#unfavourable

[queenlucythevaliant]

Okay but I do get really tired when people rag on Narnia's Biblical parallels for being too overt. Like, yeah dude. It's written for kids. Most kids don't do subtlety. I knew my Bible better than probably 95% of third graders, and yet my parents still had to clue me in. I've talked to people who grew up secular and didn't realize Narnia was Christian until well into adulthood. The Christian parallels in Narnia are at a pretty perfect level for most kids, and the fact that we as adults continue to get new spiritual meaning from it as we grow is a real testament to the depth of Jack's writing.

[wolfram-afternoons]

enviable eyeliner brought to you by wayward winslow

[stromulites]

AU Shithead acquired! Feat. the coat he stole off of Grayson (oc). For clarification you don't need to draw the coat wherlsdgdf. The wings are optional too, since they come and go at will.

@soulspite the promised ref (I hope this is clean enough kwelrsdg)

I will now put other info and Unsolicited Lore Stuff under the cut

162cm (5'3) for this ref.

I have been just calling him B.J. There's no in-universe reason for it. Just like BJ BLAZKAW-(self combusts)

Probably ADHD and on the spectrum, just never got properly diagnosed before he kicked the bucket.

Got struck by lightening or something <- Doesn't like talking about it so most people just guess.

Dying is a pretty sensitive topic since while Reapers are cool and all, the event itself is still traumatizing as all hell. Especially for those who die suddenly in violent, unrighteous deaths, like BJ.

17 when he died, chronologically 19. Age for Reapers is weird since they're just souls of the dead who don't get yoinked by The Demons when they perish.

Really likes it when Hannah (This AU's GF) helps preen his wings. He will straight forget if she didn't remind him. Visits four days a week, probably more if Hannah herself didn't tell him to go do something else.

Likes to keep his wings out, but they're not very practical in enclosed spaces so he'll tuck them away then (they straight up disappear in this context).

Bit of a loner despite it all. He'll let others get close to him, but won't fully indulge himself and keeps his distance aside from a few select people. This is a more recent development.

If he likes you enough, he will bring you random shit he found on the ground. Like seaglass and some poor sod's missing ring. Or ten million paperclips/smooth rocks that look nice when wet.

Is generally cold in body temp since, y'know, bucket kicked and over is keeled. Not affectionate with other Reapers since they also run cold and it bothers him. The only exception to this is Grayson and their jacket, which is why it's stolen so often (its warm), and Hannah, who is Alive.

Has the best American Woodcock call impression known to man.

Also, for those that want it, wing pattern ref be upon ye:

[decepti-thots]

no offense but with all the uptick of posts i'm seeing from people hoping eathspark series two will be 'darker' or 'more complex', this seems like a good time to gently remind people: earthspark is aimed at six year olds and upwards, through the solidly pre-teen target demo. it is going to continue to be extremely 'teach very young kids Good Morals' the entire time. earthspark isn't even for older kids really, it is for young children. if you find earthspark difficult to watch because of how simplistic, wholesome and morally straightforward it is much of the time, this is likely to be less a failing of the show and more a completely reasonable disinterest in watching children's TV as a full grown adult! but mostly just... don't get your hope up s2 is magically going to turn into a show for adults, because that absolutely isn't gonna happen, sorry.

[worstloki]

something very horrifying about the concept of Thor but not Loki being told that Loki is Jotun when the brothers are old enough to understand the importance of the secret

[ohithankyou]

anti tommy tiktoks are so funny to me because i won’t even realize they’re anti tommy for like the first 10-20 seconds because he just looks so cool and sweet and adoring in all the moments they include of him

[captainkirkk]

Junghyeok when things go wrong: I can't think of how to fix this...... Whelp guess I should kill myself and time travel back to the start. Bye, current universe

Dokja: ....................dude

[kal-sharok]

Hi!! If you’re willing to talk about it/up for it I’d love to hear more about the slavophobia BioWare has in relation to their dwarves. No pressure at all of course bc I’m sure it’s taxing, I’ve just not seen this before and would love a resource to reblog about it if that’s okay. Thank you love your blog ❤️

hello! im actually glad you asked, i'll try to be as coherent as possible 😅 and no u i love yr blog!!

i'd like to preface by saying i don't think bioware invented anti-slavic sentiment in games or in general and isn't the only company, game or otherwise, perpetuating it. it's found all over the western world, most notably in western europe (where we're still regarded as 2nd class citizens, pairs really well with imperialism towards people outside of europe imo), but it also gained a significant boost thanks to the red scare in usa in particular (and continues to thrive thanks to the absolute chokehold mediocre american media keeps everything else in the world in).

im also no social sciences expert, but i do have first-hand experience on the short end of the stick and a couple of books in my have read list so let's say im qualified to rant on 🤭 it turned out quite lengthy so i've hidden it under the cut below!

