#we'r cringe but we'r free

[didderd]

I present to you a dirty stinky man faeu Beetlejuice!

His wings/wing caps are based off a potato beetle, and his antenna are based off Rosalia funebris.

faeu belongs to @/antlered-prince and @/owl-bones.

[toringo]

Requested by my fiancé </3

Freaks

[deerspherestudios]

Hello!! I just played mushroom oasis today and I must say I'm a big fan of the game! I think the banter between Mychael and the mc is so charming, the development of their relationship feels so natural (despite maybe the uhhh. manipulation that may be happening) but yes I find it all very enjoyable!! I'm excited to see what more you have planned 💖

Aaa thank you for the kind words!! Having it feel natural is always important to me, especially with it being a slow burn so that means a lot!! Since I'm done with the recent game jam I'm excited to get back into continuing development for Day 4 once I get my ducks in a row!!

Also,,, completely unrelated,,, but I do recognize you around tumblr and I'm kinda holding back rn but wauhhh another,, cwinge appreciation post below,,, (everyone look away!!! look away!!!):

HOW DOES THE DCA FANDOM KEEP FINDING ME PLEASE THIS IS A PROFESSIONAL BLOG!! wailing,,,

I won't ramble too much but the fact you of all people ended up in my inbox after haunting my side blog dash for MONTHS (years????) with jester content,,, I'm clowning in public rn,,,

Anyway anyway, I love your work (esp sunmoonsun who?? who said that>> WHO SAID THAT); I hope you have a good day!!! I'm gonna scream into my palms for a few hours now ty, , , for the support,,,

Honorable mention//

You know who you are ,, ty for the fanart <3<3<3,,,,

[niirasri]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATTIE 🇨🇦🍁💜🥳✨

[descendant-of-truth]

I think the reputation Kingdom Hearts has is a prime example of something I've been thinking about recently, which is: if you go into a piece of media without taking it seriously from the get-go, any of its attempts to be serious will come across as funny.

Let's be real, KH is viewed by the general public as a bit silly, right? Like, you're telling me there's an RPG series where you play as an anime boy but your party members are Goofy and Donald Freakin' Duck? And it's filled with complicated plotlines about clones and hearts and time travel?

The crux of what makes people not take the game seriously is the fact that it's a Disney game that wants to be taken seriously. Those two things combined instinctively make people want to laugh at it; after all, Disney is just kids' stuff, it's not meant to be taken that seriously. Even if you're a fan of Disney, it's so inherently different from something like Final Fantasy that the tonal clash alone creates a certain expectation.

That expectation being: this is going to be stupid, and funny because it's stupid. The same level of joke as making cute characters swear or use guns, I think.

Kingdom Hearts is, of course, a lot more sincere than that. But if you're not willing to meet it halfway, then its sincerity becomes the joke.

Of course, even KH fans like to laugh at how the dialogue reads when it's taken out of context, which takes me to something I've actually wanted to talk about for a bit:

Data Sora: Mickey! It's Riku. They put bugs in him!

Make no mistake, I'm not saying people are wrong to joke about stuff like this. But the whiplash I felt at seeing this moment become a meme was kind of insane, because it genuinely never struck me as a funny thing to hear Sora say.

Using the term "bug" to refer to a computer bug felt completely natural, and it's a much more tangible term than "glitch" which brings to mind more like, environmental or physics-based glitches. Similar deal with the word "virus," even if that would've sounded cooler.

But either way, by this point in the story, they've been talking about bugs with complete seriousness for over an hour. They've been a corrupting force that you have to fight the whole game, and when Data Riku is injected with the stuff, he screams before freezing up and staring dead-eyed into space, as shown in that screenshot.

That's freaky! And a really scary thing for Sora to have to see happen to his best friend!

So him telling Mickey what happened in a panicked voice didn't even register as a line to take special note of, because why would it? What else was he supposed to say? I was way too invested and stressed out to care about what it would sound like out of context; I was IN the context! And the context had me on the edge of my seat!

