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rantheon · 4 years

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the bakarina anime is done! it’s just a drop in the ocean that is the otome isekai genre so these are some recs + what you need to know about them. i just listed most of my favs otherwise it’d be too long :p

in no particular order. includes some non-isekai ones too. needless to say most of these aren’t completed yet

my next life as a villainess: all routes lead to doom

using this to plug that there’s more bakarina content in the form of light novels, manga and 3 spin-offs

an observation record of my fiancee - a self-proclaimed villainess

told in the pov of prince cecil, whose fiancee bertia straight up tells him she’s a villainess of an otome game from her past life

if you ever wonder what jeord from bakarina might be thinking half the time, this is probably close. cecil is the same kind of prince who initially finds things bored and predictable until they met the mc

the things cecil would get up to for bertia? hoo boy

also the way the mangaka draws hair is addicting to look at

the villainess cecilia silvie doesn’t want to die so she decided to crossdress

the title speaks for itself~ after remembering an otome game she played in her past life, cecil (previously cecilia) is now the one capturing the hearts of the academy ladies instead

it’s fairly new so there’s not much of it yet :c but it’s pretty interesting

the original otome game had a whole rpg combat system going on and i’m hyped to see how it’s gonna lead the story

the Angelique vibes are strong in this one

the villainess wants to marry a commoner

isabella used to play an otome game in a past life, but she was really only interested in a side character named ursch. and then one day she finds him in her mansion garden

her past life self is such a mood - i too have 100% otome games in hopes of side characters getting hidden routes but alas

definitely deserves the ‘video game’ tag. isabella can see status screens and character stats/skills etc, and all the gacha rewards and grinding transferred over after her reincarnation. she’s the isekai female protag we’ve always wanted

seriously the main ship is too op for their own good aha

deathbound duke’s daughter

in a past life, erika only managed to finish 2.5/7 scenarios of an otome game thanks to an unlucky encounter with knife-kun. with the different flags of her impending doom approaching, she takes things into her own hands years before the game events start

very fantasy-oriented (the most on this list) and pretty action-packed, once you get past the game exposition in the first 3? chapters

the world building is brilliant, from the hafan mages to the aurelian alchemists, and there’s beasts and wands and spells and dnd stuff sprinkled in

the cast has quite interesting dynamics and interwoven plotlines, and they’re all dorky in their way :>

beware of the villainess

melissa remembers a novel from her past life and desperately tries to cut off contact with the male leads, but they still make her life hell & she rages

she’s just so done with everyone and you can’t help but relate to her

definitely the funniest on this list XD melissa and her reactions takes the cake but even the shit characters are hilarious in their own way

there’s also a lot of parodies to memes etc & best of all, there’s cussing. all the shits and fucks. a whole lot of it

it’s great

death is the only ending for the villainess

penelope wakes up as the villainess from a game she’d been playing in her past life, only right now it's on the hardest difficulty where death is literally everywhere. thus she tries, well, not dying

what’s cool about this is that penelope has access to the original game system. she can see menus, choice options etc. the male leads even have affection percentages floating above their heads :> which is always cool to see (and what i’m a sucker for)

but it’s definitely one of the darker ones on this list. iirc there’s depictions of violence, abuse, drugs and then some. just a fair warning

the daughter of albert house wishes for ruin

upon realizing that she’s the villainess from a past-life otome game, mary decides to stay as one. chaos ensues

i love this manga so much, everyone is so quirky and there’s something to laugh about on almost every page. the story almost feels self-aware of itself and just lets the characters do whatever. like ride bikes

addie is so cute ;o;

it’s definitely something everyone should experience

i’m a villainess daughter so i’m going to keep the last boss

one of the finished ones!

post-annulment, aileen pulls a Lisa Tepes and asks the demon king claude to marry her. he refuses. hijinks ensues

mostly on the fantasy side, as it builds on the world of the monsters

the cast is pretty fun! aileen’s smart, funny and pretty competent in her own right. plus she and claude are positively adorable together

milady just wants to relax

post-annulment, ronia decides to open a cafe in the countryside. it later becomes the frequent hangout of a beastmen mercenary group, who are intensely feared by the townsfolk

well... beastmen. that’s all you need to know /wink

okay, that aside, it’s just as chill as the title suggests. ronia slowly makes friends she can trust, and the beastmen find a second home in the only cafe that’s willing to accept them. it’s pretty wholesome

the banished villainess! living the leisurely life of a nun making revolutionary food

despite actively trying to change her ‘villainess from a past-life otome game’ fate since childhood, elizabeth gets annulled, her noble title stripped, and is sent to a church in a neighboring kingdom. she enjoys it more than expected, despite the appearance of the ever watchful leonid

there’s plenty of 21st-century food like sandwiches, cotton candy leonid’s muscles <3

the entire cast is lovable, and can chris get an f for all the heart attacks leonid keep giving him

seduce the villain’s father

yereninovica (or just yerenica) realizes that she’s in the world of a novel she read in her past life, but as the aunt of said novel’s mc. after thwarting a kidnapping that’s basically the mc’s origin story, she takes it upon herself to also prevent the tragic death of emperor belgoat

a bit different since it switches the roles around (side character x side character) and goes into the “parent generation” of the original work

there’s also an interesting bit where the world seems to recognize her as a hijacker, and where that takes her, we’ll see in due time :o:

plus the way yeni habitually calls him ‘father’ cracks me up every time

transferred to another world but i’m the savior of an otome game

after a ritual gone wrong, “yamada tarou” (fake name) is stuck in the world of an otome game. the only way back is with a magical ring, normally obtained after becoming the lover of one of the male leads. he of course says no i’m going adventuring but the game doesn’t like that

it’s absolutely hilarious - the leads treat our mc like a heroine, and there’s a lot of otome tropes that are called out on/parodied. like the seiyuus’ names oh my god

tarou’s reactions are great and his appraisal skill is the funniest thing alive

endo and kobayashi’s live commentary on the villainess

in modern japan, endo and kobayashi start their playthrough of an otome game, which becomes a bit glitchy and odd. they discover that siegward, a male lead in the game, can hear what they’re saying. they use this chance to finally give lisolette a happier ending

much of the story’s focus is on the characters slowly warming up to lisolette, and a bit on endo/kobayashi’s irl relationship. despite being the primary drive of the story, lisolette herself hardly moves the plot - if you know what i mean

regardless it’s undeniably adorable

tearmoon empire

no isekai, more of time travel? chronoskimming?

mia wakes up 10 years in the past after being sentenced to death. now afraid of guillotine-kun, she strives to solve the issues in her kingdom that had previously led to her doom

a bit similar to bakarina in terms of concept: avoid death flags, unknowingly recruits the people she meets into her little saintess cult. the misinterpretation is very strong, and in brilliantly funny ways

it has really fun narration ngl especially in the light novel

of course, i’ll claim palimony!

to prepare for her annulment, yulia starts scheming recording her fiance’s meetups with the heroine to use as evidence. if you’re gonna lose a suitor, might as well get some money out of it, right? along the way she gets involved with rudonik, one of the male leads

no reincarnation. rather than an otome game, the villainess story comes from a book written by a side character, and the “heroine” just decided to play it out in real life

the cast together is a riot, and it’s entertaining to watch yulia only think in profits and every connection she can make to achieve it

the villainess’ slow prison life began with her broken engagement

no isekai, just a plain old villainess

post-annulment, rachel is sentenced to imprisonment. which she enjoys and is thoroughly, hilariously prepared for

everyone’s a little afraid of rachel and for good reason. it’s better to find out yourself through the LN or manga, but let’s just say that even the king doesn’t want to deal with her XD

the holy grail of eris

now this one is interesting, putting the villainess trope into a mystery ghost story. that said, no isekai either

our innocent heroine constance attends a party and encounters scarlet, an executed villainess from ten years ago. a body possession and some public embarrassment later, they decide to team up to solve the mystery that might be behind scarlet’s death

i mean, ghost villainess? sign me up

+ some honorable mentions

i favor the villainess (the heroine goes for the villainess- girls? girls? yes)

a bellicose lady got reincarnated (a delinquent reincarnates as a heroine; what a concept :o unfortunately there’s not a lot of english content for it yet)

it seems i got reincarnated into a yandere otome game (i like that the mc actively makes it so that game can’t ever happen the way it should; plus, yanderes are always interesting to study)

inso’s law (modern isekai, and quite cute!)

the reincarnated young lady aims to be an adventurer / holy guardian tiger (similar to deathbound duke’s daughter in that there’s more of a focus on the fantasy aspect)

expecting to fall into ruin, i aim to become a blacksmith (so far the only one with a shounen tag that i like; its main charm is probably the cast and their interactions with each other eliza best girl)

since i’ve reincarnated as the villainess’ father i’ll shower my wife and daughter with love (big big wholesome vibes)

level 99 villainous daughter (severely op lady who takes no shit from the people looking down at her, and regularly thinks about blowing up the academy within the first 4 chapters? hell yeah)

may i please just ask one last thing? (post-annulment, the mc literally punches everyone in the room; it’s great)

this is getting long now oops

edit: i also made a visual-friendly personally-tagged-by-me bookshelf here!

