wait...WAIT...... do i dare ask for Izumii—
❣️❇️💞➿🕔🎟🔊
KDJFNGKDJFNGKDJF congrats on being the funniest person on this entire website, queen.
❣️: reminds you of your f/o
daywalker! - machine gun kelly, corpse
hand crushed by a mallet - 100 gecs (LMFAO)
❇️: reminds you of your s/i
homemade dynamite - lorde
💞: reminds you of your relationship
kali ma - neck deep
she's my collar - gorillaz
➿: you imagine mutual pining to
she's the prettiest girl at the party, and she can prove it with a solid right hook - frank iero
🕔: makes you think of the first time you met (in canon)
funeral grey - waterparks
🎟: you can imagine your first date to
stupid for you - waterparks
first date - blink-182
🔊: make a playlist between 2-8 songs long for your self ship
crush - ethel cain
bad influence - hot milk
super psycho love - simon curtis
she's so mean - matchbox twenty
bad idea! - girl in red
what he don't know - anarbor (lmao. lol, even.)
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Dabi is sooo stray cat coded to me. you find him hurt and bleeding near your house one day, and maybe you only clean his wounds and feed him whatever you had in the fridge, and he just keeps coming back. keeps finding a reason to return to you—he left his phone charger—he never returned your Tupperware—he needs the recipe for that one dish you made that one time even though he knows it’s just a gateway for you to cook it for him again.
and after a while, you just start inviting him in with no hesitation or need of an excuse. he’s such a stray cat kinda dude, just slinks in whenever he feels like it. knocks things over because he finds your reactions funny. steals your food and your warmth and your side of the bed.
after a while, you two fall into a routine with each other. he comes over and messes with you until he gets bored and leaves again, only to pop up in fewer intervals every time. but, as time goes on, in those moments, he just likes to watch you. keep his hands to himself—sometimes—and admires your daily routine. thinks to himself that this is what normalcy is like, asks himself why does he crave it with you so badly?
Dabi watches you from the corner of your bed as you sit in front of your mirror to dab on your makeup. he’s learned what the hell primer and bronzer is and the quickest way to do eyeliner, and it fascinates him more than it should. he watches you prance out of the bathroom after a shower in just your underwear and a towel on your head. how you lather your skin in these fancy oils and body butters, but finds himself asking if they’re safe on still healing burned skin.
he watches you cook him dinner and clean the living room and enjoy your shitty music and tv shows and cry over your dumb romance books and he just. he just can’t believe he’s fallen into this domesticity with you, this normalcy, as he finds himself not watching anymore but doing—with you, beside you. and he finds that he likes it. just a little.
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familiarity, the lack thereof, and the only way it could have ended.
the thing is, ultrakill is a very diegetic game. near everything, from the style meter to the bottomless arsenal to the shitass graphics themselves, are explained in some way by some in-universe fact.
so, what with violence and the implication that V1 was designed to counter earthmovers
what with 7-4 and the fact that it is a culmination of this implication
i wonder. when V1 looked up at that earthmover, did it know, with whatever passes for instinct in a machine, exactly what to do? and if it did, then, how is this conveyed to the player?
diegetic as the game is, how does it engineer a situation in which the player, themselves, knows exactly what they have to do?
the biggest factor, i think, is the fact that the earthmover's health bar appears the moment you lay eyes (or camera, or whatever) on it, and it does not leave until you have finally killed this colossus.
but this factor is much more subtle than it appears at first glance. yes, big honkin' boss healthbar on screen for the entire level, what more to it. there's a good deal more, it turns out.
first off- this is the shortest leadup by far to any bossfight in the game. you slide through a single vent, and you are greeted with benjamin right out in the open. even P-1, devoid of any other hazards as it is, gives you a long trek down the spinal staircase before you reach the flesh prison. 7-4 has none of it. you enter the level, you enter the stage, and there you have it. you know exactly what you are up against right from the outset, and it's not quite a feeling of familiarity but it tells you exactly what you have to do. which is the point of this all, isn't it?