This is the case with a lot of lines in this series that get paraded around as evidence that the writing in KH is sooo chaotic, so silly, so embarrassing, so cringe. I'm not saying that every line of dialogue comes across as totally natural, the series is capable of taking me out of the experience because of something being stilted or awkward. But rarely ever when it's trying to be sincere or dramatic.

Replica Riku: Because I'm you. Riku: No, I'M me. Replica Riku: "I'm me," he says.

This is another example. When I actually sit back and watch just that first bit of the cutscene, yeah, it sounds a little ridiculous. The back-and-forth happening here is just redundant enough to follow the "rule of threes" to comedy, so I get why people get a good chuckle out of it when it's isolated to just this.

It did not feel ridiculous after watching the series of harrowing events Replica Riku goes through before getting to that point. It certainly stops being ridiculous when he follows it up with this speech:

Replica Riku: Must be nice being real. A fake like me could never get away with saying that. That's right, I'm a phony, a fake! The way I look, the way I feel, everything I remember! And even this newfound power! I thought by finding some new strength, I could finally be someone - someone who's not at all you! But... nothing changes... I'm still just empty! Everything about me is borrowed. As long as you're around, I'll never be more than a shadow!

I bring this up to segue into another point: even KH's fans have a hard time moving past their perceptions of what it should be as a Respectable Video Game. Particularly whenever it does something that's just a little too weird, or lame, for the average mainstream.

Something like, oh I dunno... putting relevant story content on handhelds?

While this wasn't intentional, both of the examples I've used so far have come from games that were originally made for the Nintendo DS and GBA respectively. I just used screenshots from their Playstation versions because I like how their body language is animated in them.

(I also wasn't intending to make both examples about Riku, it just kind of happened)

But anyway, handheld games are also something that's generally considered to be "less legitimate" than their console counterparts. This isn't to say that handheld gaming isn't extremely popular in its own right, because it is! Series that stick to handhelds, like Pokemon, are loved for their portability.

But outside of some exceptions like Fire Emblem, if a series has games on both types of systems, the handheld ones will always be considered "less mainline" by default, regardless of what's actually in them. For an example of this, I would point to the Zelda series, and how little its handheld titles are talked about compared to its console releases. Furthermore, the Link's Awakening remake (while technically on a handheld-console hybrid) decided to ditch the pixel art in favor of going full 3D, which showcases a slightly different but related stigma.

So what happens when Kingdom Hearts, a game that debuted in 3D on a home console, starts putting the majority of its story onto handhelds?

Well, a massive chunk of the fanbase starts calling them "spinoffs," of course! Even though the ratio of console releases to handheld ones literally looks like this:

(That's a 6:8 ratio, for reference, counting KH4 and Missing Link which haven't been released yet. It's even more slanted in the handheld's favor when you consider the short length of 0.2 and especially Melody of Memory in terms of story content)

And now we still have people talking about how we waited 13+ years for KH3 after KH2, as if nothing really important happened in between those two games, or as if a game arbitrarily having a number 3 on it is going to make it more important than everything else. And this is said by people who DO CARE about the games that were released during that time! What is happening!!

People loooove to act like you can skip over games like Coded or Union Cross and they especially love to complain that a series like this would even consider putting story content on a phone. And in such a cute art style?? A cute 2D art style??? How in the wORLD am I supposed to take something sEriOUsLY when it's on... the most accessible gaming device out there??? For free?????

(I'm willing to bet that some people will be slightly more inclined to play Missing Link because it's in 3D, but most are definitely going to just be asking "why isn't this on consoles" as if the story isn't intertwined with the gameplay format they chose at all)

And so we run into the same problem as the people who haven't even played the games: dismissing something as not really worth investing their time into based on surface-level judgements. Because even if you're down with KH's brand of storytelling, there are other barriers you could have to the series that it will repeatedly ask you to lower, and you might not be willing to.

Kingdom Hearts is a series that demands you get over your biases about what counts as real art to be taken seriously, or it WILL leave you behind in the narrative. Don't want to play a phone game? Don't want to even look up the story on YouTube? Too bad, it's required reading for the next ~Numbered Title~ that you respect so much. Good luck being confused the whole time.