#masterpost #otome isekai reviews #rip tags i'll just stick to the english titles #my next life as a villainess #an observation record of my fiancee - a self proclaimed villainess #the villainess cecilia silvie doesn’t want to die so she decided to crossdress #the villainess wants to marry a commoner #deathbound duke's daughter #beware of the villainess #death is the only ending for the villainess #the daughter of albert house wishes for ruin #i'm a villainess daughter so i'm going to keep the last boss #milady just wants to relax #the banished villainess! living the leisurely life of a nun making revolutionary food #seduce the villain's father #transferred to another world but i'm the savior of an otome game #endo and kobayashi's live commentary on the villainess #tearmoon empire #of course i'll claim palimony!#the villainess' slow prison life #the holy grail of eris #i favor the villainess #a bellicose lady got reincarnated #it seems i got reincarnated into a yandere otome game #inso's law #holy guardian tiger #expecting to fall into ruin i aim to become a blacksmith #since i've reincarnated as the villainess' father i'll shower my wife and daughter with love #level 99 villainess daughter #may i please just ask one last thing

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nbapprentice · 4 years

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You said a while back that while Supergiant games (Bastion, Transistor, Hades) was mostly okay, you had some words about them. I was curious as to what those words were, since Hades' full release is soon.

okay. alright. ive been playing hades lately so i definitely want to give my two cents (or dollars by the size this is gonna get). but let’s go Step by Step

the good: i want to throw a whole Endorsement over supergiant games with the art direction and its characters, which is what keeps me coming back again and again, and what i can assume is that most people are attracted to.

gameplaywise, they have a Format they stick to which has become their staple, not to their detriment but to their advantage, like... gameplay tropes, so to speak, that they stick to (such as the addition of special conditions that give a disadvantage in exchange for more long-term rewards)

i fucking adore that they take one concept per game, go for it, and when they’re done they are Done; they don’t bother with sequels, they don’t want to run things to the ground and i fucking respect that. They have their themes, and they stick to them (to various degrees of success).

that said, like every piece of media, they are not perfect and this has to be analysed and spoken about

CONTENT WARNINGS: genocide and ethnic cleansing, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, suicide, and mentions of incest, and a general Spoilers warning

bastion: touches on ethnic cleansing, and not in a way i’d say is satisfactory. our narrator and one of our Sympathetic characters is one of the men who worked on a world-ending weapon meant to use against the Ura (a group of people coded as East Asian) which after a bit of googling is literally called “the final solution” if there was ever a war between the Ura and the Cael (who feel like rly tan white people to me). jesus fucking CHRIST.

we also meet more Ura other than our two named characters and we have to kill most of them. so that fucking blows.

the game tries for “being a genocidal monster will get you fucked up and blown up” which duh, but i feel we shouldn’t have had a person responsible for war crimes be one of our friends no matter how bad he feels about the whole thing, or the people victim of war crimes become villains in the latter half of the game. zia’s father could’ve taken ruck’s role ez pz.

transistor: the weakest of their games, imo; the lore and writing are fairly flimsy and i did not come out feeling Satisfied, especially because it had this rly good build-up that did not pay off. not to mention... their villains? 3/4 were gay people. lol. two married guys (not even explicit, you only realize by their shared last names) and the ps*cho lesbian trope (iirc she wanted to kill the protagonist’s lover or something). the female protagonist also ends up killing herself to live forever in a digital paradise with her dead lover. it’s. god.

very Aesthetic, GORGEOUS music, interesting gameplay; had potential, i do not feel like it lived up to it at least as far as the story goes.

pyre: now this one. this one’s BEEFY. where transistor felt flimsy, pyre is rich; lots to sink your teeth into, rich in lore and loveable characters, again w the beautiful music, themes of cooperation and togetherness. my favorite of the cast is volfred sandalwood, the only Black (or, well, Black-coded) revolutionary i’ve ever seen portrayed with this amount of sympathy.

onto the bad: they literally have a Class of character named “Savage”; there’s the “mystical mentally ill person” trope; there is an overwhelming amount of explicit m/f pairs (one of them being. a romance that formed in a single day and then both of the characters were somehow willing to risk it all for each other? PLEASE) while the only hints of gayness are... hints. especially when Jodariel (another of my favs) is teased to have feelings for the player regardless of gender then only gets an ending with a male character with whom she has nothing in common 🙃

hades: and now. this one. music: gorgeous. character designs: spectacular (aphrodite is straight up naked but it’s so... natural and casual, it doesn’t feel sexualized at all). voice acting amazing. character interactions charming and endearing. as a greek mythology nerd, it was nice to see them go for the obscure shit like Zagreus at all, NOT portray Persephone and Hades as a loving couple, AND portrayed the gods as the bunch of petty assholes (some more benevolent than others) that they are. imo they’re too generous with their portrayal of achilles but i’ll allow it.

and finally... it seems all those criticisms about having all the gay characters hidden in the shadows paid off, cuz we got (aside of patroclus and achilles) a bisexual polyamorous protag. Holy Shit! and it’s not even playersexual, romance whomever you want shit without the routes recognizing each other: he explicitly talks about how he’s thinking abt them both (though it’s like “yeah usually mortals take one lover but gods love many huh” polyamory is a human thing too bro!!!!!)

and this is where it all goes, well, at least vaguely downhill lol. ok so the incest warning i gave up there? well. it’s not... outright incestuous. but it has some ugly implications. i want to emphasize: the characters never refer to each other as siblings, nor do they treat each other as such (thanatos, in fact, only recognizes hypnos as his brother, and megaera only sees the other furies as her sisters), but they were all raised by the same woman, Nyx... zagreus and thanatos even grew up together (im assuming megaera didnt meet zagreus until he was fully grown).

this is complicated even worse by the fact that they tried to trick zagreus into believing Nyx was his mother. he realized pretty early on this was not true but like... adoptive mothers, anyone? granted i can believe that bc of the attempt at deception that probably ruptured any attempt at actual familial closeness, and it’s not like hypnos and thanatos saw zagreus as their brother at any point, so they were p much aware of the truth too. with the fact that thanatos even looks like goth miles edgeworth (im not kidding you can google him up right now its literally edgeworth in a cowl) i rly feel they were aiming for Childhood Friend Anime Rival Man than the “surprise kiss bc ur not actually related <3″ shit. zagreus never once refers to nyx as his mother in-game, and also refers to thanatos and hypnos as her sons, never his brothers.

so yeah, like. if one’s feeling generous, zagreus and thanatos are more of a “my father is emotionally closed off and neglects me so my best friend’s mother basically raised me” kind of situation... just pulled off in, perhaps, the worst way possible (why didnt they just say Zagreus was told Hekate was his mom, that’s such an easy fix? or that he was born of nobody other than Hades??? [gestures at athena])

but then, the gods. aaaaaaaahhhhahahahh the gods. demeter shows up! and she calls zeus, hades and poseidon... her foster-brothers. which somehow would make the persephone thing less fucking awful, apparently. they really. really really did not need to do that. she could’ve just said “my fellow gods” or whatever. or my “god-brothers” or something, to pretend it was just a weird god alliance thing??? i dont know but implying that foster family isn’t family is just... bro, the dynamics still exist.

Don’t Like That.

i even contacted supergiant games over this. they reassured me they were even trying to avoid the incest of the original myths bc they didn’t want to mess with such a heavy theme. i believe them... but i really think they didn’t think this through. compared to something like fire emblem fates this is nearly benign, but the implications don’t look good :/

tl;dr of the tl;drs: i admire their artistic philosophy and the heavy emphasis on fresh gameplay, characters and their relationships; i appreciate that it seems that they listen to criticism?; i don’t appreciate that they didn’t think to at LEAST talk to adoptees when making a game about family.

#Anonymous #asks #mod nba #supergiant #supergiant games #bastion #transistor #hades #pyre

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greasers-against-onision · 5 years

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Onion Boy’s Reapers Creek (BIG problems right off the bat)

Warning! Minor discussion of a lewd scene involving minors! Marker in red.

Hey onions slicers, I’m gonna go on a quick rant about Onion boyo’s third book in his horribly cursed trilogy of “””literature”””” (I hesistate to even call it that). This is my first real rant, so it might be too long, it might be too shitty, but we’re gonna try. I’m in AP English Literature and Composition, and I’ve been in AP English Language and Composition. I’ve got 2 years of reading classic novels and analyzing them under my belt. I know what can be considered at least an okay book. And Onion boy’s book is not okay. It’s not even bad. It’s the unbearable. Because of my experience with all that AP “author’s purpose” shit I’m going to be critiquing this very harshly.

Also I’m REALLY sorry this came out super long, I got carried away lmao.

Also good luck to anyone taking any APs this year! I’m rooting for y’all! :)

I really sympathized with KrimsonRogue in his review. (LINK! It’s a great video, I highly recommend it. I applaude Krimson for putting up with all of Greg’s shit.) I read up until Chapter 10, as I just couldn’t handle the disgusting content Onision’s had written in—nor could I decipher exactly why he put it in there. Whatever the reason was, it was as poorly executed as the rest of every type of similar scene Greg has written.

There are some pieces of work that are so bad it’s good. Let’s look at The Room, by Tommy Wiseau, for example. A classic definition of “so bad it’s good”. Awful writing and dialogue, even worse acting...but it’s all these that gives it its charm. I’m a sucker for shitty works like these. But Onision’s Reapers Creek** is so bad it hurts. There are some moments that are straight up disturbing and SHOULD NOT EVER have been as much as conceived by Gurg’s edgy twisted mind.

