#why does my art look so crunchy
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Greetings Madoka Nation on Tumblr, do you like my Kami-Madoka fanart?
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And yes that IS the legitimate photo of the Earth.
#pmmm#puella magi madoka magica#madoka kaname#kaname madoka#madoka fanart#pmmm fanart#pmmm madoka#ok back to hibernating#and the start of inconsistent posting#hikikonana#my art#why does my art look so crunchy#on mobile tumblr#im going to cry i can see the pixels
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I think it would have been so funny if they knew each other pre persona 5
#like think about it#akechi: buying something from jose#jose: oh yeah btw I saw some other humans running around#akechi: you what#and that’s how Akechi finds out about the phantom theives#persona 5#goro akechi#p5 jose#v’s art#why does tumblr make my drawings look so crunchy T^T
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He heard someone talking smack about Robbie (ง •̀_•́)ง
#gabe reyes#robbie reyes#ghost rider#so many feeling in a teeny tiny package :’(#my art#why does it look so damn CRUNCHY chat
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okay sorry for the confusion yes he is. but he doesn’t wanna be
imagine if you got your brain stripped out but you had a magic failsafe in place so I guess instead of turning into a mindless drone you just reverted back into your child self And managed to stick around in your original form as a spectre so you could yell at your child self anytime your child self didn’t meet your expectations or do as good as they needed to to be as successful in life as you were.
that’s what’s going on. as far as I understand it and the jury’s still out on the details given the fact that no one else who got the same brain-wipe seems to be nearly as coherent and capable as him nor did they turn into actual children like he did. baby pep doesn’t like getting yelled at all the time and is being raised in a very different environment than original pep was so he’s not the same person emotionally but he’s basically just. if peps had to start over from babyhood, but with his adult self looking over him criticizing his every move to his face and his moms are all settled down together and domestic instead of volatile and mid break-up
#YOURE NOT MY DESTINY! YOURE MY PAST! look. I still wanna be a dark wizard jerk. just not him.#the lady fate’s intervention scene does nothing to un-confuse me however. dunno what that homunculus is for. ‘it’s not dangerous’#auuuuuuuuuuuuu#explodes into pieces#‘you were this close to recreating me’ WHATD YOU DO AS A KID. YOU FREAK. PEPS. OG PEPS COME HERE AND ANSWER MY QUESTIONS#lady fates intervention is Probably just to keep him from becoming a mindless drone like crunchy and punch bowl. right#but it doesn’t. gripping peps and old Mr creampuff in my hands. why are they so much to me. do we see Any other candy ppl age.#OK ENOUGHOF THAT UH. SORRY. WENTCRAZY.#don’t understand pep which is part of why I’m still gnawing on wc three years later ✌️#not art#replies#this sweet little cherub isn’t Thee peppermint butler.. Right Pep? …pep?#hooooouuuuuuhuhu. That one. Okay#regurgitates wc quotes at you#'stopyelling at me!' 'IM ENCOURAGING YOU!!!!!!!!!' augh. the. them. come on.#none of this makes sense except to me. im jsut throwing quotes at the wall and Looking at them
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altair , the prophet ✨️🥀
#why does this look crunchy . . . man#just a quick doodle of my prophet so i can get a grasp of him ^_^ hes such a miserable wet cat of a person#im currently figuring out his lore n such from what little bits i can piece together thru the game#anyways uhhh . this guy !#enderal#enderal forgotten stories#hey at least now i can draw him and jespar kissing#digital art#artists on tumblr#altair#mauve arts
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@quietbox SO NICE TO ME..... yeah I was thinking about that scene when I chose to make the lightning go from blue to purple. the full title was "Only I understand." as in only he understands what must be done, but also only he understands what he's gone through to get there. the loneliness of the whole experience. I think Grovyle would have 0 self-awareness of his emotions, but I was trying to convey something I was feeling in that moment so it's hard to make much sense of it in words. still, the implication of the electrocution scene is there! I'm glad it's noticeable. what you pointed out is VERY good though, it's true... it starts with the storm that separated him from Hero and ends with Dusknoir joining his side. in my mind Grovyle has at least some mixed feelings about storms and electricity after everything.
Only I--
#woah why does tje screenshot look so crunchy#anyway thank you sm!!!#uuh I should make a tag for when I rb my art like this
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since everyone is hopping on the bluesky bandwagon imma bump my account too
#only posted a few drawings i liked lmao#tho ngl they nerfed the quality why does my art look so crunchy 💀
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May I have the five beasts x male reader who is one of them and has the power to create plants and such before his corruption he was always pressure by the witches and his advisors to be perfect always have a smile on his face make beautiful flowers and plants bloom always no matter what never allow to do what he truly wants to do force to be the perfect cookie with a perfect smile and until he snap and become a beast he use his plants to torment and terrified the one who always pressure him to be perfect and he say finally no longer have to be perfect I will go my own way I own nothing to those worthless cookies or the witches now they will all see what else can I do as he has huge creepy smile on his face as his laughts evilly as his plants attacks the cookies and earthbread and completely takes over even his appearance change to one he prefers he use a rose on his head then he becomes a beasts it has teeths and will turn into a huge rise monster by reader command headcanons please
Cream Oreo Cookie: This reminds me of a movie I once knew but I can't remember it :v
The First Ancient Cookie's:
Light Milk Cookie:
He was worried about you and was...upset with the witches and how they treat you
He doesn't appreciates the Witches pushing you to use your powers 24/7 just because you we're a powerful Ancient Cookie you still need rest
He would always makes excuses for you so the witches would let you rest
He will be there for you to comfort you if you ever needed it
Spice Cookie:
Seeing you tired and overwhelmed with work was enough to annoy The Herald Of Change from the Witches decisions to treat you like a lowly worker which never fails to BOIL his Jam
He would always so called "kidnap" you so the two of you can chat and relax in his temple
He makes sure you eat well and drink a lot and rested a lot by giving you a ton of food, drinks, blankets, pillows, stuff animals to cuddle with
Salt Cookie:
He disapproves with all of the Witches antics and how they use you
Your just a Cookie for The Witches sake! Just because you have a crunchy and hard dough doesn't mean you still can't break from exhaustion
He would also like Spice Cookie will "kidnap" you to get some rest
The two would go on for walks, or read a book under a tree or just enjoy the peacefulness of everything and relax
Plain Flour Cookie:
She has heard all of your wishes for peace and relaxation under a tree by a hill far away from your duties
She is always there to listen and give you advice
She also does not agree with the Witches Wishes of your time to give all of your energy and power of "Life" as they all say
If you ever need someone to cry your heart out she is here for you do not worry
Ephemeral Sugar Cookie:
Why would the witches force such a handsome Cookie like yourself to manual labor?
Okay maybe Manual Labor is a bit too much but it kind of looks that way from her eyes!
A Handsome and Magnificent Cookie like yourself should rest and have time for yourself to instead of letting yourself get over work like this!
She would always visit you and give you clouds to use as bed or pillows to rest on and relax alongside her!
She will wrap her wings around you as you sleep and at times hide you from the Witches so you can go and sleep for atleast 9 Hours or so
BEAST COOKIES:
Shadow Milk Cookie:
THIS, THIS IS THE REASON WHY IT WAS AN AMAZING IDEA TO LEAVE THE WITCHES BEHIND
This was there fault not yours...
If they weren't so pushy maybe this wouldn't have happened
But that's okay!
Now we can all have fun with our powers and use them for our OWN entertainment and not THE WITCHES
Burning Spice Cookie:
He was so glad that the two of you finally decided to leave those witches expectations and create your own fun
He would ask you to battle with him and spar just to see how strong you've gotten
He'll make sure to not burn your beautiful plants or work of art during those battles since he knows that you still love your plants and won't want for them to be burnt into dust even though you can always make some more
So basically he just uses his axe to cut through it
Silent Salt Cookie:
They had enough of the witches and how they treated you
So let's see what they think about the new you?
Causing chaos from left to right
You and Silent Salt Cookie we're an amazing team at the battle field
You would throw those wretched Cookie's up high to the skies as Silent Salt Cookie slice them off
Even though he doesn't talk now unlike the past
He would always bring you a head of a Cookie with it's head full of your favorite flowers in it to show his affection towards you
Mystic Flour Cookie:
The Witches always Take and Take and Take and Take
But now there's nothing to give and that's how Mystic Flour Cookie felt which is why she understands what you we're going through
Those greedy Cookie's wants there wishes to come through to the point they would crumble eachother
While the Witches never gave any care about you and how much work they weigh on you
So why not let them see how can one of the purest of Cookie can turn to the most bitterness ones
Eternal Sugar Cookie:
It wasn't fun or funny at all anymore seeing you all hurt and sad and stressed out from the witches
But seeing you now destroying those witches creations made her so damn happy for you
She even decided to join you in this masquerade of yours
She will never leave her little Cinnamon Roll behind to make all of this Cookie's Suffer!
She wants to have some fun too
Oh how she enjoyed it spending time with you with no Witches to interrupt your bond!
How Fun!
#cookie run kingdom#crk#cookie run#cookie run x reader#cookie run x y/n#shadow milk cookie#light milk cookie#burning spice cookie#spice cookie#silent salt cookie#salt cookie#mystic flour cookie#plant flour cookie#eternal sugar cookie#ephemeral sugar cookie#beast yeast#cookie run y/n#cookie run reader#beasts cookies
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i loathe repeating patterns with much of my heart. however i was very brave and finished this last week. does this perhaps get killie Another Egg?
(ignore the blacked out rectangles my Real Life Name art signature is there)
Ohhh I love this! You were VERY brave, look at all that fine line work. I love it when people on tumblr give compliments about lines. They say things like “I want to eat it” or “your lines are so crunchy and greebled” and so on.
For many years I did not know what to say about babies, when other people showed me their babies. Eventually I learned about the primary considerations of babies, and therefore, what to look for when observing and reporting on them. For example, if it’s very young and holds its head up well, commenting that the baby is clearly very advanced and clever is an excellent observation, when a basic reaction of “cute!” only convinces the most deluded or besotted parents. Human babies are mostly not cute, exactly, and if they aren’t deluded or besotted or sleep deprived, the parents can tell if you are lying or uninterested.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say here is that I love these lines a lot, even if I don’t understand why or how to compliment them. They remind me of illustrations that you would look at for a long time as a kid because they had unexpected detail in them. There is also something inexplicable in the slightly organic curve of the spiked collars and the observation of the jaw of the skull that feels familial to me. It’s very very similar genetically to how myself and my younger sibling think about those things and it reminds me of my sibling’s art.
Anyway, thank you so much. I find this compelling, as if you are a cousin, or as if I commissioned this in an alternate life. I would compliment this baby by saying it “looks like an old soul.”
#eggs for Killie#the 66th egg.#I typed that out as 66 egg emoji but then thought it might be hard on screen readers#so I was still tempted just to make sure that the general feeling of my blog is multi-sensory and truly accessible to everyone#like you should experience it much like receiving 66 eggs to the brainstem. it should be sticky and confusing. a niche experience#only desired by a select few who Get It. but also a robot voice saying EGG 66 times is worse than anything i could come up with.#anyway#this is so cool
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rating things owned by nancy elizabeth wheeler
because she’s got a lot of little things. mostly they are very cute and strange little things.
starting off strong we have the prettiest tissue box in the world. 9/10, i think if i were sick it would make me feel better to have such a nice tissue box.

i’m fairly certain this is her diary beside it because her diary looks pink in the upside down version of her bedroom. so this is probably it? 11/10, i want to read it so bad. and very sweet pic with mom—7.5/10.
next up these pinstripe pants !! 10/10 i love them so much. oh and the index finger ring is there obviously, 8/10, such a consistent piece of her character.

a ribbon for being the bestest girl ever in the world. 10/10. also the card of cardinals: 6/10, probably just a christmas card or something rather than a symbol of her love for birds. but i still like it.

mr rabbit gets 11/10 for the name alone. and why does he look dead. i love him. he’s me.


descent from xanadu: QUITE LITERALLY 0/10. at first i was SO excited to cheer her on for reading a sex and drugs book at school but as it turns out? bizarre and gross. seems to go heavy on nonconsensual stuff. i snagged a free pdf and command f’d for whore and bitch. lots of results obviously (one use of c*ck crazy bitch…lovely). it seems men in this book say a lot of sexist stuff that the women pretend to hate but love which i can’t imagine is great for a teenage girl to consume. also just not sexy at all.

literally so bad, and this is not the worst of it.

sooo bad. the author was what 70 (??) writing that his female character got clinically DIAGNOSED with being a slut for every guy she comes in contact with. i know options for sexy literature were probably limited at this time but…please go check out something else. i wanna bonk her on the head with this book (paperback) and hug her. you don’t need to read this to be cool and sexually aware. moving on.
on the other side of that, the blondie calendar gives us a sense of the GOOD media she’s consuming!! a 10/10 no questions asked. we don't really get to see many of her hobbies or interests outside of investigation so this is a much appreciated detail.

of course like all good things in life the blondie calendar does get replaced. its replacement is what i will call Weird Antinaturalist Art Piece #1 seen in her room in s4. i give it a 4/10 because idk what’s going on really.

and here is a very crunchy screencap of Weird Antinaturalist Art Piece #2 from s4 which i will give a 5/10. note the boyfriend typical photography above it, for sure a 10/10.

there is also Weird Antinaturalist Art Piece #3 which gets an 8/10 because i like the composition and the piano player. where did she get this and why. interior decoration is her passion.

the sleeping bag and crochet pillow setup. 7/10. would take a cat nap here.

pluto!! 15/10, the best mickey mouse character i would say. i hope her cousin is taking good care of him.
bulletin board 10/10. i love how obvious it is that she has had this up for forever. probably a nice constant in her life.

and my favorite pic up there is this precious one. look at herrr. 5000/10.

her floral weekender bag. 6/10, i like it, but not as much as i like the speedwalk and the toss into the backseat. she was SO ready for her lab takedown road trip.

trapper keeper is a 9/10 because they probably put anything and everything on trapper keepers back in the day and yet still she chose this lovely understated hot air balloon. elegant.

tom cruise poster is 1000000/10 actually. she is so loyal to that man. actually though not a great pic of him all things considered so maybe i give it a 999999/10. (i love it so much because i know for a fact that jonathan byers works proactively to never acknowledge this poster, because he is more mature than that.) (he is not more mature than that, in fact he is a little pouty about mr cruise.)


KITTY FIGURINE. 10/10. i thought it was just in s4 but i found it on her other nightstand in s1. very very adorable. i imagine it is now one of the first things she sees in the morning (well that and her blue telephone: 8/10) which is bizarre and cute. the mixtape drawer gets a 10/10 for reasons that i don’t think i need to get into.

white fingerless gloves! 10/10. so chic for monster hunting.

black fingerless gloves from s4. hmmm 3/10, they're cool i guess but they don’t feel very nancy and the white ones are so much better. especially because you may get the splatter effect of monster blood on them in a battle scenario, which would be badass.
piggybank (with her name on the side). 2/10 unfortunately i don’t like him. he looks at me like i took out his whole pig village and i just need some quarters. also did she paint this herself? in that case, 3/10 for customization lol.

pastel underwear drawer: 10/10. her committment to the hollistic aesthetic and color palette of her room is impressive here. it was a good idea to use this drawer as a deterrence against her little brother and a money hiding place but clearly he has no manners and is a THIEF.

STRIPED SOCKS. 10/10. i realize it's hard to see because she's moving so fast (slow down he is not going anywhere) but they are indeed stripey even though i would have guessed solid white. and wow what good sleeping socks. stripes are just cozier. hope she got lots of sleep in those.
#long post#bedroom analysis#stranger things#nancywheeleredit#character analysis#nancy wheeler#karen wheeler#mike wheeler#stranger things details#jancy#< target audience#jonathan byers#jonathan x nancy#screencaps#ballet slippers necklace coming in part 2
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Ang ganda yung art mo GGHHHOORLLLL!
I was looking at the line work you do and was wondering: do you ink it physically and then scan it, or is it fully digital? It's really good and gives a solid grit to it and adds texture to your works. How do you do that?
shdhfh maraming salamatttt 💞💕
99% of what I post here is all digital because I don’t really have access to a scanner very often! my inking style looks the way it does because I draw traditionally in my sketchbooks a LOT and the way I ink digitally is Exactly The Same as I do traditionally (which is why you see a lot of double lines in my inking, stray lines, or scribbling when I fill in solid blacks without the fill tool, I also always turn off any stabilization features a brush might have bc I don’t like the way it feels) and I often go looking for brushes that are gritty or crunchy so that it looks similar to the pens I use on paper!

You can see a bunch of the stray lines and general scribbling I did here, which is exactly what my irl sketchbooks look like, and the circled brushes (I edited these after I downloaded them all to have 0 stabilization) are the ones I used for it!
#I consider myself a traditional tools artist first and digital second so I frequently use traditional drawing techniques but. uh#make it digital??#Wendy Xu has a flex nib brush that I grabbed when it was free that feels exactly like the flex nib pen I use so that’s the other one#I like dead line weights a lot tho so these brushes (above) are really fun to me#I have HUGE respect for people that do really clean and smooth line art and I love looking at it but I simply cannot stand it for#my own stuff. feels Wrong and Not Fun and low key kind of unrecognizable when I look at it after#ask tag#basically my whole digital art experience is trying to recreate my traditional art experience in some way. I’m on a constant#journey attempting to accomplish it#I also add a noise effect to the flat colors (between 5-7%) to mimic a paper ish texture
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NO CAUSE WHY DOES YOUR ART LOOKS SO EDIBLE LIKE I FEEL LIKE IF I TAKE A BITE OUT OF IT WOULD BE CRUNCHY YET SOFT 👁️👁️ I LOVE IT
WHAAT CRUNCHY AND SOFT 😭😭😭😭 I knew it my art is a potato, crunchy (chips) soft (mashed), thank you, it's been confirmed fnxksjsiz 💖💖💖💖 ALSO THANK YOU FOR THE LOVE IT TASTES SWEET
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Stem's thoughts on Harvest Moon: Back to Nature

This game is the first to boast a set of mechanics that I think are the most easily recognizable as how modern farming sims work. It’s the first to have cooking, a detailed tool-upgrading process, a mine… All prior games have been leading up to this!
This is the first console release that I had no idea even existed. In hindsight, it explained why I kept running into game screenshots that looked like they were from a certain game but definitely weren’t whenever I went on random google-images sprees, because this is a straight up asset flip. It’s impossible to play this without comparing it to Harvest Moon 64, the console release that came out not even a year prior. Going in, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to assess this game without comparing it heavily to the remakes that came after it, considering Friends of Mineral Town was the first HM series game that I personally owned and I played it to death, but that proved to not be a problem at all, thanks to its relationship with HM64.

To be clear, this game is absolutely on par with 64. Just in terms of things I liked about that game, this one has more events with NPCs, they’re easier to catch, they’re relatively spaced out to fill the full three years you’re expected to play (rather than only triggering based on friendship levels alone), the gameplay in general runs smoothly and naturally, and the addition of some new decorative assets on top of the old ones makes it look so much nicer while still maintaining the crunchy, old art style. The only thing I really hesitate to say is better than 64 is the pacing, but I’ll get to that. First, I need to go over the gameplay.
The new
It’s hard to say that the game is mechanically too different from 64, other than the inventory and the fences. Do fences finally work as advertised? Well, yes and no, but it’s at least better than when the fences were the thing summoning wild animals in the first place.
The way fences function is most changed by the fact that the wild dog has finally gained corporeal form. After 6PM, if you’re on your farm and have animals out, the dog can come to visit and won’t really attack your animals, but it will bark at them and scare them. Your only solution at this point is to wack that thing with a hammer or other farming implement until it skitters off, or if your dog is well trained, he can help you fight the beast off as well.
The effects of the beast (making your animals unhappy) can be prevented in several ways. Of course, there’s always leaving your animals inside, the time honored tradition that it is (and my personal choice). Alternatively you could put your animals inside a fence. Issue here is that the dog can absolutely bark through the fence, so it kind of does nothing to help you. However, if the fence is two posts thick all the way around, the dog can no longer reach your animals, so in that sense, the fences finally work! It takes up way more space and way more resources though, plus the fact that fence posts rot over time. You can’t really use rocks to compensate because the wild dog walks right over them. The final option is to just not be outside past 6PM. If you’re not there to see it, the wild dog does not exist. I rarely played days that long anyways, so I could have left my animals out all the time with no fences and no problems, but then you run into the issue that your field is massive and it’s way too easy to lose track of your animals.
Oh, and there’s one other detail that I almost forgot– you don’t need to leave the animals out overnight anymore anyways. They finally eat during the day, at least my chickens did, and they were the only animals I bothered to put out because it was as easy as picking them up in my hands to put them back away. I love not fighting livestock hitboxes.
Inventory-wise, this game gives you a myriad of options for carrying things. Firstly, there’s your rucksack which you’re able to buy a larger version of, so you can carry more on your person. Then there’s a basket you can buy which allows you to pick things up in bulk, but not have access to them, so it’s kind of like a shipping bin that you carry around, except you still have to dump it in the shipping bin later, unlike the horse’s saddlebag which IS just a mobile shipping bin. I never got to use the saddlebag because it’s something you get with an adult horse, and despite my best efforts, Barley decided my horse didn’t love me enough and took it away from me. :( My horse loved me a lot though. In the end, my rucksack was big enough and my growing operation was small enough that I never even saw a real need for the basket or saddlebags. Maybe I would if there was any urgency to ship things before 5PM, but things won’t rot in the shipping bin here, so you’re free to take all the time that you need. I actually encourage taking your time, there’s three whole in-game years that you’re expected to play, after all.
In terms of other new additions, there’s now a fish pond on your farm, kind of like GBC2 had, but a little better. This time it’s not just for storing fish (something that’s much less of a concern when you can ship things any time of day), but you’re also able to breed and grow them. The store in town sells fish food that you can use to breed more fish, and just leaving fish in the pond over time will make them grow larger.
You can also finally cook things, rather than just buy meals or collect useless recipes. You have to upgrade your house to get access to a kitchen and then buy the utensils elsewhere, but once you’ve done that, you can make anything in the game and unlock new recipes by either being told them by someone in town or just trying things out for yourself! You cook by choosing both the ingredients and utensils, meaning you can make entirely different things while still using the same ingredient! Cooked meals make for fantastic gifts, and as a result, there’s a whole new feature that I love built around giving you the ability to cook new things, which is the shopping channel on your TV.


Every Saturday after you’ve upgraded your house, the shopping channel will sell items for your house at random. They’re mostly cooking utensils, but there's also a power berry in the rotation. Nothing’s cheap, so it’s a good way to keep the player working and making more money. This is one of my favorite new things, as it gives you more reason to engage with your TV, and it forces you to pay attention to what day of the week it is in game even more than usual. Having one day where you can do something as opposed to various days that you can’t (days certain stores are closed, for example) does so much for making the days seem different and makes you look forward to the next week on a regular basis, as opposed to only looking forward to town festivals which are less frequent and more varied in terms of quality. To buy things, you have to run down to the inn which has the only working phone in town– a charming little reminder that this game is set in a rural town in the 20th century, back when everyone wasn’t so easily connected and it was normal to only have four channels on your TV. Hell, back when it was normal to have cable.
Anyways, on the topic of buying things, while stores in SNES and 64 mostly had you walk up to an item on a shelf to select it and purchase it, this game still has that function, but it far more heavily leans on menus for just about everything aside from a few items in the general store, like the fish food, inventory items, and some cooking ingredients. The most bizarre shopping experience comes when you try to upgrade your house, where you’re forced to follow the very specific order of chicken coop upgrade, to first house upgrade, to barn, to second house, to hothouse for growing crops in any season. It’s kind of weird and confusing the first time you run into it, because it’s easy to imagine something went wrong or that you need to do something else to unlock your house upgrade, but I imagine this was the result of a couple of things. For one, having multiple tiers of upgrades on your house may have been a little strange to implement with their menuing system– I know that the way things worked in 64 was also very confusing and unclear, and in that game, all of it was presented to you the whole time. For two, this game is… really easy as an adult with a functional brain, so it’s a decent way to keep you working on stuff and bar you from having your house upgraded to maximum before the end of year one (which I still did anyways).


Getting all those upgrades takes a lot of wood, so it’s important early on to make sure you have a good ax. Tool upgrades now expand on 64’s leveling up mechanic by requiring you to gain experience with the tools and then take the tools along with a type of mined ore to the blacksmith who will upgrade that tool for a fee, which very nearly brings us to the way that upgrades are most commonly handled in farming sims to this day! It also gives purpose to the cave/mine, which has been a feature in nearly every console release up to this point but was never really fleshed out. Speaking of which, compared to 64, the mine is now available year round rather than just in winter. Instead, there’s a secret mine in the middle of the mountain lake full of higher quality ore that unlocks in winter. There’s no winter crops once again, so as long as you’ve got enough cash saved up, the lake mine makes winter the perfect time to upgrade all your tools, because as long as the tool is leveled up enough, you can skip straight to later upgrades.
The old
What’s truly the same as 64, or at least negligibly different, are the general mechanics for growing crops, caring for animals, and building relationships with people. The town– while arranged differently and with the addition of a specialized chicken store, a general store fusing the 64 bakery and seed shops, and a blacksmith –is generally about the same size as it was in 64, if you take into account all the offshoot areas that weren’t quite based inside the town-proper. Areas like the beach, woods, hot springs, goddess pond, mountain, and summit are all still here and generally serve the same purpose. It’s occupied by generally the same people as well, though only in appearance.
Even the number of festivals is almost exactly the same, though the subjects and contents are different. While there are a couple more minigames incorporated with the festivals here, I would say this game loses out in terms of the town having a sense of culture and life, in that none of the festivals have anything to do with personal beliefs or spirituality in any way other than the goddess festival, which is established as a dying cultural practice, and maybe the music festival which takes place in the church, and that’s it. However, the game actually has something of a narrative defense in this regard: the town pastor isn’t a religious man, which is kind of bizarre but it does track with everything else going on. Religion doesn’t really exist in this town, so rituals wouldn’t really exist either. I do still find the lack of distinct culture disappointing compared to 64, which was brimming with it, but it’s a small nitpick.


Another nitpick I have, one much more tangible, is that it lets you walk behind walls and buildings, which would be one thing if this was played at a straight-on viewing angle and with controls that easily mapped to that, but much like in 64, the camera is set at an isometric 45 degree angle which game controllers are not really designed for. If you walk behind something, a goofy arrow appears above your head to show where you’re at, but it’s still not clear enough that I didn’t regularly run into trouble just trying to go through doors. There aren’t a ton that are an issue, only two that I can think of off the top of my head, but one of those two is the entrance to your own bedroom after you’ve fully upgraded your house. Your bedroom is the place that you have to go to save your game and move time forward, it’s mandatory to go through this door every single day.
What are you farming for?
The game opens with a flashback to your childhood…. If you’re playing as a boy. If you’re playing the version released later where you play as a girl, the story is completely different. This is the first entry in the series where you can marry men! But I didn’t play the girl version, so everything I share about the story will have to do with the original, boy version. There, in your memories, you were visiting your grandfather in the country who was too busy with work to play with you, so instead you met a girl who lived in the town and played with her the whole time you were there. Before you left, you promised to see each other again.
In the current day, your grandfather has died and you’ve been given the option to take over his farm, though the townspeople are hesitant about having someone new in town. As a compromise, you’ll be able to take care of the farm for three years, and as long as you can bring the farm back to its former glory and get along with the townsfolk by then, you’ll be allowed to stay living there! But if you don’t use the land and don’t make any friends, you’re out.
This comes across as a really harsh ultimatum, especially if you don’t know what that “former glory” means, but what it actually translates to is “farm…. At all”. Just ship a couple things, and you’ve basically covered the farming requirements. The harder requirement is to make friends with the people in town, though if you aren’t managing to do that, you’ve missed out on the entire point of the game. In this iteration of the Harvest Moon series, your goal isn’t to farm for crops… but for cutscenes.


Much like 64, every marriageable person has special cutscenes associated with how close the two of you are, and additional cutscenes involving them and their romantic rival. There are also cutscenes to do with the various people in town, as a general story progresses over your three years there. Beyond the familiar mechanics, you’ll see some familiar faces, as every character is reused from 64, just a little to the left. Their families and careers are slightly different, as are the people they date and marry, thus bringing an entirely different story to the table. For example, instead of Lillia’s husband being Basil, a man who brings her loneliness because he leaves for half a year, her husband Rod isn’t present in the game at all, having gone off on a long journey to find a cure for her illness, something she didn’t ask him to do and is pretty peeved about. There’s also the little girl May, who instead of having a working father who’s so busy that she never gets to see him, was abandoned by her mother and lives with her grandfather.
Unlike 64, a lot of these relationship cutscenes, both for you and for your rivals, are slightly less dependent on your relationships with everyone. Instead, to fill out the three years of gameplay, they’re based on time passing. While it’s generally possible to get married as quickly as possible, your rivals will never get married until year three. To fill out all that time, there are a lot more cutscenes that don’t have to do with romance, and a lot more sidequests given to you.
Every marriageable character and rival has a sort of side quest of varying levels of difficulty which gives you a decent bump in their friendship. By varying levels of difficulty I mean it can go from just telling Gray “yes, you can spend a day or two working on my farm in a way that doesn’t inhibit my ability to do anything,” and then in return he weeds your entire field. Or it can be like Ann who needs you to bring her three eggs every single day for a full week without missing a single day or the whole thing ends, and your only reward other than friendship is to get the payment you would have gotten for the eggs anyways.
Probably the most famous example of these quests is Cliff’s, due to the fact that he will leave the town if it isn’t completed, and because it’s so important to his character that it was the only one of these side quests included in either of this game’s remakes. He’s a wanderer, depressed, without a job and without anywhere to go. For his quest, you’re approached by Duke from the winery at some time in fall, asking if you can help with the year’s harvest. If you can bring along a friend to help, that would be great too. The only person you can invite is Cliff, and if you fail to do that, he’ll be gone by the end of the year. What isn’t included in the remakes is the “minigame” you have to do every day of the week that you’re hired, where you walk up to all the grape vines and click on them until you finally pick up some grapes with zero visual feedback. It’s not the hardest quest, but it is certainly the most tedious, and the most punishing if you fail to get Cliff on board.
What you realize pretty quickly as you get on with the game is that the original prompt that you came back to this town to see your childhood friend again really isn’t relevant to anything. None of the girls indicate anything about that to you until the very end of the game, if you got married. What’s going on in the town really has nothing to do with you, and that’s fine. Everyone’s lives are rich and vibrant, and often pretty tragic, and it’s very fun to get deeper into the stories and get a peek into some of the town lore. There is one plotline in particular that overtakes the entire narrative, and it reveals to you what happens when you don’t manage to make friends with everyone in the town. It turns out the town is hesitant to let new people in because it’s full of bigots.
The real story
There are two characters depicted as being a different race than the town at large. One of them is Won, who is portrayed as a con artist and scammer, and appears to be Chinese. He’s introduced when the cop in town comes by one morning to warn you of a suspicious person spotted in town, and Won appears on your farm shortly after. I don’t know exactly how that storyline ends, because I didn’t report him on account of not being a fucking snitch, but Won occasionally sells an assortment of items inside the inn and sometimes comes to your door to sell very useful things like a vase and dog ball.

The other character, Kai, is the only dark skinned character in both this game and in 64, where he worked for the winery and came across as… suspiciously servile. In this game, he shows up in the summertime to sell food at the shack on the beach, and has gained the reputation of a heartbreaker, which has made nearly every man in the town absolutely despise him. At first you might get where they’re coming from, because his demeanor is pretty snarky and smug, but to me it pretty quickly came across that he only acted that way as a defense mechanism, because there are only so many ways you can manage people constantly attacking you for no reason and holding yourself as superior to them isn’t a bad choice. It’s obvious how deeply in the wrong the town is in one of the first events you can get after Kai shows up, where he gets cornered in the inn– the only place he’s able to stay while he’s in town –by at least three different men and you’re given the option to either pick a side or call the whole thing stupid, which it really is and Kai agrees.
The two who hate him most are Duke and Rick. Duke is an alcoholic with notorious anger issues. You can learn much later that his problem is that his daughter allegedly left town due to Kai’s influence (I imagine because he made her realize this town sucks). Meanwhile, Rick hates Kai because his sister Popuri is crazy about him and Rick probably fears for the same result. Popuri is a seemingly cheerful and somewhat childish girl who wants to be helpful. Her family runs a poultry business together, but she was never taught or allowed to do any work, which leads to a bounty of frustrations in her life. To make matters worse, her brother seems to be very possessive and is controlling over who she gets to hang out with, particularly when it comes to her hanging around Kai. The way both Duke and Rick behave gives off the impression that their frustrations with Kai have nothing to do with anything Kai has done, and everything to do with the fact that they’re miserable people to be around.


As you follow the story of Kai and Popuri, you learn everything about the culture problem in the town, the double-standards of acceptance that let you get away with defending Kai while he continues to get teamed up on, and you choose whether or not you want to help Kai and Popuri escape from it (albeit temporarily, they both come back every summer). To be clear, I loved this storyline. The experience of helping the two of them, though on a heavily controlled course, made me feel like I was actually making a difference in characters' lives. And the resulting lack of Popuri’s presence in town afterwards made things feel tangibly different than they were before. Farming sims seldom have interpersonal conflicts that go this deep, and it really enhances the story! I know I spoiled the whole thing here, but in all fairness, I’ve known how this story ends for decades and still had a wonderful time going through the motions. It’s more about the experience than the destination for sure.
My critiques
To beat the game is extremely low-stakes and slow-paced. You’ve got a lot of time to see everything the game has to offer, and just about all of that comes from having good relationships with the NPCs. The problem with this is that if you’re competent with the mechanics, getting through the game can be a total slog. Part of this is because it loads pretty slowly, but there also isn’t very much to do with your time. Since you need a lot of money to get animals, and a ton of money to upgrade your house enough to get married since that’s locked behind other farm upgrades, you do need to do a little bit of farming, but I personally never even touched more than a quarter of my field between crops and grass for animal feed. The ending requirements didn’t ask me to ship that many crops, so I didn’t. I just grew what I needed, and after a certain point, the amount I needed was “nothing”, so I stopped gardening.
Lack of requirement to do so wasn’t the only reason, though. I enjoy farming mechanics, so I would have done it if I wasn’t trying to focus my time elsewhere– on getting story events. By the later points of year two and three, that’s all I was after, and while they are locked by your relationships with the characters, I’d already gotten them as high as I reasonably needed them. I just had to wait for time to pass at that point, and I was getting impatient. The way cutscenes are locked off in this game is that they’ll see you’ve reached the relationship threshold, and then wait until a certain time-marker has passed. Once you’ve met both of those, it’s just about being in the right place at the right time. By and large, the time-marker is the turn of the new year, so everything fires off in a frenzy on the first day of spring that you go into town. I think my record was triggering four cutscenes in sequence by walking in and outside of the poultry farm area a couple times.
Fortunately, the events for Kai and Popuri were locked until summer, when Kai would come to visit, so it wasn’t truly everything happening as soon as spring came up, but still, fall and winter usually had absolutely nothing going on. To make matters worse, once year three rolls around, chances are that you’ve gotten all the relationships filled and all of your progression finished, so it’s just a waiting game to get everyones’ weddings to trigger and then truly be done with story content until you’re evaluated at the end of the year.


This is where we loop back to the fact that I wasn’t farming. If my relationships with everyone were filled and I wasn’t doing anything on my farm, what was I doing? Sleeping. For months at a time. Just to get through things quicker. In year three, I got all the marriage cutscenes I could (one wouldn’t trigger, don’t know why but I had to just give up on it), and then went to bed until the end of the year. My last manual save was dated “Summer 9, year 3”, meaning I slept through three entire seasons to get to the end of the game.
And for what reward? I mentioned previously that this is low-stakes. Technically, all of the games prior to this are low-stakes as well– the requirements to simply not lose your farm are generally pretty relaxed. It’s the variety of “good” endings or praise that you get which often require a frankly obscene amount of work. There are many good endings to be had, but only one bad one. Not the case here! There are different endings for if you didn’t grow enough crops, ship enough things, or make any friends and therefore are kicked out of the town, but if you did manage all three (which is hard NOT to do), there is only one ending you get where the town gathers to tell you you’re welcome to stay in town and congratulate you on your hard work. Even Kai shows up! It’s a nice bit of fanfare but… do I deserve it? It’s on me for playing the game this way of course, but after just sleeping through almost a whole year, I don’t really feel like I earned any praise. The other reward is that you’re allowed to keep playing the save file, but why would I want to do that? I’ve already done everything there was to do.

Conclusion
The first half of this game is my dream Harvest Moon. I sincerely don't understand why FoMT was remade and not this, since this is by far the better game. The fact that the town feels like it has an actual narrative (centered primarily around Kai) is really enjoyable and I feel like there’s a lot of value gained out of each cutscene, and every new bit of dialogue is a joy. In particular, the quantity and variety of quests gave me a lot to do in the downtime between cutscenes. The remakes should have added more of those, not removed them almost entirely. I’m sick to death of Mineral Town because of how much I've played FoMT, so the fact that I enjoyed this so much says a lot about the quality of the game.
That aside, three years is too much time to pass through for how much content there is here. Two and a half would have been manageable, but I understand that the only reason that was the cutoff in SNES was because there literally wasn't anything to do in fall or winter. I enjoyed the lack of goals required to get a good ending because I was so fatigued by the intense grind of the prior games, but the game was so easy that I mostly ran out of things to do for fixing my farm in only year one, and I really just spent year two scrambling around for cutscenes which I didn't really need to even try doing, because I got swamped with them at the start of spring. Maybe if I was a child and worse at playing video games, three years would be okay, but if I was a child, I wouldn’t have made it to year 2 because I wouldn't have the attention span or memory to keep me going. I know this because that’s exactly what happened when I played FoMT.
I suppose how I’d recommend playing the game is to play until you’re satisfied (which will probably be by the end of summer year 2) and then watch or look up the endings. That is assuming you care about the endings at all, which you may not because there isn’t terribly much to them. I do sincerely recommend this game, I think it’s great to play, but you’re almost certainly going to be bored with it and have experienced the vast majority of what it has to offer well before you reach the end of it.
A closing thought in reference to my journey playing all these games in sequence: there’s a chance, just going by my prior knowledge of the later games which I mostly have not played, that this is actually going to be the peak of this series in terms of both ease of play and quality of narrative. I’m sure there will be games with more interesting stories, and maybe a later game that feels better to play, but my bet is none of them hit both as well as this one did.
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Profile Tag Game!!
Hello - Hey! You can call me Kei or Keru. I was tagged by @lovelynim and since I really haven't said a lot about myself on here, this seems like the perfect opportunity to, no?
Chat: Tickling - Hm? What's with my obsession with tickling, you ask? Well, there's a few ways I could answer this... Well, let's just say I see it as just another form of physical affection. Just like other forms, I think it can be both intimate and non-intimate, romantic and platonic, just depends on my mood and who I'm with! But why I like it? Seeing those you love so carefree and laughing is something anyone would like, right?
Chat: Writing - I think one of my biggest flaws is that so much goes on in my brain but I have so little motivation. Putting my thoughts on paper just takes a lot out of me, y'know? But that's not to say I dislike it, I just have to take a little more time than most.
When It Rains - Ah, I love the rain so much...at least from inside. The sound of it hitting the window, the low rumble of thunder. It all just gets me in a cozy mood, but you won't see me outside.
When It Snows - It snowing?! By far the best weather in my opinion. Being bundled in clothes and blankets, the sun shining and glittering on the snow? It's so pretty! It's a shame the weather here tends to fluctuate too much for it to stay for longer than a week, though.
When the Sun Is Out - Ugh it's so bright and hot. Can't we go back inside with the air conditioning?
When the Wind is Blowing - Ah, such a nice break from the heat!
Good Morning - Ugh, just a few more minutes...
Good Afternoon - Wanna go grab lunch with me? I heard there's a new sushi place that just opened down the street! Oh? You're not a big fan of sushi? That's fine, you pick instead!
Good Evening - The sun is finally going down! Time to relax...
Good Night - Hm? Why am I still awake? Don't mind me, I just tend to feel more productive at night. Do you want me to be quieter? No need? Alright, go back to sleep. Rest easy.
About me: Music - I find that music tells you more about a person than anything else. Just one look at their playlists and recently played songs and I can tell how their feeling and what they like in a heartbeat! Plus, music just helps me relax, so why wouldn't I like it?
Something to Share: Shyness - I've been shy pretty much all my life. What does that technically mean? Well let's just say I have a really hard time starting conversations. But if others start the conversation then I feel much more comfortable, so feel free to talk to me anytime, I don't mind!
My Troubles - It just seems like there's so much I want to do but there's so little time... I guess I'll just have to try to make the most of it!
Favorite Food - Um...I can't say I really have a favorite, but I do like meat! It can go in pretty much any savory dish, and the variety of textures and tastes you can add to it just seem never-ending! And when you combine it with pasta? Mmm, delicious!
Least Favorite Food - Listen, I have my fair share of foods I don't like too much. Raw tomatoes, raw celery, vinegar... but I just cannot for the life of me figure out why people like pickles. They're crunchy and soft, somehow sweet and sour? Yeah, no thanks.
About @chibimochii - Mochi is probably the first friend I made in the community, and I couldn't be more happy about it! I had been around in tumblr for a few years before I made my blog, but he's the first person I interacted with. He's a really nice guy and his art is always just *muah* so cute! Defiantly visit his blog, you won't be disappointed!
About @ticklystuff - I haven't interacted with him a ton, but he's a pretty cool guy! I think we really bonded most over out shared obsession with fictional men, though.
About @undercovergamer - We have pretty regular discussions over out shared love of Itto, and who could blame us? The guy is really loveable! He sends a ton of fanfics to me, which I am so grateful for!
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I'm gonna go ahead and tag @chibimochii, @ticklystuff, @undercovergamer, and @italeean for this game! Of course, if anyone else wishes to join in, go ahead!
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i have no idea what episode this is part 2
part 2 of this post i think?? tbh i found the clip in some random youtube video i have no idea if this takes place directly after or not and im just judging based on the time of day/setting
(i actually did search through like. the last few episodes of season 1 and the first few episodes of shou and i couldnt find shit so i'm assuming that this episode happened in one of the places i didnt check. not for lack of trying but because the website i was using straight up died on the spot trying to load them all so quickly)
(edit: it's episode 16 of durarara season 1 ty @/pineapplething)
this screenshot is killing me actually. i had to pause instead of doing the 0.25 speed thing because i need his hands to be on his hips so it looks like he's just. staring down at the thing judgingly. izaya's pose is so funny because right before that he's like
'what the fuck are you doing shizu-chan'
i forget the context of this scene too but like. why wasnt he pointing the knife at shizuo?? what were they doing. bro i love not having ANY context whatsoever and being too lazy to look up the actual episode
anyway babygirl looks so ugly in those shots god bless
bro why you arching your back like that 🤨
in front of izaya too. god
the way they have four separate reaction shots for izaya. bro the things that must've been going on through his head were NOT safe for work on god.
the way he says 'seriously' and then remembers to point the knife like bro had to take a second. he was processing. he almost looks enamored in that first shot actually (<- delusional)
izaya's rectangle prism ass never ceases to amaze. glad he keeps that in both art styles
shizuo looks so funny from this angle i bet you could get the most unhinged smear frames every time he goes rage mode
can we get like an angry shizuo aesthetic moodboard except it's all either low quality or smear frames. it'd be really funny trust
also incredible how shizuo can extend the length of the guard rail to like. twice its size. it was not that big in the previous images. i wonder if that's a metaphor for something
god these SUCKED to get pictures of because celty comes in so fast and there's no indication of when the frames will switch but i do it for you (im doing this for me. im obsessed. i have a final on tuesday for the class i have a B in but actually i think it's a D now)
these would probably be much easier to screenshot if i just downloaded the videos but why would i do that when i can press the back arrow key 50 zillion times and listen to the crunchy 0.25 audio explode every time shizuo opens his mouth
this image gets me every time ugh they almost look like they were having a casual conversation or smth (<-delusional)
just. arch enemies both being distracted by something long enough to stop beefing with each other does something to me. i dont even know it doesnt have to be romantic i just like watching it (although it's usually romantic because im a sucker for enemies to/and lovers if you couldnt tell by my usual ships)
that's the end of this scene (or at least the youtube clip of it. you cannot ask me to load all those anime episodes again) but like man. good shit ill be replaying this in my brain for the next week or so
#shizaya#if anyone knows what episode this is...please tell me...im dying#im pretty sure it's sometime in shou and probably near the end but i cant load ittttttt#i need to know what happens after this so i can write a canon divergent fanfic of it where they go home and bang#izaya orihara#shizuo heiwajima#durarara
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Analysis of the song “Choker” by Raincloud Halo
(Note: I do not own any of these characters, I am just very intense about artists I like, and my adhd is very unmedicated right now so I’m on my hyperfixation bullshit. All characters belong to @cynopter / @tobyisave, I am but a humble nerd who needs to let my energy out somehow.)
