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blorbosexterminator · 3 years

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AND I am back. Once again on this lovely day to give my review for the EPISODE 24 so, here we go :

Agustin is squinting his eyes at him, as Sergio keeps muttering that Agustin has in fact done what he just mentioned he did and which both of them have known for years.

Federico is 99% dead?! Damn, what is Sergio's gonna do?! Make it 100% ? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

(I got a feeling that Federico is the kidnapper or atleast a very important lead to them)

Btw, WHO IS FEDERICO?! Tatiana's alive husband?!

(Look at me, hoping like a moron she aint dead

My dog : Yep, total moron 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Me :

Me : NOBODY ASKED FOR YOUR BITCH-ASS OPINION, YOU DUMB-FUCK DONKEY!!!! 😡😡😡)

Martin, my darling, my sweetheart, my poor angel. Nada, some help? Atleast gimme some tips, bruh, come on, you cant desert me like that. Not when I need to help someone 🙁🙁🙁

since, drunk, the last idea he got was that Laura turned out to be completely insane and kidnapped Andrés to marry him

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Martin, honey, stop drinking. This getting out of hand 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. But then again, Andres is so hot poor thing keeps on doubting.

As Roci said in one of the tags, his wives deserve the highest civilian award for putting up with him.

(Although, I just had a frisky thought. What if Sergio wanted Andres away from Martin, not because he cared bout his hermano but......😳😳😳😳😳 *whispers loudly* he wanted Andres all for himself? In *frantically looks around* INCEST WAY?!)

(Calm down, my deranged mind, you went too far 🤣🤣🤣)

Who knows, it could be the professor he punched in the middle of an exam once. Martín doesn’t think he has forgiven him.

Mood, bruh, such a mood 🤣🤣��🤣🤣 NO, OMG 😆😆😆 I didnt do it, but I do kinda have a beef with my Organic prof. I'll go off tangent again, so tell me if you wanna know the story.

He sent Silene in disguise to collect the cctv from the nearby shops and streets. His own cctv has been disabled since the IT bitch ruined it, Martín will kill him when he gets them back.

I think if and only IF Silene finds something good, her % of redemption will increase.

(Raquel s2e7 deja vu, I see what you did there 😏)

And Martin about to go John Wick on anyone & everyone. I tell ya Keanu Reeves will be crying when he sees Martin go nuts. I am willing to bet he'll pull a gun on the poor milkman, who just wanna do his job 😆😆😆

So he calls Bogota, with a little (not that little) handwritten list in his hand with the names of people he thinks he might have ruined their life in the past.

Martin : Okay, I'll just take out the list and

*the paper rolls out the door, travels around the world for 5 times and comes back while going over top of Everest and bottom of Marina Trench*

No, it’s because when he hated Martín, he had always hated him openly. If he wanted to hurt him, then he’d just try to stab him in the middle of the living room.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

“Bogota, did Tatiana have any family?”

“No, who of us did, Martín?”

“You literally have 7 children and 7 ex-wives.”

COMEDY GOLD, NADA 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

“Those kids are ungrateful bastards, if I fall dead tomorrow they would just run to see what they’ve inherited.”

Aka THE PLOT of 70% Indian Telenovas 🤣🤣🤣. Also this line alone has so much soap opera vibes 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

He has no choice but to go to fucking Sergio Marquina. And if it’s his wife, then even better. Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.

For fuck sake, Martín, Ive been telling you from last 2 ep

Stop. Blaming. Raquel.

Also, 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 damn, these 2 assholes cant keep away from each other. Nada, are we sure these 2 married the right people? As much I am a Berlermo ship stan, this here is just smth else 😆😆😆

Uh-oh 🙁 this asshole son of a bitch just poked the mama bear. And if ANDRES of all people narrows his eyes at you, You are, quoting Martin from last ep, truly, utterly, entirely, thoroughly and wholly fucked.

“Do you know him?”

“Oh yes, a childhood friend, I stole his pencil once and he never forgave me. Have you heard this Paula? Don’t steal your friends’ pencils, they will never get over the betrayal. You could steal the teacher’s ones though.”

“Why did you steal his pencil?” Paula asked seriously, with a delirious tone, and too tired to even move her head upwards. Raquel is gonna kill every single person involved for doing this to her daughter.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Sassy Andres = Best Andres. Words that should be written with GOLD. Wisdom passed onto generations

Poor Paula 🤣🤣🤣 I just imagine this in some other situation :

Andres : *saying smth smth*

Paula : *taking notes & asking questions*

Raquel after seeing her daughter :

Look what you made me do

🎶But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time

Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time

I got a list of names, and yours is in red, underlined

I check it once, then I check it twice, oh!

Ooh, look what you made me do

Look what you just made me do🎶

(Look what you made me do by Taylor Swift)

I am telling you Nada, by the time Raquel will be done with everyone, Uma Thurman will cry buckets because no one, okay?, no one can compete with A MAMA BEAR RAQUEL MURILLO.

“Poison is a woman’s choice of weapon, Anibal. Don’t be disrespectful.”

Again, words of wisdom. Only time hes not being a misogynist.

Also, Andres, my dear, are you speaking this from experience?

(Why do I think that Martin got Tatiana killed cause she poisoned him and Martin had to watch Andres fight for his life in hospital?)

“He won’t say anything, Mama. He’s the one who kidnapped grandma with Silene!”

Is anyone gonna listen to her? Or do I need to bonk Raquel myself? 🤦‍♀️

“Silence!” she screams. “I need to know everything that happened, if we’re getting out of here alive.”

FINALLY!!!! SOME COMMON SENSE!!!! WE THANK THE LORD FOR MERCY!!!

And as for me, its time for me to say goodbye and goodnight (Cause its quarter to 12 rn in my watch)

AND ILL SEE YALL TOMORROW 🤗 BYE!!! 🙋‍♀️

I'm back as well! And we've finally caught up with each other.

Valid reaction. Sergio is also slowly going insane. Love that for him.

He's hoping he could. We all know this family has beef with that last one percentage.

(we'll see👀👀👀)

Hope is all we got at this point afabgs.

Now, now, don't speak to him like that. He has valid criticism.

I'd help him if I could, but alas (lmfao no, I do love them suffering)

Same recommendation. But he just, poor boy, could nothing to think of. So might as well be Laura. (also fair, who knows, maybe Andrés gets constantly kidnapped and forced into marriage)

Definitely, she's 100%. I really don't know how they do it.

Avsnsjsvjshsjs all theories are valid. Maybe Sergio does want Martín or Andrés, who knows what goes in the head of that fucker.

Seems like an interesting story! I never got along with my chemistry teachers. (Got one once to tell me that he's still not kicking me out of class only because he feels bad for my parents that they have to deal with me and they'll be the ones who will have to deal with the mess lmfao.)

Yes, have some faith in her!

100% accurate. Martín is this close from just shooting random people in the supermarket because they also could be the ones who kidnapped Andrés.

HAHAHA YES. This is exactly how the scene went.

We stan honesty in this house.

So happy you found it funny!!

I can confirm! Like 70% of all Egyptian drama as well.

I don't think he's hearing you well. But afnajscsgsh SAME. Okay look, now I really understand show runners with super homoerotic ships that they refuse to make canon. You try and make two male characters hate each other so much for plot then it slips and gets homoerotic.

Totally agree. This guy isn't making enemies with the right people (they are all dumb, but also none of them have anything that even resembles a moral compass)

Totally agree. This guy is honestly super amusing to watch and it's mainly because he's incapable of taking any situation in life seriously.

This family is really iconic. (love the song agsnsg) but also like Raquel would basically tell her after writing done his notes just put the title on top: things to never, ever, do.

I believe you! They really fucked with the wrong dumb family.

I mean, he's still a misogynist. Maybe some of us really like dagger, has he considered that?

That's as valid theory as any right there.

Hopefully Raquel will finally start listening to the child!

Raquel is the only one with a semblance of common sense.

Hope you had a good sleep! I'll see you tomorrow!

#thanks again kal!!#lovely review as always #Ramadan Telenovela #A Spanish Tale

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xhxhxhx · 4 years

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Saw something in the further reading section of Michael Kulikowski’s Imperial Tragedy (Profile, 2019) today:

There are countless books on the fall of the western Roman empire, and more appear annually, with variable scholarly trappings but nearly all quite conventional. Still, ripping yarns and neo-Victorian analyses can be found in any bookshop. So, for those so inclined, can thinly disguised nativist tracts on how immigration (and ‘immigrant violence’) brought down the empire. To name names would be invidious.

I thought this was a dig at Peter Heather, Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and author of The Fall of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2005) and Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009), so I looked it up and discovered that not only was I right, but Kulikowski has serious beef with the guy:

Peter Heather has been fiercely criticized by members of the so-called Toronto School of History. Michael Kulikowski, who belongs to this group, has accused Heather of neo-romanticism and of wishing "to revive a biological approach to ethnicity". Kulikowski claims that Heather "manifests a clear methodological affinity" to the 19th-century writer of the Goths Henry Bradley.

But Kulikowki’s beef is nothing next to the righteous fury of Guy Halsall, Professor of History at the University of York:

Guy Halsall has identified Peter Heather as the leader of a "counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking" about the Migration Period. Halsall accuses this group, which is strongly associated with University of Oxford, of "bizarre reasoning" and of purveying a "deeply irresponsible history". Halsall writes that Heather and the Oxford historians have been responsible for "an academic counter-revolution" of wide importance, and accuses them of deliberately contributing to the rise of "far-right extremists".

Halsall got so mad at Heather, first at the 2011 Leeds International Medieval Conference and then online, at his blog, that he threatened to leave academia entirely:

Well, it's more or less a year since I started doing this blogging lark 'seriously' (the inverted commas are obviously necessary). And, as they say, what a roller-coaster of a year it's been. I've shut down the blog twice, brought it back twice, come to the verge of formal complaints being sent to my university twice (once justifiably, once most certainly not), lost at least one friend, lost 99% of the respect I had for someone I had hitherto held in high esteem, quite possibly lost the chance of a job I wanted because of this blog, taken some pretty visceral abuse, and so on. All good fun!

On the other hand I have learnt some lessons. One is that even bastards have feelings. Another is that if you have twenty-odd followers and maybe 100 hits a day, that (allowing for hits from people looking for something else, like Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian or ever-popular balding guitarist The Edge) does not mean that only twenty or thirty people in the whole wide world read your blog. Thus you need to be a bit more careful about what you say and how you say it. I've also learnt that eminent historians don't always read what you write very carefully, and just how deeply-ingrained the elitist culture of the British historical profession is, as well as just how few principles are actually held by the overwhelming majority of the practitioners of said profession. And this in response to something that I actually thought long and hard about how I wrote.