when it comes to bioware, the first hurdle is already at their utterly haphazard character naming policy. there's a considerable number of dwarves who bear names that range from mockingly slavic-esque to full-blooded backwater serbian, now in yr local fantasy rpg! examples:

gorim saelac. while i do appreciate they tried to give a dwarf a mountain-y name (gora is basically any kind of steep pile of rocks with trees and dew and wildlife over it), "gorim" is how you would say "i am burning" in multiple slavic languages. this is one of the rare ones that are not hurtful and are hilarious instead (and tbh naming him goran, which is what i assumed they were going for, would probably be more ridiculous in the long run. for example i still can't take jowan seriously despite my love for the mage origin bc someone really yassified jovan and thought nobody would notice. wrong!)

lucjan and myaja. these two (along with maybe wojech "we couldn't spell wojciech" ivo) are the classic example of non-slavs butchering the hell out of slavic names bc it suits them better, which is also something commonly experienced by all non-western cultures and communities and a worldwide sign of disrespect. the in-game pronunciation during the provings gave me a physical rash. "myaja" in particular is still in my top 5 wtf moments in origins bc 1) what kind of stroke induced spelling is that 2) it reminds me of kids speaking dialect A mocking kids' dialects B by adding y sounds (which is what set the dialects apart in the first place) at unnatural spots and 3) maja /ma-ya/ would've sufficed perfectly for ethnic coding if that was the sole purpose of her character. do better! sure it was 2009 but from the little i happen to know about the world beyond the atlantic, you're just bound to run into someone of slavic descent in alberta (maybe not exactly polish but anyone would give you a closer phonetics match than... this). it's kind of amusing how 3 of bioware's founders have very slavic surnames and this keeps happening.

bogdan vasca. we don't know anything about him apart from the fact bianca davri was forced into a marriage with him and that his very dwarven parents considered him to be 'a gift from the god' (which is what his name means. theodore would be an equivalent) when naming him. the same clan of dwarves that preserved castes topside (which is why the marriage was arranged) and thus are likely to either believe in the stone (that they do not worship as a god) or nothing, certainly not a very human god with a very human, quite possibly mage (a completely alien concept from common dwarven pov) prophetess and a very human doctrine of considering anyone not human as lesser. the jokes are writing themselves at this point.

all of this naming business falls more into petty territory rather than being outright offensive, but it does bring us to the more serious manifestation — typecasting. the western media simply cannot fathom slavic people in roles that are not violent, volatile (i.e. berserkers, though there are other influences in there), constantly infighting and better off killing e/o (i.e. the diamond quarter, the merchants' guild, the carta) and relating back to thievery, addictive abusable substances and trafficking (i.e. the carta, but also official channels of lyrium supply from orzammar to the rest of thedas). as a slavic woman, it was exceptionally painful to see bioware join virtually everyone else in depicting us as women whose major purpose seems to be to engage in prostitution and surrogacy lite (i.e. noble hunters, most evident in beraht's grooming of rica brosca into the role of one). while these practices are tied to societies of woman-hating — and orzammar, if not all of thedas very much is one — i just take incredible offence in someone naming them integral (dwarven birth rates and the blight anyone?? i hated every moment of that) for a society that's previously been coded with people like myself in mind. of course im going to relate to how someone who looks like me is treated, that's the very purpose of casting. doesn't help bioware's cause that the bulk of npc's with slavic names tend to be lower-caste or castless - with exceptions such as some minor noble houses (houses ivo and harrowmont, possibly meino too) and branka (who's again smith-born and a whole villain).

by only allowing us to fulfill such roles, we are effectively barred from actually engaging storytelling to spend our eternity on the writers' back-burner. hell, even the witcher has been sanitized for the western eye (despite literally being made in poland) and i am yet to find a piece of modern media that doesn't reduce baba yaga to a quirky chicken-legged aesthetic (while also forgetting she's specific to the eastern slavic people). not to mention that if tevinter and par vollen are truly inspired by byzantine and the ottoman empire respectively, guess which mfs were both their vasals. now guess who built the deep roads and guess what tevene mages need to fuel their magic. if dwarves have already been declared the slavs of thedas, let's at least give them/us some space to be such.

[brotherdusk]

loving this anecdote from Erebus: The Story of a Ship:

[James Ross]' unsurprising choice for his second-in-command and captain of the Terror was the Ulsterman, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, with whom he had sailed so often on bruising Arctic expeditions that it was said Ross was one of the very few people allowed to call Crozier "Frank".

