#whole lot of speculation in here

[blood-starved-beast]

So I've been thinking.

Icarus and Arachne clearly have some situationships going on (Arachne's is triggered when Mel gives her ambrosia and it looks to be mutual unless something else changes). They are both shades LIs (2)

Eris and Nemesis both clearly also have situationships with Melinoe. They are both female god LIs and daughters of Nyx (2).

Moros is highly implied (like the foreshadowing is very thick) to be a potential LI for Melinoe. He is a male god and son of Nyx (1). If we look at the pattern going on so far, we're missing one male god love interest. Who could that be?

Now, it's entirely possible that it's a god not yet included in Early Access and has to be patched in with development. But also. Melinoe has had a parasocial relationship with Hypnos going on since forever. She gives him great reverence/interest with him. She clearly is into babygirl" men. It would be wild, and I say wild, if the final male LI established is Hypnos. Once you wake him that is.

[butchvamp]

reading about the veilguard sales stats and tbh i don't know enough to compare numbers but i'm not surprised it fell short of expectations, it was in development hell for 10 years... i've kinda reached the point where i'm mostly just sad about it lol and i'm also kinda tired of discussing it because no matter what kind of criticism you have or how nicely you word it and no matter how many caveats you add about EA someone will be on your ass with excuses and trying to argue with some obscure piece of lore posted on a forum back in 2014 or some dev's tweet or a writer's AMA on reddit that i'm just supposed to know about somehow... like personally i'm looking at the game right in front of me that i paid for and i don't think i should have to do intensive behind the scenes research to be allowed to criticize it. at the end of the day i think veilguard as a whole, while fun and successful in some ways, still has really horrible dogshit writing that failed to resonate with fans and i don't think EA held a gun to their heads and forced them to make all of those writing decisions. the writers themselves have admitted to these choices! idk why we can't just say that 😭 of course i'm not trying to solely blame the writers (they are going to take the fall regardless, unfortunately) and the game had a hellish development cycle with many of the writers voicing displeasure with the way things turned out but it's actually both EA and bioware that are to blame for that. i'm sure it made the writing difficult and i sympathize but it also can't be an absolute excuse. can we just be honest. EA sucks but bioware is not an indie dev and they are guilty of many of the same practices. multiple things can be true at once and we can acknowledge both and criticize both.

[powerbottomblake]

ruby going after bumbleby's relationship hits a lot harder through a nuts and dolts lense bc then "figure out your feelings" is yet another thing that's been robbed from her forever now and yet blake gets to be visibly in love with her older sister and at peace with it while she's lost penny twice now and this time permanently

[orcelito]

Thinking again about my plans for Vash and Knives in ITNL

Which I can't really get into the specifics for How I'm going to do things w/o going into spoiler territory. But I Do have Vash & Knives tagged on the fic for a reason. I set up in the first chapter that Vash is determined to try to save Knives too.

Which. That choice, as well as the entire basis for all of this, depends so much on that final fight in trimax. The one that was literally a scene away from where ITNL Vash went back in time. His mentality just a hair's width away from that...

At the end of trimax, there was reconciliation, however brief and incomplete it was. In ITNL, my question to myself was How could I induce that again? Under different circumstances, How Else could we get there? And that is the long-game in ITNL.

[innacurateundertale]

(post follows narrachara... narrative?)

i've often struggled with finding chara's voice in runs that aren't Genocide. i don't, like some people(?), think their voice as the narrator is representative of their voice speaking to others. i've often thought of them as the Narrator as separate to them when they feel they are themselves.

chara guiding the player/frisk as the narrator feels like them pushing their voice through a (supposed) third party. like light that reflects off the mirror. still fundamentally the original light, but the mirror changes it in a way that is perceived differently. chara is obviously the narrator, but it isn't blatantly obvious. it's obscured-- only there if you're looking. to my point, chara is making this distinction. they're choosing, in some capacity, to separate these sections of themselves.

as the narrator: they aren't speaking to you. well, "chara", the segment they display to you in genocide, the role they've accepted themselves as, isn't. "chara" forgoes their personality and past almost entirely as to become what they're needed to be.

through the narrator, chara's inner voice-- or chara; the "true" one, if such a thing exists; themself-- comes out. we get a glimpse into them, beyond the mask or the front they put up in front of others. in front of you. we get to see chara as chara, who they are when they're comfortable enough to think. where, as the narrator, the eyes are off them. the need to be something falls off.

in no fewer than several thousand words, that brings me back to how chara speaks to others. their Speaking Voice. as anyone could tell, chara's speech to us in genocide is under far different circumstances than the... average conversation would take place under. of course people act differently around different people, but broadly: i think chara speaks in some combination of the... "looseness" of the Narrator's voice with the formality of Genocide's. i still believe chara speaks stiffly-- almost like genocide but more related to being generally uncomfortable rather than whatever the hell genocide evoked-- but not with the same weight as genocide. i think they're free-er, but not free, exactly.

[aromanticgarbage]

h3h3 said that joji ghosted him after he got famous, ian says they don't talk anymore too. I wonder if max was the only one he was really close with or maybe they just recently reconnected.

Ok that's a tricky topic of conversation. Read more because as always i cannot shut up.

H3h3 and iddubz don't really mean anything to me outside of their old filthy frank collabs. I actually actively dislike them. Yeah you read that right. Thats why ive tried to make the fact that i am NOT running a cancer crew blog here clear. I just hate iddubz's old solo content. Seeing him beat himself up online nowadays isn't great either but by god his old stuff is so so bad (to me). Internet drama and borderline hate speech is a recipe for disaster and if he was smarter he would have seen this coming. I understand that some people like his older stuff out of nostalgia but i am not affected by this. I was not into YouTube back then. Im still not into YouTube. I only know of him and h3h3 because im obsessed with their old homie. My perspective is different, these people barely mean anything to me.

Ok now, disclaimers aside. Ethan said that joji told him not to call him filthy frank when he was talking about his music and he personally interpreted that as him being embarrassed of his past. Personally its just clear to me that what joji was asking for when he was taking his first steps as a full time music artist was space. Being known as an ex youtuber can kill someones career and considering the sort of content he was making as ff it just doesn't seem weird to me that he wanted to separate the two lol. He gave countless interviews where he mentioned his old content and that he understood why people found it so hard to move on from such an iconic character but that he didn't like conflating the two. And even then, a few years later he was encouraging fans at his concerts to chant filthy frank so i cant help but feel like Ethan's assumption that he is embarrassed and trying to forget it ever happened is baseless and biased. And after that....well. Its pretty clear to me that h3h3 used to be enjoyed by people but its had a pretty obvious dowfall since then. Idc about Ethan's drama (or the man himself for that matter) but to be completely honest i wouldn't keep in contact with him either. Idk if you are one of those people who still enjoy his podcast but to me and to many others it just seems bad. Real bad. A lot of drama and too little substance.

Now Ian...Ian is definitely less clear to me as an outside observer. I may not like ~the old iddubz~ but joji obviously didn't have a problem with him. They always seemed to get along pretty well on all the behind the scenes and going through the cake trilogy together probably means that they developed something similar to a warriors bond. He was fun on their collabs. But alas, sometimes people who used to be close just stop keeping in touch. A lot of Joji's old college friends (pookie/david, the shaman/lewys, wheelz/tyrell) are no longer in contact with him and yet they all speak of him very highly. People online like to act like he somehow ""betrays his roots"" by not keeping up with people he collaborated with on youtube back in the day but youtube isn't his roots lmao. His high school and middle school japan friends have always clearly been very important to him and he never fell out off touch with them. He is often touring alongside Rei Brown and he has mentioned in interviews that he relies on these friendships on his day to day life (admittedly the interview im talking about was from 2018 but there's no reason to assume that he has suddenly stopped talking to people that he has been friends with since he was like 12 years old). At the end of the day he doesn't owe people online to keep in contact with anyone. People grow up and change and not all relationships survive the test of time. And thats okay. Stuff happens, people move on. For what its worth tho, i feel like iddubz's drama driven channel (because lets be fair the content cops were his biggest thing and they were youtube drama no matter how self righteous or fair they seemed at the time) didn't help. The thing about joji is that he had always avoided internet drama like it was the plague, which is once again one of those things that i appreciate deeply about him. I hate internet drama. But even my kinda biased opinion aside, the reality of the situation is probably very simple. They are both grown adults who live very different lives. They hanged out together during a few summers a lot of years ago. They followed different paths in life. It happens. Joji has been very offline for years now and i get the impression that he tends to isolate himself when his health acts up so its probably not that hard to fall out of touch with him.

And last but not least....Max. I won't lie, out of the cancer crew the only other person i actually like besides my man Joji is Max. Maybe he really was closer with Max, i certainly find him more likable. Around 2018 both Joji on twitter and Max on that one cold ones podcast episode said that they still keep in touch. Max was replying to a lot of Joji's tweets up untill the nectar era but once again, at the end of the day they live in different countries. I obviously have no way of knowing if they were still as close as they used to in the following years. Maybe they grew more distant for a while, maybe they reconnected around 2023 when joji took chad and max backstage at his concert, and then of course the wedding !! Its all very sweet, the gimme love Max and Chad video from the concert lowkey made me tear up.

But once again, at the end of the day they are all living their own lives, doing their own thing. And people who act like they owe it to them to be each others everything forever and ever because they met online a decade ago and collaborated on some extremely iconic videos make me laugh.

[cubitodragon-moved]

I feel like Forever will be the one to finally discover and intervene in regards to the soul vultures - and it’s not going to end well for him or BadBoyHalo when he does.

Q!Forever is so worried about Q!Bad, has expressed to multiple people that he knows how fragile he is. And I think many overlook that he told Bad that he remembered everything that happened while he was drugged. A passenger in his own body.

Meaning he knows what he said to Bad, that he likely remembers proposing - and he remembers the exact state Bad was in at the time. His language, his words, the tired stoop and how Bad was collapsing in on himself. Bad is coping just as badly as he is, on the opposite side of the pendulum’s swing.

He’s determined to give him a flower every day to cheer him up (no roses, yet), but he knows it’s not enough, he’s watching his friend fade away before his eyes and he’s scared. The affirmation room was a really wonderful gift, and I think it helped - emotionally. But it too is not enough on its own, a temporary harbour during stormy seas.

Action is what will truly bring change over words for these two - after all, actions are what have cause trust to waver, compared to words and prank wars and lies told with a straight face that both parties know are lies.

In addition, out of game, Forever (the CC) is essentially going to be offline for most of next month due to gatherings, conventions and traveling. so getting his character taken out of play for a bit in a manner that doesn’t directly involve the Federation this time seems likely - retreading the same ground is no fun. And Forever has also expressed excitement over Bad’s plans for Bad’s own character’s arc. They’re a pair of cheeky enablers, and they both love their complicated cat’s cradle tangle of a relationship that they’ve got going on - they wouldn’t indulge so fully if they didn’t. The CCs trust each other to tell a good story together, and I think that’s neat.

Which is why I think in trying to save Q!Bad from himself, Q!Forever is going to take a blow not intended for him. An action with a consequence neither foresee. Coupled with the morals balancing act Bad’s got going on with Baghera, I think the fallout of these respective efforts is going to be a shock to the BadBoyHalo core that finishes what his Skeppy-confided doubts started.

Or maybe it won’t. Bad is so unpredictable.

But so is Forever. And Forever considers Bad his family. That’s a powerful force - one Bad is going to underestimate, because I don’t think he’s had many people in his life willing to go that sort of distance for him.

I have a feeling that today’s streams are going to be interesting.

(Apparently first thing when I wake up and last thing before I sleep is when my brain goes off on meta tangents. Go figure!)

[sysig]

Sizing chart of cute: One Size Fits All (Patreon)

[sforzesco]

I'm so sorry if you get tired of answering asks about Pompey and Crassus BUT your response to the anon asking if Crassus let Pompey get away with things really got me thinking! Specifically about the way that Plutarch (I think?) says that Crassus didn't hold ill-will against Pompey for "stealing" his triumph. And how it feels like Crassus just kind of decided to shrug it off and instead asked Pompey for help for the consulship elections. Crassus seems so ruthless and direct while on the field, and I have so many questions about how he and Pompey worked together in Spoletium which will never be answered 😭 But then when it comes to politics I really can't see the pattern!

oh, I love talking about Crassus (and Pompey too, by extension), literally I can't stop. you can ask several people. I'll be talking about one thing, and all of a sudden: Crassus has entered the conversation. it's terrible, I can't stop. mostly, it takes me a thousand years to articulate my thoughts in any kind of way that makes sense.

I actually think that there are two times that Crassus subtextually calls Pompey a bitch, and the triumph incident is one of them!

specifically in that Crassus's comment about it:

Crassus, for all his self-approval, did not venture to ask for the major triumph, and it was thought ignoble and mean in him to celebrate even the minor triumph on foot, called the ovation, for a servile war.

Crassus is also not the first person to hold this sentiment.

Crassus' Ovation in 71 B.C., B.A. Marshall

I think it's important to remember that for Rome as a whole, the Third Servile War was terrifying because of the scale of the threat it posed to how an imperial wheelhouse running on a slave economy functions, but also because it's really fucking embarrassing for Rome's identity.