And as a result of all this I have realised that no good is going to come of me continuing to smack my head against the glass ceiling that those of us not from 'a particular socio-educational background' (you know the one) eventually run up against. I have instead come to the decision, essentially, to give up on it and 'seek my fortune' elsewhere than in the confines of the academic career-path, as it is now constructed in the UK at any rate.* I'm actually quite excited about this as I think it offers a lot of possibilities, creatively and ethically. It's been a liberating decision. Those of you who know that I set most store by the writings of those co-opted into the canon of the existentialists (almost none of whom ever called themselves by that name) will appreciate exactly why I am proud of this decision.

To some extent it makes up for the bad faith I showed in backing down and removing my post on why it matters to get angry about the lazy and irresponsible (indeed, yes, just downright knuckle-headed) way in which some historians in and/or produced by our most prestigious Thames Valley-based university write about politically and socially sensitive topics like migrations.

Halsall ultimately sanitized the 2011 IMC paper that started the war with Heather -- the neutered version is still up on his blog -- but the original was apparently quite something:

Perhaps unsurprisingly for those who’ve heard him speak or read him on the Internet, this was the one that really started the war. [Edit: and, indeed, some changes have been made to these paragraphs by request of one of those involved.] The consequences, if not of this actual speech, at least of its subsequent display on the Internet, have been various, unpleasant and generally regrettable, and I don’t want any of them myself.

Thankfully, the purged parts of the original were reproduced by some noble soul on the Civilization Fanatics forums before they were lost to the ages:

Thus we can have Ward-Perkins’ sneering parody of late antiquity studies and Peter Heather’s distortions of counter-arguments. In many people’s minds the choices before us are evidently, either, that nothing happened, or, that there was a huge catastrophe caused entirely by invading barbarians. Obviously this is not the case. Plenty of people other than me -- most famously, Walter Pohl -- have written about serious, dramatic change happening in the fifth century without blaming it on the barbarians and without denying that there were migrations in the fifth century. Yet this -- if I dare call it such -- third way seems nevertheless to be very much a minority position.

But I am not convinced that a simple lack of exposure to sensible alternatives really explains the continuing, fanatical devotion to the idea of the barbarian migrations, especially outside the academy.

I have recently said that:

“When a British historian places an argument that the Roman Empire fell because of the immigration of large numbers of barbarians next to arguments that the end of Rome was the end of civilisation and that we need to take care to preserve our own civilisation, when another British historian writes sentences saying “the connection between immigrant violence and the collapse of the western Empire could not be more direct” [a direct quote from Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009)], and especially when the arguments of both involve considerable distortions of the evidence to fit their theories, one cannot help but wonder whether these authors are wicked, irresponsible or merely stupid.”

Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives.

Are these writers setting themselves up as ideologues of the xenophobic Right or have they simply not realised the uses to which such careless thinking and phrasing can be put? You can draw your own conclusions, although it is worth noting that Ward-Perkins has been happy enough to write on this subject for the neo-liberal magazine Standpoint, which regularly publishes pieces attacking multiculturalism. There comes a point when one has to admit that actually the most charitable explanation for all this really is that these writers are simply a bit dim.

Outside academic circles, it is certainly the case that the adhesion to the idea of barbarian invasion has a heavily right-wing political dimension. Apart from the barbarians’ role as metaphor, already discussed, it is worth, very briefly, thinking about the other reasons why people are so ready to pin the blame on the barbarians. Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian analysis of antisemitism provides some valuable ways forward. Essentially, the barbarian, like the figure of the Jew, acts as a screen between the subject and a confrontation with the Real, which Zizek sees, slightly differently from Lacan, as the pre-symbolised; things that haven’t been or can’t or won’t be encompassed in a world view. Zizek showed that arguments that “the Jews aren’t like that” are almost never effective against anti-Semites because what real Jews (or actual immigrants, one might say) are like is not the point. Similarly, arguments about the empirical reality of the fifth-century cut little weight with those wedded to the idea of Barbarian Invasion. Just as the anti-Semite takes factual evidence as more proof of the existence of the international Zionist conspiracy, the right-wing devotee of the Barbarian Invasions sees factual counter-arguments as manifestations of the liberal, left-wing academy peddling its dangerous multicultural political correctness. I have read a great deal of this on internet discussion lists -- including a review of my own book, and one of James O’Donnell’s! Michael Kulikowski received a similarly-phrased review from a right-wing academic ancient historian.

The barbarian is the classic “subject presumed to”. The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. “He” is not like “us”, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians -- and you only need to read Peter Heather to see this -- are peoples with “coherent aims” (a quote), which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well -- none other than the barbarians anyway.

Halsall has never resiled from his belief that Heather was essentially a fascist, nor backed away from his commitment to resign from his post in righteous indignation -- maybe not in 2011, or 2019, but certainly by 2023 at the very latest:

My anger about all this is justly infamous but has been badly misrepresented. I do think that some things are worth getting angry about, and the misuse of the Barbarian Migrations and the End of the Roman Empire to fuel xenophobia and racism, and the way some modern authors pander to this, is one such. However, to look at the origins of this ire and animus, I invite you to compare my engagement with Peter Heather’s work in Barbarian Migrations, and its tone, with Heather’s engagement – if you can call it that – with my work, and its tone, in Empires and Barbarians. I never expect to be agreed with; I do expect basic academic courtesy to be reciprocated. If people see fit to treat me intellectually as a second-class citizen, the gloves will come off. That may stem from my own biography as (unlike so many) a first-generation academic not educated at the 'right' schools and universities, but there we are. I will be leaving the profession within the next four years (well done, guys) so I have nothing to lose by not apologising for that.

Kulikowski might have gotten in a good dig, but Halsall will always be a true master of the art of Being Mad Online.

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in-tua-deep · 5 years

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My dude, my buddy, my guy, my gal, my pal. Please yeet more of this daemon AU at me, I'm super interested in this whole idea and would love to hear more, how do all of the daemons interact with each other?? What are the little quirks shared between daemon and human?? Did any of them have a phase where they couldn't stand their daemon?? Did Vanya's owl claw out Leonard's eyes when the truth came out?? How exactly would they find out that Five's daemon didn't settle?? I'm living for this AU now

oh i am SO ready for more daemon au are you kidding here we go starting with some NAMES because all good ocs need names and while the first post was mainly for just saying what animal is what now i can develop it into a full au and no one can stop me

So the kids and their daemons share a name for most of their lives, they’re both just,, one or two and so on. But when they get names they run into the roadblock of “do our daemons get the same names as us??” and realize that their one (1) example of a human/daemon relationship is their dad he his daemon doesn’t share his name so… probably not. But he only ordered Grace to give the human in the relationship a name so it’s up to their what their daemons names will be

I’m thinking Luther probably gave his daemon a space themed name because he’s my good space boy so I’m going to name his daemon Andromeda after the galaxy !! I think she would have wanted a somewhat regal sounding name because she tries really hard to model herself after Reggie’s daemon, who is the very definition of regal. Luther calls her Dromeda or Drom for short occasionally

Diego’s daemon HMMM i’m gonna say Valencia, Val for short because that means brave and I think it would be important to Diego to have a defender of some kind and they both would want so desperately to be brave bless their hearts

oh man i am absolutely naming Allison’s daemon Amraphel which means “one that speaks of secrets” and Allison calls him Raph for short and he’s still lazy and I still love him a whole lot

Klaus’s daemon i’m admittedly a bit stuck on but i’m gonna call them Rowan because it’s a tree that symbolizes life and courage and as some very fearful kids with death powers I think they’d appreciate it. Rowan is nonbinary btw (”are you a girl or a boy” “i’m made of fucking dust why does it matter”)

I named Five’s daemon Pancha because I like it and I feel like naming her Quinque, which is Five in Latin, would be way obvious because if you think Reggie didn’t make these kids learn an archaic dead language because he’s a pretentious ass then you’re probably wrong so yes Pancha it is and when the kids figure out it’s literally the number five in another language they’re going to throw a fit

Ben’s daemon is named Tamaya which means in the center literally just because they’re in the middle of two planes of existence and one is full of monsters and also because i like the name Tama as well so this is really two birds with one stone and no one can stop me

and finally Vanya’s daemon is named Pollux for exactly no reason other than because I say so and it sounds like it could be a name for a daemons from the books which i was trying very hard for the aesthetic with all the names but it’s been so long since i’ve read them oops

ALRIGHT with that over with i can actually yell about them which i’m putting under the cut because this is going to be long as FUCK

so how the daemons interact with each other… I’m probably going to leave out Tamaya for most just bc most of them don’t know that she survived Ben’s death for like,, a really long time in the fic i have half planned in my head

SO i already mentioned Andromeda is kind of a stick in the mud and unimpressed with her siblings shenanigans. She tries really hard to emulate their dad/their dad’s daemon but doesn’t have the control on her temper that she should. She’s blunt and says what she’s thinking, she doesn’t really care about the fact that daemons don’t usually speak to people that aren’t their own and she’ll boss everyone around given the chance tbh

She doesn’t get along with Val at all and there’s a lot of posturing between the two especially after they both settle. Generally she’s dismissive but occasionally she taunts Val with the fact that she settled as something that protects against wolves, and that clearly Val is too wild to ever amount to much. Val hits right back calling her and Luther “Dad’s obedient little dogs” and just generally when you have Luther and Diego going at one another Drom and Val are only half a step behind them

She gets along well with Raph and often carries him around when Allison calls him lazy and refuses to do it. Despite that thought Raph is like,, super muscular and strong and he’s a bigass snake, Drom used to carry him into position during missions and let’s just say they were a solid interrogation team with Drom’s teeth and Raph literally squeezing information out of people when necessary (though he can always rumor people just like Allison, he’s not fond of doing it and calls it cheating because he’s a contrary bastard). He tends to help immobilizing people and their daemons and is used as a restraint a lot until their people with thumbs can come along with rope or something

Andromeda and Rowan do NOT get along, mainly because Rowan is pretty vocal about the fact that their dad fucked them up and has no respect. Some of it also comes from the fact that Andromeda is a little jealous of Rowan’s grace as a cat because their dad’s fox daemon is exceptionally graceful and regal. But generally Andromeda ignores Rowan or growls at him, she’s never physically laid a paw on him outside of sparring until that scene with drunk and depressed Luther though

Andromeda,, also doesn’t really get along with Pancha either. It has a lot to do with the fact that as kids Pancha was constantly shifting where Drom would keep a form and stick to it. She would often tell Pancha that one day she’d settle well lmao jokes on her. Pancha used to frequently insults Drom’s intelligence and has called her a “dumb mutt” before but upon return those insults have been conspicuously absent for ALL the siblings. Five still has a fairly venomous tongue, but Pancha keeps her silence.

