#but obviously I changed the colors because in what world does it make sense for an eilistraeean sword to be red and gold

[cleric4vampire]

sword-dancer

#oc: aune #Why yes that IS indeed phalar aluve #but obviously I changed the colors because in what world does it make sense for an eilistraeean sword to be red and gold #I finished this back in november but my brain was like ''no you can never post it ever''. now I'm finally doing it #freeing myself from these shackles #my art #bg3 fanart #bg3 tav #bg3 #drow #half-drow #eilistraee #cleric #(bard cleric to be exact)

[r--kt]

Good boy Tobi. Why is he acting this way?

"oh yeah, it was just Zetsu" a-ha, not even close. here I'll talk specifically why Obito resorts to roleplay, and why he is comfortable with the images of Madara and Tobi. (obviously because it's not being himself but let's dig deeper)

contents | responsibility · regrets · a sense of control · conclusions

Vol. 31 CH. 280. Tobi's first appearance.

sure this looks like another defense mechanism that allows Obito to avoid reality, especially when interacting with people. full coverage, imitation of someone else's voice, name change, personality change etc. his clothes literally look like armor, and I'd like to think that hiding and protecting himself "just because it feels right" is exactly the point (no need in armor, he's intangible, so that's a psyche). the very way he completely depersonalizes himself shows that on a subconscious level he is not comfortable being in the conditions he finds himself. this alone may indicate that he is not very happy with his position of a faceless world saviour. and this is his first damn appearance.

Tobi is another manifestation of Obito's escapism, which is the central theme of his story. I have identified three advantages of using Tobi's image for Obito, and all of them will be described below. maybe you'll find some more, feel free to reblog and add your thoughts!

Responsibility

escapism is just stress-relieving. for him, the roleplay was a way to relieve tension from the responsibility that he had imposed on himself. "no one in the whole world can do it except me" must be really exhausting. so what if I just don't be myself for a while? what if I be the one who can make a mistake? it's important to be frivolous and let things go sometimes, otherwise the psyche will be disturbed even more. so, that's the first advantage, that allowed Obito not to go completely crazy.

Regrets

CH. 652

as I said, Obito is not very happy with his position. even though he believes that tsukuyomi plan is correct, this doesn't negate that he is unhappy to fulfill it and suffer the hardships because of it.

during the war, we can see that Obito really regrets that he hadn't live his life the way he could, with his friends and dear ones. he began to ask questions: "could I have a better life?" "who have I become?" "who does my friend see me as?" these feelings burst out only at the culmination, before that they were deeply suppressed, with the help of detachment from reality, which Obito achieved mostly thanks to the image of Tobi. a ridiculous stupid guy who talks nonsense and does not pretend to be any role other than a comic relief. another personality allows Obito to distract himself from the real problems, which he can't reconcile.

CH. 281 idk what an idiot. love him.

in order to avoid all these dangerous thoughts for as long as possible, he came to this escapist behavior. it is not only a convenient tool for manipulation (I'm not really touching on that in this post, though it's important too), but it also distracted him from all his regrets. though, it's funny that he still chose orange and purple colors that probably reminded him of the past.

A Sense of Control

it seems to me that this is the most important reason to pretend to be either an inept, complaisant fool or a legend of the Shinobi world. why these two extremes?

many events in Obito's life showed him that no matter how he acts, he will still be punished, which means he personally has no control over anything. during the exposition, he is late helping the old ladies, but Kakashi condemns him no matter what. during the first turning points, he commits morally correct actions in order to end up first being mutilated and isolated, and then lose the most precious (and only) thing he really had: friendship with Rin and Kakashi. in the end, he does not even have control over his own body until he learns to control the mokuton and gets used to the constantly breaking off or deforming limbs. Madara and Tobi appear as other personalities who are able to achieve control under certain conditions and give Obito the necessary mental stability.

CH. 460

Madara is the epitome of control. the ghost of the Uchiha clan, the fear of which is alive many years after his death. by taking on a character who has more control than Obito did in real life he might feel quite cathartic and empowering, and it offered him a sense of emotional security (the mask helps with it physically, the personality and famous name — mentally).

while Tobi, besides an attempt to make up for lost childhood, is a demonstration of "the lowest standards" so that for once in his life, he did feel that he always met expectations, that more was not required of him. he's incompetent, he messes up, he's irritating, and therefore others don't expect anything else from him. yes, Tobi is judged and punished, but Tobi is not trying to be praised, so his own expectations are not broken.

CH. 359

Madara's personality is convenient because it's dominant, it controls others, inspires them with a certain fear and submission. Tobi's personality is convenient because with its help Obito choose to show fear and submission himself whenever he wants, that is, it does not become an unexpected blow for him. I would add that similar mental mechanisms work in many types of traumatic experience (not talking about his sexual deviations like moderate sadomasochism yet, the man is clearly traumatized).

does it all work? obviously, yes. there's no point in explaining that this whole Madara thing worked perfectly. Tobi, although condemned by Deidara, is at the same time accepted and encouraged by him a bit, simply because it is pointless to expect anything from him. however, this works as long as the fictional personalities do not overlap, as long as others believe in the reality of both.

CH. 396

another interesting topic is that Obito himself began to mix these personalities and demonstrate the falsity of one, which deprived him of the very opportunity to avoid reality (Madara clearly reminds him more of the responsibility on his shoulders than Tobi) and relieve the constantly increasing stress. therefore, starting from the moment when "Madara" shows that "Tobi" was just a cover, Obito loses the advantages of Tobi's image, suppressed regrets gradually surface, stress accumulates, the sense of control disappears for lack of any new personality other than his own (which has problems with control). and all these consequences falls on him during the war.

Conclusions

the reasons for this defense strategy appeared in Obito due to his low self-esteem, which was facilitated by the following. the early death of Obito's parents was most likely at the age when he was too young, and therefore psychologically this loss was fixed as "I was left because something was wrong with me. I can't be loved naturally, I need to deserve it first". because of that there was a constant attempt to be better, to reach the level of a genius opponent, who not only shows with all his appearance that you are not enough, but also constantly pokes you in your own shit like a puppy. and that's not the only situation where you're not that good. there's a lot, actually.

such an environment forms an attitude "to get recognition, I need to try harder than anyone else, because something is wrong with me". subsequently, this attitude is transformed into a new one: "I cannot get recognition in any case, which means I will achieve recognition, respect, attention through pretending and forming other personalities". and that's how Tobi appeared.

I don't even know what to add at the end. it's just great that you can see the depth in Obito, even when he's acting like a moron. here's some admiration for this silly guy

#obito uchiha #naruto shippuden #uchiha obito #madara uchiha #kakashi hatake #deidara #obito

[wasyago]

YAGO!!!! GAHFRHRHAHARHAHRHRF IM BACK (Design Detail Anon back << i dont know what to call myself LOL) I HAVE MORE WORDS

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON BIOLUMINESCENT TRITONS?!!!?! Obviously Gillion's eyes and coral already glow cause of his funky scrungly squelchy magic BUT what if... he had little glowing freckles... scales? im not fully sure how fish people work.

Your designs for Gillion and Edyn already do an amazing job of separating their underwater biology from humans like Chip and Jay (thinking of the glossy skin, the tails, and the yellow sclera/slitted eyes)- like it's very easy to tell by looking at them that while they are People they are very much FISH People. Which of course sounds pretty obvious but I mention it because a lot of triton art I see usually just looks like a blue person with gills and fins, if that makes sense.

But to expand on my original question- both Gill and Edyn are from the trench, and, in my logic, adjacent at the very least, to other deep sea creatures like anglar fish and some squids. They already have darkvision but the image of them having little hidden patterns when they get super deep in the ocean is... so cute...

im realizing after Ive written all of this that it kinda stopped being a question and started being a ramble so I do apologize :']

(on another note I love your caspian redesign it does a really sweet job of incorporating literal elements of water into his features *smooches him* **respectfully***)

OMG!!!! i love all your thoughts this is so cool thank you for sharing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (and thank you!! i tried very hard to make caspian look like a water spirit and not an ocean creature and still make him interesting visually...)

you know, now that you've said that the trench is deep under water im realizing that it's something i didn't actually think about. like, i remember hearing Gill say that he's from the trench, but it never actually registered in my brain that trench = deep and dark. everything makes so much sense now oh my god.... finn saying "why did they keep this from us" about the sun, because the sun simply doesn't reach to where they live...

i dont know why i imagined the capital as this bright white sunny coral reef when it should be dark and mysterious and harsh with no sunlight. bruh. it makes so much seeeense. and all the talk about strict rules for safety and foodchain and danger, because they're literally so deep there's a lot of giant spooky creatures.... hold on im having a worldview change.... oh god....

considering all this... YES bioluminescent tritons!!!!!!!!!!!! i imagine they don't glow too much, since while tritons are pretty smart they don't have a lot of natural protection from predators and attracting attention would be suboptimal. but they do have glowing parts for um... reasons. idk, they're magical creatures in a magical world.

i imagine their stripes and eyes and hair and underbellies all emit a glow in low lighting, and in complete darkness only the stripes are visible. and every triton has a unique stripe pattern or color so they're all different like that.

idk how it actually works. like, if they glow in any darkness or only in the darkness under water (although it wouldn't make a difference since they're always wet) or only when they're very deep or if they can choose when to glow or when to not, but its still a very cool detail!!!!!!!!!!! glowy fishy people yayyy

#yagotalk #my art #sketch #oh boy do i tag this.... its a long text post...... #aah yeah fuck it we ball #gillion tidestrider #edyn tidestrider #jrwi riptide

[mellomaia]

To my folks who experience climate grief:

Over the last few days I've been obsessed with a game called Half Earth Socialism:

[ID: opening screen for the game Half Earth Socialism. From top to bottom: there's an image of the earth encircled in a design that looks like wrapped wheat. Both are colored pink. The title of the game is below, along with the tagline "A Planetary Crisis Planning Game." Under that, there is a menu with options for New Game, Sound toggle off or on, and Credits. There is a hyperlink at the very bottom that says "Read the book: Half-Earth Socialism." end ID]

The game was created by Drew Pendergrass andTroy Vettesse, the authors of the book Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. I read the book last year, but didn't play the game until recently.

The premise is that a socialist revolution sweeps the world, and you play as a lead planner who must 1) lower emissions and therefore the temperature below 1ºC, 2) reduce the rate of biodiversity loss, 3) keep people around the world happy, 4) use political capital to implement policies and gain allies in parliament, and 5) avoid production shortages of electricity, fuel, and food.

It's very challenging to beat the game because of all those factors. Sometimes I'd do well in one planning stage on some of those areas but fail in others, and they all have an impact on your political capital and public approval. Seeing headlines within the game about environmental disasters, species extinction, pandemics, etc. if I wasn't doing well was really upsetting. In the first planning stage of the game, they're inevitable because your plans can take many in-game years to actually start improving things. I found myself skipping those after a time. But, as I figured out the mechanics and how and when and in what combinations to prioritize policies, I felt excited about headlines like "polinators are flourishing," "people are making their own gardens," "the quality of life in the Global South is improving." I finally got to the best win state earlier today after trying one or two dozen times.

