#c.paradisi

[larnax]

well this sucks

#c.paradisi #palestine #girl scouts

[larnax]

i wasnt expecting the results of that poll to suggest that dudes don't like cracking eggs in general but it kind of makes sense? the dominant narrative in the tumblr transmasc community at this very second is that You Can Never Know and providing any kind of advice is invasive and possible misgendering which is in large part a backlash to transfem spaces where egg cracking is a thing you're supposed to actively do so a bunch of trans dudes saw jokes about forcefem and thought "but if someone forcefemmed me that would suck ass bc im not a woman and dont want to be one" as if "actually im a trans guy" or even "hey, please don't speculate on my gender it makes me uncomfortable" wouldnt immediately cause any transfem person irl who suggested you might be an egg to be like "oh sorry bro my bad" bc shes like a human being capable of processing additional data, so they all made a bunch of posts about how that extremely niche scenario would be really invasive and triggering which then had to be abstracted so it wasnt immediately obvious that theyre just getting really mad at some transfem on reddit talking about putting estrogen in the water supply, and then somehow became a major community talking point.

which i think is the problem, almost every horror story is "someone decided i must be [identity] and then didn't listen when I told them to stop", because if i say i don't wanna cut my hair and some trans girl says "yknow i felt like that too before i realized i was a girl" and then im like "oh i already tried being a girl and it wasnt for me" and thats the end of the conversation it's at worst a little awkward. ofc it's different if it's a cis person telling me it's proof i haven't entirely forsaken my womanhood but this is a classic case of "changing the words in a sentence changes the meaning". the fact that transandrophobia necessitates that cis and trans guys experience gendered treatment by society the same way means that you can't say "well this is fine if a trans person does it from a place of wanting to help and is respectful about it" because a fully actualized gnc trans guy and a feminine cis guy who's never been given encouragement to explore his gender have to be the same kind of person and not two groups of people with different circumstances who will be helped and hurt by different things.

#c.paradisi #there is not a slippery slope from it being acceptable to suggest to ppl that theyre transfem #to it being acceptable to try and forcefully detransition trans dudes. like thats not gonna happen #acting like it will either means your transmisogyny is leading you to act in stunningly bad faith #end of sentence

[larnax]

no therion's story doesn't only make sense if you do a solo run. i've seen this take multiple times and every time i'm completely baffled because No It Doesn't. not true. false. incorrect.

like okay this does require you to understand that the literal words a character says are not necessarily the truth, but therion's story and gameplay both make way more sense if you accept the fact that therion is not a loner and shouldn't be one.

let's start with the beginning! the FIRST scene you see of therion is him meeting darius at age 11, who he will spend the entire rest of his childhood with and implied some time into adulthood, so he has spent probably the majority of his career as a thief working in a team, which is also borne out in his gameplay, because thief is a support class.

don't argue with me i'm right. while you can run therion as a DPS, investing in attack over speed and evasion means that therion's frailty gets in the way, and he struggles to do damage on par with olberic/h'aanit/alfyn, and cyrus/tressa do way more elemental damage than he does. however, if you instead spec him for support, share SP becomes the most insane skill in the game. a speedy therion can debuff a boss into oblivion before they have a chance to do much before stealing enough SP to let olberic fire off three divine skills without needing a refill. dancer therion is worth doubling up on weapons because his speed and evasion means that he can buff allies quickly and a dancer/thief is the only combo that will regularly dodge attacks before the late game.

therion's skills primarily revolve around giving allies openings to more easily take down enemies(i mean for balancing reasons but play with me in this space) because that's the job he had when he worked with darius. he's not an especially skilled combatant on his own because he didn't need to be, his job was to pin foes down so darius could spam sweep.

additionally, while i hate this decision badly, therion's percentages are fixed so that every chapter past the first has a necessary skill check that's very difficult to pass without either a glean info character and a KO NPC character(why did they do base 3% brigand leader's garb to him.), again because he's used to having someone else deal with gathering information and doing the majority of the fighting for him. he's not terrible at getting info out of people, but he's also not great at it, for example he just goes along with barham's scheme instead of finding a way to threaten or coerce him into revealing the info right away. like basically all of his plans would've failed if the guards or his informant had just said No and refused to help him as opposed to cyrus who responds to being told no by finding out that his informant's daughter died in order to manipulate them into coughing up the info he wants. therion might be capable of manipulation beyond basic impersonation or pretending to be friendly, but if he is we don't see it.