Andromeda and Pollux don’t have a relationship, simple as that. She ignores Pollux’s existence, even when the other daemon attempts to interact with her. She basically assumes their father is correct in Vanya’s uselessness and as such doesn’t care all that much about either of them. To be fair Pollux has learned from their childhood and doesn’t interact with Andromeda much either, and even when Vanya attempts to like,, call Luther out Pollux keeps his silence.

Val doesn’t like Andromeda and isn’t afraid to show it, bristling and snarling. Val actually settled first of the two of them (a point of pride), and some part of her is a little hurt that Drom turned into a dog that protects a pack from wolves and took it personally as Luther’s literal soul saying that he didn’t see Diego and her as part of the pack.

Her and Raph don’t really talk a lot but they have a lot of relatable sibling-eye-contact moments over their family being dumb shits and whenever Andromeda wasn’t available it was Val who would carry Raph so they’re actually closer to one another than their people are. Raph firmly refuses to get between any argument of Drom and Val’s and would 100% rumor them apart when they were all kids because Raph was Sick Of Their Shit™ despite his general distaste for rumoring

Val and Rowan get along pretty well actually, Rowan frequently hops up to ride on her back like they’re the captain of a furry wolf shaped ship and Val allows it even though she thinks they’re a little shit. Rowan used to hide behind Val from Reggie and his daemon and Val might still have a lot of protective pack instincts that she showers on them because they allow it. Val may or may not be 90% of the reason that Diego just sighs and lets Klaus tag along whenever, though Diego and Val often disagree on how to handle the Klaus/Rowan situation since Val wants to kidnap them both and keep them safe in their boiler room while Diego is of the firm belief that Klaus is a big boy now and they aren’t responsible for him.

Val thought Pancha was a mischievous little shit when they were kids as the other daemon would frequently jump wherever she pleased. Val isn’t surprised when Pancha “settles” as a hare since they’re associated with tricksters and are more solitary and independent and tougher than their rabbit counterparts. She’s super worried about Pancha when she arrived back with Five though, since the other daemon is far more withdrawn and look daemons are representations of someone’s soul they can’t lie - Five can put on a tough act all he likes but Pancha’s behavior is pretty clearly off and she looks at all of them like she’s seeing ghosts. Val is the one to carry Pancha back after the shrapnel incident, swearing because she knew she should have been suspicious that Five was carrying Pancha when she’d always hated being carried when they were kids

Val doesn’t particularly care for Pollux and is actually mildly uneasy around him. There’s just something… off about the other daemon. It raises Val’s hackles even if she doesn’t know why, and she doesn’t figure it out until after the fact that the reason she was wary of Pollux is literally because on some level she recognized the chains on him via the medication and was repulsed even though it wasn’t Pollux’s fault. She’s trying to be better after the fact with him.

I’m making myself so sad about Pollux right now tbh he deserves so much better than what he’s got but moving on

Raph is honestly the chillest daemon with everyone else’s daemon. No one has beef with Raph. Like, they might have beef with Allison, but not with Raph which might be why Allison and Raph are probably the least in sync out of the siblings with their daemon actually outside of Vanya. Raph loves Andromeda who carries him places and doesn’t mind him winding up on her because she’s warm.

Raph considers Val to be his bitchface pal and they bond over their people being stupid. Honestly Raph just wants to sleep for the most part. But legit though Allison and Raph need an intervention for them never being on the same page I think Raph might resent Allison leaving to become a star and he’s the one that dislikes using their power and constantly advised against using it so he might, on some level, blame Allison for them losing Claire (and Allison wonders if the stereotype against snake daemons played a role and sort of blames him) and honestly their relationship is a fucking mess

Raph and Rowan are chill, they’re bros, they know what they’re about. Raph thinks Rowan’s sense of humor is fucking hilarious and they’re both sleepy bitches (Rowan is a cat they knows what they’re about regarding catnaps) so they napped together a lot when everyone was under the same roof. They’re at an unspoken truce regarding the drug issue because unlike the rest of the family Raph actually listens when Rowan explains about their power being the fucking worst and having to numb it down after Raph offers to rumor them to get clean. But yeah like Allison and Klaus don’t hang out much but Raph and Rowan are bros.

I said Raph gets along with p much everyone but he’s not super close with Pancha simply because she was constantly on the move and shifting every other minute as kids back when everyone was unsettled like she was constantly itching to get out of her own skin. Like, Pancha’s thing is moving and being quick and honestly Raph is a little surprised she didn’t settle as a bird daemon the way she flits about. Raph being lazy, they didn’t see much of one another but he was always up for a conversation when Pancha calmed down enough or exhausted herself. He likes her, he just thinks she’s exhausting. He’s much more concerned for her after she gets back from the apocalypse though.

Raph and Pollux kind of,, also don’t have a big relationship tbh. There’s just something about Pollux that makes Raph uneasy, but he’s a chill dude and is probably one of the closest to Pollux after Pancha. Sometimes when Raph would be going slithering through the house, Pollux would sit upon his back and chill as they both went to whatever destination. Raph does think it’s a little weird that Pollux doesn’t fly considering he’s, you know, a bird, but he doesn’t press the issue (which he regrets, later). But overall he’s not nearly as interested in mending bridges with Vanya as Allison is since there’s still that something that prevents him from fully liking Pollux. But as the plot progresses he warms up to the idea more and more without realizing that the reason he’s warming is because they stopped taking the drugs hmm

Rowan doesn’t get along with Andromeda but they’re pretty chill with everyone else’s daemons. They get surprisingly protective of their siblings and even though Klaus isn’t great in a fight pre-Vietnam, Rowan isn’t afraid to flash their claws when necessary. The biggest reason they got kidnapped is because Hazel’s daemon didn’t come to the firefight in the manor and they weren’t willing to break the taboo on touching a human when it seemed like the primary objective was to take Klaus not to kill him. They ended up regretting it for the torture scene though oof.

Rowan loves Val a whole lot and likes trying to groom her and they 100% climb up on Val’s back when they feel like being lazy. Rowan is a self proclaimed dog person though they often say that there are always exceptions and eye Andromeda but this comes up again with Dave and his australian cattle dog daemon where, when they meet, Rowan blurts out that they’re a dog person and Dave’s daemon snorts in laughter considering that Klaus’s daemon is literally a cat. He is the personification of ‘cat person’ his soul is a cAT.

I already yelled about Rowan and Raph being nap buds, they like Raph because he’s never judged them and just accepts that they know their powers well enough to know what does and doesn’t work

Rowan and Pancha actually get along weirdly well?? Like, Rowan can be off the walls crazy at times as you know cats get that simply zest for life and just go fucking nuts for a while before going back to sleep?? so Rowan is actually one of the few of the siblings daemons who could keep up with her when they were kids and Pancha was the last of them unsettled. There was a minor freak out where they didn’t see Pancha at first when Five popped out of the portal which prompted the whole “does anyone else see little number five” comment bc ghosts don’t have daemons but then Pancha popped up and Rowan was so fuCKING RELIEVED and continuously prodded at Klaus to follow either Diego or Five because they want to hang out with Val and Pancha

The only one of the siblings daemons who knows that Tamaya is still alive. She doesn’t speak almost at all, only rarely talking to Klaus but she talks a little more to Rowan. Tamaya is usually curled up in Klaus’s pockets or general clothing but there have been a few occasions where she rides on Rowan’s shoulders or goes off on her own for a little while (those are the occasions where Ben’s ghost also goes off for a little while, neither Klaus nor Rowan question where they go). Tamaya also occasions hides in Klaus’s room instead of accompanying them places. During the kidnapping she nibbles through Klaus’s restraints and allows him to escape a little more easily since no one expects an unaccompanied daemon, haven’t decided yet how this impacts the whole Patch dying situation

Rowan doesn’t really talk to Pollux and Pollux doesn’t talk to them, though Rowan does care about Pollux. Rowan is the most easygoing with Pollux because honestly being high means that they don’t notice Pollux’s strangeness on the same level as the others and will often direct comments towards the owl daemon. Pollux rarely responds, however.

Pancha time!! I love Pancha she’s a ball of nervous energy and can’t sit still half the time. As a kid she was constantly shifting between animals like she would run across a room and be five different animals in the time it took her to get to the other end, just always restless. She and Five kept each other sane in the apocalypse - I haven’t decided whether Dolores exists in this au and if she does would she get a stuffed animal daemon?? Decisions decisions. She’s changed a LOT from the Pancha that the others remember and is noticeably a lot more quiet and standoffish, but also she fades into the background where as a kid she was constantly bursting to the foreground and demanding attention. She looks at them all like they’re ghosts and will flinch when addressed sometimes even by other daemons. The others can sense there’s something just a little bit off about her but attribute that to the trauma (eventually though it comes out that Pancha is still unsettled and that explains it)

Pancha never got along with Andromeda and they butted heads a lot before Pancha left. Pancha’s a smartass daemon alongside her person so would frequently insult Andromeda’s intelligence or go off plan because she thought of something better and would frequently yell for Andromeda to ‘adapt!’ because that was her biggest criticism. Her fluidly changing from one form to another depending on the situation was her calling card for adapting and Andromeda would always growl that one day Pancha would have to settle and Pancha would shrug it off. As adults they still don’t really see eye to eye though Pancha has noticeably softened towards Andromeda. She doesn’t call the other daemon a dumb mutt anymore and in fact doesn’t insult any of the others at all.

Pancha liked irritating Val when they were kids but still got along reasonably well with her. Now that they’re back, Val is noticeably more protective of her family and Pancha is included with that. There are a couple of moments where Val bores holes into Pancha’s head to try and telepathically ask if the hare is okay that Pancha doesn’t respond to. When Five and Pancha are drunk off their asses, Val is the one who carries Pancha even though Luther is carrying Five. She insisted. She also carried Pancha home after the shrapnel injury and curled around her on the bed absolutely FURIOUS that someone dared to hurt her sibling. Pancha says some things while drunk that break Val’s heart, and Pancha never protests the coddling unlike Five. She doesn’t lean into it, but she doesn’t protest it.

Pancha and Raph aren’t close but Pancha likes the other daemon regardless because he never did pry into her business and showed her how to do cool tricks as a snake after he settled and she didn’t. Raph never made comments about her being the last to settle unlike most of the others (even though Ben and Vanya only ever mentioned it kindly).