Aside from lifting my mood and sense of hope, I also learned a lot about proposed and existing technologies meant to address climate change: biochar, carbon capture, electric grids, energy quotas, etc. Also, it helped me feel impactful, even though I knew it was just a game. For example, one of the policies I tended to implement in the first planning cycle was granting indigenous sovereignty. I loved being able to do that in basically one fell swoop.

Even when I had critiques of the game, I found those meaningful because I started thinking about points the developers missed and what else would be needed to create a just transition. That's super important because no one person is going to think of everything.

Obviously, your capabilities and decision making processes in the game are oversimplified for the point of educating and simulating. And the game reflects certain biases of the developers. For example, the idea of one central body organizing every policy and process in the world, with most of the decisions coming from one person, does not sound to me like it would work well. Even so, I think instilling that sense of capability is so important, especially since so many everyday people feel defeated and like they can't change anything right now.

Suffice it to say, I enjoyed this game, and I recommend it highly! The game is in English, Spanish, and Portuguese (Brazilian and from Portugal).

#long post #games #video games #climate change #climate grief #simulation #half-earth socialism #half-earth

[arepitademanteca]

A large part of the public and the fandom affirm that Flapjack was Evelyn's palisman or was carved by her as a gift to Caleb, but really, those deductions are not solidly based or well argued. Dana's latest statements do NOT confirm that Flapjack belonged to Evelyn, she just states that Evelyn's spirit was NOT in Flapjack but Belos saw it as the culmination of his brother's corruption.

In Hollow Mind, inside Philip's mind we can appreciate paintings that frame his most important memories, and Caleb is present in all of them. There is one in particular in which Caleb is carving the characteristic mask that Philip would later adopt when changing his identity to Belos. But so what? Well, both the writers and animators don't put random details, rather they put them because they are important to a great extent, and they are worth noting, so the fact that they put Caleb carving the mask was not by chance, but because the painting itself is confirming that Caleb, from an early age, was a woodcarver. It can easily be deduced that Caleb was in fact likely to have started the Clawthorne tradition of palisman carving, rather than the other way around.

Caleb is depicted as a carver from a young age.

Hunter's wish was to carve out his own future, a wish that prompts Flapjack to join immediately. I highly doubt that a young witch who was able to travel between two realms would have so many conflicts for her future.

Now let's think about Caleb's future as an orphan who had to abandon his childhood to raise his younger brother, in a puritanical society in which absolute perfection was demanded of man. The ultimate goal of the Puritan community was to maintain moral purity in all areas of life. The Puritans held that God was the highest authority on any subject of the human being. Only divine grace had the ability to change people, who had to live according to God's precepts as thanks to his mercy. In this way, they thought that they fulfilled what God wanted from the human being and, therefore, they would access Paradise, since God had great plans for those who followed him. Doesn't look familiar? Flapjack's connection to Hunter must have antecedents regarding the desire that brought them together: Hunter wanted to have enough freedom to be able to choose his future for himself without any higher entity, family or society telling him what to do. And that surely was Caleb's wish; freedom, choice and criteria.

In some illustrations of the brothers, already as adults, Flapjack is present on Caleb's shoulder. If he were Evelyn's palisman, despite how close he could be to his owner's partner, it wouldn't make sense for him to be in the human world, it's as if they represented Luz and Ghost together, much less, that he was was so familiar with the house that it belonged to Caleb and Philip.

Many began to theorize that Flapjack belonged to Evelyn or that she had carved it as a gift for Caleb due to the Wagon Ride in Thanks To Them, in which in the intro, a bird that is obviously Flapjack appears surrounded by fire in the hand of Evelyn attracting Caleb. Such an act could be perceived as symbolic, since the Hollow Mind paintings show that Flapjack was not present at the meeting between the brothers and the witch, and we all know that Philip would not have overlooked such a detail important like that. What is a symbolism? The different forms of expression that use symbols to represent ideas and facts are known as symbolism. Symbolism is the idea that some things represent others. What we mean by that is that we can think of something, say, the color red, and conclude that it does not represent the color red itself, but something beyond it: say, passion, love, or devotion. Flapjack is a red cardinal and represents all of those symbolism for Hunter.

But it can also be associated with anger, aggressiveness, revenge and blood. The series usually handles a lot of color symbolism.

I could give an example of the symbolism of the forbidden fruit and the serpent presented in the story of Adam and Eve. The serpent tricks Eve so that she and Adam eat the forbidden fruit which, according to tradition, is an apple. This act is universally known as "original sin." As a result of their disobedience, the first human beings are expelled by God from Paradise. The supposed apple represents the "knowledge of good and evil". Specifically, having their own ideas about what is “good” and what is “bad” instead of relying on God's wisdom and moral law. The snake represents the human desire to investigate and understand the unknown; our curious nature tempted Eve to seek the forbidden fruit to find her own answers.

Dana is well known for putting, or wanting to put, religion-related references, and was apparently inspired by the fables of Adam and Eve for the story between Caleb and Evelyn, and Cain and Abel for Philip and Caleb. Evelyn fills the role of the apple, magic the snake and Flapjack the result of Caleb giving in to temptation. In the story of Cain and Abel; Cain kills his brother because he did not know how to control his jealousy when he saw that God appreciated Abel's offerings over his own. This can be understood, adapting to the mythology of the Islands, that Caleb pleased the Titan by learning and adapting to magic, and Philip kills him out of jealousy when he sees his brother being happy with magic, with Evelyn, with flapjack.

If Flapjack were Evelyn's palisman; he wouldn't have left after Caleb's death. Palismans seem to be passed down from generation to generation, and the only way they stand alone is because either their owners died, or they were abandoned. If Flapjack was Evelyn's palisman, and she only lived with Caleb, she wouldn't have gone off with the Bat Queen. We could explore and get to Dell's palisman, which is a yellow cardinal, similar to Flapjack, and which is surely Evelyn's real palisman, which was inherited until it was left with Dell. I don't think it was carved after Flapjack's disappearance and Caleb's death, because he also has a scar, and that may mean he was and participated in the conflict.

Flapjack is not attached to Eda, despite the fact that the series has made clear his similarities with Evelyn. Flapjack had seen her before Hunter, and even so, it didn't occur to him to go with her, nor with Luz, who was her companion. But he did seem to know the Clawthorne family and trust them enough, therefore, Eda. I gather that because she had no problem pushing Hunter out of the way at Eclipse Lake and calling on her when Hunter disappeared. He knew Evelyn, surely he loved her, but his behavior with Eda shows that he did not own her.

Caleb represents change and the desire for freedom, reasons why he was killed, certainly. Birds may be the symbol of the Clawthorne family thanks to Caleb, and it would be poetic symbolism. A bird is a universal symbol of freedom because it represents the ability of birds to fly through the skies whenever necessary, to escape and be free. In the same way, a bird in a cage is a symbol of the freedom that has been taken from it. The Gold Guard's mask may have been carved by Caleb like Philip's to play with, and said mask represents an owl. The shield of the Golden Guard, Gravesfield and even the Emperor; they are birds, and we know for a fact that they reference Caleb, who may very well have been fond of birds, and combining it with woodcarving, results in the Clawthorne lore and Flapjack, and if we go further, reintroducing from the palismans to the Boiling Islands, then I detail that theory. Quote: "Freedom is a bird with wings; you can fly. Birds have all the freedom. They don't have to stay in one place all their lives." It's very close to what we know of Caleb.

There are other reasons that may undermine the popular theory that Evelyn was the owner or carver of Flapjack, and I personally think those theories detract from Caleb's weight in the story. As I listed the reasons, I was asked questions as I wrote them down: If the Flapjack was Evelyn's and she had carved it before the events presented in the story, why would it have the name human food?

All of the birds that the Clawthorne family is inspired to make for their palismans and their family logo are human birds, including Flapjack himself, who doesn't have any whimsical island elements.

Caleb was a woodcarver, and surely that was his job in the human world. Is it not logical to think that it started the tradition of palisman carving?

They're throwing all that data in our faces for God's sake.

Belos, in his fit of rage, called out Caleb's name when he saw Flapjack, before Evelyn's. As Philip fatally wounds Flapjack, he says "Bye, Evelyn" mockingly, but before that he declares, "You wouldn't want me to hurt a precious palisman, would you? On second thought, I don't care what you want." And he proceeds to name Evelyn and impale Flapjack, with many taking those lines at face value. We don't know who he is addressing, when seconds later Hunter regains control of his body, which alludes that his control over his body was weakening, and it is likely that those words were directed at Hunter himself, who seconds later declares his desire to carve palismans. She could also say it to Luz, who she was looking at in the act and showed genuine concern for Flapjack, or Evelyn herself, but she never refers to HER palisman, she refers to ONE palisman. He could also be talking to Caleb, and it would make sense if we analyze that, later, he would enter a mild dissociative state in which he would refer to Hunter as such and after precisely killing Flapjack, he sees his ghost or his hallucination. His enthusiastic "Goodbye, Evelyn" is due to the fact that he ended the symbol of love, freedom and union that marked a before and after in Caleb and in his relationship with Philip, and could also be part of his teasing in his internal conversation with Caleb.

Caleb's first true connection to magic, which would define his decision to remain in the Demon World and become a witch, would be Flapjack. When a warlock carves a palisman, their souls are bound for life, and Caleb carved Flapjack. The series presents many parallels between situations, relationships and characters, and from the current events we can deduce how some previous events were; Luz carved her own palisman, with the help of Eda, who was the one who gave her the wood for the palistrom. And why would it be any different with Caleb? Eda gave her the wooden palistrom because Luz really wanted to be a witch, and maybe Evelyn saw that her good human friend, open-minded and non-extremist, is a carver, and well, it would be nice if she gave him a piece of wood and BOOM! Caleb carves Flapjack, and it would make more sense based on narrative and lore for Caleb to be the one to carve Flapjack, and not be a gift or palisman from Evelyn, since, in addition to detracting from Caleb's own actions and decisions about what he wanted in doing so removes the symbolism of his character and even the relationship between the bird and the Hunter. Going back to the subject of palismans, the fact of sharing souls and that, while Caleb was in the human world; Flapjack linked it to the Boiling Isles. Flapjack was the anchor, which ended up uniting the islands completely. Flapjack represents the link with witchcraft, and at the same time with Evelyn, the culprit that Caleb has known that world. Belos sees in Flapjack the magic that ended up anchoring Caleb to the Isles, and the magic was what separated him from him.

The parallels between characters is one of the best-treated topics in The owl house. Eda, Willow, and Amity can be compared to Evelyn from the point you see it, while Hunter, Luz, and again Eda to Caleb. And I think these scenes are an indirect response to what happened between Caleb and Evelyn.