****——Warning: slight discussion of a lewd scene involving minors below!——****

Aside from its obvious self-insert main character,—“Daniel” is sometimes referred to as Greg, oops!—the poor formatting, the endless typos, the shitty syntax style, etc, the biggest most disgusting part about the book is the explicit scenes with the 11 YEAR OLD MC. And it’s EXPLICIT. It is a sex scene. With an 11 year old boy. I do not care that Julie or Julia (or however Greg felt to spell her name this time around) is 15. They are MINORS. I nearly fucking threw up reading this. If you don’t believe This is CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, Greg! Do you know how many sick, disgusting fucks would get off to this if you let them get their hands on this?

For comparison, let’s look at Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s a controversial work, I know, and absolutely disgusting to read, but I have read it to reference it on the AP at the advice of my teacher, as she read it in grad school. Keep in mind, Lolita is by far worse in content, as it focuses on a pedophilic relationship throughout the whole novel. There are gross scenes where the nasty pedo protag makes out with Lo, but there are no explicit sex scenes. The most is like a sentence just saying that it happened. But it was done with a reason. Nabokov uses pretty language and juxtaposes it with horrible, disgusting acts on the protagonist. It’s about propaganda. The reader is tricked by the protagonist Humbert into thinking he is a good guy on purpose. It’s “Tyranny from the POV of the Tyrant”, as one person put it.

The point is, Nabokov had passable reason to write on a subject matter so horrifying and despicable. To show how people can be manipulated with pretty words and an unreliable narrator (sound familiar?) By the way, it’s totally fine if you disagree and hate Lolita. It’s an uncomfortable read, and I totally understand. I’m just bringing up its merit to show how Greg’s writing is utterly horrible.

Why does Greg make his 11 year old protagonist have sex? Why, the same reason there’s sex scenes in all of his other books! The same reason he throws tragedies like school shootings in his books. Because he wants his self inserts to get laid. Why the fuck else?

In Stones to Abagaile**, the school shooting only brings James and his love interest closer together.

In This is Why I Hate You**, the school shooting again only brings Arthur and whatever love interest he had back home closer together again.

In this book, its sex for sex’s sake. Greg just wants Greg—oops! Silly me, I mean Daniel— to get laid. That’s it. Oh, and didn’t Onision himself give us the green light to interpret the novel as we wish? In the introduction he says that we can decide what really happened and what is just a “product of creativity” I believe he said. So, in the words of KrimsonRogue, headcanon accepted, Greg only wrote this to fulfill his weird fantasies.

Thank you for listening to me go on a literary rant about this shitty book.

**I’m not gonna italicize it. It doesn’t deserve even that. These books suck, btw. Not you, though. You rock. :) unless you’re Onision.

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momestuck · 5 years

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Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim... volume 18!

Imagine I edited the final shot of End of Evangelion here to put trolls on it. That’s more effort than I’m actually willing to put in. Imagining it is probably almost as good.

This chapter is fittingly called “Of Endings, Many”.

The opening narration is kind of pointed and sarcastic. It jokes about saying trite things like ‘the circle is complete’... and then goes elsewhere.

“You’ve got enough friends, now you need answers-” - and then it interrupts itself, realising it’s just the intro screen.

I wonder who writes the intro screens?

This time we have... another jadeblood, and also a final pair of purplebloods, the second troll pair.

Lanque

Lanque is written by the mysterious “V”, who previously managed to get us to lick a clown’s armpit and then wrote some interesting things about intertextuality. I have high hopes!

Content warning: Lanque’s story deals explicitly with sex with a man, in a situation of dubious consent on the player character’s part.

Lanque’s theme I’m sure I recognise from Homestuck proper, though I’d have to do some digging to see what it’s reprising. It’s called “yall know i just do the music right” - another James Roach piece.

It begins with us getting a call from Lynera. The narration somewhat uncharitably says “that nutty bitch is exactly the sort of destabilizing influence your life needs right now”. In a positive, not sarcastic way at least.

She wants to start making friends herself...

The narration is really in a hurry this time around. We reprise the party background from the last episode.

I appreciate the kind of breezy enthusiastic chaos in V’s writing.

We’re in a cape, bra and fishnets. A perfect outfit for the final chapter.

Wow the narration just isn’t giving a shit anymore. Final chapter striking hard.

We try to figure out whose hive we’re going to... and oh shit, it’s Ardata’s. First troll we ever met, as well. The party is described as a “frathouse rager” - which, Lynera acknowledges, is not her scene at all.

Is the narrator already drunk? Or is Ardata fucking with our head again?

Ardata declares that it’s a ‘kiiickback’ for all the ‘world’s fiiinest iiinfluencers’... and neither me nor Lynera is invited. Apparently she heard about it from someone called Lanque, who’s also not invited.

What is up with this narration? It’s coming across like a standup performance.

At that point, Ardata drops a... nsfw warning on us.

I didn’t actually realise this volume had an ‘accompanying mature content description’. I think what I’m gonna do is... obviously I’m gonna play the chapter, but I will put specific content warnings before sections of the post that have potentially triggering content, and if there are explicit images, I will pixellise out any explicit bits before I embed them in the post. spoiler alert: this ain’t exactly Ladykiller in a Bind there.

That’s a hell of a warning, huh. Especially given the previous armpit-licking chapter by ‘V’ was about at the absolute limit of sfw horny anyway. Fuck knows what they’re about to inflict on us now.

Also: James Roach’s track name is starting to make sense. Apparently he wants to distance himself from this episode, semi-ironically at any rate? God, what are we in for.

So, presumably the ‘oof, you’re too scared’ link takes us to an abrupt end to the chapter, we’ll check it later. Let’s go on in.

Quick soapbox: as much as I hate the kind of shallow analysis that throws around ‘problematic’ as a summary judgement of a work - nah actually, you can’t just disclaim shit under ‘challenging or controversial material’. By the same token that you can write whatever shit you want in a Homestuck computer game, critics - and random nerds on the internet, which is to say, the entire audience of this game - can discuss it however we find appropriate.

Nevertheless, you haven’t actually done anything worse than make me lick a clown’s armpit so far, and we can approach challenging themes in a way that says something meaningful and important, so let’s see what you have for us, V. To be honest I’m expecting some kind of portrayal of sexual violence given all the disclaimers, but who knows.

The party sounds like hell.

To Lynera, who remains glued to our arm, it’s ‘more than she was expecting’. But before we can leave, Lanque arrives.

I was wrong about what I thought was Lanque’s theme. Lanque’s theme is a slow, mournful saxophone piece. Maybe the music before was Lynera’s theme, and I just forgot how it went?

The narration mentions a ‘curious red stain’ on Lanque’s shirt. They’re obviously going for a whole ‘sexy vampire’ type thing with him. Maybe a Twilight parody, with Lynera in the Bella role? That would be a little dated, though.

I vaguely recall that it was said at some point that the jadebloods were all women. Which makes me suspect that Lanque is a trans guy, and this story is gonna touch on themes of transness and such. That could be something I completely confabulated, though. I’d check the wiki but no doubt it’s been updated by now, and I don’t want to spoil myself on this arc.

He seems to be in a flirty mood. Not sure how old either of these two are supposed to be.

Oh yeah. The knifemeter actually hasn’t shown up in this episode so far. He expresses surprise that Lynera has friends. Or at least, friend.

Eesh, this guy gonna be another Zebruh?

Lanque asks about us and we blather about being an alien, and also general disaster.

It’s really hard to get the sense that this is a loud party where we can barely hear each other over the noise, given both the narration and the soft jazz background.

He says something about not biting unless asked. So if it’s not already obvious... either a genuine rainbow drinker (hey, if Kanaya could do it at age 6 sweeps/13 years, no doubt he could at age... whatever age he is!), or someone who likes pretending to be one.

Anyway, our protag is apparently not overcome by friendship lust at this point, and tries to play wingman and put Lanque’s attention back onto Lynera. This... doesn’t go as well as expected.

(2.43 sweeps, that is - about 5.3 years)

Hmm, why would that be? This could be like, a transphobia thing? Do trolls have that? I’d say of course they fucking do, but apparently they don’t have homophobia, and their gender system... well who the hell knows how troll gender works, having all the signifiers of gender in the real world but none of the material consequences.

Anyway, Lanque calls Lynera a ‘nasty little bitch’. But then immediately says he’s not one to criticise.

So... maybe it’s not a trans thing? We’ll see. Lanque continues being a huge dick, suggesting that Lynera is interested in him because the ordeals are coming, and she wants to take the chance to fuck before they roll around.

Lynera is kind of... not surprisingly pretty hurt.

The narrator challenges Lanque on his rudeness without a choice.

Ah, the classic ‘she deserved it’ defence. Second only to the ‘it didn’t happen, but if it had, they would have deserved it anyway’ defence.

The protag demands to know why Lanque even invited Lynera if it was just to have such a huge go at her like that. Lanque’s explanation is... kind of unclear.

It’s not like she got much of a chance to defend herself there. So far my impression of Lanque is: this guy’s a huge cock. Or possibly a huge nook. Idk what the troll equivalent is.

The narrator decides to ‘Switzerland out of’ this conversation. They say this out loud, of course. Who needs an internal monologue, these days?

Lanque invites us to stay - we’re ‘much more interesting’ anyway. Eesh. I’m inclined to look for a ‘fuck right off where’s my pepper spray’ button, but that’s just me being a lesbian I guess. (Pepper spray is also illegal in the UK. I’m pretty sure.)

Yeah, you said it. He says he’s got ‘less time to waste than most’.

Bryn sees a meta joke about the narrative structure, Bryn clicks the screenshot button.

(Speak of the screenshot button, I had to rebind it to make it easier to paste the screenshots, you see in Ubuntu-- oh, you’re asleep?)

Anyway I kind of expected a choice around about now, but no, we barrel forwards, and end up dancing with Lanque. He takes our hand and leads us to another part of the house.

At that point, Elwurd shows up! I wonder how much of the cast is set to make an appearance in this chapter. If it’s all 35 trolls we’ve encountered so far, this is gonna be a long chapter!

Elwurd seems to be Lanque’s dealer. Not sure what drug she’s selling exactly. Apparently ‘you a drone?’ is the Alternian equivalent of ‘you a cop?’...

Anyway, Lanque buys the drug, and peer pressures us to take it. We’re like, nuh-uh.

We did not, we tell him, ask him to buy drugs for us.

I’m proud of you, protagonist. At the beginning of this story you’d have done anything to get a friend.

At that point, Diemen makes his reappearance. We really are going through the entire cast here, huh.

Yeah. That one’s just too obvious.

Anyway, undrugged, we get to dancing.

God, V, we get it, you want to fuck trolls. The narrator goes with it, though.

I find it kind of interesting how, like... our protagonist in the beginning and ending sketches is pretty much like, a marshmallow, indicating that they represent some kind of AFGNCAAP. But over time, little assumptions leak in. For example, we’re some kind of American nerd - our education system included a ‘high school’, and we had the option to learn Spanish there. We are relatively physically unfit. The wordplay suggests we know English.

Sometimes it’s deliberate - clearly someone made a choice to make it so that our protagonist has opinions about rap and knows a bit about professional wrestling, to suit the themes of the chapters. Those aren’t like, presumed traits assumed of the Homestuck audience, but things that kind of carve out a specific identity

So yeah... we’ve already had the whole ‘cheese person’ thing in Fozzer’s route, and here they’re straight up declaring the protag has pale skin. (Which doesn’t mean they’re white, necessarily, but they are apparently not Black, say.) I think that’s kind of a shame - a wasted opportunity.

Homestuck has already traded a lot on the ambiguity of its characters, which the fandom tends to read as implicitly white, except for like, a relatively small corner. This came to a head at points - most infamously the ‘CAUCASIAN’ controversy during the trickster mode phase, when Hussie ‘jokingly’ declared that his previously ambiguous characters (shaded pure #FFFFFF white, implying a ‘blank slate’) were ‘CAUCASIAN’ in bright flashing letters - at least while in trickster mode. After backlash, the panels were left as-is, but ‘CAUCASIAN’ was replaced with ‘PEACHY’.

Friendsim could have been an opportunity to improve the record a bit, especially as its narrative explicitly addresses many questions of societal oppression and occasionally makes explicit analogues to racism. But... they didn’t do that. Alas.

Anyway, moving on.

Apparently I’m very predictable because the very next panel addresses this exact line of thought.

I feel like this and the ‘not racist’ joke in the previous arc by ‘V’ are kind of... well I don’t know anything about ‘V’, and what they might be intending by these jokes. Here, it’s kind of parodying the whole thing in Homestuck rather explicitly... but whether it’s like, challenging it? There’s definitely a reading that’s like... pointed sarcasm, challenging the source material’s noncommital laziness.

Hey art interpretation is hard lol.

V’s writing is unusually striking, in a way I’m not quite sure how I feel about. I will think more about that once we’ve fully explored this chapter.

Things are getting pretty meta. He comments how we’re paper thin and he can see our blood. We’re like, ok, so you’re a vampire then?

This is the kind of thing! Writing that’s like... on the edge of like, telling a story and just directly talking to the reader, pushing us to engage with ambiguity and metaphor.

To release the tension a bit, the narrator does a ‘sexy dance’.

Anyway, we don’t get to find out what Lanque really thinks of our sexy dancing. Because at that point, Bronya shows up. Lanque decides it’s time to go.

...to a respiteblock, where else. So much for this being a friendsim and pointedly not a dating sim.

We are, it seems, safe. Lanque politely asks if we’d like to kiss. There’s another reminder that this is a very nsfw not for kids scene about to go down in this room right now.

So that’s apparently going to be our decision here. FUCK THE BOY/DO NOT FUCK THE BOY

...no, that’s not our choice. We’re kissing the boy no matter what. This is also portrayed in first person view, because consistency is important!

Apparently our blood tastes ‘sharp and dangerous - like a weapon’.

I feel like this is about to answer a whole fucking lot of fandom questions. At least as far as Hiveswap canon is concerned - arguably a separate entity to Homestuck canon, though obviously, like an expanded universe, designed to be read almost exclusively with intertextuality in mind. An elaboration, I guess.

There’s more like... hey check it out we’re going NSFW. Still nothing like a choice button yet.

One thing I find interesting is like... while this game is packed with lesbians of various stripes, and evidently many of the writers are gay or bi women, all the trolls who get really horny scenes have been boys. (Two of them written by ‘V’, admittedly). Mallek first with his shirtless scene, then much more recently Marvus, and now Lanque.

Also look at these guys. Pretty sure V has a type.

Anyway, the narrator makes the mistake of saying something vaguely derogatory about buckets.

Not sure like... what he finds derogatory there. Mentioning ‘buckets’ vs ‘pails’ (might be a distinction between reproductive and non-reproductive sex?), or saying that he doesn’t seem to have one? He says it’d be his first time.

With an alien, huh. *xenofucker fist bump*

Instead of a sex scene, we get a lore drop.

Once he gets shipped offworld, there will be no more ‘sneaking out of the caverns’. To Lanque, this effectively means his life will be over. This is his last chance to fuck!

A little overdramatic, dude!

Before we can get to it, Bronya interrupts.

So we get interrupted by Bronya. This is finally our choice point. Do we dob Lanque in, or do we fuck?

Regarding ‘problematic’, the main thing I’m seeing is like... Lanque is, at best, barely of age. Since he’s talking about getting shipped offworld soon, I’m guessing he’s close to troll adulthood. In terms of real-world narratives, this is taking on the general tone of ‘college story’ - complete with allusion to a frat party.

I think like... I’m going to read this whole visual novel, and write what I think about it. However, I can also totally understand why you would not want to read this kind of ‘first time’ story. So I’m going to leave that branch to a readmore at the end of the post. Above the cut, to give you all some kind of ending, and we’ll go down the ‘call his mum’ branch. Lol it’s not nearly as nsfw as they make it sound, there’s nothing that really need readmores, nevermind this lol.

Bronya busts the door open and tells him to get dressed immediately.

Lanque gets his mean streak back on, and goes in on Bronya now.

He does love the word ‘bitch’, does Lanque. He tells her she’s not actually his lusus (oh yeah, lusii... it’s been a while since we’ve seen one honestly. The last one was the goat.) She slaps him. He pretends like it was a sex thing.

This is not pretty. Bronya launches into a lecture on Lanque: sneaking out, being an ass to Lynera, and...

Yeah, maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get further involved.

Apparently he’s not deterred by the fact that we literally called Bronya up to get out of fucking him, and adds us on Chittr before he leaves.

So that’s an ending. Sweet look, protagonist.

But it’s not the ending ending. We get a final screen.

Sure, I want to understand. Is this going to be some kind of direct artist-to-reader commentary on what they were trying to accomplish with that chapter?

The text box turns white, and the font changes. I bet this is Doc Scratch. So no, probably not that. In fact, this segues straight into the epilogue. I think there are different versions of the epilogue depending how you approach the final chapter, or else we were supposed to play the other branch before Lanque, so for the sake of putting the epilogue at the end, I’ll save it for a future post. (I’ve already written it up.)

Now, the other Lanque branches. First of all, refusing at the NSFW notice.

So they poke fun at the reader for like, not accepting the NSFW notice. Uh-huh. You know that Steam doesn’t automatically give a mature content warning if you’ve set up your account that way right? Which I guess is my own fault lol.

Anyway, doing this leads to like... a totally different arc, and a totally different canon. Huh, I genuinely expected they’d like just end the story there.

It’s a cozy party now, apparently.

This version of Lanque is... different.

For one thing, he’s got a flower crown. And instead of soft sexy jazz, we have a pretty piano piece. He says hi to Lynera and me.

Hmm. Not entirely un-hornified, then.

Lynera gushes wildly about us, recapping a whole bunch of plot.

It turns out, rather than taking drugs and having sex and other such risqué things, this party is a chill poetry reading.

So I realise this entire branch is just like, an extended joke at the reader. Look how un-edgy this is. We’re going to support our friends and read poetry.

In this one, instead of asking to kiss us, he asks to hold hands before we read poetry. And he says this is a poem about a past relationship, and it might be a bit raw.

We get Lanque’s poem, in full.

I was going to copy-paste the whole thing in, but it’s quite long, so let’s be uncool and respect copyright or whatever because my fingers were getting tired. It is quite good... addressing loss, and memory, and the lingering influence of a past relationship. It makes me wish I had ever developed the ability to appreciate and comment on poetry, because I feel like I just don’t have the vocabulary to comment on it, or what it might connect to, or anything else. The narration agrees: raw, emotional.

I imagine, though perhaps this is presumptuous, it is reflecting something quite real in the real life of ‘V’.

Lynera also gets the chance to read out a poem. She happens to have one on hand. It’s about Bronya, sure enough, and her loneliness and alienation.

Afterwards, she is self-deprecating.

This version of Lanque is kind and reassuring - the complete opposite of his persona in the sexy branch.

We leave with Lynera after hugging it out. Reading her poem, and being with other trolls in this way, seems to have really helped Lynera. There’s another pointed bit of defensiveness at potential critics.

Soapbox: This is the state of discourse, where the complex feelings we have in relation to fictional works must get flattened out into strict ‘rules’. A character can easily support lesbian and bi interpretations; it can be a relief to bi people and upsetting for lesbians when one of those possibilities is ruled out by having her express interest in a man (not that this, ultimately, rules out lesbian interpretations, since a person can of course be mistaken about their feelings).

To lesbians, it is perhaps likely more salient that many characters they identify with end up expressing attraction to men, and this can seem like yet another instance. To bi women, narratives about picking a ‘side’ are perhaps more likely to be salient, and it can be relief to have an explicitly bi character.

The only conclusion we can draw is that gender is a hellish system of punishment and exploitation, and we should seek to be kind to each other and also abolish it forthwith, write our own stories, and abolish the stranglehold that capital holds on all aspects of our lives including the symbolic media we use to understand the world.

All that said, this repetitive defensiveness about ‘problematic’ writing does kind of annoy me a bit, even if I can understand where it comes from. Let your work speak for itself.

Anyway, that’s enough huge essays (I say, falsely). Let’s finish out the branch.

“...right?”

This branch finishes out with a poke at the whole structure of the game so far - the good endings, bad endings, and so on. We’ve not made a friend, but we have made a stronger connecting with an existing one.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take that given the way ‘valid’ has become pretty much a joke word, if this is still an extended dig at the audience, but there we are.

That was a surprisingly long and rich branch for a first choice, which is kind of nice, actually.

If we click ‘no’ on ‘do you want to understand’...

We just get a game over screen with us sitting in our watchtower looking sad.

So now... it’s time for the nsfw section discussed above. Except... it’s a total fakeout.

First of all, we get an implication that it’s not his first time at all. Anyway, then we get to it. Which is to say, we get a fade to silly anime joke. God, this is like those old 4chan stories where they’d set you up for a sex scene and then rickroll you or something.

We get a ‘dorito faced anime boy’ joke I guess?

Afterwards...

Lol.

Anyway, in this branch, he doesn’t add us on chittr. Lol.

So yeah we die of shame. Welp.

God I can’t believe I thought this would actually go there. Of course it would be a joke at the audience.

Looking back, well, you know, reading the metaphors: he’s a predatory guy and lied through his teeth to get into our pants. Obviously it’s not his first time; obviously he’s not about to bugger off to space and never have sex again T_T, obviously the shit he said was just to get us to fuck; this isn’t just cheesy narrative tropes but within the fiction him playing the protagonist in order to get us to fuck. Complete with the whole attempt to drug us, and make it very unambiguously rape. (Which no doubt Elwurd knew). He got us to explicitly consent before we did anything, but also did enough shady shit so as to make that ‘consent’ kind of questionable when viewed later.

Viewed in that light... what I originally thought was just someone writing a horny fantasy about a hot dominating guy who’s totally into you~ is actually like... a pretty sharp piece of writing about shit pulled by men. There were plenty of warning signs - the ‘objectifying’ way he looks at you, the way he attempts to drug you, etc. I would like to imagine that IRL, rather than taking it as a piece of fiction, I wouldn’t be vulnerable to the same tactics. (Well, obviously I wouldn’t from a guy, at any rate). But it’s kind of a nicely written piece to make you feel stupid and taken advantage of afterwards like... why the fuck did you go along with this.

Though given that this kind of thing is something that people like... actually go through, I feel like they could have warned for it better than ‘challenging and controversial material’. Yes, that might have robbed it of some of its power; but it would also mean that it wouldn’t trigger people who have trauma over this exact kind of thing.

So.

“V”.

Honestly, my strongest feeling about “V” is one of respect. Both their stories have been a weird blend of cheeky, challenging and playful, with some very astute elements and an enormous amount of energy and intensity. They’re prepared to fuck with the reader in ways both silly (lick the troll’s armpit!) and rather more serious (this whole arc), they fuck around with canonicity and narrative structure in creative ways... I wonder what else they’ve written?

There remains only these two clown twins, and the epilogue.

Barzum and Baizli

To finish out the set, we have another pair. The Alternian text says ‘The Soleil Twins’, so I guess that’s their surname. The twins are written by Kieran Miranda, who previously wrote Azdaja, Stelsa and Charun.

The story begins with day nearing, and the protagonist friendless. They get the idea to like... head over to relax with Skylla, but before they can, they run into a house.

A very haunted looking house.

An easy choice for us to begin. ‘No fucking way’ naturally skips this arc, right?

Nope, back at the house. We get another choice: leave left or right. I picked left. I doubt it matters.

Yep, that kind of house. We can’t escape.

After a struggle, we reach the door.

Inside, we immediately pass out with a sense of nausea. Lovely. This can only go well. We hear something like bugs skittering away.

The mansion does at least seem to be explorable. Unfortunately, the door leads to a portrait gallery full of clowns, which is not the most welcome place to end up.

Someone tunes one of the portraits. It turns out to be a TV. Dramatic piano chords come in.

Oh hey it’s some friends.

Their shtick is that the one on the right finishes the one on the left’s sentences, the one on the left speaks in all lower case, and the one on the right speaks in all caps.

They want us to find them. They’re very bored you see, and want to play a game. This is, I understand, an allusion to the Saw series of horror movies, in which I gather a person places people in buildings full of sadistic traps, monitored by various cameras and a small puppet with spiral cheeks. So I guess that’s us now.

We get our first real choice.

I think the door is too obvious. If there’s not another exit, we’ll have to take the door anyway - though that’s likely a different branch, realistically speaking.

We discover a hidden door. Behind it is... a hole in the ground.

I guess we have instant-death options later than usual in this chapter. Our final thought is about the terrible loss of our Chittr profile.

Well, that’s fine. Let’s see what happens if we go straight into the house instead of wandering around.

Approaching the house immediately just skips the wandering around; the text is the same. It was a fake choice. Skipping forward, let’s see what happens if we take the obvious door, not the hidden one.

As we move down the hallway, the lights come on and the walls start bleeding. Lovely. Glorious sense of interior decoration. Tip top.

Beyond the door, we end up in another dark room. Maybe this one will be more of a true CYOA, with death options in every room.

But no. Not immediately, anyway. Ropes come out of the ground and tie us up. The two trolls who were watching us make themselves known.

Carnivalish music kicks in. We finally get a clear view of our captors.

Baizli right (allcaps), Barzum left (lowercase). I’ll try to remember that.

The twins say some predictably sinister stuff about removing our intestines (acid tubes, in trollspeak). The narrator grumbles about once again being reduced to the status of ‘torture muppet’.

When we express a desire to leave, Barzum and Baizli swap both demeanour and capitalisation rule. Now Baizli looks sad, and speaks in lowercase, while Barzum is pissed and speaks in caps.

These two twins, in the tradition of creepy twins, seem to share one mind. Which means they can hardly prank each other! They need someone else.

They rev up a chainsaw and suddenly... we’re back in the same room we started.

Looks like we’ve had another bit of time fuckery from The Powers That Be. Compare Fozzer. The loops kick in, faster and faster. Glued. Buried alive.

Having read the epilogue, all I’ll say is that it seems like someone is trying very hard to push us onto a timeline that ‘works’.

There’s a joke about time loop movies which I don’t get because I haven’t seen very many time loop movies.

After ‘20 or so’ loops, we decide we’ve had enough. But we get a choice of what to do about it.

Let’s try ‘Fuck this.’ first.

This turns out to mean attempting to intimidate the twins instead of begging them to release us.

While they’re baffled by this display, we make a break for an air vent. Surprisingly, we make good our escape. There’s a mention of all our jogging training with Stelsa, which happened in a non-canonical timeline - there was a whole thing about it! - but fair enough. Guess that’s another thing that persists between timelines. Or maybe the protag just thinks they went jogging with Stelsa in this timeline.

We find we’ve missed a bunch of texts from Skylla while we were out, and plan to head over there. But alas... the space loop is still in effect.

We end up back at the house. Unable to escape from the pocket dimension, the branch ends...

So let’s try the other option: ‘remember who you are’.

Come, try to remember...

And that is, of course... FRIENDSHIP. This time, we have something to say to the clowns (after ensuring we haven’t pissed ourselves).

Not killing us is apparently a novel idea for the twins. Or rather, they didn’t plan to kill us - just cut us up a bit, unaware that we wouldn’t heal right back up. The protag corrects the misconception.

So now we’re teaching the creepy clown kids the meaning of friendship. Novel!

The lights come up and they put on a little circus show for us. Apparently this building is not their hive.

They show us various other dangerous-looking circus tricks with the torture/circus equipment. Ah, says the narrator, so risking their lives is these kids’ hobby.

It turns out these kids hatched from the same egg. They tell us they do in fact share a mind entirely - one mind, two bodies.

And at last we end up chilling out and sharing stories.