Pancha and Rowan are bros though Pancha disapproves of Rowan drugging themself to keep the powers at bay and always expresses that they have faith that Rowan will learn to control them one day. Honestly Rowan finds it kind of nice even if Pancha disapproves because at least she disapproves because she 100% believes in them instead of being disapproving for disapproval’s sake. Pancha expresses that even drugged Rowan is one of the most observant of their siblings. Rowan worries about her after she comes back and keeps trying to convince Klaus to go after Five, but Five has a very venomous tongue and Klaus is delicate no matter how much Rowan figures it’s just a defense mechanism since Pancha doesn’t echo the sentiments. Rowan is worried about Five as well. Rowan is just worried :(

Pancha is the only one in the family who loves Pollux and actively seeks the other daemon out. She knows something isn’t right, but instead of being repulsed finds herself delighted at the mystery and assumes that the ‘wrongness’ is why Pollux doesn’t fly. Before Pancha jumped to the apocalypse, she kept trying to teach Pollux how to fly by shifting into various birds but it never did stick.

Yeah though Pollux is a daemon that really unnerves other daemons because they can tell something is terribly wrong even if they can’t quite put their finger on what. Pollux and Vanya don’t really communicate either and get second place in the “our human/daemon relationship is super messed up” after Allison and Raph.

Pollux doesn’t really speak. To anyone. Especially after Five and Pancha vanish. He’s just,, not really all the way there to be honest. He goes where Vanya does but does precious little, often standing as still as a statue on his perch until moved again. Sometimes he’ll interact with other daemons but not usually by speaking - he’s sat on Raph’s back or tugged at Andromeda’s fur to get her attention or silently stood in someone’s way but seriously for the most part he’s somewhat catatonic.

After they go off the meds he starts perking up again and speaks for the first time in years to Leonard/Harold and his skua daemon. He actually does have a personality, but he’s been suppressed for so long that he’s still figuring himself out alongside Vanya tbh

As the White Violin his colors switch and instead of being brown with white spots as a spotted owl he becomes white with brown spots. He also is constantly flying while they’re using their powers, flapping and keeping himself aloft roughly above Vanya’s head, half suspended by their own power. As they figure out control, they eventually realize that it’s Pollux who can direct their sound based attacks with his wings and if Vanya tries to go alone it’s uncontrolled like the attack on the trucker dudes without the focus of her violin. They have to work together to control Vanya’s powers, and it’s difficult because they genuinely don’t really have much of a relationship or know each other very well since they’ve been sedated since Vanya was like, four years old

this post is already so so long so i’ll cut it off here probably but yeAH there’s probably a scene where Pollux attacks Leonard/Harold’s daemon and claws her eye out and there’s a translated wound on Leonard because that’s how daemons work and then they both get fucked up by Vanya and Pollux’s powers/knife storm thing

(Pollux isn’t as angry as Vanya is, truthfully. He’s just… tired. He’s so tired. Vanya wants to end the world in her fury. Pollux wants to end it just so everything… stops.)

but yes please keep asking me questions about this au i’m living for it i love these dumb idiots and their daemons

(still need to come up names for the background character daemons, there’s a part of my mind whispering don’t you fucking dare name reginald’s daemon regina soul i swear to fuck so that’s a thing - i’ll also take suggestions for background character daemon names as well!! it was hard enough coming up with these losers)

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dazaiapologism · 5 years

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1/Uhh my bsd fave is actually dazai? I mean he’s both adorable and hot as fuck and mamo does way too good a job with the voice acting and ive always had a weakness for genius characters who fail at basic humaning? And whenever he’s being a magnificent bastard mastermind or just a regular garden variety bastard harassing his coworkers I just find it awesome &/or hilarious? And then theres the fact that he genuinely doesnt care one way or another about morals but still joined the “good” side

2/for oda and the #aesthetic? And his very obvious chronic depression that I painfully identify with? I dunno he’s just. So interesting. I adore him. And of course I love chuuya too because I have eyes and a pulse and he’s just the coolest ever, no contest. So I ship them bc I love them and their weird-ass relationship to pieces. And like people are entitled to their own opinions but it kinda makes me sad and a bit confused tbh that so many skk shippers apparently hate dazai but still ship him

3/with their fave. So when you say you hate dazai do you mean that in a “he’s trash but he’s my trash” way or just like straight-up hatred? im very bad at detecting sarcasm so this is a genuine question

oh wow this ask is the complete opposite of the last time someone sent me a long ask about hating or not hating dazai on this blog. dazai maximum polarizing legend.. i feel like i have very complicated feelings on the matter but i havent summarized it in a minute so here is my answer:

i do legitimately have beef with the real author dazai because i genuinely truly respect his talent but also he hated women so hard he died of it. like no longer human articulates a lot of really personal and complicated feelings that hit real fucking hard for me personally but at the same time often in the same breath he throws in just a really exceptional amount of misogyny and i get real mad about that. so sometimes that leaks thru to bsd dazai who i tend to see as like, an adaptation of the protag of no longer human.

when i say i hate dazai i think what im saying is that im watching him make obvious mistakes in the way he relates to other people and many of them are mistakes i also find myself making. completely separate from that he was real bad to akutagawa like theres no getting around the fact that while he was already an unstable kid dazai full on fucked him up. he is also just kind of a huge bitch.

i think i do actually very much like bsd dazai but i actively refuse to let up on calling out the ways he fucks up bc at the end of the day i really want to see him be if not 100% redeemed then at least i want him to get some peace. bc if the edgy terrible anime boy can do it then of COURSE i the real human person who has not done a lot of murder can as well. probably. but you cant just like sweep the bad shit under the rug you have to like. tackle it head on and shit.

DAMN that was so many words when i couldve just said no he’s very close second fave in bsd bc i am to some degree kinning but i didnt want to say that. now ive gone and said it anyways lmfao

#bsd tag #this was a yes or no question and i wrote a fucking essay fdkjghsdj

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aqua-dan · 5 years

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I may as well try the Xenoblade ask things: all the story ones (11-30) and 50 if that’s not too many.

Oh my! That is quite a few! But hey, never let it be said that I’m a quitter! Thank you for the ask, my friend! Here goes nothing…

11 - Did you get any of the plot-twists spoiled to you before playing Xenoblade?: Nope! I mean, okay technically yes. But sometimes I can be really stupid and oblivious, and even though I was dropped some REALLY BIG hints, I still managed not to get it due to my sheer stupidity alone hah! I suppose being naturally dumb has its perks sometimes!

12 - Which character did you like the most?: This is one of those questions I can never truly have a solid answer for! I’ve re-played Xenoblade so many times, and I swear I have a different favorite of the main characters every time! They’re all very great in their own ways. But!! If we’re including non-main characters in this question, then Kallian and Alvis are solid faves forever.

13 - Opinion of Juju?: I’ve never minded him too much. He’s a little helpless, sure, but he’s got his own neat little arc with all the Colony 6 stuff! I think people make him out to be worse than he actually is.

14 - Was there any scene which made you cry?: Aah,, It really might be a better idea to ask me which scenes DIDN’T make me cry, because I swear there are fewer of those. But regardless, the ending cutscene in particular always gets me pretty emotional.

15 - What’s your opinion of the ending?: Ah yes, speaking of! The first time I watched the game (watched a lets play before playing it myself), I didn’t really understand the ending all too well. But after playing it myself and dwelling on it for a really… painfully.. long time, I ended up understanding and also really enjoying the ending! It’s very bittersweet and it absolutely made me cry. Just seeing them all in normal situations after all of this is over, in a way beginning a new journey, it’s so lovely!

16 - Which character do you think deserved more spotlight?: KALLIAN. Listen, he’s actually one of the most important characters in the game, and I don’t think he’s often treated enough like it. I think it would have been really lovely to see more of him, hear more of his thoughts and how the events of the game affected him, and especially him interacting with Melia/Shulk/and various other characters. Also he’s really quite the dork if you listen to his lines and I love that. I’d love to see more of him.

17 - Did you want to kill Metal Face, even after it was revealed he was Mumkhar?: I’m pretty 50/50 on that one. I always love redemption arcs, and in truth, I’m VERY high-key a pacifist when it comes to the vast majority of things. But Mumkhar, he very well might have just been too far gone. He didn’t show (idk about feel) remorse for any of his actions. He loved to taunt, to gloat, and especially to put Dunban down. Clearly the dude has some issues to work through. But I suppose what it comes down to for me is whether or not it’s actually kinder to spare him. And in truth.. I think that’s a no in this case.

18 - How do you think Xenoblade handled the two semi-love triangles? (Shulk/Fiora/Melia and Sharla/Reyn/Gadolt): 0/10 do not pass go, do not collect $200. The love triangles are really my one big beef with the game. I think the Reyn/Sharla/Gadolt triangle was handled better, personally. It started off feeling pretty forced, but in the end it did seem to work and I certainly don’t mind Sharla/Reyn as a ship! It’s really just the Fiora/Shulk/Melia love triangle that throws everything off for me. I had no indication before a specific line that Melia had any interest in Shulk other than being friends, Sharla and Dunban’s interference and comments were frankly weird and out of place, and the tension between Fiora and Melia then just seemed… so off-putting since I never really could get into Melia’s romance side of things. I’m very much a multi-shipper within the Xenoblade fandom, but Shulk & Melia just really don’t go together in my mind. However, I wish MOST of all that Dunban would stop making comments about Shulk and Fiora getting together. There’s like three of Dunban’s heart to hearts dedicated to that and I’m like DUDE. Let em sort it out on their own time, you’re just being weird about this.

19 - Favorite race in the game? (Nopon, High Entia, Machina, Homs, any Bionis enemies): High Entia! Probably not the most original pick, but I am just strangely attracted to these arrogant bastards with wings on their heads. (kidding, I love em, but they can be so incredibly stuck up)

20 - When heading towards the final battle, how did you react upon seeing our own solar system and then finally Earth?: I didn’t really understand it at first, but the second time I played it made a lot more sense! I think it’s very interesting, but honestly not very memorable.

21 - Did you predict any plot-twists before they got more openly hinted at? (Like predicting Dickson’s betrayal before the “I feel bad about deceiving these kids” line): Once again, my own stupidity knows no bounds. I knew something was up, but the first time I saw the game, I took it very face value.

22 - Is there any lore which you’d like to know more of?: Tons, actually! I loved learning about the history of Bionis in the game! But in a more narrowed down category, I would really love to know more about Alvis’s backstory. I have my theories, only somewhat backed up by the second two games, but it would still be nice sometimes to know more concrete things! Would definitely also help for me with writing fanfics.

23 - Do you believe Zanza was redeemable?: Yes, actually. He was quite far gone, but I do think there were potentially things that could have ended up redeeming Zanza. The things he truly wanted could have been achieved in other ways. As Shulk said, his future and our future,, could have existed together.