Cw suicide, strangulation, general violence, OCD, and intrusive thoughts.
Linking to the creator’s post about the characters, I’m just gonna go more in depth and speculate about specifics within the song and what each lyric could be alluding to. Again, send this dude bro all the love, motherfucker deserves it for scratching at the adhd parts of my brain and having such crunchy looking art. Anyways, if their art had a flavor it would be salty and spicy, and that’s my favorite, so go check them out.
Gonna go bit by bit, lyrics in orange, my notes in white.
“Veering off the path
With the devil on my shoulder”
Townsend went as far into the middle of nowhere as they could get to hang themself, they’re going off the already established paths to make sure no one finds them. People who kill themself will sometimes go out of the way to make sure their loved ones don’t find them. This is most likely what Townsend is doing, not realizing that it’ll trap her as a ghost. The devil line is a reference to the fact that their family and community blamed their OCD on the devil, so Townsend’s religious trauma is showing it’s hand.
“A sturdy branch that won't snap
And Baby's jacket dangling at my waist
'Cause he won't miss it when he's older”
First part is just referencing Townsend finding a branch that’ll hold their weight so that they can hang themself, the second bit is what I’m more interested in. Townsend stole her baby brother’s jacket to take with her as a reminder as to why she’s doing this, and I believe the line has a duel meaning. Townsend’s brother won’t miss the jacket when he’s older, sure, but he also won’t miss May. He’s a baby at this point, he hasn’t been hit with the consciousness beam yet, he won’t remember the older sister that died if she does it now.
“It gets really bad
I don't know why they're not scared of that
I only dream of hurting him
Now images of wringing him out”
Townsend is terrified of her intrusive thoughts, she had OCD and is suffering from violent compulsions. She wants someone to hold her accountable, to hurt her, to keep their distance so she doesn’t hurt them. It’s why she commits suicide, in her mind it’s the best possible way to keep her from hurting her brother since she loves him. She’s sort of hyping herself up in this moment, once more reminding herself as to why she’s doing this.
“No one ever tell you not to nurse the wolf pup?
Now I've gone and tied the ends off on this strife
Sorry, that's just what happens when you trust me with my life”
May sees herself as a dangerous creature, therefore is comparing her family keeping her around to keeping a wolf around. In her mind she’s just going to maul someone, so she needs to be put down for the greater good. She finishes tying the noose, apologizes one last time, and dies.
“The city
Good people passing through me everywhere I go”
May wakes up as a ghost, she’s officially the ghost at the towns end, and Townsend is figuratively born. The thing is, since she’s a ghost, no one can see her. Everyone around her seem like “good people”, better than her, and she’s stuck alone having to watch them. It’s like living in hell, seeing “normal” people just living their lives, and none of them seeing the supposed demon standing right by them. It’s why she lives in the edge of town, she can’t stand to see them.
“And I hate that you found mе
Don't want to have to say I told you so”
Enter stage left Phượng, she can see ghosts and finds Townsend. And Townsend fucking hates it, not because she necessarily dislikes Phượng, but because it means she could potentially hurt someone. As much as Phượng reassures Townsend that she’s not dangerous, she doesn’t believe it and is waiting for the “I told you so” moment. She’s anticipating the moment she snaps and hurts Phượng, and is fucking terrified of the thought.
“"Don't touch me, I'll kill you"
The devils will slip through”
Townsend is trying to keep Phượng and her brother as emotionally distant as humanly possible, it’s safer that way after all, at least it is in Townsend’s mind. Along with that she’s trying to get Phượng to lash out and exorcise her, to kill her and get it over with. It’s a fucked up way of trying to protect the two. The devils line is once again referencing Townsend’s religious upbringing and her belief that Satan himself is fucking with her brain and making her want to kill.
“But still you hold me to yourself in bed
Like it’s all in my head”
Phượng has full knowledge of Townsend supposedly being an evil ghost, and in spite of that, she still wants her. She still loves Townsend, she loves May, and still is completely comfortable sleeping next to May. Phượng knows that May would never hurt her, May can’t event stomach the idea of hurting someone, let alone hurting her partner. Phượng keeps telling May that it’s just in her head and that that there’s no way May would hurt her, pulls her close at night so there’s not the kind of distance May thinks is safe for Phượng, is insistent that May isn’t dangerous or evil. Specifically having it be when Phượng is sleeping next to May is something interesting to take note of, because she trusts May at what could be considered a person’s most vulnerable state. People can’t defend themself when sleeping, so it’s a big sign of trust and security in May.
“But it gets so bad
I don't know why you're not scared of that
I'm thinking of your broken body
Reaching in and squeezing softly”
Townsend’s worst night has started pulling itself out of the hellscape that is her OCD, the intrusive thoughts and homicidal compulsions have transferred onto Phượng. She’s started thinking about killing Phượng, and it’s hell. What’s worse is that the compulsions have gotten more gorey and violent, which scares Townsend. Even still, after presumably telling Phượng about her compulsions, Phượng remains a devoted partner and isn’t scared of May. It confuses the hell out of May, Phượng knows damn well what May is thinking about, and she still loves May.
“No one ever tell you not to play with fire?
Somehow got to hang me higher than your knife”
(Going to be so for real, I’ve got no clue what the knife line is referring to, so gonna focus on the other one. )
The line about fire has a larger meaning, May is comparing herself to fire, something dangerous and deadly. Thing is, Phượng isn’t scared of fire, she burns stuff often as offerings to her sister. May saying she’s deadly, that Phượng is playing with fire, but it’s a double meaning that helps show why Phượng isn’t scared of Townsend. Phượng can see the good in fire, the good it can do for her sister, and is completely fine around it. Townsend is fire to Phượng, but in the sense of the warmth and safety it brings, and more importantly the love.
“I swear to god
Stop saying that you trust me with your life!”
Phượng keeps trying to reassure May, tell her that she trust her, but it’s just cold comfort to May. May couldn’t even be trusted with her own life, how is she expected to be trusted with her partner’s? It’s the racing thoughts of not being able to keep a loved one safe, and all their reassurances not making May feel better. Sometimes loved ones say the wrong thing and can cause people suffering from a mental illness to spiral or lash out, being told this just makes May feel like she got handed a loaded weapon with a hair trigger on it.
“ "Choke her" Fuck Him" "Devil"
Why would I do that?
Why would I do that?
Why would I do that?
"Choke her" Fuck Him" "Devil"
Why would I do that?
Why would I do that?
Why would I do that?”
May is full in her own mind at this point, she’s scaring the every loving hell out of herself, and questioning why she’d even want to choke her loved ones to death. It’s scary, and she just is repeating the question over and over again in her mind. The three most common intrusive thoughts she has are full swing, the thought of choking Phượng, the thought of harming her brother, and the thought that keeps calling herself the devil due to her religious trauma. It’s bouncing back and forth between the compulsions and questioning why she’d ever even think of doing that. The bridge is basically just one extended panic attack May is having in her mind.
“Choker!”
Roll credits.
But seriously, this is just May calling herself choker, and the compulsion of “choke her” morphing into an insult in her mind due to the stress and similarity of pronunciation. Townsend has managed to find a way to turn her compulsion into a title/self loathing term by meshing the two words together.
“I lover her
And I love my baby brother
Love her (Devil)
Love her (Devil)
Lover (Devil)”
May is reaffirming her love for her brother and for Phượng in her mind, along with accepting the fact she is in love with Phượng. She accepts Phượng as her lover and is willing to have that vulnerability, even tho her own low self esteem keeps causing thoughts that call her the devil. She’s trying to comfort herself with continued remembrance that these are the two people she loves most in the world.
“I’d never do that
(Choke her)”
I think this line can be read two ways,
•May accepting that she’d never actually hurt Phượng because she loves Phượng, even if the compulsions are still ringing in the back of her mind.
•Townsend having a crisis of conscious and desperately trying to cling onto the last bit of self soothing she can find when she feels like the intrusive thoughts and OCD are consuming her.
Personally I like the first one more because it leaves the door open for hope and the possibility of May being able to life a happy life with her lover. The mental illness may never go away, but she still knows that she loves Phượng and her little brother, and at the end of the day she’d never hurt them.
Moral of the story, intrusive thoughts don’t make you a bad person, there is no such thing as thought crime, and the Catholic Church should never be trusted with mental health issues.
This is just my own interpretation and analysis, I could be completely off the mark with this one, I just am having fun.
Again, please go check out the original creator, his work is amazing and he deserves more love for it. Their work really resonates with me, especially Choker with the fears of how intrusive thoughts could harm loved ones, and I think there’s a lot of good to be had in someone making stuff like this. Plus, the dude is just generally really skilled, and you can see the amount of effort it took to get to this point in his various artistic endeavors. I pray for that man’s wrist, the carpel tunnel must be so bad.
#raincloud halo#orange peels on fire#opof#not my oc#not my character#townsend#Phuong#cw ocd#cw violence#cw death#cw sui mention#cw strangulation#analysis#song analysis
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