It is thinking like: I want Maduro to suffer because I am destroying everything he ever wanted, which is everything related to Chavismo. Having already given these examples that are not personal at all and that obviously do not represent the national sentiment of an entire nation; having injured Flapjack, and about to kill him, is Philip destroying everything Caleb ever wanted, everything related to magic. That's why Hunter responds seconds later saying everything he wanted to do, even though Philip didn't care. They were words directed at a man he murdered 400 years ago, from whom he has taken and continues to fight to take everything from him, and that everything is what "pushed" them away in the first place. Obviously it wasn't you stabbing him in the back and chest that destroyed his family, of course not, it was a bird that your brother carved because he wanted to do magic and fly. Yes, Philip, you would make a very interesting case study for psychiatrists. And again, yes Philip, you deserved to be puddled and stomped to death.

If you read this far, thank you for your attention. English is not my mother tongue and in my degree they only give English applied to audio, so I don't have a good command of it. little things

#toh s3 #Caleb Wittebane #Flapjack Toh #The Owl House #Evelyn Clawthorne #Philip Wittebane #Belos toh #Eda Clawthorne #Luz Noceda #Toh Hunter

[xerith-42]

wait so i love the idea of MCD laur being launched into MS season 3. Now i have questions.

Does he end up telling them about being a shadow knight? Or does that… reveal itself (rubbing my hands together menacingly). If so, how does that go down? What’s the reactions? The circumstances? mwahaha

Does he get to visit Cadenza? What’s that like? For that matter, are his dads alive in this universe? (AUGHEUGHEU) Does he ask Cad about them?

Oh now that's an idea...

He 100% would want to keep it on lock down. Even if these alternate versions of his friends are surprisingly chill about him being from another dimension, they even ask him questions about it, there's some stuff he refuses to tell them. Idk where he would start living, maybe with MyS Garrance who knows, but whoever first sees him without a shirt on would no doubt notice the amount of scars across his body. There's a difference between "I come from a dangerous world" and "I have scarring of multiple stab wounds and burn marks that would have easily killed someone."

If anyone tried to ask him about it he would just dodge the question, tell them that it's nothing, just wounds from a battle he's already won. I don't think his calling would fully be able to act up in this other dimension, but it would try to. He'd be hanging out with everyone, getting to know them, and then when he looks over at the now second alternate version of the woman he loves so much, it just happens. In an instant his hands become shaky, his eyes start to cloud over, and all his thoughts are filled with the urge to kill.

And let's remember, at the point he got yoinked out of his original timeline, Laurance has just barely if at all started to come to terms with his condition and what it does to him. He's still in denial about how bad it is because he doesn't want Aphmau to worry or Garroth to distrust him. He doesn't know or understand different symptoms because they just started, and now he's surrounded by people who don't even know what a Shadow Knight is.

I imagine the calling acting up would make Laurance run away, like physically run the fuck away from Lover's Lane with no way to track him because boy has inhuman speed and no phone. The thing that gets him to come back is when they find him hiding in the woods that line the city. And the person who finds him is this dimensions version of Cadenza. The one person who no matter what situation Laurance was in, is able to talk him down.

She's not the same as his sister. When he sees her he can see the difference in them. His sister is a little taller, carries herself differently, and is obviously dressed differently. But her voice sounds so similar, her laugh is the same, and the soft way she talks to a freaking out Laurance is enough to ground him to some sense of reality when he's spiraling. Cadenza was always able to talk Laurance down from a bad decision when they were kids, and now this alternate version of her is able to do the same.

MCD Laur and MyS Cadenza become absolute besties after this. Like forget his budding brotherly relationship with MyS Dante that reflects the same one they had in MCD, he's found someone he can consider family here. He never talks about what happened, just tells everyone it was some warrior instinct that went haywire. What do you mean his eyes sometimes change color when he looks at Aphmau for too long? You're making things up again Travis.

Fun little aside, Laur would 100% tell most of the cast about their counterparts, and Travis would be so upset to learn that he doesn't have one (as far as Laur knows).

And one day Laur goes to Cadenza's house so they can talk and she can figure out a way she can properly dress him. Everyone else lives alone or with another adult roommate, so he doesn't even think to ask about who she lives with. When he knocks on the door, there's nothing that can prepare him for who opens it.

It's Joh.

His dad. His real dad, or the closest thing he had to one. The man who first took him in, and the first person Laurance failed to protect.

Emotions take over logic and he just hugs this man. He doesn't know if Cadenza's informed him of the situation, he doesn't know if he's supposed to pretend to be the other Laurance, and he doesn't care. In a precious moment he's able to hug his father and maybe break down crying while he's hugging him who knows.

I do think Cadenza tried to explain to her dads that the man coming over is an alternate version of Laurance from another dimension. And while Hayden is a sci-fi nerd and can actually wrap his head around the concept, Joh was sort of nodding along for the conversation. He gets that this man looks and acts a lot like his son, but isn't his son. Yet this doppelganger hugs him the exact way his son did when he came home from college, with so much love that it crushes him.

And for Laurance, even if he knows this is no doubt an alternate version of his father, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because for just a sweet sweet moment he gets to hug his father and pretend like he didn't completely and utterly fail him. When this now very awkward hug breaks, Laurance has to come to terms with reality, see that this man is indeed different from the one he failed to protect.

But for just a minute... it felt like he was.

#long exhausted sigh #Cinn #why do we do this to ourselves? #minecraft diaries #text post #aphblr #aphverse #laurance zvahl #minecraft diaries laurance #mystreet cadenza #mystreet aphmau #mystreet dante #mystreet travis #void paradox #mystreet #angst as always #answering asks

[earlgreytea68]

EGT's FAQ About A Fall Out Boy Cover of the Billy Joel Song "We Didn't Start the Fire" Covering Newsworthy Items from 1989-2023

Why isn’t it in chronological order?!

Was the original in chronological order? Yes, roughly speaking (it wasn’t in exact chronological order, either, for instance, the Brooklyn Dodgers won their first World Series after Disneyland opened but the Dodgers are mentioned before Disneyland, but I get it, it is roughly chronological and definitely more so than the Fall Out Boy cover).

The original, however, was also about a different time period in history: It happened to cover the Cold War. It makes sense that it would go in chronological order because there was a very definitive narrative arc to that portion of history: The Cold War started, all these things happened during it, the Cold War ended.

The era since the Cold War ended arguably lacks this narrative arc. So it makes sense that if you were doing a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for the modern era, you wouldn’t go in chronological order. That would imply a “beginning” and an “end” that our era doesn’t deserve. Arguably, what mostly characterizes the post-Cold War era (and especially the twenty-first-century portion of it) is the jumbled chaos of time-meaninglessness. We say it all the time on the internet: What is time anymore? It means nothing? We have no sense of it. Things that happened yesterday turned out to be from 2003. There are a ton of other memes about this. You can’t believe the pandemic was over three years ago now. You can’t believe it’s been seven years since the 2016 election cycle. You can't believe that Friends is as far away from us as The Andy Griffith Show was from Billy Joel. Our histories, both personal and on a grander scale, feel like a jumble we can’t untangle, and so does this cover of the song.

In the 90s, people used to talk about being at “the end of history,” and they meant this in a good way. Like, there was this belief that “western democracies” had won and now all we had to do was keeping going up. Obviously that fell apart quickly, but I am Pete Wentz’s age, and I remember very much being given that message when I was in high school and college. In the way that the country boomed after winning World War II, it was assumed we would also boom for a long, even more extended period of time because our victory was even more complete. And then September 11 happened and it felt like it accelerated everything falling apart much more quickly. But that fever dream quality of growing up “post-history,” so to speak, is I think captured really well in the non-chronological lyrics, in a way that I think following a chronology would have done a disservice to. Our lives are this weird mish-mash of constant horrors mixed with the numbing agents of pop culture, and so is this song.

The song ends on September 11, and there have been 22 years of history since September 11, and I get why it’s upsetting to people for the song to end on an event from 2001, and at the same time I think it’s the most effective part of the song, because it does not feel like that was 22 years ago, it definitely feels like it was yesterday, and it also feels like sometimes it’s the only thing that happened in the past thirty-plus years, because of how much it dwarfed everything that came before and how much it colored everything that came afterward.

Also, Fall Out Boy did make a deliberate choice to change the way the chorus goes. Billy Joel sings, "We tried to fight it," and Fall Out Boy sings, "We're trying to fight it." That, to me, adds to the impression that this isn't a narrative with a beginning and an end, it is all over the place and we're still in the middle of it all. So the song ends in the middle, basically.

I am speaking, of course, from the bias of a privileged American born in 1980 who graduated high school in 1997. But, speaking from that bias, I personally get why it’s not chronological, and I don’t think it’s a fatal flaw of the cover. To me, after a moment of being surprised the first time I listened, I felt like I got it and it captured the era better, and it was a feature not a bug. Obviously not everyone will agree, but anyway, I just wanted to say it.

There’s no way they did that on purpose, though.

I’ve got news for you about literary analysis, which I can confidently state as a writer myself: I’m sure there are some writers deliberately doing stuff on purpose but I bet a lot of it is the stuff you don’t even notice. The stuff you do notice and make much of, I’m always like, “…well. Gotta pretend I knew I was doing that all along…” I used to feel guilty about that, but I don’t anymore, because I’ve decided that the things I do instinctively, because they feel right to me, count just as much. When it turns out later that I was doing something because of x, y, z, only I couldn’t articulate it, I think that’s okay. And I also think it’s better than okay when people read what I write with their own experiences making it mean something to them that I would never have thought about.

Which is to say, I’m not particularly bothered by whether Pete Wentz said to Patrick, Joe, and Andy, “Let’s not do it chronologically in order to capture the chaos of this era.” He probably didn’t. But he did make a choice not to do it chronologically, and that’s good enough for me. (He actually starts with a very early reference, so it’s like he’s faking all of us out, like, You thought this would be a nice chronology, but it’s not, it’s an absolute mess.)

Didn’t Pete Wentz basically say it was just too hard to do it chronologically?

Never believe what Pete Wentz says about his own lyrics. He says Thnks fr th Mmrs is about Coachella.

Okay, but you’re surely giving him too much credit.

I’ve been analyzing the man’s lyrics for a long time now. He’s so much smarter than anyone gives him credit for, tbh. Believe me, I also used to think it was just coincidence that he kept tripping over these really elegant, multi-layered, evocative phrases. After twenty years, I don’t think it’s coincidence anymore. I think he just knows how to write.

But also, We Didn't Start the Fire gets held up as a Cold War epic, and it wasn't actually about the Cold War either, Billy Joel just lucked out that the Cold War ended the year it came out.

Fine, but anyone can just rhyme a bunch of proper nouns together.

Yes! You are correct! Anyone can do that! Go for it!

Yeah, but why is everyone paying so much attention to Fall Out Boy’s?