Don't want to play a DS game? And you won't even watch the condensed movie version that we put in our Respectable Console Collection? Okay, but don't come crying to us when its recurring narrative themes seem like they came out of nowhere later on.

This is a series that does not have spinoffs, and trying to explain that to someone who hasn't played it makes it sound absurd. "The mobile games are important?" a non-fan asks, laughing at the concept. "Yeah, it's pretty stupid," the fan responds with a laugh of their own, because even after everything, how can they really engage with this story on its own terms when it makes such silly decisions? When it has such cringey titles? When it's so embarrassing to like?

I think I might've strayed a bit from the initial thesis statement of this post, but my point is that Kingdom Hearts exposes a lot of elitism in people regarding games and art. It pushes the limits of what it can expect its audience to take seriously, delivering purposeful, engaging storytelling no matter if it's 2D or 3D, a Triple-A Video Game on your Playstation console or a free-to-play phone game. Which makes it pretty darn neat, I'd say.

And also sometimes I get thrown off by what becomes a meme, because I get so invested in the story that I forget things can be funny out of context

[spinz-404]

My friend and I were watching those shitty deathbattle vids and then ended up making this.

Yeah

[roderickstrongs]

idk what takeda's deal is in mk1 (and i haven't peeped spoilers on that stuff) but i like to think that this takeda is from the previous timeline but older just so kenshi sees him and is like "what the hell i have a SON??" while johnny is like "i'm dating a DILF??" and kenshi wants to die

[maliro-t]

replaying dav act 1 and the way i instantly prefer the minrathous route is wild sorry antiva 💀💀💀

[77ngiez-archive]

21 / 15

closeups under cut

some closeups

[starmilkman]

LUPIN III LOST SPIN-OFF SERIES FOUND?????

After his encounter with Lupin III back in Part 1 of the series, up and coming reporter Monroe Monroe dedicated his life to capturing the PERFECT STORY! On the tail of Lupin III and Inspector Zenigata, Monroe bungles up capers and investigations as he teams up with the mysterious ex-detective, Val. Together they face reoccurring villains: Dr. Martin Shelley IV and Food the were-cat! In hopes of capitalizing on the popular Lupin characters, a spin off series was created titled: Looped In! The title shares a name with Monroe's news column and his tendency to wrap up others in his fictional tales!

[frontallobotomy03]

guys you won't believe who my favorite hazbin hotel character is

gay people real..??? I'm going to shout slurs at them

Extra doodles that I have a love hate relationship with

[stil-lindigo]

can i just say,,, your comics (ESPECIALLY The Golem one) and poetry have inspired me so much to just go absolutely APESHIT with what i make and stop giving a shit about what others think of it. thank you so much for helping me get over my creative anxiety,,,,

i hope you're having a wonderful day!!

that's fantastic!! im so fucking happy i was able to help you get there - be free! be creative! express yourself, we're all gonna be dead one day so who cares, just have fun with your art!!

[linabirb]

i want to make a selfship blog so bad sometimes but then i remember that 1) im that person who goes "ohh im just a bit selective that's all ^^ btw i will block you if you have at least one take on my f/o that i don't agree with" and 2) some of my f/os are. questionable. of course i can just not talk about them but sometimes i do get an urge to say "btw just a reminder that i love makima sm <3" and 3) i could be a wholesome selfshipper but unfortunately i never grew out of my yandere phase. like bro i think i'd just scare everyone away

[kumakuma-circus]

we don't draw them enough.

[soulsoffairlight]

Did that one comfort character meme because it's so silly LMAO. This features Avi!Zoot (an au I've never shown here) and Avi!GhostFace, two aus of major comfort characters of mine

[pluage-docters-go-brrrrrr]

there is something so fun to me about seeing your Ratchet family post just a bit before I make a post for my own take on his family

rise up Ratchet family gang

Yes, your post about the family trio trying to eat bean ratchet gave me the confidence to actually make character sheets for them. Rise!