24 - Which of Fiora’s forms do you prefer – her Homs form, Face Nemesis form, Mech form, or Meyneth form?: Mech form! I mean honestly, she’s wonderful and beautiful in all forms. But Mech form is absolutely the most useful... and she makes for a very pretty robo-girl. Like y’all, I’m 100% gay and yet I’m still a little star struck when it comes to Fiora

25 - Is there any cutscene which stood out to you?: I really enjoyed the cutscenes from the second battle of sword valley. Kallian does indeed happen to be one of my absolute faves, so it’s easy to call me biased, but it’s so interesting to see his growth in the small moments you’re able to see it. He seems so much more confident here, so much happier than in other parts of the game. He’s doing what he believes is going to allow them to take the future into their own hands, and you can visibly see that it excites him! It’s cute!

26 - Which story arc is your least favorite?: Probably the whole Ether Mines thing. It’s not that the CHARACTER arcs were bad there, but the mines are just terribly boring.

27 - Which line is your favorite?: “Your blade, it did not cut deep enough.” IT HAS SO MANY DIFFERENT MEANINGS LORD ALMIGHTY HELP ME

28 - Did you enjoy Riki’s role as a comic relief provider?: For the most part, yes! He’s a very enjoyable comic relief character! But I really appreciated his more serious moments. It’s refreshing to see comic relief with depth. Sometimes, on occasion, I wish he had more of those moments. But regardless, he’s well received to me!

29 - What’s your opinion of Shulk as a protag?: He’s such a good boy!!!! Okay, admittedly there are some Shulk moments I’m not overly fond of, and other characters I find more compelling, but he’s still really great and I wouldn’t have any other protag here!

30 - What’s your opinion of Zanza as the final villain?: EXCELLENT! I think having him as the final villain, it really summed up the whole feeling of the game, how changeable things are, and taking the future into your own hands.

50 - How did you get introduced to Xenoblade?: Chuggaaconroy! What a dude!

#skyqueen3 #Xenoblade Chronicles #Xenoblade Spoilers #Danny Says Shit

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ryouverua · 5 years

Text

Trial 6 - Retrial (1)

...... Alright, let’s do this.

Speculation post with theories are here.

It’s so... blue....?

i’m not saying this shade of blue makes me think of anyone in particular but I’M TOTALLY SAYING IT MAKES ME THING OF SOMEONE IN PARTICULAR -

Is that a ‘the results will speak for themselves’ thing or literally ‘someone else will choose’ thing??? We’ve had to deal with ‘an outside force is actually a part of this’ thing, but last time that was a force for good and they were pretty much rendered helpless. What are the chances that’s the same this time...

Probably because he and the mastermind being threatened with exposure are two different entities??? It sounds like he doesn’t have anything on the line this time!

MONOKUMA DO YOU REALLY HATE US THAT MUCH

LMAO

Damn you Monokuma you really can make me laugh sometimes when I’m not ready for it.

“’They’ being ‘me’, in case I didn’t make that clear.”

And then, after setting up for the trial and a long pan around the remaining participants, we land on....

.... one Very Tired Detective.

There’s one pretty glaring reason to have a class trial even if there hasn’t been a murder; someone incredibly significant still left to identify....

.... I-I guess this is the way we’re doing it though! Okay! We’re going to straight-up retry it!

I guess this is as good of a way to do it as any! This all pretty much revolves around the events of that night in the end!

“Incredibly ironic, considering the circumstances.”

lmao I swear I mentioned the Ultimate Mastermind as a joke possibility at one point whoops

I do like how we have Himiko to confirm it for us. Actually, that works out perfectly - we have a classmate almost every step of the way to confirm most of the evidence, except... I guess in the case of the flashback light room, right? Which is, y’know, good, considering we’re probably going to be accusing one of them within the hour... 8′D

And he wanted a second. Most people don’t want to go back in for seconds. Here’s a question though - did he remember the last killing game in the prologue? Is that why he recognized Monokuma? But.... why wasn’t he freaking out at that point? Or maybe that’s just because of his apparent ability to keep calm under pressure...

HE GOT FUCKING PLAYED

This speaks to the hidden trap that’s always existed in Shuichi’s own mind - that he often assumes that anything he can do, such as notice the hidden door, other people can do just as easily. Because ‘if someone like me can do it, who only became the Ultimate Detective by accident, then surely it would be presumptuous to think that no one else could make the same observations as me’. N-Not that I understand those feelings on a personal level or anything.............

Out of pure curiosity, I wonder if he was given the Monopad specifically by Monokuma or if he just woke up with the second one? Or maybe it was left for him in his room? He had to have reviewed it at some point in isolation, because he was clearly shaken up by it. For that matter, when did he see it? Just after we first originally met up in the gym, post-talent acquisition? Or later than that? I wonder if it’s possible to pinpoint before and after him going through the Survivor’s Perk based on his reactions? I do remember he was checking out the library during one of Kaede’s FTEs when we approached him, but I can’t quite remember when that was...

Wait, are you telling me the video itself was on his Survivor’s Perk? I thought it was just in that safe - then why was there a copy of it on a USB in his lab??? Was it to paint him as suspicious if we got that far? A bonus prize for someone if they were able to figure out the clues?? Hell, was it a ‘motive’ to paint a target on Rantaro’s back the same way the flashback light targeted Kokichi in Chapter 5, in case he made it that far? WHY WAS THE DECK SO STACKED AGAINST THIS POOR BASTARD

“He just had an incredibly scary face while coming to that conclusion, so naturally it was very suspicious at the time.”

.... Man, what’s with all these people with our best interests at heart having such terrifying sprites? Rantaro, Kokichi, Gonta, Ryoma, and I’d argue Angie in her own strange way - all of these guys had some of the creepiest reactions in the game. the lesson is it’s the plain cute ones you gotta watch all the pun intended -

don’t be rude Himiko

“If only I’d had the protagonist power at the time - I could have wooed him. I could have wooed him!”

This is pretty damn sad, though. I wonder if there was anyone he was considering reaching out to? There’s at least one person that comes to mind immediately and I 100% guarantee it’s not who you think it would be:

.....

Ready? No, it’s not Kokichi.

It’s Ryoma Hoshi.

No, seriously! Ryoma literally made it clear that he was willing to give up his own life to end the game. He showed the resolve to help someone get out of there in order to rescue the rest of them. Rantaro literally had to argue him down from doing that. I know at that point it was the day of the deadline, but... man. What if Rantaro had come clean with Ryoma about what he knew? Could something have changed?

Behold: Rantaro Amami, the Ultimate Cryptic.

How heavy was this burden on his shoulders...

I know it’s not relevant to the flashback but SHOW HIS SCARY SPRITE YOU COWARDS

RANTARO WE WILL MAKE UP FOR THIS IN THE BONUS SALMON MODE, I SWEAR IT TO YOU RIGHT NOW -

Behold: Rantaro Amami, the Ultimate Sacrifice -

if there aren’t what-if AUs out there about potential scenarios where Rantaro opens up to someone I will riot.

I-I mean, we weren’t going to explicitly say that but -

“.... Patience, Shuichi. Their time will come. And they won’t know what hit them.”

I see you, sneakily trying to sneak that truth and lie theme back into the trial, and I wholeheartedly approve ~

Are you just saying that...? You were there, right? You saw that we found the Survivor’s Perk. You know we found the lab, so why are you not trying to redirect us? Will you try to do that in the debates or -

oH -

SHE DOESN’T KNOW WE FOUND THE HIDDEN PASSAGE FROM THE BATHROOMS

SHE DOESN’T REALIZE WE CAN PIN HER DOWN WITH THIS

LET’S DO IT!!!!!

Well THIS explains why the Monokubs are participating in the trial. 8′D

E N O U G H

We can match it... aaah, we can match it to the picture that shows him holding it! And it wasn’t there with the body, but in the mastermind’s room!!! Man I’m so pumped up!

I love how Shuichi’s shutting down the Monokids lmao - I’ve never seen him act so aggressively in a Rebuttal Showdown before. 8′D

Man that’s a lot of blood to have landed that way, but who am I to argue about blunt trauma blood physics. THE POINT IS WE HAVE PROOF, BABY! CONFIRMED SECOND PERSON IN THE ROOM!

oh right also this happened:

So we’re just gonna lose them one-by-one during the trial, huh? I’m okay with that.

can you let it slip again

pretty sure you’re thinking of Scar and Simba was Mufasa’s cub -

THAT TOO

DO MONOKUMA AND TSUM - THE MASTERMIND HAVE BEEF OR SOMETHING DEAR LORD

“And it’s totally not someone in this room.” awkwardly attempts to not make eye contact with a certain plain girl -

In those brief few precious seconds...

Cutting all the fluff out, but all you need to know is that all the Monokubs are absolutely useless and don’t know anything except for Monodam because of course.

T... The interval timers. We’ve talked about this already. It was a big thing in the last trial - literally why Shuichi was suspected for a while, and how it got narrowed down to her and Kaede.

It’s always her. It’s always her.

TSUMUGI IS LITERALLY ‘CASUALLY’ TEAMING WITH MONODAM TO DISPROVE SHUICHI I CANNOT BELIEVE HOW BALLSY SHE’S GETTING

Didn’t the mastermind have the advantage of Rantaro triggering the camera both times and setting the ‘30 second’ clock between intervals? Just sayin’ ~

I’m so glad and not surprised that K1-b0 is the one remembering Miu’s contribution. look I have room for kiiruma in my heart too okay

with that said I love the ‘so done’ look he has while he’s next to her in this picture

30 seconds sounds like a short amount of time, and it is. but it can also be surprisingly long. She would have to be quick and deliberate... but she could do it. Dart out, grab it and go. And she’d probably be watching the live feed so she would know exactly when to do it! Between the flash and the ball dropping on him, she has two cues to work with!

I see you too debate online.

this is the ‘take a minute to appreciate the text and graphic design’ minute, don’t mind me - I just really l ike how they have such different styles denoting who’s speaking. Man I can’t get over how well designed it is.

....

Wait, we really have to bring up the idea that they have surveillance cameras? When one of the biggest sticking points of the last trial was that Monokuma didn’t know who the victim was because Kokichi interfered? YOU THOUGHT WE WOULD GET THROWN OFF BY THAT POINT -

This is K1-b0′s big win, so I’m glad he’s the one sassing them and presenting the sixth cub ~

this better be the last damn time we ever agree on anything EVER

I mean, I guess we had to clarify that for the sake of being able to move on but... eh.

Though! Though it does help us confirm that the mastermind had to have been in the room and not one of the people who were known to be downstairs, so that is good! I mean, we honestly pretty much knew that already, but it definitely doesn’t hurt. Gotta tighten that trap after all!

I DUNNO TSUMUGI, WHY WOULD THEY?

