#with logic! and consistency!

[satsuha]

ema's standard for prosecutors...

i like the original version of this dialogue because she says she doesn't like klavier because he's "jarajara" (sfx for jangling/clinking) because of his chains and not "hirahira" (sfx for fluttering), an obvious reference to edgeworth's cravat but i like to think it refers to lana's scarf too

[essektheylyss]

I understand the impulse to clown on Essek for walking around in Vasselheim with his recognizable voice with the Bright Queen's spearhead commander, and of course we could turn to the metatextual elements (the necessity of signposting the world for players on the part of the GM, the ease of using a familiar ally to introduce a relevant NPC and new point of contact) to dismiss this if we wanted, but I think it's more interesting—and funnier, as you'll see—to imagine this as simply an extension of the laws and logic that dictate the Mighty Nein as a narrative entity.

Fundamentally, the Mighty Nein within their campaign pursue personal and collective agency, often at the expense or in denial of political power. Where they do interact with more political forms of power, they evade its grasp upon them, most notably in their interactions with the war, but also while they engage with the Cerberus Assembly, the Cobalt Soul, and even the Revelry. The way they pursue agency, on the other hand, has far more to do with their own support of one another and their own individual power, especially where there is magic involved, and manifests in having the freedom to move and act as they wish in the world.

The culmination of this, as we know, is the mechanical ability in their final battle against Lucien and the Somnovem to manipulate the terrain of the battle map to their advantage with only imagination. At the same time, Jester and Caduceus can both call in free favors from their gods, one of whom is unlimited by the Divine Gate and in fact is far more governed by fey logic. Fjord has made three different divine pacts and is virtually unrestricted by any of them. Caleb's hallmark is an almost infinitely malleable home that almost literally seems to operate as a hammerspace, with a pinnacle dedicated to the potentiality of the universe, the application of which is one of his signature spells—against all odds successful in his initial goal, no longer fueled by guilt and grief, of bending reality to his will. It's narratively and thematically cogent that this be the calling card of the party as a whole.

The Mighty Nein are, in effect, dictated by Looney Tunes logic, and nothing else. They have been so successful in their pursuit of their own freedom that they no longer abide by the cosmic laws of Exandria, let alone the laws of physics or sense. So yes, from an external point of view, it does look exceedingly foolish for Essek to be traipsing around in Vasselheim under the Bright Queen's nose, but it's far more entertaining to argue that being a member of the Mighty Nein in fact simply confers the capability of ignoring the laws of reality without consequence when it's narratively convenient, characteristically interesting—or just really fucking funny.

[cologona]

Yeah nothing Jason does would work in the real world. Good thing he does not live in the real world. He lives in Gotham, which operates on the logic of Hollywood movies from 40 years ago. Oh wait- perhaps that’s integral context for his character!!!

[heartorbit]

catch us if you can! ☆

[tainebot01]

I was working on this video when the Investigations Collection Announcement dropped, then proceeded to spiral for the next few days before finally finishing it.

[fite-club]

gotta be honest a lot of these "everyone unfairly demonizes men and treats them as dangerous!" transmascs got suspiciously offended at the suggestion to ask roided-out dudes at the gym where they get T. like a suspicious amount of people decided to interpret that as them being told to go get assaulted and are using it as proof of "transandrophobia". but like, why are you automatically assuming that buff men are going to assault you for talking to them? what happened to the unfair stereotyping of being dangerous??

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[kaiserouo]

umbra daddy

now that's the real question

[shaylogic]

shoutout to the consistency of not seeing Edwin's reflection here

[vaguely-concerned]

walking through lucanis' mind prison. the tam lin of it all

[radsplain]

"the problem is men, not trans women!"

ok but what is a man? what is it about this group of people that makes them a problem? is it the identity of 'man' that's the problem? and if all men stopped identifying as men would the problem go away?

[phanboyo]

So the lichtenberg scar thing.

Technically lichtenberg scars only last for a couple of days, yeah? But maybe Danny's is Special because its his death mark or whatever, I've seen that kind of sentiment going around. Though there are Implications for people who know him as Danny but don't know about his ghost half. That's a whole other post though.

You know who else I've seen headcanoned as having a constant lichtenberg scar?

Billy Batson. His would fade like normal in a couple days, but he's constantly being struck by lightning to transform into Captain Marvel so it never really gets the chance to heal and disappear fully while he's constantly using his powers.

So I propose. Danny and Billy both picking up on each other's vague references to another form, both seeing each other's barely hidden lichtenberg scars, both coming to the incorrect conclusion that they are the same thing.

Danny thinking Billy is also a halfa who got electrocuted. Billy thinking Danny was also blessed by a wizard to tranform with the living lightning.

BETTER YET. If it's one of those scenarios where Danny came in from another dimension, they're convinced that the other is their dimensional parallel.

Danny: *making references to the Ghost Zone and half dying assuming that Billy knows what he's talking about*

Billy: *completely misunderstanding and responding with references to the Rock of Eternity and the wizard*

[meltedmush]

Do you have any tips for people trying to get better at art?^^

I’ve been getting this question a lot, so here’s my answer!

I highly recommend just studying the fundamentals of art and consistently practicing with them in mind. It’s probably a lame answer, but knowledge is your best friend when improving and I can’t EMPHASIZE how important these fundamentals are.

This is a triangle I pulled from the web with some of my notes (in red) which have a good decent order to the basics. Obviously it’s not all of them, BECAUSE there’s SO MANY. These fundamentals are also just so deeply intertwined with each other along with physics and psychology.

I always think of these basics like a building. The more stronger and proficient you are in these bases, the better and stronger your art will become. It’ll also allow you to deconstruct artworks and learn why they are so appealing and why they work.

I would love to go off and explain every single inch of the basics I’ve learned, but I’m gonna end up writing an essay by accident. If there’s anything specific like perspective (I’M SO DOWN BAD FOR PERSPECTIVE), color, lighting, shape, and composition you want me to elaborate on or DEMONSTRATE, I’d love to!! :D

[highladyluck]

What's wrong with me that I want to write science fiction in a fantasy setting :(

[skyheld]

gatt is very funny because you'd be tempted to assume his opinions on magic align with fenris', ie all magic is bad and all mages are dangerous, but they really don't. gatt's tevinter life has made him think that magic is a normal part of the world and nothing to fear in and of itself. the difference is in how it's used. while he never had access to many magical luxuries in tevinter, he'd find it perfectly normal to use a spell to heat or cool a drink and has absolutely no issue with healing magic. he hates weird magic which is basically anything that concerns spirits or the fade, and anything that manipulates blood or the dead, and anything he doesn't like in general.

unless it's a mage he trusts performing those types of magic, because then it's probably not that weird.

[eveningdawn222]

there r some parts of fanon i dont even really mind, or even some i like! the lazarus pit giving jason side effects isn't bad in and of itself, but when it crosses over into pit rage i always tap out. tapetum lucidum? interesting and uncanny!! little fangies ? will forever be allured... eyes glow sometimes? depends how u use it, but can be cool!

i will always be in favor of jason being the magic one. more all blades, more leaning into the fact that he crawled himself out of his grave and no one really knows why! there's so much potential for jason find himself outside of the batfamily, for distancing himself from their ideas of what doing good is...