Honestly, I don’t know. They put out a really stellar album that most major media outlets and casual social media managed to ignore, and they’re in the middle of a super-ambitious tour where on any given night Patrick Stump might cover Queen or they’ll just pull out something old or maybe something brand new and I haven’t seen anyone talking about any of that, either. So I’m not entirely sure why suddenly everyone’s so fixated on what Fall Out Boy is doing, but Idk, if you’re curious, the new album is excellent and doesn’t have a single cover song on it, it's all original and it's got ton more Pete Wentz lyrics to pore over.

The lyrics are very sports-heavy, though. Was that necessary?

The lyrics are extremely Pete Wentz. I know everyone else in the band helped him, too, but these are the things Pete Wentz cares about: Chicago sports, Marvel stuff, Tiger King, other emo bands. Lots of other stuff, too, but the fact that he includes the Cubs and not the Red Sox is entirely a function of Who Pete Wentz Is. It’s actually an extremely personal listing of the last thirty years, and I kind of like that about it, too. Everyone’s version of this song is different, and that’s cool!

But it doesn’t even mention COVID!

I, too, was surprised by that, but it mentions Tiger King, and I think that’s better, it made me laugh and also very vividly evoked that particular time to me better than just saying, like, "COVID-19 quarantine" would have.

There are other huge events it leaves out!

Yes. There are.

I can’t help it, I just really hate the song.

That’s cool. There are songs I really hate, too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(the funniest thing to me is that many people make fun of Patrick's lack of enunciation making lyrics unintelligible, but he's worked so hard on his singing that people can understand these lyrics, oops)

#long post #fall out boy #fob #bandom

[supertrainstationh]

Why I Quit “Pokémon Violet”.

I'm officially done with playing "Pokémon Violet".

No, I didn’t complete it.

Sadly I found my enjoyment of it so deeply sabotaged by lack of basic quality control, that I gave up on the game fairly early on, though I did put in a number of gameplay hours.

In terms of total concrete plot progress, I completed a single gym, and then briefly went into a Team Star base just to see what it was like.

The gym was by orders of magnitude the most easily completed first gym I ever encountered in a Pokémon game in terms of field-based challenges and Pokémon battles.

From what I heard, the gyms in this game can be approached in any order, but that they don't actually scale with your team's levels, or based on how many badges you already have.

If this is true, this is laughably lazy design for what is supposed to be an open world game in which you can approach challenges in any order, but if this is not true, then pardon me on not knowing in advance whether or not this is true, as I went into the game as spoiler-free as possible in the hopes of experiencing this game without outside bias coloring my experience.

The concept that gym leaders choose to face challenging trainers using a team selected based on the challenger’s current experience level is something that had already been explored in official Pokemon material more than a decade ago, so the failure to deploy it here when the game’s open structure obviously calls for it is inexplicable.

I did the Cortondo Gym first. My levels were similar to the Gym Leader's own Pokémon, but I effortlessly crushed them, and had more difficult encounters with ordinary Trainers out in the overworld in the areas I had been exploring near the city hosting that gym.

I'm someone who will ALWAYS peruse "easy mode" options if they are available. I am completely illiterate in regards to competitive Pokémon battles, and don't even have the full type advantage chart memorized. But even for me, Cortondo Gym was disappointingly lacking in difficulty.

I also want to comment on the pre-gym minigame, which was set outside the gym itself in an area on the outskirts of the town.

The olive roll maze was a neat way to tie in some of the cultural elements of the actual locations the games setting, the Galar Region, is inspired by, but the mechanic of moving the inflatable olive ball felt lame.

Though it is only a minigame which is supposed to be inconsequential, I am harsh on it because it seemed like minimal effort was put into it, regardless of its overall importance to the game.

The playable character's in-game model does not act as though they are interacting with the olive ball, and I would go as far as to say that it appears that they are unaware that the ball even exists within their universe.

Compare this to "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker", released decades earlier on far less advanced hardware of the standard definition Nintendo GameCube, in which the player character automatically looks toward objects of interest in the immediate area that can be interacted with, and the characters arms and face actually change to reflect the effort and intention of moving that object as the player makes this action happen.

But in this olive roll minigame in “Pokémon Violet”, you just walk at the ball to make it move in the direction you want, while the character mindlessly gazes forward as though nothing is happening. It doesn't feel like a minigame meant to entertain or challenge the player, it looks and feels like a collision detection demonstration assembled with minimal care or game design theory put into it.

And even so, the minigame was completely effortless to win, and I didn't even realize it was over, and that I won, until it took me to the result screen.

There wasn't even an on-screen timer to add any sense of urgency to the minigame, and I have no idea if being penalized for taking too long was even a possibility.

I've been interested in Pokémon since I first read a blurb in a gaming magazine in the mid-90's about a monster collecting and battling RPG for Game Boy that was becoming popular in Japan, and I was enchanted by its world and characters since the video games and anime first hit North American shores.

This franchise shaped my life for the better in ways too extensive and detailed to discuss here, so I'm not happy to be in a situation where even after counting down the days till release and roaming from store-to-store to find a copy, that my interest in "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" has deflated.

In spite of how much I wanted to give this game a full playthrough, in spite of mounting frustrations, my final straw was when I actually stopped looking forward to streaming on the days I announced I was to play “Pokémon Violet”, and felt regret that I "had" to play it on my show in order to fulfill the schedule I promised to my Twitch viewers to stream the game.

The mere complexities of modern games already made me feel a slight disconnect from this title.

Going from traditional 3D Zelda games like "Wind Waker" and "Twilight Princess" to the new style introduced in "Breath of the Wild" was an extreme learning curve for me, especially in regards to operating the more sophisticated interface, though over time I was able to get the hang of it and enjoy the game.

I never imagined that I'd be in a situation where a Pokémon game of all things had a more complex user interface than the latest major Zelda release, and that I'd be mashing one button after another trying to activate nested and cryptic functions that were accessed in very simple menus even as recently as the Nintendo 3DS era.

In addition to that, this game forces the player into tutorials for the simplest of things universal to most modern games of even the mildest complexity, yet leaves tutorials for mechanics newly introduced to the Pokémon series restricted to completely optional and easy-to-miss places tied to special events.

The real killer for me is the extreme lack of polish in almost every aspect of the experience. Characters even just a single body-length away from the player's character are frequently animated with frame rates resembling a flip-book in which half the pages have been torn away.

Obvious shortfalls in the timing and pacing of Game Freak's cutscene animations lead to thinly veiled shortcuts such as cutscene text scrolling unreasonably fast even for a literate adult with an above average reading speed.

Static screenshots are sometimes used during otherwise fully animated cutscenes, and at other points cutscenes loop clumsily and unconvincingly on a particular moment as the scene waits for a player prompt to continue the narrative

Other times the graphics fail to accurately depict things that players are expected to believe are taking place within the game world. Important details essential to gameplay or story beats are sometimes not shown on screen, are mentioned only in interface or character dialog, or are rendered in outstandingly unconvincing ways.

In the first decade of the 21st Century, I owned Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube, and enjoyed games on all three systems.

Since then, I have focused my gaming habits on Nintendo systems.

I chose Nintendo DS over PlayStation Portable.

I chose Wii over PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360,

I chose Nintendo 3DS over PlayStation Vita.

I chose Wii U over PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

And today, I own Nintendo Switch, but not PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S.

If I was concerned with enjoying ultra high-resolution visuals and maxed-out frames-per-second, I would not have been choosing Nintendo systems in spite of them being the lowest performance hardware options on the market.

But even within the limitations of the Nintendo Switch, which is running a low-power-consumption mobile chipset that was arguably already out-of-date when it first hit the market six entire years ago, “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet” completely fail at taking reasonable advantage of what the system is capable of.

"Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" are 2022 releases, published exclusively on Nintendo Switch, the same system that launched in 2017 with "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

"Breath of the Wild" was was a game designed with the intention of being launched as an exclusive for Wii U, an even less powerful console released closing in on five years earlier than the Switch, and more than a full decade ago as of the time I'm writing this, with Wii U itself having been widely considered under-powered at the time of its 2012 release, being in the performance range of high definition consoles that entered the market as far back as 2005.

"Breath of the Wild" had its technical shortcomings, but even the Wii U version of "Breath of the Wild" completely annihilates "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" in terms of rudimentary technical proficiency, and when examining "Breath of the Wild" in terms of overall presentation in comparison to " Pokémon Scarlet and Violet", the comparison is such that I'm amazed that Nintendo, who founded their brand as a video game manufacturer and publisher on industry-leading high quality, would allow their name to be associated with the latest Pokémon entries.

I can not overstate the extent to which “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet” fails to deliver on the promise of basic quality control. Games with far fewer technical problems than this game have been criticized severely by review outlets and the gaming community, and I am convinced that these new Pokémon titles are being excused for their incompetence based on good will alone in ways that no other franchise would be permitted to get away with.

In-game tutorial screens featuring screenshots for illustrative purposes are from the Japanese versions of the game, and had this text censored out with a very crudely applied distortion filter in an embarrassing and ineffective attempt hide this fact. This is something appropriate for a work-in-progress demonstration build of the game, not the final product.

The first time I caught a Pokémon, the Pokéball animation froze in mid air, leaving me to think that this was the game's way of depicting Pokemon catching, and that these new Pokéballs hovered in the air rather than falling to the ground as Pokéballs in previous games did.

No matter how good this game is, when malfunctioning animations are mistaken by an experienced player to be representations of what is actually taking place in the game world, that is a serious problem, and anyone paying money for this game deserves better.

Shadows of environmental objects regularly flicker in and out of existence in a way that's not only unconvincing and an obvious malfunction of the graphics system, but in specific instances may pose an actual safety hazard to players susceptible to seizures triggered by blinking lights, which is something a product in the Pokémon franchise in particular should have been exceptionally aware of after similar light patterns in an early episode of the Pokémon animated series triggered seizures in children, which became an international news event, but a cause of widespread condemnation and ridicule aimed toward the franchise and the companies behind it.

The seizure incident caused by the Pokémon anime so impacted the culture of the franchise’s brand management that a particular Pokémon creature featured in that episode was never again depicted in animated form to avoid even the slightest association with the public safety disaster, and references to that particular character have been kept to an absolute minimum in the decades since, so the fact that glitches which cause blinking and flickering patterns being permitted to exist within the newest Pokemon game is mind-boggling.

Characters and objects within immediate sight of the player character frequently vanish and re-appear without warning.

The player character is liable to sometimes phase through the ground, or pass through what are meant to be solid walls, breaking immersion and sometimes causing the game itself to become impossible to play.

It's been amazing to watch Nintendo fans point and laugh for years at slipping quality standards for headline games on competing systems that were significantly more powerful than Nintendo's, using them as proof that more powerful hardware and better graphics alone don't make for better games, only to see them now accuse those who point out the shortcomings and fundamental deficiencies of the newest Pokémon games of being "haters" who are holding Game Freak, The Pokemon Company, and Nintendo, to unfair and unreasonable standards.

