#which is what we were worried about

[samsspambox]

howdy! i did a thing!

tw: medical procedures

i think i've mentioned this before on here but i've been having stomach issues for years (i legit dry heave after every meal. and when i get nervous/any strong emotion. it's so annoying) and i finally got my doctor to refer me over to a gastroenterologist. so! after a 15 minute visit in november, i was scheduled for a Upper Endoscopy, which happened earlier today at a hospital!

now, i've been lucky enough to never be admitted to the hospital before, so this was a first for me. i was scared shitless. that and it was cold, so i couldn't stop trembling LMAO

anyway! i had to go under for a few hours and it was the weirdest experience of my life. and also had some funny bits lol.

when they first hooked me up to a heart monitor, my heart rate Would Not Go Down. it wouldn't fall under 120. the nurse was like 'deep breaths' and i wanted to laugh bc i am an Anxious Person. 120 was as low as it was gonna get LOL. it'd always spike when someone new entered the room too, which was the funniest thing. the person who came to help with my IV was like 'are you okay'? yeah, i was okay. just nervous and scared lol. the IV guy was so nice and even tho he had trouble finding my vein, he only stabbed me once. thank you IV guy.

when the anesthesiologist came in, it was so funny too.

anesthesiologist: do you have any anxiety or depression

me: yes

anesthesiologist: ...one or the other?

me: oh! whoops, both. sorry about that.

and then came the time that they actually put me under. it was so weird. the doctor hadn't even finished saying 'you might feel a little burning' when i just clonked out. the whole world started bubbling and i went 'oh this is weird' and bam, i was asleep. granted i think only having 3 hours of sleep on me helped LMAO

i ended up coming to in recovery! and fairly quickly too, i think they were just finished moving the bed to the spot when i started talking even if my throat was sore. which was also another funny interaction in my opinion LMAO

me, still mildly out of it: is it over?

nurse: it is. you just rest up and then we'll move you to another room.

me: my mom is in the waiting room, can she come in?

nurse: i'm afraid not, sweetie.

me: okay. thank you for taking care of me

nurse: you're welcome. would you like a blanket?

me: yes please, thank you.

let it be known that i am a polite camper!! look at me, using my manners LMAOO

idk how long i actually spent in recovery since i was still mildly out of it and i didn't have my watch or phone on me. they wheeled me out into another recovery room with a heated chair and plopped me down and then got me apple juice, which i was hella stoked about. they then called my mom and she walked into the room, but at this point i was much more lucid and happily eating a graham cracker.

me, looking at my mom who's looking for the room i'm in: oh! ma! hello!!

mom, hearing me and walking over: ay mija! what did they do to you? you're all pale!

me: really? i feel fine though

mom: yes really, you're pale!

me: hey at least i'm awake and conscious enough to tell you how to get out the parking lot

mom: you're right

and then i got discharged, but had to wait a little bit bc my mom got lost inside the hospital and had just made it to the car when they sat me on the wheelchair (a wheelchair!! pushed by a nurse!!! idk i was just very surprised bc i felt like i would walk it on my own and i know it was policy but huh!!) and then we went home at around 9. for context i was at the hospital since 6am, and the last time i was able to check time was at 7:20-ish, so i was out a solid hour and a half.

and then when we got home i crashed and then ate some soup.

this experience was weird. going under was an interesting experience. i hope i never have to do that ever again LMAO.

[haunted-xander]

What's there to be afraid of?

[sysig]

Blood sugar levels (Patreon)

[naamahdarling]

.

[dykedvonte]

I dislike takes that Danse would be just as conservative in modernized aus when it's clearly shown his staunch views of things come from his time in the Brotherhood and his deep-rooted desire to belong to something with a greater purpose.

Not to mention lines that show much more open-mindedness that get overlooked for his harsher sentiments when you first meet him. Like the oppurtunity to be a part of something is why Danse fell so far into Brotherhood dogma and it doesn't negate the offense things he does but I feel like it's just lazy to be like "hmmm he'd def be racist" just so it aligns to his BoS beliefs.

[dekarios]

i’m getting sick to death of this

[mlobsters]

~one minute later~

supernatural s1e13 route 666 (w. eugenie ross-leming, brad buckner)

swamp diving for a corpse laden racist truck, totally normal💁‍♂️

[jessicas-pi]

hear me out on this ok. ROTS AU where Anakin still turns to the dark side but that's Palpatine's problem.

So, Palpatine decides last minute that ehhhh maybe dooku could come in handy later and he doesn't encourage Anakin to kill him, and Dooku gets arrested and imprisoned in the Jedi Temple awaiting trial. (Also he didn't get his hands cut off because of uhh plot reasons?)

Fast forward.

Palpatine is encouraging Anakin towards the Dark side, tells him about Plagueis the Wise, etc. etc. But see, the thing is, Anakin is at the end of his tether, probably hasn't slept more than three hours over the past week, and has no remaining impulse control or inhibitions, and upon hearing that the Dark Side can save people from death, his first thought is, "wait a sec, we've got a Sith Lord in-house at the moment!" and he sprints out of the space opera and books it back to the temple.

Now, Dooku has been calmly waiting in Temple custody, confident that Darth Sidious will arrange his escape. But THEN Anakin barges into the cell like OMG THE CHANCELLOR TOLD ME THE SITH KNOW HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM DYING AND I'M HAVING DREAMS ABOUT SOMEONE DYING AND I NEED YOUR HELP TO SAVE THEM

At which point, Dooku realizes Palpatine's plan. He's going to tempt Skywalker to the Dark side and REPLACE DOOKU. this is totally uncool.

So he's like "...who are you dreaming about, exactly?"

Anakin freezes. He can't admit it's Padme because their relationship is top-secret and he can't admit how important she is to him so he tries to think of a good fib and goes "uhhhh OBI-WAN! Obi-Wan, it's Obi-Wan, I'm dreaming about Obi-Wan dying-" and he just throws himself into the drama because now he IS imagining obi-wan dying because Obi-Wan is fighting grievous at the moment and he MIGHT ACTUALLY DIE and that's in addition to Padme dying and he's totally spiraling at this point- "pleasepleaseplease you gotta help me he's like the only father i've ever known I don't know what i'll do without obi-wan I have to save him YOU GOTTA TELL ME WHAT TO DO I'LL DO ANYTHING--"

Dooku begins to smile.

(Would stealing Skywalker out from under his Master's nose be petty? Oh, yeah.)

(But it would also be very, very satisfying.)

---

Obi-Wan calls in to a council meeting to report his defeat of Grievous, but before he can say so, Mace announces that Dooku has escaped and the Sith Master has been killed.

Silence falls between the eleven councilmembers (eleven, not twelve, because their newest one is conspicuously absent. Obi-Wan wonders just what Anakin's up to now. Honestly, that boy will be the death of him.)

Obi-Wan clears his throat.

"...indeed," he says, trying to handle the shocking news with composure. "Well... at least we're down to one Sith, now."

Another awkward pause.

"Yeah, about that--" Mace begins.

[rxttenfish]

Asking because I’m extremely curious about this, how did MonProm’s writing get different over time? I remember you saying that the lore and characters feel different, and that it's missing sincere character interactions, too. I know almost nothing about the lore and I’ve only seen a few people mention the characters, so I’d be interested in a rundown of what aspects you think got worse in the series

I wouldn’t mind a very long response since I’m not that active in the fandom, I need to catch up on what happened

sorry for taking so long to answer this! i kinda waffled on it for a long bit, mainly because i started doubting myself again, and whether or not this was me simply overreacting or being tinted by nostalgia or simply being extremely picky and choosy in what i like (the last of which is true, i seldom get into fandoms at all for this reason and stay away from most popular media, but i wasn't sure if it applied here). i've posted about it already, but i'm in the middle of a psychotic episode where i can't feel a lot of pleasure to begin with + most things i do experience ending up solidly in the "very bad" category, so as you can imagine, i really didn't want to mislead and check that i was actually in objective reality.

as it is, this is also when a lot more screenshots started to be posted in the monster prom tag, and that helped me bridge the gap back into returning to the games themselves and feel like i was making a more accurate judgement. if you're one of those people who have been posting screenshots, i sincerely thank you, and i appreciated seeing you in the tag greatly.

for those not in the know — i've been in the monster prom fandom since it first released, prior to even the first additional ending to be added (the "Punch the sun" ending, and i recall the minor fandom drama that happened at that time due to it). my impression of monster prom is very much influenced by this, as what got me into the first game was the fact that the characters genuinely seemed to care for each other and were friends with each other (not merely tolerating each other's presences nor dressing it up, they sincerely thought of each other as friends and were open about that fact), on top of the wide variety of small details and statements that, if taken at face value, could create compounding complexity in the lives of each and every character and had wider implications for their lives.

no, they were not necessarily explored nor even necessarily "real", with so many conflicting events and statements, but i liked this too, because it meant a wider flexibility in what you could imagine, helping to create a more tailored experience for everyone who thought about these characters. this was what i liked about the early fandom too. what was baseline "canon" was so vague and minimal that you could have wildly different interpretations of the same characters' histories and relationships with each other. you would have radically different perspectives on what the world itself looked like, what it was like, that there wasn't really any wrong answers so long as their personalities remained the same. this is where you got the old headcanon of polly and liam being childhood friends who knew each other as humans, or that the world of monster prom was post-apocalypse where humanity itself had gone extinct or only existed in tiny pockets, or my personal headcanon that both monster and human society existed right next to each other and had minimal crossover for petty cultural reasons. this was also prior zoe-as-ro, and there were wildly different interpretations of zoe's personality, with most going for a far more disquieting creepy-cute than the deep nerd we got.

this is why you get stuff like the timeloop theory, where everyone is repeating the same weeks leading up to prom over and over, and are perhaps vaguely aware of it but broadly unconcerned. this is also why it felt like the joke that, the characters were still in high school but were all fully legal adults with most in their 20's, best landed, because it was absurd and strange and didn't quite make sense, but the world itself was inherently absurd and semi-malleable to begin with. realistically, i felt like everyone understood it was making fun of the trope of having adults play teenagers in american sitcoms and wildly casting outside the age range, but for more in-universe explanations it wasn't any different from the way that you would have a large, dramatic ending in which everything changed, but then you'd restart and everyone would be right back at the beginning with nothing different, or even having conflicting events in the same run. it was a dream-logic that fit with the tropes and, thus, diagetically made sense.

to be clear, i don't mind canon having a set, well, canon on which it refers back to itself. i don't mind expanding that or including more things which are set in stone. but there was a perceivable shift in how the games handled this over time, becoming a lot more... bitter, it felt, towards all of these different branching ideas and concepts that, yeah, the people making them knew wouldn't necessarily be "canon" because "canon" already liked to contradict itself so much. most people weren't even sold on any one idea, and there was a much greater sense of enjoying and appreciating all the varying ideas people would come up with even if you personally didn't share them. making the characters be out of character was the real crime, because then it didn't diagetically make sense in the same way, didn't wholly fit.

(again, this is not to say fanon didn't happen and characters weren't smoothed down into a simplified personality that fit these varying fan-interpretations instead of the game itself. certainly damien love/lust was just as bad as it had ever been, and everyone loved to mangle his character into a more stereotypical "bad boy with a heart of hold" all the time. but it certainly felt less set-in-stone about it than it does now, with any deviation from the norm being considered strange and odd and even broadly shunned from the wider fandom.)

all of this is setup for establishing what the writing, lore, and characters felt like in the earlier days. the characters were the strongest part, with their relationships to each other being equally as important. the lore played it fast and loose and was far less interested in setting anything in concrete because that wasn't the important part. the lore wasn't the important part, which was what made it all the more intoxicating to think about, all the more fun to play with.

montrip is easily the biggest offender when it comes to setting everything in all-or-nothing terms and demanding absolutism from the world. broadly i blame the hitchhiker conversations for the worst of it, but i think ultimately the way they handled the entire premise of the game is where this problem stems from. it's not really an exploration in the same sense that you might explore the first game, discovering different perspectives and different people with different relationships to each other. it's an exploration in the sense of a sequel that over-explains the monster, that takes the most boring option out of all those that were possible and floating around and settles on something that was blatant, obvious, typically rejected not because of how novel it is but how trite and par for the course it is in the rest of the genre.

yeah, okay. humans know nothing about monsters and there's a "monster dimension" that exists separately from the human dimension. there's no crossover between the two of them. of course there's a big grand-scale fight between the eldritch powers that zoe used to be a part of, from which not only are slayers the main organization against them, but also the merkingdom has some horse in this race too. it's an urge to make things so universal in explaining them, in revealing connecting threads which unite everything that's ever happened in here, that makes the worldbuilding and lore immediately much more boring than it ever was before.

and it didn't have to be this way! nothing in the first game contradicts any of this too explicitly (see the above, the first game loves to contradict itself), and i would even be happy if this was basically canon but never stated or confirmed to be the big overarching everything going on underneath it all. i believe you should probably know these things about any world that you create and have them in the back of your mind. the difference is that you can know these things and keep them in mind, even focusing on things where its very relevant, and still not reveal them. this is why you have lore bibles, after all. every horror writer knows exactly how their monster works and the full underlying reason for everything that happens, but that doesn't mean the audience will see it or possess this same information too, and leaving it intentionally obscure will make far better stories.

which, this is bad enough, but it wouldn't be the breaking point for me if this was all there was.

but the worst thing of all has to be the slow decay of the very same characters that sold me on this world, this lore, this game in the first place. monster prom is nothing without the characters in it. it's a dating sim, it has nothing but characters to get you to play, and liking these characters are the entire reason anyone would pick up monster prom in the first place.

and the first game pulls this off extremely well. it's all in the tagline: be your worst self. they are, indeed, all terrible people. yes, even that character that you just thought of right now. they all have points in the game where they commit atrocities, where they kill or hurt people, where they do inexcusable things that could not be ignored in a more serious setting.

but that's the point. i think there's something very powerful in creating a character who not only do you love and love their personality and the way they interact with the world, but who also are inapologetically terrible, and to have the humor and the charisma be so good that you don't get bogged down in the "this is awful". likewise, it never feels the urge to really go out of its way to justify what's going on. this is not to say theres no discussion of if someone "deserved it", but usually there's still the sense that the joke is on them, that this is still an extreme reaction specifically for comedy and not necessarily something that can be justified. you can have damien set leonard on fire and have it feel earned, without prompting the needed reaction of what it's actually like to watch someone burn to death.

this is what sets the prank masterz ending apart from the rest of the game, and really establishes it as the first real "bad ending". because nothing that you do or happens in the prank masterz ending is any different from anything else that happens in any other run. you summon evil beings from other dimensions as a throwaway gag on how visiting one location raises your stats. you kill other people and damn them to terrible fates. you watch as body horror happens. the only difference is that, in the prank masterz ending, the laugh track doesn't play.

the rest of the game and the writing echoes this philosophy, this careful interplay of tropes that keeps everything tongue in cheek and yet sincere enough to make sure emotional beats still land when they're needed. the characters feel true to themselves and their own emotions, even when the world is extreme and excessive, when everything else runs on comedy logic.

this is also what i noticed failing first as time went on.

like i said, fanon has always existed and there's always been very specific ideas as to what characters are like in the same way fanon always flattens down characters into the same tropes over and over. scott is stupid and innocent and doesn't know what sex is. damien is violent and hot and too cool for anyone else. miranda is the idiot girl character. repeat over and over and over until you get sick of it.

but it's been an issue as time has crept on that canon has started to approach fanon and began to merge with it. now, scott is so innocent that he can't even curse. polly starts being mean to her friends and saying things that would be very hurtful to hear. the merkingdom isn't really super evil and fucked up, it's just miranda that's like that. they become simpler, easier to digest, streamlined for social media posts and mass-sharing. they become less and less subversions of existing tropes and moreso just another example of them, something else to add to the collection, not their own individual stories.

even further from this, what more complex traits they had are now stated and not shown. polly is stated to be smart and clever in a way that her party girl persona doesn't imply and to be sincerely rather down to earth with the people she cares about, but we seldom ever see this anymore unless its the game specifically trying to make a point about it, in which case it won't let her do anything that implies cleverness and moreso will just outline it in the narration. vera is stated to care for people in a very genuine and heartfelt way, but seldom will get a chance to do so, and every opportunity for her to do so to their faces is missed while she will just outright state it later. it does not feel consistent, it does not feel like any of these are intended reads of their actions. it feels like the devs have something they want to do but no idea on how to actually do so. and forget it if you want these traits to manifest in small ways that show up in unrelated moments and scenes.