With this friendship established, we sense a shift of some kind. We take this as a sign that the door might have finally opened.

Not only is the door open, but the ‘pocket dimension’ has dissipated too. The power of friendship! ...or fulfilling some secret design of whoever created the pocket dimension. Mmm.

How touching.

There’s a fakeout victory jingle, which turns out to have been a prank. They explain that... the creepy blood seeping walls and so on were their ‘chucklevoodoos’, but as for the time loop... Not them at all.

“Do you want to understand?” asks the prompt again. Time... for the epilogue.

#momestuck #lets read hiveswap friendsim #sex cw

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invinciblerodent · 6 years

Text

Propositioned by the Billionaire Moose - A moose(!!!) shifter romance liveblog

Yes, I’m doing this.

As requested by my dear friend @kurosmind, here it is, the first part of my (hopefully complete) liveblog of this wonderful trainwreck.

And before I would go on to cut this with a Read More, let me begin by saying that I am by no means being purposefully malicious. This is not a terrible book. It’s not a good one either (tbh, the other one I read from this series, “Her UnBearable Protector”, was, to me, much better- the titles are equally silly, but that one kept my attention way longer), but it’s not terrible, and this is purely for fun.

That being said, onto the shit-talking.

Also,

‘Nuff said.

This goes for the introductory blurb AND Chapter 1 as well- the plot is dead simple. It’s the one I would hesitate to call the “tried and true” plot because I hate it with such a burning passion, but it’s the one, you know the one, where the bratty and arrogant heir-dude has to find a wife in a set amount of time in order to get his inheritance.

Because the patriarchy is fun, and forcing someone who doesn’t want to get married into a rushed marriage is going to make for a good and healthy relationship that will benefit both him and his chosen bride. Only this time it’s a maple syrup empire, because THEY ARE MOOSE, and also Canada.

His name is Bryce Elanroux btw, not like it should matter because let’s face it, these kinds of protagonists could be called whatever and they would still all be mostly the same. It doesn’t even have the kind of Character™ that I like in these dude-names beyond it screaming “French-Canadian trust fund kid”. Like in the last one I read the prince was named Niccolito (and surprisingly he wasn’t Italian, what are the odds), and before that, the bear shifter dude was named Salvatore, and I physically cannot read that name without overpronouncing it to shit in an ostentatious and stereotypical Italian accent. Once I read one where the rock star guy was named Ari, and it took the book A WHILE to reveal that Ari was, in fact, short for -guess again because I guarantee it’s not what you expect- ARISTOTLE. So, to get back down from this tangent, Bryce is a real boring name, but not awful. Unfortunately it doesn’t fully embrace the silly or go way Italian for no reason. Gets a C- from me.

Oh, and this time there is also a Suddenly Appearing Cousin Who Is A Competitor For Grandpa’s Will™. Surprise. Where did I put my jaw. I hope that he’s not a moose so we can have just a regular dude in this, just watching in bewildered terror as his uncle and cousin turn into giant land-mammals.

I don’t know how to describe this next part (which is the last paragraph of chapter one), so I’m just going to show it to you as it is:

Charming fellow, isn’t he. Also, a buck with plenty of prancing years.

Chapter 2 begins with introducing our female protagonist, Melanie. Who is inexperienced with guys (check) and would like a “sturdy man” to take charge “for once” (check). It’s real confusing that she would begin by complaining that the reason for her inexperience is that she doesn’t want to actually physically hurt a man, but then also she complains about the juice she bought being heavy, but not really because she can carry it easily, but it’s heavy and there should be a man here to carry it. Makes me think that she too might be a shifter? Maybe a sharp one because she’s talking about giving guys stitches, and later she mentions having claws, but keeping them sheathed? I’d dig that, if she were like a tiger or some shit like that. Imagine what a moose-tiger hybrid would look like.

Real stupid, I’d wager.

Oh, and she also fantasizes about killing her sick mother. Which, yeah, I kinda get because their relationship seems real abusive and draining for her, with no love between them whatsoever, but… look, folks. This girl is a grown-ass woman and has a degree and a job, and she’s lamenting that she has no money because she has to care for a woman whom she hates? Who sometimes flings scalding cocoa into her face because reasons. Leaves me wondering why she even does it? Obviously she can support herself, and it might be my European self talking with our public healthcare backing me up, but Canada, where this is set, also has a publicly funded healthcare system? So I don’t see why it would be cheaper for her to do all this than to have professionals at a hospital or a sanatorium care for this middle-aged woman living with chronic liver problems. It just seems like it’d be a simple enough issue to solve that doesn’t need a BILLIONAIRE MOOSE, but, y’know, some backbone. The ability to make decisions. Taking charge. Y’know, something these protag ladies all seem to sorely lack. Even the ones that make cryptic references to being a were-cat-tiger-bullshit creature.

Btw, a couple paragraphs later? I totally called it. Hell yeah she’s a shifter. And a sharp one. Not a tiger, but a cat-bullshit creature. Another call I’m making now, they’ll meet as animals first. Why else have them both be shifters?

Chapter 3 is back to the dude. Joy. (Side note- how clever would it be if this was a gay story, and the “boy-toy” character was named Fisher Bryce? Fisher-Price? Eh? Eh?)

Btw, I will never stop finding their use of the word “rack” to refer to his antlers funny. It makes it sound like he has a pair of tits on his head. Which, uh….

It just conjures this image in my head, every time.

Oh, and I called it again, they meet shifted. She’s a lynx. Not as good as the image of a tiger shivering somewhere in Canada, but hey.

She’s a furry. The weird kind. Also I had to google “moose ass” for this.

In this chapter, the moose (the prey animal) saves the lynx (the predator) from three wolves (predators). No idea why the wolves would even attack a lynx, or why they would be afraid of a prey animal (which, okay, I get moose are fucking huge and strong, BUT HE IS STILL A DING-DANG DUMB DEER), especially if they’re all shifters, but y’know. There is nothing like a good ol’ Damsel in Distress situation to start off a novel.

We meet the cousin too, Rory, who -so far- seems somewhat less of a shithead than our protagonist.Who, upon finding out that his grandpa is dying, is only talking about the inheritance and shows…. Literally zero compassion. Or nothin’. Even though they seemed to be at least kinda close. Okay then. Asslord.

Also, grandpa is a real romantic. Apple from the tree, I see.

The chapter closes with, and I wish I hadn’t seen this, the third person limited narrator literally saying “#betweenacrackandahardplace”. Which is just. Super bad to read. It took me like five whole seconds to decipher what it was saying, and it still doesn’t make sense.

Here seems like a good place to cut this- I wouldn’t want to go on too long, in three chapter increments seem like a good way to do this. Next time I have a day off, I’ll definitely get to the rest of this and post chapters 4, 5, and 6 because it’s, ngl, real fun to bitch about a not-very-good book.

Again, this is by no means as awful as the last one I tried this review-thing with (that one I didn’t even get to finish because jesus christ it was awful and the reason I hiss at regency romances from afar), but it’s…. quite silly, and has enough opportunities to poke fun of it to last me a while. :) I can’t yet call if it’s gonna be that bad, but we’ll see. If it gets too good I’ll stop this, because then it’s no fun, but.... I have a feeling I might be in for it.

#book review #book liveblog #shifter romance #propositioned by the billionaire moose #are you telling me that's not a tag yet?#noooooooooooooo #no way

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thegeminisage · 7 years

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more botw blogging, SUPER spoilery

this is a real long post sorry normally i break these up and this time i didn’t

and finally, off we go to a new province

this time im making its tower my first stop, since i can see it from here

i tried to paraglide across the river but i didn't have enough height so i landed on the cliffside and ITS RAINING!!!!! for fucks sake

i cant believe this game actually got me to hate rain..........

not only that but when i died in the water it didn't reload me back to where i started to glide from but a bit of cliff i stood on lol so #struggles right from the first minute

rain for the next 3 hours.......and i gotta climb it in the rain....jesus

i guess i could fast travel but i'd have to walk all the way back there :/

hmm. maybe the gae's throwing me the rain on purpose. an npc mentioned this river was notoriously difficult to cross :///

yep as soon as i turned away: it cleared. Great

well i see some bridge-like things further downstream i guess i'll check that out

lol jk i managed to glide across a different part and climb

like i saw my forecast change but then it changed back to sun so w/e i'll take it im up here now

aaaaah i can see so many cool things from here!!!!! i cant wait to explore them all!!!! that #new province feel

i hate like, feeling obligated to track down every last bit of stuff in the old ones when you're seeing new exciting stuff

but i love the feel of getting to a new one and not even knowing which cool thing to check out first

ohhh my god lol there's a big-ass bokoblin camp on the way to the tower i think i see a moblin but im not sure

aaaand im dead

at least there werernt any moblins!

tbh it isnt a difficult camp i just wasnt vigilant about healing

me every time i see something new: what the Fuck is that!?

in this case it was an ice wizzrobe which made it snow EVERYWHERE oh my god

That Was Difficult

if i didn't have my fire arrows and lynel bow it would have taken way longer

i died again!!!

those weird pattern bokoblins have SO much attack power ):

come on i have to clear out the camp AGAIN? and kill the wizzrobe?

naw dude i am skipping this nonsense i am going straight up the fucking cliff

HA i sniped them from above >:3

there's a zora on top of this tower!!!!!!!