The more extreme and irrational defenders of the state of the game have gone so far as accuse critics of lying about quality control issues to make Game Freak look bad, and claim that that the ample footage of these easy to encounter malfunctions was either manipulated by hoaxers using video editing software, or even filmed using deliberately altered copies of the game that were made to suffer glitches.

I feel I am being generous to Game Freak in saying that everyone working on the game had the best intentions, but should have spent (or been allowed to have spent) at least another year on this title.

My already stated observations of the elements of this game which are obviously struggling to function properly don't even begin to address the parts that are simply reflections of either laziness, a rushed development cycle, or both.

When exploring the game's world, I encountered  multiple duplicates of the same stores selling the same items within eye-shot of each other within the same city, or even directly next door to one another.

This was so blatant that it made me speculate if these choices were cheekily made by rebellious lower level Game Freak employees to see how far they could push the limits of corners they were instructed by their superiors to cut, before they were actually confronted over them by their employers.

What's worse, the interiors of most shops are represented in the game only as text based menu interfaces, which pull me out of the game world just as much as laughably bad character animations that resemble fan-made parody cartoons posted to the internet.

Poorly rendered, poorly applied, and obviously repetitive surface textures that make certain objects such as cliff faces and buildings resemble assets lifted from a Nintendo 64 game are just the cherry on top.

"Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon", itself a Nintendo 64 title, has every single shop in the game rendered as a location with an interior that can be entered and explored. No matter how inconsequential those store interiors were, they helped to convincingly portray a living world that is real to the characters within the game.

Menu based shops do NOT do that.

My continued fascination with the Pokémon world, and its creatures, locations, lore, and characters, can not overcome the fundamental incompetence demonstrated by "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet", which completely demolishes my ability to enjoy it, which is a shame, because the intent to create an imaginative world thriving with lively creatures, memorable locations, and characters worth helping or fighting against, is clearly present, and in some cases the heights of care put into these elements match the lows of the bad quality control.

Unless an obvious revolution in The Pokémon Company's standards of ambition and quality is reflected by the next generation of Pokemon games, it breaks my heart to say that "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" will be the last mainline entries in the series that I will be excited for, or interested in.

I pushed myself to play "Pokémon Violet" in spite of all its bad points.

I'm regretfully ending my time with "Pokémon Violet" in spite of all of its good points.

---------------------------

This was written LIVE during Episode 1 of my gaming and writing Twitch show!

If you liked this, check out my SCHEDULE and join me live next time!

[Twitch] [VOD Channel] [Writing FA] [Ko-fi]

#writing #writeblr #pokemon #review #video game review #stsh streams #a griffin writes #pokemon scarlet and violet #pokemon violet #pokemon scarlet #pokemon review #nintendo #nintendo switch

[jadagul]

My model of writing is something like: we have ideas, which are vague and amorphous and imprecise. And then we have to translate them into language, which has two benefits:

This can commuicate those ideas to other people

Language both allows and requires you to refine your ideas and make them more precise. This also helps expose contradictions and catch errors.

GPT doesn't really work like this!

With GPT-2, this always made it really obvious to me when I was looking at GPT text. The words and sentences made sense locally, but there was no idea underpinning them so they didn't connect to each other usefully. The newer GPTs are way less obvious, because they do seem like they can hold some sort of train of thought later.

But it still feels like they don't "think", and I was trying to probe that intuition. (And articulate it to make it more precise: step 2 above!) The first draft of the thought was something like "It just makes words, and doesn't know things about the world". But that's obviously not exactly true. If I ask it "what color is the sky?", I get this:

The color of the sky can vary depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. During the day, the sky can appear blue, while at sunset or sunrise, it can display shades of orange, pink, or red. At night, the sky can appear black, but if the moon is out, it can have a bluish or grayish hue.

And that represents some amount of information about the world! The model encodes a bunch of information about the world, which it learned by consuming text. But it does still seem like something is missing.

And on consideration, my new thought is: GPT4 has ideas (whatever information/data/priors are embedded in the model). And it has point 1 above, the ability to communicate those ideas to people. But it doesn't have point 2. It doesn't look at the words it writes and use them to refine the model.

And like this bare fact is uncontroversial, right? The training weights of the model don't update based on the conversations it has. So if the weights in the model are the things GPT "believes", then it is not capable of changing its mind.

(Of course the character it's simulating in any given conversation can change their mind. But that's a local update within the conversation. It's not drawing on all the information and beliefs GPT encodes, and it doesn't cause those beliefs to change. I can argue with ChatGPT. I can win an argument with ChatGPT. But that won't change what the next person gets out of it at all.)

So GPT can produce text like I can, but it doesn't use text like I do. It's a way to output precached thoughts; it's not a tool for thinking. (I almost want to say that it did all its thinking during training, and then doesn't think while you're talking to it.)

The LessWrong crowd was always worried about the dangers of an AI that could recursively self-improve. That seems to be exactly what GPT can't do.

#ai #gpt

[fioras-resolve]

Playing Style Savvy for the first time has been pretty cool, delving into a kind of game we don't usually play and getting to experience the fashion world as trans women. (Incidentally, I say "we," we're a plural system. Please don't get mad, at least not in the replies. I'm Maya, I love fashion, and that's about all you need to know.) But playing it has also called attention to something that I just cannot ignore as a fat trans woman, which is the lack of body diversity. So, let's get into it.

So, I wanna start with a concept I'll call "the world of pretty." This is a fictional setting where just about every character is some kind of attractive. Style Savvy is obviously a world of pretty, but so is Final Fantasy, Hades, a lot of anime, and the portfolios of plenty of artists on this site. And this is a good, fun thing, you know? It gives the work a kind of appeal that's incredibly straightforward to understand, so I don't need to dwell on it for too long.

Here's the thing, though. I am, as I said, a fat trans woman. Not many worlds of pretty include someone with a body like mine, because trans bodies are so often forgotten, and fat bodies are simply excluded from a lot of people's idea of what an attractive person looks like. So when Style Savvy doesn't even let me be an XL, the implication is that my actual body is not worth having in your world. And that's not even to mention the limited or non-presence of people of color in many of these works. When I realize that my own body is excluded from a world of pretty, the illusion shatters.

Now, the fact I mentioned tumblr artists as an example of this might raise some eyebrows. After all, this kind of thinking can easily drive someone to hassle an indie artist about changing their style or preferences. I don't want to encourage that here, and if you've received grief about not drawing fat, trans or PoC characters, I'm sorry that happened, and it shouldn't have. I've been in the position of wanting to have this kind of conversation, but knowing it could easily get drowned out by people who do not fucking speak for me. I just want you to be mindful that, when you make attractive character art for a long time, you inevitably create a world of pretty, for good and ill. I can't tell you how to use that power, but I want you to know that it's there.

And, additionally, there are excuses, some better than others. Final Fantasy and Style Savvy are both inspired by high fashion and normal people fashion respectively, so it makes sense their characters all look like models. Worlds of pretty are very marketable, and it can be a hard sell to break from that mold. And it is genuinely hard to have diversity in your work, in a way I will explain right now.

Okay, look. To give Style Savvy its due... gamedev is hard. I would know, this body does it all the time. So like, if you're making a game with any kind of visual element, you need either sprites (2D drawings basically) or models (Basically 3D puppets with potentially hundreds of moving parts). And these models will almost always require a rig, like, a skeleton with bones and joints, that determines how the model can move.

From a production standpoint, you can crank out new characters from the same base model, much easier and faster than if you spent the time building another model with a unique rig. I can't speak for this exactly, because we've never done 3D dev before, but it's just way less of a headache and a hurdle if you're trying to get the most "content" out of your limited budget of staff and time. It just makes sense not spending the time to make different body types, especially in a game like Style Savvy where they'd also have to do a metric shitton of work modeling all the clothing for each distinct body type. I understand this. We sympathize. But what it means is that fat bodies are not in the games' world of pretty.

(hey, Angie here now) so like, i am not immune to the world of pretty. it's part of why i like the things i do, and it's part of why i picked up style savvy to begin with. even as the illusion shatters, i still like a lot of media and artists that don't really do body diversity. but at the same time, as i was playing style savvy i started imagining a version of it that actually did have what i wanted, and used that to create an even more positive experience. like, imagine playing one of these games, playing a clerk at a boutique, and then a trans woman comes through the door, bashful about her looks but desperately wanting to find something that suits her. i'm imagining a world of pretty that includes all body types, that finds beauty in every body. and i know i can't create this because i'm a lowly game designer... but i imagine it and i start to feel happy.

#game design #style savvy #maya speaks

[gothibara]

Okay, so related to that one post abt somebody with plant powers not really being able to control ibara, how DO you think she sees the world?? Like to be honest i live your interpretation of her quirk and could read a whole book on it. You said it was kinda translated right? so how would she expreince her senses then??

Haha, thats a really good question! Ive actually been reading a book on plant perception lately (What A Plant Knows, by Daniel Chamovitz) so while i cant say i definitely know everything, its helped put things into perspective. also for the sake of Not Being Buzzkills obviously horikoshi didnt think abt this its just hc im using canon to supplement and draw conclusions dont be silly

also um. im putting this under a cut because it really is a book's worth of meta. i got really excited.

But i think, from how we see Ibara, a large part of it is going to be filtered through religious experiences+delusions. It already seems like how she talks and understands thing is subconsciously put through this filter (i dont think shes calling shishida "apocalypse beast" out of spite or to be inflammatory-- there is religious theory that the beast of gevaudan may have been god-sent, albeit this theory is rare and far from widely accepted. Ibara doesnt seem to follow any specific doctrine, though, and i really think parts of it are just kinda her brain drawing connections in line with her deeply personal beliefs as opposed to dogma. To her it may just be that she believes theyre saying the same thing in essence, while he does not)

But on the topic of sensory experiences specifically, I would also say that Ibara is experiencing exponentially higher levels of sensory input than most people, so i cant blame her for being a space cadet. And while the fainting is an anime-only gag presumably to show her delicate sensibilities or whatever i personally am choosing to interpret it as an incredibly reasonable consequence of her brain hitting the limit. Like cut the cameras im OUT!!! It's documented frequently in the history of religious ecstasy and other spiritual experiences, so adding an assload of input i can imagine only heightens your chance.

And so onto your question about how that manifests-- its hard to say! But i have a few ideas.

Firstly, i think we should address what the plant is perceiving, and how. In a base function, we can say that they respond to stimuli in certain forms (light, sound, smell, balance, touch, etc) which loosely correlates with our own senses. They differ in the organs used, though, but Ibara having a centralized animal brain both simplifies and complicates it.

Plants don't "see" pictures-- they have sensory cells dedicated to seeing both light and different wavelengths of light (which helps control their circadian cycle and even flowing schedule! Even a small disruption of flashing a certain color light during the night can allow farmers to delay or change when certain plants flower), but these arent rods and cones connected to an optical nerve connected to a brain. But at the same time, they... ARE connected to a brain.

