on allies. Kael’thas wants to be the One to lead the high elves to salvation, but nearly turns them into ravenous slaves of the Legion. Garrosh wants to be the One to lead the Horde to glory, but leads to its implosion.

Great Men don’t exist in Azeroth.

Now, let me take a step back and explain that this is what we, in the literary criticism business, call an “aggressive reading”. I will bet money on the fact that no one at Blizzard intentionally set out to make this the theme of the Warcraft series. In fact, if may be permitted a touch of wild speculation, I suspect Metzen himself is likely to believe in Great Man Theory. Apologies if I’m mistaken on that, Chris. But authorial intent does not matter here. All that matters is what the text, itself, says.

Of course, some of you may already be trying to think of some counter-examples. Perhaps Thrall springs to mind. Fair enough, Thrall was a great man (orc). He led the orcs to the safety of Kalimdor, and founded Durotar, but the thing is that, first off, Thrall never really had much ambition. Founding Durotar is probably the most ambitious he gets, but that’s also just kind of the natural next step. I mean, what was he supposed to do? People can do great things, but great things are never done alone. In founding Durotar, Thrall has the help of the tauren, trolls, and even Jaina. Not to mention that it’s really the people who found the nation, and really Thrall just gets credit because they looked to him as their leader. It’s much easier to credit a single person for doing something than it is thousands. Still, it’s more accurate to say “the orcs founded Durotar” than to say “Thrall founded Durotar”. Now, I’d also like to point to the one time when Thrall actually does get closest to being the One person to do something: Cataclysm. But in doing so, I’d also like to point to the community’s feelings about this at the time. Thrall was not a popular character while he was hogging the limelight and getting all the credit.

You may also be tempted to point to your player character. They do a bunch of great stuff. But… most of what you do is quests and instances. Instances are, obviously, inherently a team effort. No one person gets any more credit than anyone else for slaying VanCleef or Yogg-Saron. Even canonically, every instance boss is credited as having been slain by “a group of adventurers”. And as for quests, the majority of quests are things that many people could canonically do concurrently without a need for further explanation, like clearing troggs out of a mine, or gathering materials for a team of engineers. Those quests which are an exception typically get credited canonically as having been performed by a group, like with dungeons, even if they aren’t actually group quests (though, notably, many once were before Cataclysm). Even in the more modern successors to these quests, the completion of the quest is usually thanks to the quest giver just as much as to the player. Even if they aren’t participating in the activity themselves, the quest giver tells you what needs to be done, how to do it, and sometimes gives you the tools needed to get it done. Without the quest giver, your character wouldn’t be able to complete the quest any more than the quest giver could without you (ignoring the restrictions and side effects of this being a game, of course; we’re talking in-universe).

Even when the player character gets more singular attention like in WoD and Legion, the Garrison and Class Hall have many people going about working on things that are needed to keep things running, even if they’re less exciting than adventures. You may be a catalyst, but you aren’t the sole driving force behind anything.

But then comes BfA. And suddenly… Great Man History everywhere! Sylvanas wants to execute a nonsensical attack on Teldrassil. So of course no one questions her, because Great Man History. It’s not like we’ve ever had other leaders push back against decisions they disagree with. Rank-and-file soldiers showing doubt? That’s not a thing that happens! In Northrend. During the Third War. Perhaps in a mission named after that very act. Sylvanas is the Warchief, so of course everyone’s going to follow her blindly. Even if the last Warchief had a completely different outlook. And the one before that was overthrown for pretty much doing this exact same thing. Even though he was more widely trusted by the members of the Horde than the current one.

I mean, I could also talk about how what is probably Blizzard’s most nuanced character ever (which admittedly isn’t a terribly high bar…) is getting every scrap of that nuance just thrown out the window, but plenty have people have already said so much on that topic… What really frustrates me - and what’s risking me losing all interest from here on out, not just until things blow over - is that… it’s the themes of the entire world. Not just the planet, but the setting. That are at risk, here. And that’s not something that’s as easy to recover from.

At the very least, ever since Warcraft III, contrary to its name, the Warcraft series has been almost anvilicious with its themes of cooperation and reconciliation. Archimonde could only be defeated because the orcs, humans, and night elves set aside their differences and worked together. The Horde and Alliance worked together against the qiraji as the Might of Kalimdor. The Scryers and Aldor unite as the Shattered Sun Offensive against Kael’thas. The Ashen Verdict. The Avengers of Hyjal and the Earthen Ring. The Siege of Orgrimmar. In addition to the customary-at-this-point Horde/Alliance… alliance, even Garrosh and Yrel fought side by side against Archimonde. And everyone hops on the Vindicaar together to take the fight to Argus.