7-4 is also... not a bossfight! it is a full level! it is a full level framed as a bossfight. the health bar frames this full complete level as a bossfight.
and on one hand, this is not new news. on the other hand, i think this is the crux of it. the thing is, most bossfights are near-to-entirely new. you do not know how the boss acts. you do not know their attack patterns. you do not know their capabilities. you are learning something new. levels, though, you have done a thousand times over and so the player knows how they need to play through this bossfight in a way that is not quite present with any other boss in the game.
the content of the level is new, of course, because that's how it goes. but you know the motions. you have done this for two acts prior, you know the motions. you know exactly what to do.
also! this level does not exist in a vacuum. what i am saying is this: the rest of violence layer shifts its storytelling and its tone and even its graphics. it is something completely new in contrast to the rest of the game. 7-4, though, returns to environments and graphics more akin to what you have experienced before, bringing you back to familiarity and again knowing what to do here in a way the rest of violence hasn't let the player experience.
one more thing about this level: it plays directly into expectations. which is something that the rest of the game actually does not tend to do.
the game, at base, is just not a typical FPS. it gives you movement like a roguelite or a platformer, it takes guns you expect to know the mechanics of and goes utterly wild with how far the archetype can be changed.
in a smaller scope, here is a comparison of the earthmover and the corpse of king minos as two separate colossal bosses foreshadowed in similar ways. and i mean, minos's bossfight isn't unprecedented in other works. but i think the thing that matters here is that you are not, in fact, the underdog as is the case with so many other bosses of its ilk. riven of many voices, destiny 2, similar bossfight similar scale. you are hiding from her you are a fireteam of many you are triumphing over a dragon larger than life. project gestalt, madness project nexus, you are pulling out every stop you can to take down something so far over your head (both literally and metaphorically). corpse of king minos- V1 looks up, stands its ground, and parries his god damn fist.
and the thing is, the earthmover plays into a different expectation, but it's playing into an expectation nonetheless. you look at this thing and you climb it and you dismantle it from within, like you have done in many games prior. you know what your goal is from the moment you see that healthbar and you hook onto the conspicuously placed hookpoints that tell you- you will climb this machine; you will fight your way up to whatever its core is and you will kill it. you play through the entire level with this expectation and you get exactly this expectation. you destroy its core and it begins a countdown, and so very many games have countdowns before the collapse of whatever level you have just beaten, and you know exactly what you have to do.
i don't know. i love diegetic storytelling. i love this level.
it's just familiarity, i think. this level runs off familiarity. it gives you, the player, things and tropes and designs you are familiar with. it signals to you that you should know what to do, and it lets you do exactly what you expect to do.
if i were any more cheesy i could absolutely end this by restating something about the only way it could've ended, but uh. i am not that cheesy. this time.
aw crud now i don't know how to end this oh well goodbye then
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man okay so I used to play mechquest and dragonfable back in like, 2008 when I was a kid with very little patience to follow a storyline. coming back as an adult and finishing mechquest has absolutely slapped me silly with how deep and serious the story is in between all the absurdist humour. I have. so many emotions over the whole storyline, and especially so many thoughts about the unique form of tragedy that is The Reset.
You save the world but it's not the world anymore. You and your friends survive but you don't know each other anymore- have nothing left of the lives you fought to keep. You 'save' everything but it's still all gone. Everything you knew and loved, gone, and you don't even know what you've lost. You can't even keep the memory of what you had- and that's almost kinder compared to being one of the 3ish people who DO remember... and have to live around everyone else who doesn't, knowing their closest friends look at them and see a stranger, and that they may as well be because they aren't that person they remember being.
And to top it all off, that terrible sacrifice doesn't even end it. you're still left fighting impossible and devastating wars over and over. It's the tragedy of doomed time loops with extra layers of devastating all over the place. The GEARS University students being forced to become soldiers because they're all that's left to protect their homeworld. The horrors of the Shadowscythe virus taking over friends and loved ones you may be forced to put down to save yourself. The town of Falconreach burning over and over because no matter how hard they fight, it's never enough. The people like Sha'rae who sacrifice themselves to try and prevent tyrrany from seizing power, only for it to be utterly useless.
Anyway the brainrot is severe and especially dangerous since I'm coming into exam season and all my hyperfixated brain wants to do is chew on glass about these games.
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