[murderballadeer]

god. people on instagram saying that having a scale in your house is a matter of basic health and that if you don't own one you're putting your life in danger and if you don't make your kids weigh themselves you're putting them in danger. sorry but the brief period we had a scale in the house it made my mental health much worse bc i couldn't resist weighing myself and it made me miserable. i go to the doctor she weighs me and she keeps track of it and that's all that needs to be done, unless you have a specific health issue that causes you to gain or lose weight rapidly i don't actually think you need to know how much you weigh every minute of every day. & people were saying "you just need to do it without shaming yourself" ok well do you think i consciously choose to feel awful abt my weight when i know the number do you think this is fun for me do you think if i had the choice i would keep doing it just for fun. skinny people who have never struggled with body image rly need to stay off this type of discussion like i'm glad having a scale in the house works for you but i don't appreciate the statement that i'm ruining my own life by preferring not to know the number on the scale

[abba-enthusiast]

VAR, my nemesis 😔

[alraunee]

the crucial mistake i think people make is looking at farcille as being in an already committed relationship before the story begins. the feelings are there but neither of those girls is equipped to confront those feelings during their dungeon exploring days. falin is too used to people being freaked out by her to imagine anyone would be romantically interested in her unless they spell it out explicitly (this is why she seriously considered toshiro's proposal,according to the adventurer's bible. she wasn't attracted to him but thought he might be the only person who'd ever feel that way about her). and marcille does not do this if she fully acknowledged how much falin has grown up at this point in time she would actually snap for real.

[true-blue-sonic]

I find it kinda sad how some of the fandom will characterize Silver as all "Whiney" and "annoying" because he was implied to cry once and she'd the slightest amount of tears in the comics (old comics) and it's just sad bc silver has so much more character then that. I think that's why I like your writing so much, because you give him more then just dorky kid and whiney child guy y'know? (Sorry if that got a bit rambling and stuff lol)

I figure that ties in into the massive mischaracterisation Silver suffers from basically all sides of his character, but where his 'babyfication' runs most rampant, in my personal opinion. Furthermore, for me him seemingly crying at the end of his storymode in '06 nicely ties into that overall plot point of the game, and makes for something meaningful and interesting to analyse. The whole idea is that the person containing Iblis may never cry, lest their tears call forth his flames. Silver never cries in the game no matter how frustrated he gets with his never-ending battle against Iblis or when he loses Amy as a friend or when Elise dies.... but then he loses Blaze, the one person he thought would always be with him and who he would never want to take on the burden he was going to inflict on himself, and that is what makes him cry. I cannot put exactly into words why I find it so meaningful, but I feel that they wouldn't have put in the sight of him wiping at his eyes for no reason considering how much crying played a central role in the game. And as for the The Silver Saga issue where he cries too, his friends were basically dying because at that moment he wasn't strong enough to defeat the Second Devourer. I can forgive him crying then, since he gets a second wind moments after.

So yeah, people seem to cherry-pick only certain moments that display Silver's personality, and then use that to determine that the whole of his character is like that. Silver is far more multifaceted than either an innocent naive uwu baby or a brooding murder machine; he's got touches of both, but that both is very important. Not one or the other, just... Silver, basically. Polite and friendly to the people close to him, a heart of gold, self-sacrificial, and with the best intentions for the world, but brusque and rude while on a mission, smug and overconfident, absolutely ruthless when he feels it is necessary even in situations where cooperation and just talking would get him to his goal much faster, displaying the occasional black-and-white thinking and tunnel vision, and not allowing himself much time for sad emotions. And yet in the Rivals games, he can absolutely be polite, tries to indicate to the other characters what might be going on, and multiple times calls to talk to "Eggman" first before getting roped into a fight anyway. So generally he's not baby who bursts into tears if you look at him funny and would never ever hurt a fly (seriously, I really wonder how the heck people get that perception of him?? The things I see sometimes are mind-blowing in how bafflingly ooc they are), nor is he excessively violent, unreasonable, and brooding (traits I would say are much more ascribable to a character like Shadow or Metal Sonic). What traits he displays most seem highly dependent on the state of the world and whether or not he is on a mission and has support from his friends.

Though, what I furthermore thinks also leads to people finding Silver more whiny is the fact that he got quite a young, inexperienced voice from Pete Capella. Quinton Flynn does it a bit better imo (he's my favourite Silver voice actor), but Bryce Papenbrook goes right back and makes him sound younger and a lot more cocky (to the point where in TSR I occasionally felt like I was listening to an even cockier Sonic than to Silver). But if you asked someone to listen to all three of those and then to Daisuke Ono, I think no-one will be able to tell the Japanese voice is for the same character, haha! In Japanese Silver's got very deep, serious voice whereas in English he sounded/sounds far more childish and rude, and that might also contribute to the perception of him being annoying and childish and ✨uwu cinnamon roll✨. So yeah, overall Silver suffers from massive ooc-ness and mischaracterisation, and it, well, sucks. It doesn't help that he was basically HATED during his first five years of existence until Generations salvaged his boss battle. I do not think it is a bad time to be a Silver fan, people seem to like him a lot more these days, but I do wish they'd take a less flanderised view of him sometimes, haha!

[stromulites]

BJ explaining no, he doesn't actually kill people. That's not what he does. Yes he's a Reaper, no he doesn't "reap souls" why would you say that hrkdsnkgsdf

[h3lm1nth]

THEY WILL NOT TEAR US APART THEY WILL NOT DESTROY US THE BONDING OF MUSCLE AND METAL IS ETERNAL

[uebermacht]

great out of context line I found on wikipedia: