steeples my evil little fingers. guess what im still thinking about. anyway i think mark spends several actual days in the Tube and the trickster keeps trying to keep him bugs and he’s starving and getting more and more pissed off. hangry even. but the only food the trickster gives him (every day on schedule dinner bell and everything. probably on schedule. its not like mark has a clock) is a fucking pile of meal worms. mark kills them, because he’s learned the hard way that constant wriggling unsettles him more than the lonely stillness, and ag LEAST it gives him soemthing to do. but he refuses to eat them. are you fucking crazy he’s not going to eat bugs. So he snaps one day when the trickster appears with that fucking bell and snarls something angry anout being starved and those are bugs. thats lizard food. Humans eat meat and he’s a human. The trickster freezes, smile still in place, and slowly tilts its head. “Meat?” it echoes, and mark realizes his mistake but he is so fucking hungry that he doesnt understand the potential ramifications yet. The trickster turns around and walks away without dumping the meal worms and mark figures he fucked up and wont get “fed” today. He doesnt want to eat those fucking worms. he wont. except he needs to live to safe ashe, so he’ll do what he fucking has to.
the trickster rings the dinner bell an hour later. his hands are full of meat. Raw. ground, but by a machine—like its been shredded by claws. There is no skin, no fur, no feathers. Nothing he can use to identify where this came from. The trickster cheers, “Dinner!” and the meat disappears from his hands and reappears on the ground on mark’s side of the glass. mark snarls again, scared but reacting to the fear eith anger, “no! I meant- cooked food! Beef or chicken or fish! *cooked!* or— fuck the meat, what about vegetables? tomatoes??” and he has to be specific here because his stomach is roiling with hunger snd an active imagination and the blood on the trickster’s hands reminds him of his wife’s heart in ashe’s.
the trickster leaves. mark doesnt touch anything. he’s so fucking hungry. he’s so angry.
when the trickster comes by the next day (more meat in its bare hands, still bleeding) he tries again. it tilts his head, stares at him, and smiles wider. “Say please.”
this is before, i think, a lot of the really horrific nightmares and shit. no time loop deaths. biggest horror is the trickster’s existence. mark is still angry and prideful and he wont eat the bugs because he wont play along with whatever sick game the trickster is playing. refuses to act the lizard. refuses to be a pet. stays silent, grinding his teeth (later he has to check that they arent cracked), and doenst say please.
the trickster laughs. Rings the bell. gives him the bloody meat. leaves.
and mark is fucking angry and he is so fucking hungry and he has to live for ashe. he’s getting weaker by the day. the trickster is gone for hours and he knows itll be gone for at least two dozen more. its disappeared for a full day at least once so maybe even longer.
…hes so hungry. its not bugs. he doesnt know what it is but it isnt bugs. he can even make it a person meal, kind of, when he grabs the raw meat in his bare hands and electrocutes it to cook it. horrible fucking idea btw because then its charred in most areas and undercooked in others but its something his brain will let him recognize as food.
he eats.
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Blinky pulls his hood over his head and squeezes it down so that it’s completely pressing against his ears. He goes for his sunglasses before remembering that he had left them in his other hoodie after the shower, and instead squints to hopefully filter the amount of light coming through from the bright fluorescents of the grocery store. Even close to night, it’s still reasonably full with chattering people and carts with squeaky wheels going back and forth through aisles after forgetting something or adding items to their buys. He smells fresh produce nearby and decides to stumble around until he finds what he’s looking for.
Tinky would have gotten lost…
As he justifies going all the way to a store to help his baby brother while extremely tired instead of sending Karaxis, Blinky finds the glass case of raw meat. If he was honest, he understood Nibbly’s preference to it - it did look filling, even uncooked. Bliklotep wouldn’t try human meat without reason to, but he certainly wasn’t opposed to it.
You there.
He strides up to the counter and presses his palms onto it to stare the gal working there down, and his squinting might make him look just a tad more stressed than he actually is.
Get me the thickest and largest piece of meat that you have. Preferably something human-tasting.
He thinks it over.
Like pork. Or - you know what, steak is close enough. Or veal, even better. You got veal?
The woman stares at him. Blinky taps his fingers on the counter impatiently.
Well?
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!!CW: DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENCE/SA (and spoilers, obviously)!!
Highlights from my Paradise playthrough. Shout out to my saint of a partner for letting me spam him with my bullshit.
I use generic names for my partner's benefit (they're a sane person with no interest in BL VNs), so MC-kun is Azuma, Fluffy-kun is Takara, Asshole-kun is Mitsugi, and Reliable-kun is Madara.
Let's begin!
Paradise is the 20th VN I've played and I think it's the first one to have this option. Overall I really liked the technical presentation.
I generally avoid checking spoiler tags when going in so at this point all I had was my experience with other BL games and a few hints about this game's brutality. Overall the content itself is in line with things I've seen before, but hoo boy did some of Azuma's inner dialogue hit hard. That poor guy.
As an aside: I always approach a VN blind until I get an ending. After that I choose who to target and get all their bad ends first, then the good before moving on to the next LI. This approach was perfect for Paradise since the bad ends gave you the context needed to fully understand the good endings and greater mystery in the narrative. Mitsugi > Madara > Takara is definitely the best experience.
(This is subtle foreshadowing of me using up the nation's entire copium supply a few days later)
(And this is subtle foreshadowing of my choice for Best Boy)
The translation for this game was pretty good until the last arc. Mitsugi and Madara's routes all felt natural. I'm not the kind of person who wants everything to be literal, so it was nice to see a real effort put towards localizing their routes. I think the only line I raised an eyebrow at was the Scooby Doo reference (which I'm assuming is localizing an extremely Japanese joke/reference).
Sadly this didn't hold up in Takara's route. Suddenly it felt like a very unpolished machine TL- stilted phrasing and sudden tense switching pulled me out of some big moments. Inconsistent terms were suddenly an issue too; namely, the literal transliteration "log house" being used instead of the localized "cabin" in a few places. Lastly, the many instances of "we're" instead of "were" in the script. C'mon! I've read fan TLs with more polished writing and editing y'know? Was it due to a deadline crunch? Careless oversight? Don't know, but I do care.
My heart broke for Azuma over and over again. Just, all the time. At this point I knew the game was an utsuge so I just sat back and let my feelings get trampled as intended.
Classic BL problems.
Classic BL "solutions".
Go ahead and laugh at past me. I am so disappointed in him.
I can't tell you why I like having my heart crushed, spit on, set on fire, and launched into the sun. But at least I know what I like.
I have mixed feelings for the story itself but the characters are above par for a BL VN. Faint praise? Maybe. But I get the sense that the happy ends are supposed to make you feel despair too despite the upbeat music and framing. It's not a good thing that MC-kun comes to accept the guys who have fucked him up. It's uncomfortably true to life how he makes excuses for their abuse just because they showed him some kindness, and it leaves me feeling hollow to watch him disappear into the sunset with them. Yes even Mitsugi. He doesn't get a pass just because he sticks to verbal abuse in the same story as a violent sadist and a murderous cannibal.
Case in point about the "good endings still feel bad".
I was down so, so bad. Good job Paradise you successfully got me to pin all my hopes on this little fucker.
I'll spare y'all the long barganing phase I went through but it ran the gamut from "maybe he's possessed" to "split personality" to "unholy experiment gone wrong". By his first bad end the scales had started to fall, though. I hit rock bottom at last in the second bad end.
I generally limit the title of Best Boy to a LI, even if it's closer in spirit to "Guy I Hated the Least". The only VN I've changed that for is Tokyo Onmyouji because none of those men deserved Tengenjibashi. It wasn't even a fucking contest. Here? Well...
Badly stilted TL in a crucial emotionally heavy scene. This is just the worst example I snipped while playing but man, did anyone look at the script for this route after the machine TL spat it out?
I learned nothing.
And here is where all of my negative feelings about Paradise stem from...
I understand that writers need to rein in the story at some point. You don't have infinite budgets for VAs and all. But the janky, sudden skip to the reveals being recited right away followed by the drive off into the sunset soured the whole experience for me. I wasted hours of my life trying to figure it out when the writers just said shit we gotta go here's the Cliff's Notes see you never. I bought in and was rewarded with the most underwhelming delivery I've seen this side of Phantom Thief Jade. The payoff is the second most important part of a mystery story guys! You gotta take the time to pace the Big Reveal and let the player chew a bit before taking the plate away! It's such a shame that they went through so much effort to layer and misdirect only to give up right at the finish line.
Despite that, I still had enough fun that I consider Paradise a worthwhile investment. I hope the fan disk can be brought over too someday.
Never mind- burn it all down. No survivors.
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