I think for Ibara, plant sight is like a murky, back-of the mind addition to her normal range of vision. It's not a picture the same way her Eyes work, but she knows intuitively theres light, shadow, and colors around her, and can focus in on it a little more if she tries. Details and motion that doesn't block light wouldnt be part of it-- the plant can only see what blocks light covering it or reflects light onto it. Ever-periphery flashes of shadowy shapes and colors. (and conversely: i think the prayer pose, with eyes closed and hands clasped makes it easier to focus on the information filtering through)

sound is also different-- while the studies about plant growth and music are bunk, plants do react to sound. the mechanics of it are still heavily under-explored, but we know they do, just so long as its sound that may be relevant to a plant, like running water or insects chewing. I don't think Ibara could do what Hawks does-- where he can focus in on sounds through his wings and hear conversations. The vines aren't a dedicated sensory organ, they just communicate signals back that are of relevance. She may KNOW there's sound somewhere, but it's background noise until it's something that triggers a response. The question is really what would be deemed important enough to do so.

See, the thing with plants is that they don't have emotions, or even a centralized brain, as we've established. Animals can and do. humans especially. Things deemed important by a person can be important for a variety of reasons, beyond just survival. While Ibara uses the vines as an extension of her limbs, it doesn't change the built in systems of stimuli response the plant has, but the plant isn't a brain in the sense that it will decide anything. So the question of What Ibara Hears from the plant is an interesting one. Personally, I don't think she hears the sounds "as is". Ibara doesn't HEAR insects chewing, because the cells are communicating a stimulus and response, so it would be an interpretation of the response. Sort of a plato's cave issue-- I think ibara may say she "hears omens of danger" or "tidings of great joy", but it's not like she's being told a Coherent Thought By The Vines. it's sound of water = good = we are safe and can find safety + an avidly catholic teenager = the angels bring tidings of joy. it's thing she "hears" but doesnt hear because its never actually touching her own aural organs or nerves. She may not be able to pinpoint what the sound itself is, just what it evokes or what her brain fills the gap in as, like talking.

Taste and smell are both something plants do, but defined slightly differently, as we associate these things with specific nerves in the human body that plants Dont Have. to define it the way my book does, we're going to say "taste is the reception of chemical signals through touch" and "smell is the reception of chemical signals dispersed through the air". and plants do taste, and taste one another-- many parasitic plants show preference for certain species, like the dodder vine. other vines, especially those that climb, will avoid climbing their own species because they know that the support is unstable. this is something they figure out by the chemicals they release onto their surface. This is something that would really be tightened up by ibara having an actual real world plant on her head but trust me trying to find anything that matches is a mess. more on that in a bit. but we know, in theory, she can "taste" other plants, and maybe even other type of similar compounds through these vines, which i think would then also manifest in at least a vague idea of a taste in her mouth-- once again, platos cave of sensation, although honestly its probably a bit more in line with what the actual thing would taste like. (tomatoes, for example). this taste may also correlate with a signal that associates emotionally, but ill touch on that in the pain part of this.

Smell is similar- once again, just detected through the air instead of touch. (The smell of cut grass? An airborne danger signal. Ibara probably can't stand being around freshly-cut lawns, it must feel like a giant panic attack. How this would manifest? Not sure! The smell of blood? As a sound instead? It's hard to say what could compare to the scope of fear that kind of flood would cause). I won't go into depth since it's the same as above, but I would also like to add carbon dioxide as a mention. Plants can detect levels of CO2 (and it can decide how they photosynthesize!) in the air, and I think because for Ibara, photosynthesis has to be accelerated (due to the faster growth and usage of energy being more akin to that of an animal instead of a plant) and she and the plant share an exchange of signals and nutrients.

I'm going to diverge briefly into the realm of digestion and nutrition. Firstly because I love it. Secondly because it will circle back to our carbon dioxide talk.

Ibara's vines are, as we see, leafless. This is quite relevant. Leaves, as most people know, are responsible for the majority of photosynthesis. While chlorophyll in any parts of the plant can photosynthesize, leaves are by far the most effective way thanks to the broad surface area and certain specializations. Leafless plants (especially in the case of vines) tend to be parasitic. Plants that evolve photosynthetically-inefficient leaves tend to be carnivorous, which I would like to explore a little.

A plant is defined as carnivorous if, typically, it shows a form majorly inclined towards having prey-trapping mechanisms, and receives a substantial amount of nutrition from doing so. They tend to grow in areas that have high sunlight and water levels, but with incredibly nutritionally deficient soil. Nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and proteins, which are found in meat (bugs included)

Now, Ibara's vines don't have visible roots, so I think it's safe to assume the root system is within her body, and goes deep below the surface. Water, nutrients, and neurological signals all need to be shared; and so I think her entire body is connected to this root system. Ergo, all the nutrition the plant gets that isn't photosynthesized comes from what Ibara digests-- which is also why I don't personally subscribe to the vegan or vegetarian Ibara headcanon-- because nitrogen and phosphorous are INTEGRAL to stem growth, and baby, she's all stem. In fact, I think she probably loves meat-- second only to bread, which provides long-term energy in the form of complex sugars. I personally think Ibara would dislike sweets in the traditional sense of candy and desserts outside of winter-induced cravings from a drop in photosynthesis, but that would be because the sugars her vines produce for her already maintain a decent level of homeostasis, so it would cause her blood sugar to spike and make her feel ill. Conversely, bread breaks down and is stored much more long term, so it would both benefit her and the plant, which is inefficient at photosynthesis compared to a plant of the same size with leaves, and would need a boost given how much energy it uses to grow, detach, and move.

I know this girl can put away a MEALLLL after training. Yaomomo style.

I think you could argue Ibara (and her quirk) qualifies as a carnivorous plant. Her vines lack leaves and instead have developed extensive thorns (which can be a type of modified stem-- its complicated and varies plant to plant), and we never see them branch off of each other, so they may not even be capable of developing stems. She also doesn't appear to have any flowering mechanism (nor does she need one!), although I will say I'm a sucker for the idea of Ibara having psuedo-blossoms that aren't functional flowers, but rather an indicator of health. Either way, the heavy focus on the vines for strength, complex movement, and grasping through pointed extrusions makes me think you could convincingly argue that they are the "trapping mechanism", which is a requirement for carnivorous plants.

So, once again, we've established that there's a complex nutrient exchange both from Ibara to the vines, but from the vines to Ibara. And because of this, I think there's an added level of complexity to her digestive system-- specifically regarding the stomach's direct connection to the brain. Just like her own nutritional needs can trigger certain responses like in any person, but the plant probably has the same access to these hormone signals. Things like craving sugar and being irritable in winter because of the inability to produce her own as much, but also conversely, I think the plant can trigger a digestive response to prepare for the influx of sugar being photosynthesized. A "heads up, we're about to start sending this your way" to help maintain proper levels.

So, back to carbon dioxide finally. When plants detect higher carbon dioxide levels in the air, they may photosynthesize more. This may result, in my opinion, to "phantom smells" and a trigger to the digestive system, resembling how our own mouth waters when we smell food. Whether it's just an ambiguous food smell or one specifically (maybe bread?) to Ibara I'm not sure, but what I'm saying is that if Bakugou's explosions over the course of an hour can produce about the same amount of carbon dioxide as an entire person throughout one day, she probably thinks he smells fucking delicious and for no reason why. It's funny to me.

Ok! On to touch. I think it's obvious that Ibara's vines react to touch and that's transmitted to her, given how she knows that she's found someone and is pulling them out in JTA. Plants definitely can feel touch, and respond, but I'd like to note that plants can't feel pain. They don't have the ability to feel pain. They can react to adverse touch, certainly-- for example, grass releasing their smell when cut, but they don't feel pain. It's solely for survival, and feeling pain isn't really important for a relatively stationary being. Nor do they really have the factor of emotional association with pain that typically is bundled together. But in the case of Ibara; who, once again, has the burden of the complex mammalian brain... maybe she does feel pain, even if it's not "real"! It likely has to do with whether she has the expectation of and emotional association of fear/pain/etc, so simply cutting away the vines aren't likely to make her hurt. But I don't think phantom pain is out of the question, especially for someone already as high-strung as Ibara and who has so many wires crossing at so many times because of the nuance of the signals transmitted from cell to cell.

And related to touch... a fascinating and storied study in plants includes gravitropism and proprioception, or-- balance and how they know what's up and what's down! People have incredibly complex proprioception systems (most people know about the inner ear, but it goes far deeper than that!), and plants, too, make use of this ability. In fact, it's integral for plant growth.

Plants have two main mechanisms for gravity sensing. The root caps, and then in the stems, the endodermis (which is also responsible for osmosis in cells, sorta) both have genes that develop statoliths, similar to the otoliths we have in the inner ear. These statoliths tell the plant which way gravity is pulling. The root caps make roots grow down, the endodermis makes the shoots grow up.

I think for Ibara, her vines have become an extension of her own balance and ability to know where she is in space. Losing all of them suddenly would result in something similar to a damaged ACL-- having to readjust and being wobbly for a while. Not only that, but I think quirks that impact someone's sense of balance would seriously waste Ibara. While Ibara does move her vines in more ways than up and down, the ability to tell what's what still relies on the individual cells in the stems and roots. While Ibara would still be able to produce the growth hormone and self-amputating mechanisms that detach her vines (i have to look more into this, honestly-- autotomy has only been recorded in one type of plant, and even with abscission ibara's vines dont follow typical patterns. smh my head.), there would be little if any control over the movement, especially if the balance reduction hits the endodermis in more ways than one, because that would impair the hydrolic movement that causes movement in plants.... Either way, Ibara's quirk would be rendered functionally useless. Deidoro Sakaki has this one. And in my opinion, with Uraraka's quirk, they would grow, but wouldn't show proper gravitropic bending, and so may also be impaired in their ability to perform actions.

And I think a complete removal of Ibara's vines would honestly feel like... overwhelmingly suffocating? Imagine having so much of the senses you're used to having cut off, it's probably incredibly jarring and upsetting. I don't think she would prefer it to the every day life she lives, because it seems like she's generally not that impeded by her own world view and strict standards, even if others oppose it (OCD queen lets go #1).

So...as a TLDR; I think Ibara experiences normal human sensory input, she just has another layer that bleeds into it. While I often refer to the plant separately in the above, that's solely for clarity of biological mechanic explanations-- they're one and the same, the same way we started reproducing mitochondria despite their likely beginning as a different organism. She may see things that aren't there (like in the case of warning signals from other plants, or in her mental translation of all sorts of things), "hear" things in her mind, smell or taste or even feel pain... while the mechanics aren't the "real" ones we associate with the senses in question, she's still reacting to stimuli she is receiving, and I think she's learned to adapt to it. It's hard to explain, because it almost has a sort of eldritch feel... but really, Ibara is Ibara, she's a bit stubborn and translates everything into her world view, and so that determinative personality probably helps streamline the constant influx of information. Angels, music, emotions, memories-- those are things she assigns to the experiences, but they are no less validated by the biological machinations behind them. Human survival also relies on our ability to feel and the more complex machinations of the brain, the social advantages of more refined expressions and speech, and Ibara's just as human as her classmates, and her quirk ultimately is another part of that, even if we know the individual cells of the plant are without that same neurological function.