omg poor thing he can't get back down i wish i could carry him on my paraglider

man i love the tower cutscenes and music and the way they unfold it's so cool

BIG SHINY NEW PROVINCE YYYYEAH!!!!

oh hey i found another zora down near these bridges

they all want me to go see their prince haha noooo i have too much to explore!!!

oooh it's so easy to get all turned around on these bridge thingies

man i love this province it's SO pretty

ah i found a goron on a sandbar!! how did you get out here with all this water...

nooo the blood moon again i knew it was coming the music has been funny all night >:(

lol jk the music faked me out its 2am and i warped to the stable for nothing (i was trying to get that one dude's reaction)

i came back and did the shrine and found another zora!! lol they all really want me to go see that dude

there's a thing i need to climb but ugh rain

while i was bored i chopped grass and attached octo balloons to things

now i am in the wetlands which are AWFUL to walk through i can practically feel the mud squishing between my toes and i want to die lmao

there are horses here!! i miss mine ):

ive done enough shrines now to get another upgrade but i dont feel like doing all that backtracking blegh

oh noooo i see a guardian out here, a moving one ;_;

ah it's been awhile since i failed to fight the still ones on the plateau...i wonder what the start screen meant by "the right tools" ive got a lot of damn tools!! did they mean arrows??

lol yet another zora telling me to meet with the prince.........dude

this prince must be either desperate or spoiled

okay maybe its a glitch but i think?? i see?? a flying island in the distance? What The Fuck

wait no it looks kind of like a ship or giant bird??

my pins don't stick to it, it's definitely moving around

jesus fuck

AHAHAH FUCK THE GUARDIAN SAW ME

HAD TO TAKE REFUSE IN THE FUCKING SHRINE

jesus christ i hate those things!!!! you can't kill them!!!!!!!

NO oh my god there's a hinox over here too

why this Why This

lol the hinox fighting music is giving me trauma flashbacks

actually that wasnt so bad with a defense elixir on

maybe it's just me but this province feels kinda small? i feel like i could finish exploring it p quickly, which is nice

not that i'm not having fun but i know i'm going so slowly ):

me every five seconds: i miss my hooorse i want one to ride around to go faaaaster

i guess...i could catch...one of these

and like. not register it bc the stable is 10000 miles away but

a temp ride. let's see if i can. need to use up some of my sneak potions anyways

i caught one and rode it awhile, but my heart's not in training it...i want My Horse

oh my god wait i hear town music!! is this a stable right here!! AAAAAH

so i did catch a pretty black one and named it luna - had to let the first one i caught go lol but it didn't have great stats and i only rode it once so it'll be happier in the wild probably

KASS IS AT THIS STABLE IM SO HAPPY SO IS HESTU

he's playing epona's song i'm gonna CRY

I MISS EPONA IM DYING

oh my god he had a story for me!! the same one that impa told!!!!! man

the music is still so good. fuck.

lmao i was talking to one dude and he was like well might as well head back inside ugh that place is so filthy and the women so free you might as well call it a manfill

UM?? NINTENDO??

i can see hyrule castle super close from where i am and it looks super scary and i super want nothing to do with it rn

i get the feeling you can like, go in there whenever? maybe even do the endgame stuff early? but oh my god i Dont wanna

OMG i just mounted a bear

i read that you could ride things other than horses but holy shit lmao

i mean

it killed me after i got off, but man

sadly i must now board my horse and continue with The Story see i explored the non-story bits of that province SUPER quickly dang

oh no

this shrine is called a minor test of strength

Oh No

Why, God

oh. that was actually like SUPER easy compared to the other two haha phew

this lady at the crossroads said the prince was creepy omg i knew there was something, ahaha, excuse me, "fishy"

whoa i love his music theme!!

lmao i always get so SHOCKED when they talk!!! even still!!!!!

voice acted cutscenes of this game are like fmvs of final fantasy games in generations 5-7 lol

oh my god...the wink/sparkle thing...he's such a HAM

he's flattering me TOO much omg dude what do you want.......

ok, ok, i like him

he doesn't seem very trustworthy but since his people are in trouble i'll cut him some slack on that one

oh nooo i gotta climb this in the rain......

ah, it's sunshowering tho! that's kinda neat

i just got attacked by octoroks and my heart wept a little because traveling up zora's river dodging octoroks to get to and save zora's domain...I've Been Here Before

listen, i could write a book on this

(lol i did write 300k on this but shhh that was a long time ago)

like...if link is actually a reincarnation does he get flashes of memory

oot happened in every timeline but i know wind waker didn't

but do you think assuming this is in the same timeline as wind waker something in him feels at home the first time he sails a raft again

or hears kass play epona's song at the ranch

or ducks an octorok on his way to zora's domain

people treat the incarnation thing as a kind of tragedy - the world will never be free of evil so long as ganon/ganondorf exists

but maybe there's happiness in it too

no matter what happens, no matter how sad the ending - i mean hell, in this very game, link and zelda LOST

no matter what though, it's guaranteed that they'll see each other again

over and over and over without end, link and zelda are gonna meet and be together for awhile while they defend hyrule again

frankly if that's not a soulmate idk what is

and frankly i'm perpetually offended that they don't develop ganondorf the man more like they did in wind waker...that was the Peak tbqh

i would kill for something like that again

anyway

i love how present the current here is, like with the stuff floating down the river, thats a NICE touch

tbh it's actually really nice that he keeps uselessly checking on me on the way up the river

like, i've been so lonely

even now i miss my companion going "what's WITH that guy" like they probably would if i had one

so this is nice. tbh.

i know it was probably a deliberate choice and makes the game stronger but a companion for this game, someone to share it with...that would've been cool

even just zelda as the protag, she could do some internal narration

but the whole thing is just so quiet.

this place is so pretty tho?? in the distance i see these like, pink coral looking plant things, and the blue columns and bridges are gorgeous

OH NO LIGHTNING GOD WHY

i think its an area thing too i cant just wait it out lmao im gonna Die

oh jk it's just rain now

idk why my entire forcecast changes to a particular type of weather and its only like that a few seconds...super weird and annoying

lol sidon all "you're almost halfway there i believe in you!!" and not helping fight and link's little "k" wave

i love link as a silent protag even if i did have him talk in my writing like it's so endearing

i wonder if link is like sgr like "i am 100 years old what is this zora kid even doing. what is he EVEN DOING."

lol just had to dodge some rocks rollin down a hill

you see this is what i mean. there's a weird sense of familiarity and nostalgia if you've played the games a lot. i wonder if the spirit of the hero feels that way with each new adventure, too

like if he's okay doomed to an eternity of fighting and parting with zelda over and over

because in the end he always gets to do this again

like i can see the spirit of the princess/goddess being high key miserable about those circumstances but i wonder if the spirit of the hero is maybe secretly glad

because part of him will always yearn for the next adventure

he never COULD be happy settling because this is what he was born for

WE love doing this again and again and again, maybe it's not such a stretch to think the spirit of the hero does too

or maybe i'm projecting so hard onto him because undertale has so successfully blurred the line between the player and the game for me LMAO

oh man i just noticed all the names on this map

lulu, mikau ;_;

i miss them!!!!

just once i wish zelda games would feature the same side characters in two or three titles

we never got to see saria or darunia or lulu again

we get to come back to the world but every friend we've ever made has been gone

like some narnia shit i swear to god

lol this is why i should never do story all i do is rant about My Zelda Feels, which are literally endless

oh NICE battle with a blue moblin on the bridge!!!!

ah i like the zora history here too please give me all the worldbuilding i wanna know everything about this world that i can bc rn all i know is "we got Fucked"

i guess i also know about the automans but i need More

i say, while procrastinating on getting to the story

in other news i have an ice and lightning rod which i havent bothered trying to use

bc when i tried to use the boomerang i failed utterly lol

but these? holy shit dude these are Powerful when you actually land a magic hit like Dang

i Love them im never avoiding another wizzrobe again (thats where they drop from)

oh wow

i finally made it, and

man. oh man. it's so beautiful

i wish i could see if better

jesus the zoras always had the prettiest parts of the games imo

OH NO THE MUSIC

OH NO!!! im gonna cry omg

it's the same melody from oot i think!! oh my god!!!!!!

omg there's a zora here named rivan who says he knows me?!?!

omg no he's listing some of link's old pals from Before im so sad why can't he remember

OOOH i shouldn't speak to the elderly bc apparently i am "guilty" of something?? i love this development PLEASE tell me more

i love that they all age so slowly #nice

am i walking into a fucking execution lmao sidon don't play me......

omg the little zora kids are adorable!!!

omg there's a statue of the zora champion ;_;

man this is all so cool i wanna know EVERYTHING about what happened back then!!!!

lol the shrine here was SUPER nerve wracking god you had to like, roll the giant ball down a hill and stop time at JUST the right moment skjghf

oh my gosh ANOTHER zora who knows me (lol "linny")

im so ;w; they all know me!!!!!!

i slept on the blissful water bed at the inn and was mystified and alarmed by the sound effects but i got an extra stamina wheel and 3 extra hearts!!! god damn you can't beat that shit

im so amazed at how many people knew link and like, blame him? i wanna know so bad what happened, i wanna know more about mipha

ten bucks says she's still alive and like trapped in the divine beast but corrupted

or a ghost or something like the old man ;_;

aww zoras sleep in the water aw aw :3

i'm loving this theme of link sleeping for so long like at first i thought of sgr but i just realized it's also like oot (and i can't believe i didn't make that connection first...)

like in oot the people who knew him Before are so happy to see him again and are sure he can help them

but in this game it's a bit mixed

and in this game we don't know the details of 100 years ago yet ;_;

zora's domain here is like. so GLOWY. reminds me of waterfall from undertale tbh lol i wanna paint it

so i'm talking to the king and this one elderly zora goes "the hylians abused an ancient society's power to turn hyrule into what it is today" & like...tbh my dude you have a point. if they had never gotten those guardians out then they couldn't have turned on them

oh my GOD

i just got my first look at a divine beast and i can't believe i was calling them jaegers

my jaw dropped irl holy shit

like that thing truly looks both divine and beastly (this one is an elephant)

is mipha still in there as like a ghost ;_;

it's so clear how much everyone misses her

and she seemed so sweet in the one short memory i recovered

every time sidon does his sparkle smile i love him a little more

i didn't trust him at first bc he seemed a little too eager but now i see he's just doing his best!!!!

especially as someone who thinks radically and progressively in a society where elders stay around hundreds of years

YESSSSS I GOT ZORA ARMOR!!!! YES!!!!!!!!