So after all this, when the world itself has been smacking the Horde’s and Alliance’s heads together like unruly school children, why in fel should I be expected to take such a nonsensical status quo reset lying down? What am I supposed to make of the fact that Vol’jin, the Horde’s Warchief most dedicated to peace, second only to Thrall, chose Sylvanas? Stepping outside the narrative, why should I be content when we’ve been here before and the story offers literally nothing new? Why should I continue to have faith that engaging writing will be on its way when every actually interesting plot hook got unceremoniously dropped in favour of such a ridiculous war?

I ask because I love Warcraft. I truly, deeply love it. You don’t put this much thought and critical analysis into something you don’t love to perhaps a slightly unreasonable degree. And I don’t want to lose it.

#warcraft #long post #literary analysis

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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The Great Library was a vast enough eldritch realm that there were enough room for smaller pockets for magic to carve out enclaves of spirit sanctuaries within them, and establish little pocket realms loosely tethered to the rest of the Library; close enough, so to speak, that you could walk through a door in the Library and into someone’s personal realm with ease and comfort, but distinct enough that the all seeing eyes of the spirit that commanded the Library had no actual influence or power there.

He probably didn’t care what anyone did, as long as it was not misusing his knowledge or stealing it, but it paid to be cautious around spirits… divorced from understanding of humans, or so Raven understood. Magnus had taught her this with some urgency when she was young; she knew that spirits were more direct than mortals. They were a purpose and domain given its own form, and did not understand the complexities and changes that a human did. Some dealt with this magnanimously, such as spirits of righteous concepts like Valor or Honor. Some, like the great knowledge spirit of this Library, regarded mortals as hopelessly treacherous and insane, as lost as the tides upon the ocean. And he had told her scary bedtime stories about entities like Koh the Face Stealer, and those like him altogether too interested in mortal weakness, taking the faces and perspectives of mortals to experience it for themselves.

Ever since she was small, long before she had ever towered over him and everyone else, Raven had always listened closely to him. One day, a red giant with one eye had taken in a half-demon girl, on perhaps a whim or a stirring of compassion within his heart, and a longing for a father who had long since left into the ether.

To Raven, the demon Trigon was a monster. A nightmare that even the great demonic Who’s Who tomes refused to talk about in detail. Talking grimoires clammed up, stifling their screaming voices, and would say nothing of him. He was many things in her mind; a looming inevitability, something she would have to take care of, a reminder that she had been born wrong. But he was not Father to her.

When Raven thought ‘Father’, she saw a giant of a man, with a great mane of feathered red hair, a single shifting eye. Always a word for the curious, sarcastic snarking for the unwise, and moments of childish pique… but always kind with her, patient and encouraging her talents no matter how they might frighten her, or she frighten others.

The sanctuary of Magnus the Red, his students, and those he had named sons and daughters, they lived within a realm partially modeled after many worlds he had taken a liking to, an ever shifting magical wonderland of infinite possibilities, and the multiverse’s most complicated antique shop. Buildings lay within this realm at odd angles to one another, streets sticking out around invisible trajectories to create mountains of buildings all twisting around one another, and talking raven-spirits flapping about to make sarcastic comments at people.

Presently she and Magnus were within his own sanctum, a place of power to preserve his incorporeal form and make him properly solid for a while and stabilize his powers a bit. It pleased him to follow her whim to make it look like a giant T-letter. Within it, they were having a meeting.

“Sit, my child,” he said, squatting down upon a heavy mat in the fashion of his homeworld from lost antiquity, Prospero. Raven sat in precisely the same way, her gargantuan backside serving the role of a chair. Awkwardly, she pulled her heavy cloak over herself, trying to wear it like he did and she had some trouble. Her chest was getting in the way. Granted, he was quite broad in the chest but not quite in the same way she was.

She was, in every way, a loving daughter who wanted nothing more than to be like her father. Not Trigon. Magnus.

He looked fondly at her, but also sadly.

“There is…” he started, and stopped. He fumbled for the words. “Ah. ...You are well, today? My child?”

Raven nodded demurely. “Yes, father. I am well. The nightmares of…” she shifted anxiously. “Well, you know. I am not dreaming of that anymore. I suppose the medicine worked?”

“That’s good to hear. Yes, good. Er…” he looked awkward again. “I think I know what was causing those nightmares.”

“You do? I thought the general idea was that… he… was growing in power and was attempting to contact me through my dreams.”

“I had thought so too, and that is indeed the case. However… I may have unintentionally given him a route, of sorts.”

Raven’s face, as red as his own, paled into a grayish horror. “You, you what?”

“Not on purpose!” He waved a great hand anxiously. “I was studying a summoning spell for him!”

“Oh dear lord…”

“Not to summon him, not at all! I was simply trying to find out his name!” He sighed. “I don’t want to have to wait for him to make the first move. When we face him, and we will, I swear to you, I want it on our terms. But I needed more information; his name, something to use to track his realms of power or fiendish armies, a way to figure out his cults in the material realm. So I was decoding his summoning spell, working out the programming in it, so to speak.”