“The mastermind is a punk bitch -”

“O-Okay, we plain get it, that’s enough -”

“No. No, I think I need to elaborate on what a scaredy-cat coward the mastermind is -”

LMAO HE’S REALLY INTERRUPTING SWEETCHEEKS ON THIS

..... What a weird point to be hung up on. And the way you’re talking, like you are the mastermind rather than an independent AI, is definitely different than before.

i-i mean look what just happened with kokichi and maki but okay, yeah, we’d totally work together and not have a random student try to make a stand on their own or, hell, have a flashback light designed to instigate chaos and confusion -

Yes............. but. Uh, I’m going to bring this to the point below actually - *

okay blow up a Monokub now

....

damn it

Oh damn, I didn’t think that rule would ever actually come up in a trial. Cool.

LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU -

YOU LITERALLY SET HIM UP YOURSELF!!!

.... Or, the mastermind did. One of you did. I don’t know - I know in my head that I should probably be treating them as one and the same - but they just feel like different entities to me. And if I’m going to humour that idea, that means there is the very real question of ‘who decided to set him up with that message’, ‘who decided they had to steal the Survivor’s Perk back’ and for that matter, ‘were these decisions made independently of each other or was the idea to take back the Perk back conceived the moment the Perk itself was created?’

* To pick up where I left off earlier -

It sounds like discrediting the idea of the mastermind would all be much more important to said mastermind moreso than Monokuma... right? Because Monokuma seems convinced that everything will be fine (the game will continue) even if they find the mastermind, right...??? So I don’t know if the reason was to keep the killing game going, because she clearly showed she is able to create a motive even when the students are banded together against a single person, and she can even misdirect them - I think it’s more to protect herself, because she never wanted that to happen in the first place. Iunno. It just feels a bit different to me than how Shuichi put it.

Oh....?

B-BUT, LIKE, WE CAN STILL FIGURE OUT WHO IT IS FROM THAT... >:( let me accuse my cosplay girlfriend you monojerk

So, erm. Right.

At this point, if you weren’t seeing my little spur-of-the-moment text reactions, you wouldn’t know that I did a double-take when I saw this happen live. Because, well... I’d figured out the whodunnit, the whydunnit, the when, the how - but apparently I’d managed to miss the fact that there was a ‘what’ to resolve. So I figured out the culprit.... but didn’t realize that we weren’t just investigating a theft, but the actual murder again.

With that in mind -

[funky murder mystery jazz music stops]

IT’S A W H A T ? ! ? ! ? !

TSUMU - I-I MEAN -

MISS MASTERMIND, WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!?!

#Ryou plays drv3 #Shuichi Saihara #Tsumugi Shirogane #Maki Harukawa #Himiko Yumeno #spoilers #drv3 spoilers #Monokuma #Kiibo #Keebo #K1-b0

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tumblunni · 5 years

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okay to talk about EXACTLY HOW i would handle giving charon a big good boss fight and also sympathetic backstory and redemption and all that jazz

there are approximately ten million words beneath the cut, and also ten million raspberries in my shampoo, and these charon thoughts are just as sweet as that

alright so ALREADY i kinda did feel like he was sort of a friendly enemy when i first played the game?? like his Thing of being the constantly never fightable dude actually was kind of sympathetic in a way. it always just felt like he was Chilling Out and not giving much of a shit about being evil and also had nothing personal against you the player. he doesnt follow any of cyrus’s big philosophy and he’s clearly only here for the money and really phoning it in, and that kinda makes him not your enemy at all, even though he’s on the team youre fighting. Like I always found it a good establishing moment that in the Valley Windworks when they first introduce “hey this time there’s two galactic teammates here” and all, CHARON IS STANDING DIRECTLY IN EYELINE OF YOU RUINING EVERYONE’S PLANS. he’s just standing there! and of course he’ll never do anything to warn mars about you, the game just isnt programmed that way. but it fits really well with his character if you think of it as an intentional thing? just imagine this random gramps sitting there drinking tea while all his teammates actually Care About Things and Use Effort. He’s always criticizing team galactic’s plan too and like WHY IS HE DOING THAT TO YOU if not because Nintendo Wants Him To Be My Best Friend ok. Like he doesn’t fuckin trust anyone on his team so why would he spill the beans about his big secret plans he has to make money off of this villain plan and then bail before they actually do all the dumb shit with legendaries and such. Yes ok its PROBABLY just because its a videogame and they need to exposit stuff to the player that the character is probably just thinking and not saying out loud. But wouldnt it be so much better this way!!!! Also even when you finally face off against him personally in the postgame for his actual dumb money plan he’s still like ‘lol fourth wall breaking time im gonna not have a boss battle cos if you beat cyrus’s ass i aint got no chance’. Dammit nintend i still wanted to fight him but thats endearing so i cant stay mad at u! And he has several lines during it with stuff like “i like seeing children trying so hard BUT YOURE TOO LATE” and “youth like you can live in idealism but for me its all about the money”. Like man u remember that time i had a big angry rant about how his manga version was super OOC cos they didnt just choose to make him eviler but made him murder a child? like the only time anything involving children is mentioned in canon its him being mildly more polite to children!!! MILDLY FRIENDLY! LET ME HAVE THIS...

okay so YEAH the first big change would be just giving him more screentime and more fleshed out character in these early scenes. Make him a full on friendly character who is technically on the opposite side but has no beef with you and no loyalty to the greater plan of his team. So he’s just comically like “oh hi again! yeah lol today’s plan sucks huh?” and makes idle conversation while the main character villain admin of the day is actually doing important plot stuff. like have him along for everyone’s scenes not just mars at the start, dissappear for hours until the very end. And yes definately keep the thing of the game constantly lampshading that he’s a new character for the third version of the game, and everyone in the team thinks he’s useless and forgets he’s even there. it was annoying in the original game cos he actually didnt get any love from the writers themselves, but yknow you could give him an expanded role and rewrite that stuff to be more like “oh poor guy he’s the underdog”, yknow? am i the only one who felt inherantly sorry for him?? i mean he’s a tiny grandpa!!! and he looks so sad on his official art!! Oh oh and also add the additional running jokes and expanded characterization he had in his very brief anime appearance, which was honestly the only well written part of the entire team galactic arc. It fleshed out a bit of his relationship with jupiter who never really appeared alongside him in the game except to say “im not teaming up with you” at the end. Having the context that she finds him annoying cos she’s very serious and also very dedicated to cyrus so she hates this opportunistic bastard pretending to be dedicated when its an obvious lie. And also she thinks his laugh is obnoxious XD Oh also I liked how they expanded upon that one scene of Saturn being sarcastic at gramps and made it into an actual thing that him and charon most often work together and have a mutually sassy dynamic. I found it humanizing that anime saturn is very serious but can comically overreact to very minor teasing from this grandpa! I thought that was better than the games where he’s just serious or the manga where he was 100% changed to be 100% silly and kinda stole charon’s personality for reasons i will never understand.

ANYWAY! IN SUMMARY! show scenes of charon being endearing by being not really interested in the big evilness, being underdog-y by always failing at his smaller evilnesses and getting disrespected, and also maybe drop in some more interpersonal relationships between the admins to hint that charon does indeed have some friendship going on even if he’s a tsundere bitch who’d never admit it. Also maybe the other thing from the anime where they made him a cool computer guy? cos srsly it was lazy that the games just said “he’s the science” and never clarified wtf he actually does at his job. cos cyrus is already a science boss??? he kinda already did most of the big sciencey plans?? why does he need this man if its not for mechanical or legendary pokemon stuff OK HEY MAYBE COMPUTERS! also its funny to imagine him being a memey blogger but sun and moon actually made faba canonically that so i dont think you could improve on him. TAKE NOTES FROM BEAN MAN, NINTENDO

Also maybe you could hint at the rotom backstory before it actually happens? like could just show some mild implications that he is sad, cos the ‘friendly enemy’ thing would already be decent foreshadowing for him potentially having a soft spot. “Wah i am an emotionless evil money man” says local villain, while gossipping with Dawn about his coworkers and sharing lemon squares. But like I mean i don’t really want him to be LITERALLY that, i still like him being grumpy and guarded about his secret good heart. I’m just saying “friendly” as in.. sort of a disconnect between what he says his personality is and how he actually acts. The stuff he actually says is very grumpy but like.. hey he’s saying stuff to you when he doesnt need to, and nobody else on this team is casually talking to you as if youre not an enemy. Like he’s SUBCONCIOUSLY friendly and doesnt realise it? He’d never SAY “i am lonely hello please talk to me” but he’d sure as hell walk over to you and talk to you anyway. About grumpy things! Grumpily! And maybe express occasional compliments in a sort of “haha im surrounded by idiots you’re way more down to earth than all these adults who act more like children”. Cos in that fourth wall breaking moment he has, he respects that you’re a badass and decides thats why he’s not gonna have a boss fight. “You’d just kick my ass, so lol fight these grunts instead while i run away and do my evil plan” That is the kind of sympathetic charon i want!! He’s doing a douchey thing by breaking the script of how boss battles work and making everyone else fight you instead even though he knows that they’ll lose. But he’s also likeable because breaking the script of boss battles is unexpected and comedic! And he’s also accidentally being complimentary to you so its like SIMULTANEOUS JERK AND NICE AT THE SAME TIME. Thats the good stuff!! That quality grumplegramp content!!! if he got redeemed and just 100% changed his personality to lose all the sass and sneakyness then that’d be boring yo...

OKAY WHERE WAS I? Okay hey once you’ve established that, maybe now you have a basis for the sad foreshadowing!! Like you could have one scene where he’s suddenly NOT friendly, he’s not just grumpy in the funny sort of way but actually seems cold and stoic and actually does something useful to the team’s mission or whatever. Sort of a ‘whoa what’s wrong with him today’ thing and it could be subtle cos on the first playthrough you’d just think he was being a jerk cos he’s a jerk and all. but maybe it happens on a scene of team galactic doing some evil plan in eterna forest/other place that’d potentially relate to the rotom sidequest. like he’s just really fuckin depressed to be reminded of his one big failure in life. OH maybe it could actually be at the unnamed junkyard thats mentioned in his backstory but doesnt actually feature as an area in the original game? It could make sense that it’d be part of their plan cos team galactic attacks various energy sources and other technology related places to find the stuff they need to make the big world erasure machine. could just be simply them robbing some old generator parts after their attempt to take the whole power plant failed.

Oh and also maybe add a lil something to his last scene at the galactic lab? Cos like.. what we already have in the game has potential to be a moment where he did a good thing but no its not. Like when you look at it, hey he kinda helped you out here by being all “hey lol saturn the kid is here, bye im not stopping u, feel free to take the lake trio”. Even if saturn is the one who actually SAID feel free to take the lake trio and actually had a good hint at redemptiveness moment and all. Please never take that away, that was good, you just coulda had both of them do it, yknow? And we dont wanna make charon go full good guy all of a sudden when he hasnt even finished his characetr arc, so instead make it more of a moment where its like “im a bad guy but this is going too far”. Like maybe ACTUALLY HAVE A PAYOFF for the foreshadowing that he has no loyalty to cyrus and is blatantly plotting to betray him at some point. He never actually did!! He only tries to capitalize on cyrus already being defeated in an entirely optional sidequest that fails at delivering a proper payoff.