SWIM SPEED UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

omfg and it's an engagement thing just like the sapphire

MADE BY MIPHA?

thats right that other lady said link was supposed to choose between her and mipha

listen mipha seems cool and all but i've been shipping zelink for 19 years, so

oh NO, mipha had feelings for link

oh no poor mipha...oh my god

WAIT AM I ABOUT TO GET ANOTHER MEMORY??? OH MY GOD!!!!!

duuuuuude

"no matter how bad the wound i will ALWAYS" heal you and then link wakes up in water

did she do that!!! did she save him ;_; oh my god im going to cry

"you are quivering like a hatchling" PLEASE protect my poor son

muzu is making me sad dude he misses her so much and he hates this so much

ooooh i have to fight another lynel for shock arrows...good Lord im not looking forward to that

I KNEW IT

"calamity ganon took control of the beasts and trapped the champions inside" yep either she's still alive like link and zelda or her body is in there and so is her fucking ghost

DUDE!! i just swam up my first waterfall and it was AWESOME!!!!!

so im at shatterback point now hwere lynel is just bc i wanted to swim up a waterfall but probably he will kill me quickly lmao

apparently you can mount him too which. sick.

but idk i dont have any good food or elixirs or weapons ready im just up here for science im probably gonna knock off soon i gotta Draw

Oh Fuck There He Is ):

it's super tedious to have top go back and delete every fucking picture i take for my copendium one by one those shouldn't save in my album automatically come on dude im trying to take a picture of this lion centaur thing here

aaah there's a rainbow here too #nice

ah well got him about a quarter pf the way down before i died :/ not bad for being completely unprepared

tbh i only had one defense food?? had i had more i could have whittled him down eventually

anyway thats all for tonight!! i doubt i'll play anymore tonight bc i have drawing to do

lol this is a long post but it's all in one bc i'm typing them in notepad now and don't have to worry about them getting too long

#in which im too busy having the feels to play the goddamn game #personal #loz blogging #botw spoilers

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courage-a-word-of-justice · 6 years

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Juuni Taisen 8 | Netjuu no Susume 7 | Mahoutsukai no Yome 7 | Houseki no Kuni 7 | Girls’ Last Tour 7

Juuni Taisen 8

I’m fresh off the Hozuki no Reitetsu season 1 boat and ready to rock! Let’s go.

Atari? Isn’t that some game company???

I can kinda feel Nisio Isin’s motivation waning, like Dragon and Snake don’t really matter. Dragon and Snake really don’t matter, considering they’ll die later anyways.

Well, at least Graphinica makes nice ice effects. They must be pretty coo-what, you want me to stop with the puns? I didn’t even finish that one.

I wonder if Ufotable hires Graphinica for 3D effects? Those fire effects look familiar.

Ooh…the Dragon brings the court to its knees. The more I watch, the more I’m convinced these Tatsumi twins are the Beppus. (I think I’ve said that for previous episodes, though.)

Hmm. I don’t appreciate the fact I just sat through two episodes’ worth of monologues, but hopefully we can actually get something good out of this. Like a battle.

Can Duodecuple please do something more useful in this show? As much as I like to hear Hiroki Yasumoto speak English, Duodecuple’s a lousy “god” to the zodiac and a horrible narrator, since the monologues do everything for him. Even Navi does better than this in the manga…

Netjuu no Susume 7

Sakurai has a pink keyboard. That suits his name (sakura = cherry blossom).

Interesting to note they don’t use the kanji for “I” (watashi) or “you” (kimi). There are two different yous and two different Is used to imply different genders.

Hayashi has signs saying moratta (received) which CR translates as “gift”. Hmm…there seems to be a disconnect between those two words.

Frigglin’ heck. It’s like these guys knew I was reading Haruhi Suzumiya light novels not too long ago!

Asymmetry short, ponytail long, mannish (?) short and ribbon hair (long). That’s what those hairstyles are.

As I pointed out once, this is from a web manga. Meta joke!

Netjuu no Susume eyecatches make good wallpapers once aga-what? Who’s this with the strange bow in their hair?

Giant burger plush. I want.

Koiwai uses Windows, LOL. (Vista, I think?)

The subbers spelt “server” wrong. It’s weird, because they spelt “sever” instead…

Moll-Oh. Morii. I get it now.

Koiwai has a sister? (based on switched genders)

Koiwai is gonna fricking pull these lovebirds together, isn’t he? He already did it in real life, so it’s not like he couldn’t here, that noob.

The butterfly effect in the background, haha. Harumi’s AFK, people. Respect the AFK people.

Oh…dear. They put Mamiko Noto on double cast duty, which makes sense, but they put Tomoaki Maeno as Harumi, which…uh, suits that muscular woman. Yuki though…they cast Yuki with someone else. I think, from the credit list, the brown character who’s paired off with Yuki is called “Hearth”.

Mahoutsukai no Yome 7

There are some interesting parallels between Alice/Renfred and Chise/Elias…

That mandrake is so rattled…I like it. It’s cute.

Serously, what do you call the sheep-thing?

When you get the chance to, pause and read the note. It’s not proper English, but that is some fancy handwriting…

Holy No Face, Batman! It’s a spirit that looks like the internet group Anonymous!

Is the church grim a fairy?

Chise is such an otome game heroine. I’d pay good money for an otome game with her as the protag.

Houseki no Kuni 7

Snow is a symbol of sadness…

Cinnabar doesn’t have blobs of mercury around themselves in the OP. Interesting.

Hibernation in Japanese is literally “sleeping [for] winter”. The language really can be simple sometimes.

They made these pretty dresses, all for sleeping huh? That Kongo must like being surrounded by gems then…haha.

I know gems don’t have any genders, but I like Antarcticite already. His extremely bishie look makes him a contender for my heart. I heard through the grapevine Antarcticite was a fan favourite too, so that’s…unfortunate. (Although En’s quite the fan favourite in Boueibu, so what gives?)

Antarcticite reminds me of Rod from Cinderella Phenomenon. I’ve been working on that otome game as of late, so of course I’d make the connection.

Let’s be real: does anyone find Phos endearing?

I think I saw an image of this on Yoichi Nishikawa’s Twitter. Dangit, Antarcticite spoilers.

Uh…question? Is this work shoujo or josei or what? I get shoujo vibes from it because it’s all long leggy stuff like CLAMP. Update: It’s seinen! Shocking, isn’t it?

Phos and her bowl, it almost makes Phos look drunk, haha.

“I do the things I can as best I can.” – Nice quote…uh, Antarcticite? Or Phos?

Is Phos gonna fall i-spoke too soon. Completely anticipated this show’s direction right there.

Why does a sheet work on Kongo too? Humour? It definitely worked on me, if that was the case.

Antarc is such a daddy’s bo-I mean, gem.

Whoa! That was freaky! Did they just imply-oh sorry. It’s a hard topic to speak about on the internet.

I wonder, could I write…actually no. I think I’ve done that already. (I was thinking of doing an article about how replacing oneself over and over with different parts could easily make you a different person, but I’ve done that kind of discussion already in Next to Me.)

Girls’ Last Tour 7

Those pipes are CGI. My CGI sense is tingling about it.

This show is a Problem when on Normal Mode. (What I mean by Normal Mode was that it was easier to see when they were in the temple a few episodes back – that’s the single exception.)

Yuu: a worse photobomber than Yumoto…

I’d like to make a joke about how the arrow points left and they just said “right”, but I’d need a visual cue, dangit. Too lazy for visual cues right now…

I thought Chi would be really grumpy as she slid down the chute/pipe/whatever, but she’s having fun too.

The button colours are around the wrong way. What the heck happened to make them like that???

Potato powder? Y’mean, potato starch???

This kneading montage is quite obviously looped.

Oh great. We got Shokugeki no Souma in Girls’ Last Tour, for some reason…

#simulcast commentary #juuni taisen #zodiac war #ancient magus bride #girls' last tour #land of the lustrous #houseki no kuni #mahoutsukai no yome #recovery of an mmo junkie #netjuu no susume #Chesarka watches Juuni Taisen #Chesarka watches Houseki no Kuni #Chesarka watches Netjuu no Susume #Chesarka watches Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou #shoujo shuumatsu ryokou #Chesarka watches MahoYome

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