Raven calmed down, a bit. A summoning spell ,of the classic ‘call up something into a circle’, was effectively the magical version of messaging someone with the bonus of making them materialize under certain controls. What he was talking about was theoretically possible, and she had no doubt he could do it.

“Then, you have his name?”

Magnus bowed his head. “Yes. I have a name, of great importance to him. The seed of his existence.”

“You do!? What is it?”

He hesitated. “Raven… this is… ah. Look, I called you here to tell you this because we both know the day will soon come when you will have to face him. Sooner or later, he will press that matter, and I intend to see you slay him and take his power for your own. But… now, there is something else. I have to fight him. Not just because I want to, for your sake.”

Raven frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. Do you not have his name?”

“I do. And that is what worries me.” He sighed. “Daughter, you understand that many ages ago, I was… very, very badly hurt.”

She recalled her history lessons. “The Thousand Sons teach that in ages past, your essence was shattered into many shards. Each one containing a portion of yourself.”

“Yes. And in order to retain me, my shards sought each other ought and enough recombined to allow me to keep my mind. And I was badly weakened, as most of my power was scattered. And over time, I found more of them, becoming more whole and powerful… but I never did find them all.”

“The best of you remained as the core aspect, and over time, you found more pieces of yourself,” she said.

“Yes! Very good. Now tell me, how many shards do you think a soul would break into? Bearing in mind that the soul is, by its nature, indivisible and infinite.”

She considered this riddle. “I would think that there is no limit. You could have any number of shards, and since the soul encompasses all you are and COULD be, you might have many, each comprising a minute facet of your being. Is that not so?”

“Indeed. And as I embody the magical potential of humanity as a whole, and therefore multitudes, I could be stretched farther than mortals would be.” Magnus tapped his chest, a nail clicking against one of the spike/horns growing from his chest. “So how many do you think I was reduced to?”

Raven took a guess. “Hrm. A few hundred?”

He winced. “Selling me a bit short there.”

“...A thousand?”

“I wish. More manageable and I enjoy the theming. But no.”

“Father, I don’t know. How many did you break into.”

He looked up, his face weary with an ancient ache. “Trillions. More.”

“Trillions!?”

“I broke apart into so many pieces, each one aware, if barely. Some larger and more powerful. Others less so, but each one an aspect of me. When some of these shards found one another, they fused into what I am now; myself, if not quite whole at least stable. And there were still vast gaps in my being, for eons I searched but never found them all.”

Raven leaned forward, eyes wide and fearful. “Father… do you mean that… oh, are you alright? Are you hurting, even now?!”

“Don’t worry, dear child. I have become whole, over time. The soul is a growing thing, and experience, understanding, growth? I have found all that. I have changed, and so my soul has healed itself. My power is weaker, yes, I would have to fuse with my shards to truly regain my full power, but my being, the essence of what makes me who I am? I have grown into a new Magnus, and made myself whole. I fixed myself, you see.”

Raven sighed, looking relieved. “I was worried there, Father. And, why do you tell me this?”

His single eye narrowed gravely. “You must know that, therefore, many of these shards are still out there. Most are just pockets of raw potentiality, unlikely to do more than exercise random magic. No mind there, just a sense of will. But some, with more essential aspects in the beginning, took on their own life.”

“And, if you grew back into someone…” Raven pondered this. “Then perhaps they have grown into something else as well?”

“You have it! And for the most part, this is not so bad. Some of them are harmless. Others, mutated into dangerous monsters that I must find and slay. But others embodied… terrible aspects of who I was. Spiteful tendencies, vindictiveness, thoughts of wanting to be extremely important, and overwhelming arrogance.”

Raven loved her adoptive father, but she was also realistic. “Thank goodness you left all that behind,” she said sarcastically.

“Yes, it’s rather a good job, isn’t it?” Magnus replied proudly, quite blind to it. “But those parts of myself are still out there. They are still in existence, and over time… I believe they found one another. All the worst in me, coming together without a single aspect of the parts of me that knew compassion… trust, love, the need for other people and a desire to help. Everything, in short, that makes me human.”

Raven frowned. “And those shards might have grown, as you have.”

Magnus’ expression was terribly blank. “This is no hypothetical situation. I can prove it.” He pulled out a roll of parchment, and upon it were many things, but at the bottom:

A summon spell, decoded in messy script, and below it, was the name of Magnus.

“Father?” Raven took it and studied it. “This spell… your name is the central part of it? What is it?”

“A summoning spell for the demon who sired you,” Magnus said grimly. “This is what I’ve been studying, and he used that to try to pinpoint your location. I’ve created wards so he cannot do that now, but I’ve learned his origin.”