#ibara shiozaki #shiozaki ibara #bnha #bnha meta #quirk analysis #yes im adding a lot of tags im proud of this.

[shinewonder]

Whats ur interpretation of fnafs lore

All of it? Well, i'm no good theorist, so most of the things here might be wrong and are just opinions, really! Won't even go over the steel wool games because ruin is about to come out...

>Bite of 83 happens first (Why: It gives William a motive to kill; Gives a reason for Henry to make the security puppet; "Don't you remember what you saw?" doesn't mean it was a murder that he saw per se, this could relate to "What's seen in shadows is easily misunderstood in the mind of a child", what was misunderstood might've been an employee putting on the fredbear suit; "Not until i undo what he has done and heal this wound. A wound that was first inflicted on me" doesn't necessarily imply that this "wound" is the very first thing to happen in the story, just that Charlie was William's first victim, the Crying child's death could be left out of that speech since that wasn't something William did; Midnight motorist's name in the game code is "Later that night", what night? The night Charlie is murdered, maybe. Her death is also a minigame in pizza sim, so it works as an allusion to it and in Midnight motorist we play as William driving around, he steps out of his car to kill her as seen in "Take cake to the children". This minigame, however, shows some things that make me believe CC is already dead and is golden freddy, which i'll mention later) >Crying child was always in agony, this amplified his remnant and gave the Fredbear plush sentience (Why: Fredbear plush's presence in fnaf world [Which is canon! Not the gameplay part, obviously Freddy Fazbear and his gang aren't throwing giant pizzas at Rainbows, but the hidden lore in it] relates to his "I'll put you back together" promise; The color change in text. Why would William show up to see his son in the hospital and refer to himself as the fredbear plush? It's not him anymore) >CC possesses golden freddy and haunts Michael (Why: Midnight motorist's person watching tv is far too understanding to be Mike, considering the things he does in fnaf 4's minigames; The place that makes the most sense for the son to go is the grave, why else would it be there if it wasn't important?, but Mrs Afton is never really mentioned anywhere, what would be the purpose of making her be dead and never even show that that's the case?; The bigger footprints aren't human, this can't be an animatronic or a springlock suit - it's raining, golden freddy has far more supernatural abilities, he teleports to the office and jumpscares you with his head flying towards you; Fredbear plush uses the same words on fnaf world's clock ending as he does on CC's death and on fnaf world we are seen making the fnaf 3 minigames which lead to the happiest day, implying that the kid with the golden freddy mask and that possesses him is CC, recieving the birthday he never got to have; Why can't the son go to "that place?" If it's CC's grave and he's coming back to taunt him, maybe Mike's going there to check his grave, and William who doesn't believe his son's soul is tormenting his brother is angry he just won't stop going there no matter how many times he's told him not to; "It's me") >William becomes an alcoholic and kills Charlie in a drunken rage

>Discovers Mike might've been right about fredbear showing up to haunt him and deduces that's his son through seeing the puppet being possessed and decides to put him back together >The MCI happens >Charlie uses CC's remnant to give life to the MCI kids (Why: Give gifts, Give life's last kid, golden freddy's kid, never is given any masks by the puppet, he already has one; When CC dies we can see the main 4's plushies disappear one by one; "Why would the tiny toy chica be missing her beak" because the crying child's memories had an effect on the souls; Why do we only have to put CC back together? Maybe "you're broken" refers to his remnant being taken away from him; this one's a stretch, but maybe the "was it me?"s and "1987"s on fnaf 4's teasers relate to cc's memory of how he died having an influence on the bite of 87 happening) >Jeremy Fitzgerald suffers the bite of 87, with Mangle being the one to do it >(This one's more of a headcanon, really, but) William convinces Mike to help him collect remnant without telling him what it really is. remorseful over what he did to CC, he agrees and becomes Fritz smith and later Mike Schmidt (Why: "It was right where you said it would be" and "I'm going to find you" mean William was still around and in touch with Mike before sl, which places that game after fnaf 1, since the minigames that have William getting springlocked show that the animatronics he dismantled were the originals. Considering that, the popular notion that Michael was working as Mike S and Fritz to find his dad doesn't really work. The logbook shows sketches of fnaf 1 and 2 animatronics so he was around by then, but what were his motivations? What does tampering with the animatronics entail in-universe? My best guess is since he went along with what his dad said in sl, couldn't he have done it before? While his dad was killing on the dayshift, he was helping him by night, analysing the animatronics and extracting remnant from them, and when he ultimately got fired in 1, his dad went back to get the remnant Mike couldn't and got springlocked. i don't think Michael would approve of helping the murders, if we consider him Fnaf 3 and pizza sim's protags. plus i don't think the tone he uses regarding his father on that cutscene was particularly fond, though it was kind of vague. so if this is the case, then he had to have accepted due to not understanding the reality of the substance they were getting, believing he was atoning for what he did to CC and putting his family back together, only realizing what really was going on on sl)

>The funtimes are made and Elizabeth dies (Why: this one has to be placed later for the progression to make sense - killing with the suit -> robots that kill for you) >Fnaf 1 happens, William becomes springtrap >Sister Location happens and Mike turns on his dad >Mike lives due to Elizabeth believing he's her dad (Why: "You won't die" = remnant transfusion; "They thought i was you"; Baby's desire to make her father proud) >The box had Fnaf World in it, Michael plays it so he can put his brother back together and give him his happiest day as Fredbear plush guides him during fnaf 3 (Why: "What's in the box? It's the pieces put back together" -> Fnaf world is about putting CC back together - Clocks = memories, "i will put you back together", relation to happiest day, map looks like a brain; Open box on fnaf world's files; Mike's Fnaf 3's protag [considering the logbook's drawings] + Fnaf 3's minigames = Mike's fnaf world's protag) >Pizza sim happens >UCN follows Mike being held in purgatory by CC (TOYSNHK) while the other kid that forms Golden freddy torments William (Why: "The one you should not have killed" Why shouldn't you have killed this one in particular? If it's Michael who we play as, CC would fit as he's the only one Mike's killed; The roster - Why would william be haunted by the nightmares or the mediocre melodies if he didn't have any connection with them?; The character that approaches Old Man Consequences in Ucn has the same sprite as fnaf world's protag character; "Leave the demon to his demons" as William screams on the background; Old Man Consequences is an alligator, Andrew wore an alligator mask in "the man in room 1280", but this character does not seem to have any issues with the player, Mike didn't kill him)

Another thing that i believe, but doesn't really change anything is that CC is Cassidy (Why: SenshiOfSadness on reddit found that the logbook's foxy grid's answer is "is springtrap"; Faded : "The party was for you", Altered text: "It was for me" = the altered text's writer's name isn't decided by the foxy grid, William afton isn't ever celebrating his birthday after all, so the other name that was found on the logbook, Cassidy, is the Altered text writer's; It makes very little sense, narratively, to introduce one character that's heavily associated with his birthday [Dying on his birthday, Fnaf world + happiest day connection] and just have some other kid also have a party be for them; The altered text knows far too much about CC's life; To me, Afton family reunion works better as a story than William and Mike are having a conversation and Cassidy just likes to gossip. I still do believe in golden duo though, it's just that Cassidy is the Afton and the other one has no name yet, maybe it's Andrew?)

Wow this got long...

#i didnt write this very carefully #its not very clear i dont think #then again im not sure of the lore myself haha #you can try to debate me on this timeline but it wont really be a debate #ill probably just go along with whatever you say... #fnaf #five nights at freddy's #fnaf headcanons #golden duo #andrew fnaf #cassidy afton #crying child #michael afton #william afton #ask #asks #anon #rambles

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY: Something that will forever bother me is that I thought they would change their outfits. I dont like v7 outfits too much so wehn I saw they might be on a beach. I thought, 'Cool. Maybe they'll remove some layers of theit WINTER outfits and they might look better.' BUT NO. I thought weiss and blake would lose their jackets, yang gets a ponytail, im not sure about ruby, shes fine ig. But still pretty unhappy. oh well

Yang in a ponytail, my beloved. So near and yet so far 😭

I get that it takes more time, effort, and of course money to create the new models (even overlooking the fact that RT is no longer the struggling startup it once was...) but for me, missing details like that really hinder my sense of immersion. They don't actively take me out of the story, but they don't help me stay tethered to it either, which is much more of a problem when the writing is struggling like RWBY's is.

As I mentioned in another post, I've started Demon Slayer (which is excellent) and little moments with clothing really help the storyworld to feel real. Why doesn't Tanjiro's uniform tear during all those intense battles? Oh look, here's a scene with his mentor explaining precisely how that's possible. Why doesn't Inosuke's mask fall off? It does after a particularly vicious headbutt, finally revealing his face. Here two of the characters are removing their outer layers to give someone a pillow and blanket. Here they are changing into a new set of clothes while their uniforms are washed. Zenitsu hangs onto others' robes when he's particularly scared, pulling them askew. Inosuke wears or doesn't wear a shirt depending on the situation. People comment on the bamboo in Nezuko's mouth. Tanjiro's earrings are slowly being revealed as significant... Clothing is a part of the characters and the story actually treats it as such.

In contrast, RWBY has lost almost all of that work despite starting out as a series built around the thematic significance of outfit colors. Not even their weapons, tools through which the ENTIRE conflict is built around, are given any true acknowledgement anymore, not when Weiss finds hers in a heartbeat offscreen, getting Blake's back becomes fodder for jokes, Ruby shows no inclination to get Crescent Rose back (with, more significantly, her teammates ignoring that uncharacteristic passivity), and Jaune apparently has never tried to mend his sword. Only stealing Yang's arm is even somewhat significant and likewise treated in a jokey, ultimately-unimportant-to-her-development manner.

Now take into consideration everything they DON'T do, including reacting to the tropical nature of the Ever After. Give me scenes where Yang puts up her hair, Blake takes her stockings off, Ruby tears the sleeves off her shirt, Weiss cuts her skirt to make it shorter, and she and Yang both loose their jackets because holy shit it's hot here. Also we're literally lost in a parallel fantasy world, maybe dead, who gives a crap how we look or if we need to buy new clothes later?? Give me the girls pulling off extra layers to cushion Ruby's head after her faint. Let them tear off a strip to bind a wound. Who's going to trade something like their jewelry to gain what they need? (Something we did get with Ruby's rose pendant, but it happened so fast and with no emotional punch it was just frustrating. Great idea, terrible execution.) Who's going to pick up new pieces while traipsing across the Ever After, perhaps visually signifying their acceptance of the place (something we could have gotten with Ren in Atlas)? Who's outfit gets scorched or torn or soiled because unlike Demon Slayer, there's no canonical reason for why these clothes should still be looking pristine after all they've been through?