So hey! My idea! Add some complexity here by making it clear that charon is evil in a more petty and mundane way and not in a.. like.. actually dangerous way. Once things start getting actually dangerous he starts chickening out! Like he’s a jerk who does mean things to get money but he’s just MEAN and not friggin murderous or worldending. Give him a moment of “oh shit cyrus was actually serious oh god how do i get off of this train”. Like it seemed that he never really believed that team galactic would ever truly create a new world, and he certainly didnt give a shit about it, he just thought he found an easy opportunity for a paycheck in some dumbass’s deluded plan that’d never really work. But OOPS i guess it actually is happening, oh fuck! Give him a bit of a crisis where he realizes what he actually helped this man do, but not like a full on “everything ive ever done is bad and i dont wanna be evil anymore”. Not YET! Just friggin.. “oh fuck i cant spend money if the universe doesnt exist and also i am dead”. “PLEASE HELP ME CHILD, CYRUS IS GONNA TAKE AWAY THE MONEY!!” xD It’d be fitting for his character and a good light moment of comic relief after the emotional and dark stuff happening around this section of the game. Like he already kinda does that by having that scene of saturn snarking at him, but it could be even more funny! Move the first him and saturn bickering scene to earlier on and have this be like a satisfying scene of saturn actually winning? cos in the anime it was always charon being smug and making fun of him while saturn gets all grumpy about it, now it could be the reverse with smug charon having a breakdown and realising his whole money plan is in shambles and its his own fault.

Also maybe it could have additional payoff with Charon actually helping you take down cyrus? Again, not actually because he’s switched sides but because he's still evil but evil for different reasons than cyrus. That good ‘reluctant teamup with minor goofy villain to take down big actually scary villain’ thing. With the added bonus that the minor goofy villain is objectively a worse person than the scary villain and the scary villain is still redeemable, as opposed to in the manga where they used this same trope in the form of “cyrus is good now and we’re making charon the big scary villain to prove how good cyrus is cos charon is worse”. That was dumb. It was especially dumb cos WHY ON EARTH would you pick charon for this??? like they still had moments of him being comedic and wimpy yet at the same time wanted us to believe he was legitimately threatening? ANYWAY my idea for this is that charon’s computer skills could pay off and it could be something like “oh i always put a failsafe kill switch in my computer just in case i need to grab the money and run”. Like him being a paranoid untrusting selfish asshole was actually the reason he was able to save the day! Also it would explain why cyrus’s machine only fails and summons giratina in platinum version. the manga actually did say that charon sabotaged the machine so thats one actually good thing that came from it! Congrats u filled one plothole while making twenty more XD

OH and perhaps this same section could also foreshadow the rotom thing? like I was thinking about how he could actually choose to give up and let you take the lake trio and have it still be 100% in character. It could be an extension of his “shit, i didnt think things would get this serious, please save me from the consequences of my own actions!” moment. Cos I think that any normal dumb greedy money man would still be horrified at the idea of mutilating a thousand year old majestic unicorn of mythology and then flushing it down the toilet when it outlives its uselessness. Like he doesnt do it because he wants to help you save the day or anything, just cos the idea of killing the lake trio is just too evil for even him. It could be kind of a meaningful moment about how cyrus is doing all this for good reasons yet they caused him to do these actions that are even more evil than the actual dude with evil motives. And maybe you could establish this through a scene of him and cyrus inetracting, which could also help amp up how intimidating cyrus is, in preparation for the big climax? Have charon trying to wimp out of “disposing of the useless specimens”, but cyrus is having none of it. Like it could start off funny with him making up loads of other excuses cos there’s no way he’d admit he’s having Feelings and all. “Wait but let me have them! if theyre useless to you then i can just sell them right?? ha ha thats the only reason im saying this, lol you know me i’d never be swayed by any sentiment” But cyrus sees through it instantly and gets right up in his face like fuckin Raw Cold Fury, no you are NOT going to disobey me. He is PISSED OFF because the only reason he kept this useless senile old bat around is because he’s the only one in this group who isn’t a simpering moron at the mercy of their pitiful heart. If you can’t even do that, then what’s the use of you? So everything charon tries fails and all he accomplishes is getting fired on the spot for even TALKING ABOUT defying his boss. And cyrus just orders saturn to dispose of the lake trio instead. Saturn of course is smarter and says nothing in defiance, but then the both of them work together to let you take the pokemon and just act like they failed to stop you rather than doing it on purpose. And its kind of an uncharacteristically quiet and intense moment between these dudes that are usually at each other’s throats with funny banter. They’re united for a moment but for very different reasons. Charon knew that cyrus wasnt a good guy from the very beginning and he just underestimated him, and is now feeling in over his head and worried this could be the end. And saturn always thought cyrus was good but is starting to struggle with doubts. And maybe charon actually tries to warn saturn about it? Like “hey i knew this all along but i never told you but HEY CYRUS MIGHT ACTUALLY KILL US ALL” and saturn starts on his usual speech about cyrus being the greatest but he starts to question it and AAAAA! but ultimately this moment isnt the moment where he makes the right choice, and he does end up going back to cyrus and continuing the plan. and also charon is on the edge of actually doing something good and trying to stop cyrus’s big ol doom time (albiet for selfish reasons of No Money In The New World) but he also wimps out from this chance and instead decides to grab as much cash as he can and run the fuck away, as if its even possible to outrun the destruction of a whole dimension. but at least him and saturn agreed on the lake trio rescue operation, thus their moment of almost-redemption helped the player even if they didnt actually turn good. AND then you’d have the surprise moment of charon actually stepping up at the last minute and doing his thing to sabotage the machine and all. which again doesnt really solve the whole thing and doesnt really make him turn good but at least it downgrades the threat from ‘cyrus actually succeeds in destroying the world’ to ‘okay we just need to deal with a slight case of poke-hell and one collossal centipede’. Srsly man sinnoh’s plot has the highest stakes cos in platinum you straight up actually fail and cyrus actually would have destroyed the world if not for giratina! Oh and also a random note is that i think it’d be funny if charon helped you out while still running away? like you just learn about the machine sabotage being his responsibility cos it flashes his goofy hacker logo from the anime or something. Maybe instead he hacks your Poketch and is like HEY HELLO IM GONNA SPLODE THE THING BUT NOT COS IM A GOOD GUY, BTW I AM A SAFE DISTANCE AWAY PLEASE DONT LET CYRUS KNOW I DID THIS

SO YEAH! whatever! whether or not we get that added bit of teamup with charon in the climax, we’ve still given him a bit more screentime so the player actually remembers him and actually cares about doing his optional sidequest in the postgame. so him not having a boss fight would be less of a letdown and all. But having the teamup plot would be a good opportunity to turn the wifi event into not a wifi event! maybe during his panic charon drops the key to his secret lab and thats how you get it? cos really it makes no sense at all that the magic wifi gods can just hand you something you’d have no idea existed and never have an opportunity to get. none of the other wifi items are literally a thing owned by a significant character that needs to be teleported out of his pocket by plot magic! Also it sucks that a chunk of important backstory would be hidden in a wifi event so if they still wanted rotom’s alt forms to be a wifi event then JUST make it the ability to get the forms and not the charony diary bit. Cos it makes no sense that the ENTIRE REASON CHARON EXISTS is to introduce the rotom form event yet you’d have no clue he was connected to rotom until after youve already finished the event. It gave no damn indication you had to take the key to this particular dude’s lab in team galactic!! ANd click on an otherwise unmarked wall!! Put the diary somewhere else and hey there’s a Charon Clue(tm) and now you can actually find the damn event, there you go, fixed. Also annoying cos nothing in the event tells you you have to go somewhere entirely different to catch the one rotom in the game, and click another unmarked piece of scenery that only has a staticky screen to indicate rotom if you happen to be playing at night. Seriously this is why serebii.net was such a lifesaver!!

Okay so WOOP there we go, here we are at a point where the player has seen more of charon and had oppotunities to grow to like him as a character and be suspicious that maybe he could have some sympatheticness. And if he drops an Importante Key Itemme right before the end of the game then thats a hint that postgame stuff exists involving him, and at least one clue where to find it! All the rotom diary stuff would play out exactly the same except that its less of a hell to find, lol.

BUT THEN the big difference in Stark Mountain is that now you have the full context of charon’s backstory and the game actually reacts to you having that knowledge. Like maybe if you dont do that step first then either charon never appears at stark mountain until you do, or you get an abbrieviated version of the quest without the redemption plot? I was thinking actually maybe make it one of those daily repeatable quests, to avoid the player doing the quests out of order and permenantly losing the chance to redeem gramps. Like if you dont see the rotom diary then instead of a big actual quest you just get some five minute “oh we’ve seen team galactic sneaking around stark mountain, defeat them for Some Money Or Something hey thats weird that they were only stealing money hey yknow who’s all about the money? charon! maybe go follow up on his Importante Key Itemme to continue the plot.”

SO THEN once you return Emboldened By The Knowledge Of Good Gramps, you get the proper thing. And... it would actually play out totally the same as in vanilla platinum. Charon doesn’t have a boss fight, all his minions leave him and say he sucks, he gets anticlimactically taken out by someone else in a cutscene, and his last moment is someone making a crack about him being so frail and useless that the hot volcano breeze could knock him over.