the dialogue becomes harder and harder to tell between each speaker, if you are just looking at what's said and not at the pictures attached to it. the characters' distinct voices have been eroded away, so that they speak more and more like each other, relaying the same terms and ideas in the same words. perspective becomes a suggestion, instead of a must.

this is something that started back in monster camp too, as all of the endings in that game felt ultimately the same as every other ending. it's very hard to place or define the full reason why, why there feels like there's no emotional stakes nor investment, why everything feels moreso like selecting different coats of paint and trying to find all the different ending pictures rather than being interested in exploring the characters as characters.

stranger yet, the series that started with the tagline of "be your worst self" has experienced a kind of... softening, for lack of a better word? what i mentioned about being able to handle the balance between terrible people who do terrible things and the light tone of the game starts to change, as abruptly the same characters who were down with violent murder in the first game start to lose their nerve, acting more and more on more typical morality. it's one of those things that feels like it's starting to damage the tone, as abruptly it's not as absurd as it used to be, demands less suspension of disbelief which could buffer and support the rest of the setting on it. there's even a part in one of the endings in montrip which involves current-polly and current-scott looking back on their monprom selves and reacting in horror at how violent and careless their pranks are, in a way that fundamentally felt like it was undercutting and disparaging all the things that felt fun and made monprom what it was.

which is odd, really, because more and more i feel like the characters in these games like each other less and less. the friendships and genuine enjoyment of each others company that brought me to this game in the first place has gone. now they don't mention each other as much, don't care for each other's feelings and reactions as much, aren't as willing to support each other. they are more and more found on their own, relied on their own, seem to seek out contact and interaction with their own friends less and less. it feels like they're all separating out into their own worlds, but also feels like they wouldn't willingly want to interact with each other if they weren't already forced together by some other outside contrivance.

if anything, i'd compare it to every other dating sim out there, where you, the player, are the most important person in these characters' lives, and they only feel ambivalent or antagonistic towards every other character. which, again, is not why i picked up monster prom or why i liked it so much in the first place.

and it's because of this that it feels like the current state of the series has to focus on its increasingly weak worldbuilding and lore, trying to form a more serious foundation without character relationships being so tightly bound together, without the characters themselves being more developed and rich, without an aspect of absurd humor to rely on.

more and more i've noticed monprom has to rely on referencing other series to make itself funny and create humor, which, again, it's always done. it was just easier to ignore back then, if you didn't know what was being referenced, because there was always more going on in the exact same scene to bolster it and give context clues as to the setup and punchline at play. it feels like the current games are much more dependent on you knowing pop culture references in order to have any fun with it, and i'm someone who, again, is very picky in what i like or what i'll seek out. i'm not interested in a stream of references about other things that i would much rather be doing than playing through a game that feels like it hates that i like it at all, when i could, again, just be engaging with the thing that takes itself seriously and knows what it wants.

[nobodysdaydreams]

Giving a complicated tragic childhood backstory to your favorite character is all fun and games, until you realize you need to account for how old all the other adult characters would have been at the time and realize that scenes that would work perfectly if one character was twenty three and the other was fourteen stop working when you need other characters who are played by adult actors clearly younger than they are to be in college at the same time so your story beats line up thematically.

[wonder-worker]

Is it true that Elizabeth of York birth celebrated like she was a son? I have seen some historians say this.

Hi! Yes, Edward IV did celebrate his daughter’s birth as though she was a male heir (“a prince”).

While we have no contemporary reports at the time of Elizabeth of York's birth, we know that Luchino Dallaghiexia reported that the birth of Edward and Elizabeth's third child, Cecily of York, "rejoiced the king and all the nobles exceedingly*, though they would have preferred a son'. Wanting a son (ie: an heir) was typical for their time period, likely enhanced by Edward and Elizabeth's unprecedentedly controversial marriage, her very unsuitable origins and his own status as a usurper. The fact that he was described as being "exceedingly" delighted at the birth of his third daughter in a row regardless does support the claim that he would have gone over-the-top to celebrate the birth of his first legitimate** child.

Hope this helps!

*Bizarrely, I have seen several historians and blogs using Dallaghiexia's letter to claim that he was bitterly disappointed at Cecily of York's birth. I don't understand how historical reading comprehension can be so poor that "rejoiced the king exceedingly" has somehow been rewritten as the...exact opposite of that. With no self-awareness whatsoever. **His illegitimate daughter Margaret (known as Elizabeth for some reason) was almost definitely born before his marriage. We don't know the birth dates of his other two illegitimate children: I think the likeliest conception date for Arthur was in early 1470, but it's unverified; and we know nothing about Grace (which was in fact her surname, not her name) other than the fact that Elizabeth Woodville seems to have been very attached to her.