Obviously RWBY doesn't have to do all of this, but it should do something to sell the idea that these are real people post-battle, traveling a hostile, tropical-esque land after they've been prepped for the ARCTIC. Keeping them exactly the same doesn't help me fall into the fantasy of watching RWBY, it just makes me go, "Oh, they probably want new outfits for Volume 10, so they're not bothering to change anything now :/" The viewer is already well aware that Volume 9 is a filler season that's struggling to be significant in the grand scheme of things. You don't want anything that's going to add to that feeling.

To use an old meme:

#rwde #rwby #mymetas

[someone-named-adel]

Okay okay, listen to me

First of all, this is a somewhat (actually not so much) recent thought, so it has no coherence or anything like that.

Listen, listen (actually it would be read?-)

We already have the Isekai through a video game and a series, but but BUT

How about an Isekai a little bit out of the norm?

Like, it has all the usual stuff, the guys stalking (can it be considered as such?) MC since they is the favorite character of the four and blah blah blah blah.

Nothing changes up to that point

BUT

Let's add something else to the formula.

One day, MC feels weird, but in the sense that everything is weird.

The bed they're woke up in, the color of the walls of the place they woke up in, the decor, even their body feels weird.

THte looks down at their hands, and all they can see are green hands, with only three fingers.

Hands that obviously don't belong to him.

Panicking, they starts to get upset (obviously).

Where am I?

Whose body is this?

Is it my idea or am I taller/shorter than before?

Why are there posters, pictures, figurines and more of me around the room?

Is it inside the room of some stalker obsessed with me?

Questions of that kind start pouring out of their mind in a frantic manner.

MC doesn't know what's going on, they doesn't even know if they are sleeping or not, they doesn't even know if they are dead or alive, they just knows there's something terribly wrong.

Okay to make a long story short, MC accidentally mind-melded with one of the four brothers, and the other three don't know that, but they are a bit suspicious of their "brother" because he's not acting like before.

So, MC feels trapped, they are in an unknown world, in an foreign body, and with people who are strangely attached to them.

Notice how their eyes light up when talking about them, how they look at their video game/series/movie like it's their only reason for living, and how they are so aggressive when someone outside of them mentions something about “MC”.

That, plus the strange obsessive thoughts that come up at times in their mind, which are always in the main character.

So there is this situation where MC is trapped in the body of this turtle brother and is bombarded by his obsessive thoughts daily (at this moment they doubt that it is only them in possession of the body, it is not discarded the possibility that both minds merged or both minds are living together, since it is a fact that MC would never have obsessive thoughts for themselves), adding to the demonstration of the other mutant turtles' own obsession, who start to worry about their brother, since he has stopped interacting so actively in conversations about MC (which is, like, almost the only thing they talk about) and seems more distant, also, why does he flinch when one of them mentions a fact about MC? , Why does he sometimes say that what they say is a lie and states the opposite of what they say?

Why does he seem to know more about MC than they do?

It is clear that their dear brother has something on his mind, and they are anxious to know what is so much on his mind, as they wish their brother would go back to his old self.

Because really, this new version of their brother is starting to bother them....

#possesses #character #if someone doesn't understand #Don't worry #I didn't understand anything when I was writing either #yandere tmnt #yandere teenage mutant ninja turtles #yandere mikey #yandere leo #yandere rottmnt #yandere donnie #yandere raph #yandere rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #basically MC the body of one of the turtles and discovers the sick obsession that these guys have regarding their #and they know it's screwed if the turtles find out

[morethanaloveinterest]

A Heartbroken Review of Leia's Costumes in the Sequel Trilogy

Let's talk about what our space princess wears in her final appearances.

We are first introduced to Leia wearing this jumpsuit in this trilogy. It is similar to her Hoth look from ESB but obviously with some changes to reflect being in a warmer place. It sets itself apart from her original iconic white dress and shows us that Leia is no longer the princess we first met in ANH. The jumpsuit is still a light color but with a darker vest - probably the darkest thing we've seen her wear before. Overall, it is a very practical outfit that matches her role as general of the Resistance.

Female representation: 10/10 Jumpsuits are always great, what can I say? She looks much like her colleagues in the Resistance and that is perfect for her. As a sequel to an old property, it shows a clear effort to indicate how she has changed over the years (without making her a crone or whatever).

Practicality: 10/10 Again, can't go wrong with a jumpsuit. I like the fancy belt buckle - she always liked belts, while otherwise being fairly plain.

This is the dress she wears at the end of the Force Awakens. I'm not crazy about the cutout in the bustline but it is nice to see Leia in a fancier dress, somewhat reminiscent of any of Padme's dresses. It's also a new color for her and definitely a flattering one. It represents the hope that the Resistance now has and matches the water world where her brother is hiding (as we see with Rey arriving at the end of the film).

Female representation: 10/10 Older ladies do not uh exist in many franchises, but they usually do not get cool dresses to wear when they do. I enjoy the jumpsuit but I also really like that we get a glimpse of regal Leia here, too.

Practicality: 9/10 Less practical than a jumpsuit but still pretty great. I am sure she is able to command the Resistance wearing this just as well as in anything else.

She wears this dress at the beginning of the Last Jedi until she is rescued from space. The color change from blue makes sense because things are much more dire for this film - they are fleeing the First Order and she has lost her husband. The simple design of the dress also makes sense for her (most of her dresses are of fairly simple constructions). The overdress adds a note of authority as she directs the Resistance from the bridge. She has added some jewelry, which is nice.

Female representation: 10/10 Absolutely a fantastic costume for an older lady to wear, and for our princess to wear as a mature woman. It still reflects the femininity of a character who mostly wore dresses in her younger days and conveys her status as a senator and head of the Resistance.

Practicality: 9/10 While it seems surprisingly practical for her time spent in space (it's warm, presumably), it is not as practical as her jumpsuit. It does not inhibit her movement, however, or expose her to the elements, so it's great.

This is the outfit she wears at the end of the Last Jedi. The collar is very dramatic and I love that we get a scene of her using it as such. From what we can see, the dress underneath is fairly simple and the overdress adds even more flair than the previous one. She has different jewelry on, and of course carries a blaster again, which is wonderful. Again, her color is gray because things are still a bit dire but there is hope at the end.

Female representation: 10/10 Again, these outfits are all fantastic. The neckline is a bit lower on the underdress than the previous one but she obviously pulls it off.

Practicality: 9/10 While she gets up to a lot more in this dress than the previous one, it can't be as useful as the jumpsuit.

Okay, I'm not sure how to really talk about this one since obviously it was using footage that wasn't used for the Force Awakens. But it is a dress that seems to be the same color as the one she wore on Cloud City, covered with a long vest. She still has the fancy belt and some jewelry. It's definitely in character and I like the cowl neck we haven't seen her in before.

Female representation: 10/10 I mean, I have Thoughts on how the movie itself treats her, but it's a lovely outfit that she would definitely wear in this current iteration of her. I just wish she'd gotten more than one in this movie.

Practicality: 9/10 It seems to be just as practical as the other dresses, while being just as lovely.

If you enjoyed this, check out my Star Wars for the Girlies Series (Leia episode out now!)

#leia organa #princess leia #costume reviews #may the fourth #hanleia #sw: sequels

[dognightmare4]

reposting these here because of the Everything happening on twitter rn 

[image id: three screenshots of Tweets followed by three diagrams. The first screenshot reads “(this is headcanon) Vex isn't from Craftworld OR Carnivalia. He's not "from" anywhere. He's the manifestation of the fear that collects in the Imagisphere. Every small worry, every anxiety, every nightmare that a Dreamer has is still part of their imagination (cont.)” 2. “ and therefore still goes to the Imagisphere. The form he takes is a representation of the biggest fears during that time on the Orb of Dreamers. The imagination of children is generally the strongest, so their fears are more pronounced. (cont.)” 3.” A lot of kids are scared of clowns, creepy dolls, etc. and that caused Vex's form that we see in-game. If he comes back every generation with a new form determined by the Orb of Dreamer's biggest fears, it begs the question: what would he have appeared as in previous generations?” 4.” While child Dreamers are the most powerful, the adults still contribute to the Imagisphere. His other forms could be created from anything, from the fear of spiders to the fear of death. Furthermore, what would he have been in ancient times? Pre-history?” 5. “ As Dreamers developed languages and cultures, how did that change the Imagisphere? If Vex is a being created from the concept of fear, and therefore has existed since the beginning of Imagination, did he choose his name? Or is it simply what Craftlings referred to him as?” 6.” Did he, or does he, have titles other than "Vex"? Do different corners of the Imagisphere have different stories or mythology surrounding him? About a being made of pure nightmares and dread that terrorized them in previous years?” 7.” All this to say: There's a lot you can do with the concept of "an eternal being made of nightmares in a world made of dreams". Don't limit your ideas of him to what we see in-game, because the game is made for kids and is simple/toned-down from what it could be.” 8.” Or do. I can't control you. i didnt intend to write a whole essay about this but. yeah. maybe if i have time in the future i can write out my ideas more concisely, but for now, this is good enough.” End of the first screenshot. The second reads “ Elaborating on this, if Vex comes back in a different form every generation, it's reasonable to assume that he looked a bit different when fighting Scarlet. It's possible that the plush she has isn't actually off-model, but is based on what he looked like at that time.” 2. “ Obviously the plush isn't one-to-one with his previous form, but some small "inaccurate" details may have been accurate at the time, like the different color scheme, less stripes, solid plush arms rather than 3 ropes, the bells being gold instead of silver, etc.” 3.” In The Gathering Storm she's shown to be pretty skilled in plush making, so I think that if she saw the Vex we see in-game, she would have made the plush more accurate.” End of the second screenshot. The third reads “ so. how do vex's hands work like, if he were to take off his gloves, what would it look like? how do they move? do the ropes of his arms act as bones/muscles? i made diagrams of some possibilities am i overthinking this design from a kids game where plushies can walk/talk? yes.” three diagrams are attached showing different possibilities for this question, showing a x-ray-like view of his hand. The first shows one idea, that the three red ropes that make up his arms need to split to create 5 fingers. A second is included in the first image, proposing the idea of a simple plushie hand. End first diagram. The second image shows a three-fingered diagram, as seen in the game’s concept art, with the caption “concept art hand makes more sense but thats not what the final design looks like so” End second diagram. The third shows the same x-ray-like view of his hand as the first image, but the ropes that make up his arms cut off at the wrist with the caption “The glove IS the hand (makes the most since, but is also the most boring)” End ID]

#lbp #little big planet #littlebigplanet #sackboy #sackboy a big adventure #sackboy vex #vex sackboy #saba vex #vex saba #i havent done an image id this long before so sorry if its confusing #mostly posting this because i wrote a short fanfic with these concepts that ive not posted yet. idk if/when i will but this is for that.