BUT THAT ISNT THE END

Its just a fake out that its gonna have the same funny ending as every other charon appearance, and the same lack of him being remotely threatening.

cos NOW WE FINALLY GIVE THE MAN A GODDAMN BOSS FIGHT

and yknow how i said i hate the manga where he’s all super evil and owns three legendaries and kills a guy? okay take away all that stuff but KEEP THE MOMENT OF GRANDPA GETTING TO DO SOMETHING BADASS FOR THE ONLY TIME EVER

Maybe he surprises everybody by actually not being down for the count! And by now he’s just SO pissed off from a whole game’s worth of failing and being disrespected that he does something desperate and stupid at the last minute. If he was meant to be the dude who invented the red chain, maybe he could use it to control heatran even if looker took away the magma stone? like i feel it’d be in character for charon to secretly steal a prototype red chain for himself during the whole “oh fuck my boss is legit destroying the world i need to get out of here” thing. Grab some stuff to sell now your last paycheck is dissappearing into an ominous void, lol. He didnt expect to actually be using it, and if the actually completed red chain puts enough stress on its weilder to make them cry blood then this thing must be even more risky to use! so its a really huge holy shit moment of tiny gramps actually doing something intimidating! and his boss fight could actually be using heatran and actually having heatran get to goddamn appear in this sidequest. it was soooo underwhelming to have to return thru the dungeon a second time to actually see heatran, this time without any story stuff to break up the long walk...

also this entire thing could be a great climax to his character arc and sort of a moment of “okay THIS was actually his motivation all along!” Cos I always felt like Charon’s real motive was low self confidence? Like he’s always on about money but he seems to focus more on SUCCESS instead. Fame and success. “Ha ha i am the greatest scientist and i want people actually aknowledge me” is a thing he repeatedly brings up and also that other characters directly demonstrate in how they act towards him. It just feels like he thinks he can buy that with money if he’s failed his whole life in earning it. And the old “acts egotistical because he actually hates himself” character archetype would work really well as a sympathetic interpretation of his character. It would be like how he’s ‘subconciously friendly’. The thing he actually does (being boastful) is because of a different reason (not believing his own lies and being super insecure about his self worth), but he keeps it so well hidden that not even he realises that its really what he feels. Similar to how he acts grumpy because of a different reason, because he actually DOES want friends and he’s just guarding his emotions under a million walls cos he’s scared of being hurt again. And scared of how he knows he’s a weak willed person who might betray his friends again for his desperation for money. Which is really a desperation to feel valid as a human being, which is really just ‘i want friends’ again under another coat of paint. So depressingly he caused his own problems because of the same character trait that was once a positive in his life! I think he works well when interpreted from that angle, he’s like a dark subversion of a pokemon professor or of your classic ash ketchum figure. Like “the power of friendship” is what turned him evil, and also turned him into a guy who acted awful to his friends. And it could add to this thematic thing if “loving pokemon” was also referenced throughout his plot in a negative sense?

That’s actually one other good thing about the manga, they removed his greedy grumpyness (bad) but replaced it with the same motive as the villain of the 2nd movie (weird flex but okay). Aka “a guy who collects legendary pokemon just as trophies and has forgotten how to treat them like genuine friends”. Even if that wouldnt be his main character concept in this hypothetical rewritten game, it could still be a secondary trait that’s used to suppliment the main emotional arc. Like instead of just saying “money money money” you could flesh out more scenes of him actually talking about HOW he’s gonna get the money and what he’s gonna use it for. Via collecting all the rare pokemon, and to collect more rare pokemon. Which will somehow (in his twisted cynical perception of how the world works) make him a person of value and get people to respect him. It could also tie together pretty much every scene he already has! Cos his backstory is finding this pokemon friend... who was a rare unknown species. And maybe as a kid he decided to become a scientist initially just out of excitement to learn more about his new friend and show them to the world! But then the realities of the difficulties in being respected as a scientist gradually wore him down and he became more cynical, more obsessed with recognition, more believing that the only way to get it was by being an asshole and he’d just get taken advantage of if he kept being soft. And he started to forget why he really wanted that fame in the first place, and instead it just became an obsession, a vain hope that he’d hate himself less if he accomplished his life’s dream. When really from the player’s perspective its obvious that even if he succeeded he’d still be depressed when he realized how he’d lost everything in the process. And it’d be a more realistic sort of way he could have turned from a good kid to an asshole gramps. There wasnt any single day he suddenly made the decision to change, it was just a gradual wearing down of his morals over the years. he became more obsessed and more cynical that normal moral ways of doing things would never get him what he wanted. he started making small sacrifices to his personal sense of morality, and eventually reached the point where he’d completely abandoned it all without even noticing the gradual change. And somewhere along the way he forgot that he started this because of his pokemon friend, and discarded it as “not good enough” in favor of this vain quest to acquire a million other rarer pokemon and just friggin put them on a shelf to boast about them and feel less empty inside. And then also his redemption was a gradual change too? After he reached that point of completely betraying his own sense of goodness, he gradually got sadder and more tired with living this way. By the time you see him ingame he’s not remotely happy with being evil and he’s just a poor dude who’s deluded that being evil is the only way to escape the sadness rather than the cause of it. And thats why his whole ‘oops im accidentally subconciously befriending my coworkers and also the enemy’ thing kinda set him on the road to eventual redemption, cos its the first bit of small upliftingness he’s had in ages. sorta recharges his Ability To Care and he starts realizing what he’s doing and feeling regret. But yeah throughout the main game he never actually acts on his doubts and just repeatedly misses the chance to get redeemed and makes you Kinda Frustrated, similar to zuko or peridot’s redemptive arc? And ultimately reuniting him with his old best friend and showing him that its not too late to fix what he broke = the actual catalyst for his changes to fully stick and he completely switches to the good side.

BUT ANYWAY thats why he needs a boss fight first!

Something like 50-70 years worth of self hate and frustration from devoting himself to a super incorrect way of defeating that self hate, and sacrificing EVERYTHING for the sake of it, and being disrespected the entire time, and being terrified that you’re getting old and running out of time, and almost dying to some guy’s weird void plan, and losing the only thing you had left aka the team galactic job and a few maybe sorta kinda friends you had, and now being disrespected AGAIN by those same people you thought were friends (but never actually admitted it to them) and then also bitchslapped by a frog?? Also this place is real fuckin sweaty?? Yeah stark mountain is a great climactic point for his entire frustrations to boil over and be a bigger eruption than the actual volcano!

Thus we have Grand Dad Gets Serious And Has An Actually Interesting Boss Fight!

but also grand dad is being emotionally open and whoops accidentally might be tearing down those walls he built up around his big ol soft as fuck heart

like the battle would possibly be more ‘you talk him down into giving up, realizing he was wrong, quitting being evil, and going home to his friend that he misses so much. and finally realizing that thats actually the only way he could ever really defeat the self hate that drove him this far in the first place. also he’s not worthless and his friends always believed he was the awesome dude he always wanted to be’. Yknow, rather than actually defeating him and all. I mean you still do that but i think it’d be a case like with the giratina fight where even if you lose or run away you get the same result, just slightly altered text? Just as long as you come here with rotom in your party your victory was already a foregone conclusion. you just get a really cool boss fight as your reward, yknow? cos seriously I WAS WAITING THE WHOLE GAME FOR THAT DAMN BOSS FIGHT!!!

obligatory link again to the cool song i think is a great summary of all of my headcanons for this man’s character arc and would also be badass backing music for a hypothetical boss fight:

youtube

context: it makes more sense if you imagine it as his own internal thoughts of all the stuff he’s been running away from accepting in his own feelings. and/or what he THINKS that the player and rotom would be saying to him, so he’s shocked into speechlessness by the fact that they actually do think he deserves a second chance and has the potential to be good.

actually that could be a really good ending to the fight!!!

like when you get through to him and convince him to stand down, he cowers in fear thinking he’s gonna get the karmic payback for everything he’s ever done. and he tries to run away from reuniting with rotom. half of him is scared that his friend hates him and the other half is.. well..

i think it would be thematically appropriate to end it with a hug

just an image of this lil toy robot pokemon hugging this scared old man, and he’s just so empty and doesnt know what to say. its the last thing he ever expected. and then his shock turns into pain and sadness, as he was really the most scared that his friend actually would forgive him. that everything he ever did really was all for nothing, and he should have done this years ago and saved all that lost time. he’s so scared because he thinks he doesnt deserve forgiveness and he doesnt know what to do now its happening. so he just lets out all those tears he’s never cried over all these years, and the scene ends with him desperately hugging his best friend and never wanting to let go ever again

And then that’d be the big moment that was really the turning point for him, though of course that wouldnt be the end of his redemption and if there was any further postgame content you could show various scenes of him atoning throughout that. or just some images in the second credits scene after you beat the postgame stuff. i’d kinda like if there was some moment of him apologising to the rest of team galactic and joining them in their attempts to rebuild the team into something good. and maybe an extra postgame segment where this redeemified team goes on some bigger quest to try and rescue cyrus from the distortion world and heal his pain too. i think you could get a lot of good scenes out of a redeemed charon being along for the ride! like you’d obviously have cyrus being skeptical that this dude really has changed so much, and probably an extension of that earlier scene where he’s pissed off that the one guy he thought agreed with him about emotions being foolish is actually being the most emotional of everyone. but i think because of that they could also have scenes of relating together and actually starting to form a friendship in the end? like i can see charon feeling guilty for never trying to reach out to cyrus before, and also believing really strongly that cyrus can be redeemed cos like ‘yo i’m way worse than you and i was able to change, please believe that its a possibility for you too!’ Also cyrus likes machines so i think he’d be happy to meet rotom and become friends. And he has that whole grandpa related backstory so it might help a lot towards healing those scars and reuniting the two of them if he starts forming a friendship with a different gramps? THERES A LOT OF GOOD THEMATIC LINKS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT TEAM GALACTIC MEMBERS THAT ARE NEVER EXPLORED IN THE ORIGINAL GAME

also in the original version of this plotline it was a fanfic/fangame idea of an alternate universe swap where dawn/lucas/other customizeable protagonist is a galactic grunt instead of the hero. so a lot of the details were different but in that version the protag was literally adopted by whichever galactic admin they picked as their main friendship route. entirely because of self indulgent ‘i wish these guys were my dad/sister/grandpa/whatever’ feels cos sinnoh helped me thru a tough time as a kid. soooo i cant really do that charon grandpa idea where he also renovates the Old Chateau into a ghost pokemon sanctuary and becomes like an actual good pokemon professor. (also rekindles his friendship with prof rowan and agatha from the kanto elite four cos thats just a random headcanon i have) BUT i could still do all that except the part where he adopts u cos canon dawn/lucas already has a mom lol. And i think it’d be more fitting of canonverse protag to adopt Cyrus? Like obv in the canonverse itd probably be the main boss of the team who gets the bigger redemption plot and is canonically the best friend EVEN THO for tumblr user tumblunni in particular it is All Grandpas All The Time. And i like the idea of Cyboy being a survivor of child abuse who tries to become a good dad just like his parents werent. But i also like the idea of dawn’s mom adopting him as her new big brother and him getting to experience a genuine loving family for the first time! I think itd work that way cos cyrus is meant to be 27 even tho he looks older, and i dont think dawn’s mom is that young and also i just see no chemistry between them as any sort of ship. (and headcanon cyrus as asexual anyway) But also the family does still keep in touch with all the other galactic friends!!!

hhhh i wrote So Many Word just about grandpa redemption holy shit i’ll probably die if i try and cover all the other teammates now

ok i will leave it here but just know i also have Deep Headcanons about all of them, even if charon gets the most. somedaayayyyay i will share with you more!!

#commander charon #why. why am i like this #okay apparantly i have used that exact tag like 15 times already on this blog and im betting most of them were also about charon #please love charon

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