[sunsetzer]

On one hand, I want a final fantasy 6 remake, because the game is criminally underrated and the amount of fan content (which is all absolutely fantastic btw) is Not Enough for my neurodivergent, hyperfixating brain.

On the other hand, that would inevitably encourage more people to join the fandom, which would be great, except it seems these days the bigger a fandom gets the more toxic it becomes, and I really like what we have going on over here in our little corner. We all just love the game and its characters and nobody fights about who should and shouldn't date who or who you shouldn't like because they're ~problematique~. Nobody's trying to make one ship morally better than another, nobody's calling anyone names or threatening to doxx people who don't agree with their opinions. It's so peaceful and I love that for us. We're just vibing. Moisturized. Unbothered. In our lane. Flourishing.

[jakeperalta]

just got liverpool night three tickets?!!?! they were the exact same section and price that I got kicked out whilst trying to buy for night one earlier omg I'm so happy 🥹🥹🥹 my wildest dreams were to get a set of the cheapest seats and a set of lower bowl for a june and august show and I got that and it's at the exact amount my bf and I had put away in our eras fund!!!

[heyitsspaceace]

so i’m about to start season 8 of doctor who right, and my situationship compared us to twelve and missy after we had our first kiss, i’ll updated you guys in a bit how i feel about this comparison

[lorephobic]

2, 17, 22 for Saltburn

2. a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

this means nothing to anybody who follows me for saltburn, but i just answered this question about my other blorbo and came to the exact same conclusion for the complete opposite reason. oliver quick would NEVER top because he is clawing to be the main character of every room that he enters. he wants to be desired so badly that he'll reinvent himself into whoever he thinks you want.

there's a sort of trope in obsession-related media where the obsessor ends up forcefully taking from their victim exactly what they want. and i think that oliver subverts this narrative by never taking anything from felix. he never asks for more than he's given. when he finally has the opportunity to kiss felix, he doesn't. he takes from venetia, and he takes from farleigh, and he takes from james and elspeth, but at the crux of his character, is his need to be taken by felix. this is, of course, a metaphor for bottoming LMAO

17. there should be more of this type of fic/art

ok so tbh i'm not a huge fic person because i'm so incredibly picky about the way that the media that i care about is interpreted, which is why i've never read a single saltburn fic and honestly i probably won't ever, just because i feel like there is very little room in this story to expand and no way to twist and rewrite it in a way that is true to the characters that i care so much about. but WITH THAT BEING SAID, i was honestly so totally astonished by @125hr's cattonquick art that it made me realize that maybe i do want to see more beautiful art of them kissing and we can all pretend like they had their moment<333

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

this should honestly be it's own post, but since my last rewatch i've been thinking a ton about the final dance being a reflection of felix's initial tour through saltburn, which has been talked about! but what i haven't seen talked about is all of the other scenes that end up echoing each other. felix's life on the screen and oliver's role in it form a perfect mirror image, starting and ending with oliver staring at felix at parties and not being able to touch him. starting and ending with oliver watching felix have sex with someone that's not him. starting and ending with oliver fucking people who aren't felix in an attempt to get closer to him. on a second rewatch, when you know all of the signs, there's such a devastating sense of oliver returning back to square one, lost in a crowd full of felix's friends and nobody even knows his name. there is a time before felix and there is a time after felix and exactly at the center of this timeline, there is a man on his hands and knees in a bathtub getting the closest he will ever get to the thing that he wants.

[kickedin17]

Actually very funny that in the Only Band In the World the author was (affectionately) like "yeah so the clique is basically a cult but it's cool it's fun" and we also joke amongst ourselves about being a cult & now we're getting a bunch of letters from random Dema citizens (/banditos) who sound like they've started/are recruiting for an underground revolutionary movement which heavily idolizes Clancy, who in-lore is responsible for all the music we've been hearing, in a way you could perhaps consider cult-like in the same way some people consider irl music fandom to be cult-like. Aria and Barea and Jansen you're just like me for real