Crassus is also not the first person who commands the leading role against Spartacus. Spartacus goes through two other commanders before Rome asks Crassus to enter the scene. Crassus specifically is a private citizen when he is asked to step into this role: up until now, Rome's own praetors and consuls have failed to rise to the occasion.

Crassus' Ovation in 71 B.C., B.A. Marshall

Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic, Allen Mason Ward

this is a deeply humiliating moment for the Roman reputation and identity. Pompey taking credit for Crassus' victory is an expected power grab, but it's also kind of cringe that he did it. Crassus was doing Roman's Duty To The State (or, if you like a spicier take on it, may have pulled strings for it. after all, you can't consider a man rich unless he can fund his own army. and the army Crassus brought with him for this was is own)

and so taking credit for that is like. man. this was NOT a "glorious war" that was fought. (Lucullus cites this as a blemish on Pompey's character during his vulture speech, it's very fun!)

so while Crassus may have realized that writing back to Rome and requesting back up was a mistake because whoever showed up would have the world's easiest time taking credit and accepted that it would happen, I do think that he took alternative measures to even the playing field in a 'okay sure, have your triumph, but don't think you're going to have it all,' kind of way because he also does this

Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic, Allen Mason Ward

Pliny, Natural History 15.125

Gell. NA 5.6.23

Cic. Pis. 58

which does not strike me as the behavior of someone who is letting Pompey just run away with it without any kind of pushback.

and now to throw out literally everything I just said about the Triumph Incident, B.A. Marshall (whose article I've cited several times already in this) has an incredibly compelling case to make that there wasn't really as much conflict between the two over this as ancient narratives might indicate (which. seems to be a recurring theme with them)

Crassus' Ovation in 71 B.C., B.A. Marshall

I will stick to my narrative speculation that some of their respective peers probably thought it was at least embarrassing behavior on Pompey's part, because Lucullus has a lot of vitriol to direct at Pompey, and he does cite this incident as something negative to Pompey's overall character) someone who steals credit and glory from other people). so. hm. I think the assumed personal and periodically biting rivalry (in addition to the usual political rivalry) between the two is extremely fun, but so is. this. thoughts! much to think about.

[sportsallover]

🤨

Where’s Quentin??

[spacetrashpile]

just saw sausage's tweet about the weekend episode and how excited are we all for hermes to get kidnapped

[czolgosz]

you know that "life of an unknown assassin" essay thing. anyway the part about leon czolgosz homosexuality speculation has this bit about people describing him as effeminate, which kind of bothers me that its mentioned bc in the listed source, it's meant in the context of him not working outside of the house (which was seen as woman behavior), so like thats different and not really relevant to this topic of the essay

[alexiaugustin]

im going to be so honest for a second here but i genuinely think that this whole kit connor was forced to come out narrative is blown out of proportion like yeah people need to stay out of celebrity’s private lives but at the end of the day it was just jobless people on twitter accusing him of queerbaiting and it’s just.. not that deep? like these people had nothing on him and would have moved on to get mad about some other random shit in no time because that’s how fandom cancel culture on twitter works like. kit connor still decided to type out that tweet and come out instead of just logging out idk

[dnpsuck]

meanwhile dan and phil:

Best RPF Ship - Round 6 Match 1

[orcelito]

I just can't get over how pretty some of these page compositions are

[gibbearish]

hii i didn't know where to post this but I figured your blog could be good since a lot of ppl who are questioning their gender will check it out bc of our uquiz

There's this one uquiz called "are you transgender (afab only)" by 033950 that's made by a terf and even though in retrospect the questions & answers on it get suspicious early on, it still felt awful, the result is super shitty & hurtful (there's only 1) telling the quiz taker to "accept reality" & a dumb speech. So yeah, anyone afab who's questioning and doing uquizs for fun ignore that one... Take care

jeeeesus christ i just went and took it myself and yeah those questions/answers are. so fucking manipulative, ESPECIALLY with only one answer. theres a reason none of the answers in my quiz are definitive like that and it's because. like. im aware that i wrote mine based on my own feelings and experiences and that i dont actually know yall taking it and therefore Cant Give A 100% Solid Answer, and "no youre dumb and just imagining it" is, imo, a terrible response no matter what. even if you are imagining it, even if it is a phase, that does not at all mean that those feelings are invaluable or invalid, which is exactly what that quiz does. and i mean i know that's the whole point of it, but like. holy fuck did they swing for the fences. thank you for putting the psa out, i hope no one gets too turned around by it and im sorry you were hurt in stumbling across it:(