Raven tried to work this out. “Okay, but what do you have to do with-”

The shards of myself can grow…

Pieces of myself, the very worst in me, without any shred of humanity or compassion…

Father’s name, on the parchment. On a summoning spell for Trigon.

Evil pieced together, without any room for goodness in there, evolving… growing… and demons, fiends, were just what happened when evil took on a face and a will.

And Trigon looked so very much like Magnus the Red.

Raven paled again. “Oh dear, sweet Primus.”

Magnus shuffled away from her. “Please… Raven. Understand, I am not Trigon! And he is not me! I-”

“But he was made from a piece of you,” she said, understanding dawning. She forced herself to calm down.

This is Father. It has always been Father.

He is not the monster you fear.

She remembered a great red hand, always at her shoulder. Giving her treats. A warm voice, making snide comments at the more fussy Thousand Sons. Always standing up for her, and so kind to her mother…

Father.

Raven tried not to think about the terrible feelings welling up, the confusion and random surges of fear, and silenced them. Deal with them later, she told herself. She wiped away tears. “I’m sorry, Father,” she said meekly. “I.. I don’t… this, this isn’t your fault…!”

What have I done to Father? He must think so terribly of himself…!

Magnus’ face curled in horror. “My fault!? I, no! This isn’t about me, this is about you! The demon that plagues you, he is my fault! Now, more than ever, it is my responsibility to help you end him.”

“Does that mean… you can become more whole by making him fuse with you? Will that help you?”

Magnus shook his head. “No. We’ve been apart for so long that I haven’t the faintest idea what he has become. A fiend, yes, but apart from that? He’s certainly far less human that I ever was, and I suspect he’s evolved into something else entirely. I’m more interested in how you can help yourself by… hrm, how do i put this delicately… ‘absorbing him’, I suppose?”

“You, you really think that’s a good idea?”

“I trust you, daughter. And whatever power he has, I’d rather have you claim it, and make yourself the best you can be.”

“But, it’s your power!”

He didn’t look at her. Just saying ‘I don’t trust myself to stay me after absorbing him’ was out of the question.

Magnus trusted Raven. He did not trust himself.

“We can end him,” he promised. “Whatever happens after that. We are the key to undoing that monster’s evil. I, the remnant of what he once was a part of. You, the person he made as a vessel. We are in a perfect position to ruin his plans, and for you to become something even greater than you already are!”

Raven bowed her head. “I am willing to try, at least.”

Sometime later…

“And that is the situation,” Magnus said to the assembled Thousand Sons, the Blood Ravens, his other orders, and the human wizards and witches that were allied to him. “Are there any questions?”

A Blood Raven raised his hand.

“Yes? Gabriel Angelos!”

“The plan is still to kill this wretched fiend,” Angelos said. “So apart from a technicality, that the fiend was born from pieces of you, has much actually changed?”

“A lot has changed! It’s a lot more personal than it already was, and it was really damn personal to begin with!”

“Doesn’t sound like much has changed.”

“Oh, shut up and let someone else ask something. You! Tall wizard, the one with red hair.”

A human wizard, red-haired and peeking out of the copious masses of Hermione Granger’s hair, had his hand raised. He was called Ron Weasley, and he had a point to make. “So does this make Lady Raven your actual daughter, or what?”

“She already was,” Magnus said flatly. “Next question.”

“No, no! I mean, adopted, yes, but… biologically! Is she your actual daughter!?”

“We have different meanings of ‘actual’. She is my daughter, end of story. Next question?”

“But if she’s Trigon’s daughter, and Trigon is a part of you, is there some kinda, what’s the word, transitive property that make her your kid too?”

“For pity’s sake! No one actually cares!”

Raven raised a hand. “I care, Father.” She smiled at that.

“Oh come on! Don’t tell me you believe that biological parentage is more ‘legitimate’ than adoption!”

“Well, no… but it’s still a nice notion, all the same.”

Magnus sighed. A Thousand Son - Ahriman, perhaps - piped up. “This, I think, makes the Lady Raven Lord Magnus’ first heir!”

“SHE ALREADY WAS!” Magnus bellowed. “It’s even in my completely pointless will!”

“I recommend a grand celebration!” Ahriman continued, ignoring him. “Let us celebrate the downfall of our eldest enemy, and the discovery of a true scion to lead us all!”

“How is he an eldest enemy?” asked a witch; Luna Lovegood, Raven thought. “You’ve only known of his nature for a short while.”

“He is retroactively a greatest enemy,” sad a Blood Raven, with a straight face somehow. “And he was at one point part of Lord Magnus. Everyone knows that Lord Magnus’ greatest enemy is himself.”

“Hey now!” Magnus complained.

“I’m sorry, Father, but they’ve a point,” Raven said.

“Oh gods not you too.”

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