therion in general is also a very passive character if you look past his words at his actual actions. he resists for about two seconds when heathcote cuffs him before following their orders for the rest of the story even when he's uncuffed in chapter 2 when he's still not a huge fan of the ravuses. he again goes along with barham even when he's almost certain he's being fucked with. he is almost always either acting on someone else's orders or defending himself from someone else's attacks. the reason for this is best illustrated in one of the cutscenes with darius where it's made pretty clear that for the majority of their partnership, he kept therion dependent on him to make decisions, and because that started when he was relatively young it's likely that therion just doesn't have that strong of an instinct for advocating for himself or firmly saying no to people twisting his arm(he asks darius a question once and gets thrown off a cliff for it, implying he was even more obedient before that). he can say no once, but we have no idea if he would've given in to the bandits at the beginning if they hadn't responded to his initial no by attacking him, so it does actually make perfect sense that any of the stronger-willed travelers could just respond to that no by saying they weren't asking and dragging him along. he's prickly and verbally hostile, but that mostly seems like a defense mechanism because otherwise he's easier to coerce than ophilia. i get that this seems like i'm trying to infantilize therion but that's really not my intention, in fact that takes the Therion Doesn't Kill People point i made awhile back reflect less on his being a secretly good person and more being too passive to feel the need to finish the job and generally makes him more morally ambiguous because it's less clear what decisions he makes due to personal growth and what he makes due to inertia. is he a good person, or is he just too tired to be a bad person? ideally the story would actually go somewhere with that theme but it wouldn't be octopath if they didn't periodically drop the most insane writing that rewires my brain before either doing nothing with it or actively ruining it.

also, therion's story gets way stronger if he's in a party, because while cordelia and heathcote are (TREATED AS) the reason he learns to trust again, in-story they spend, what, one hour together maybe? cordy and heathcote are his bosses and the most either of them do cordelia using her empath powers to deduce that therion looks sad or heathcote telling him that he's the real asshole for being mad that he's being blackmailed. they're also canonically lying to him when they say they don't know what the dragonstones are, so even at the end of the story they don't really trust him(i wont spend too much time complaining abt them i just don't think you get to be a savior character if the town you own has a ghetto). on the other hand, if you do his story with a party the travel banters all make some attempt at showing therion slowly coming to trust and rely on them despite initial friction, and in gameplay therion acting as a support expresses the theme of him realizing that he actually can work in a team where his allies have his back and there are people he can trust. in that instance his final conversation with darius includes him talking about his companions, because to be here at all they have accepted him after seeing him at his worst and helped him despite it, and who he's been able to help in turn. if you're doing a therion solo run he's just talking about how his boss who's blackmailing him for free labor said he looked sad one time, which is a pretty weak climax if we're going to be real. i stand by saying that octopath works best when it's episodic and stories shouldn't rely on specific characters to work, but genuinely i do think therion's story's themes being expressed strongly in gameplay and the nature of rpgs with a party system are quite cool and my favorite thing about his story.

so it specifically annoys me when people are like "oh well he limply says no before letting you continue to drag him around" like it's a plot hole and not a character trait especially when therion's being a prickly asshole who is also a complete doormat is i think very interesting characterization!!!! ophilia commenting on the fact that therion has no instinct for revenge and therion says "yeah what's the point" makes me so normal.

ALSO why's therion the poster boy for "hey this character's story doesn't make sense with their gameplay" when primrose exists???? why it so contradictory a character whose story is about them learning to trust in their companions again to be in a party while a character who starts off by telling you to fuck off and leave her alone because this is her fight before heel-turning for no reason and then just continuing to be your ally with no justification is totally fine. also why is primrose a support class???? she's not a dancer she's an assassin she doesn't support anyone in her story and her character is about her singleminded and specific familial revenge. she's also a very strongwilled character so it makes no sense that she wouldn't just say no and mean it. i know the answer is that octopath doesn't like women so primrose just got slapped into a princess jasmine costume and femme fatale character before any of her story was actually developed but like oh my goddddddd. primrose girl im so sorry they put you in the nightmare hell dimension.

#c.paradisi #octoposting #i get that to a degree this is an interpretation #octopath never says any of this stuff explicitly enough that i for sure think thats what they were going for #but at the very least it feels like a really weirdly uncharitable reading of his character #his entire story is abt learning to trust his companions again. why would it not make sense for him to have companions #to be uncharitable right back i think its a thing that happens a lot in fandom #where characters are reduced to who they are at the very beginning of a story #and then further simplified into tropes #therions a criminal so he is an evilbadman who hates people and loves crime #which is boring. i think thats a boring direction to take his character in. #it also makes other characters more boring bc you have people infantilizing tressa or alfyn so therion can be evilbadman-er in comparison #i have so many thoughts on cordelia and heathcote though #theyre very well-written villains that do a really good job of mirroring darius and illustrating therions passivity as a character #ot just doesnt uhhhh. seem to realize that.

[larnax]

#c.paradisi #palestine #likes to charge reblogs to cast

[larnax]

i mean re: ipad kids not actually learning how to use computers i think its a combination of 1) kids not being born knowing how to do stuff like i didn't know a lot of basic stuff abt computers until i started using mine to do enough things that i ended up with weird bugs i needed to fix, 2) software companies intentionally making their systems more opaque so the user has less and less obvious agency and things are more hidden, like the only reason i even know that you can clean the junk left over from installs beyond deleting the application is that i spent two days trying to figure it out after i installed avast on bad info, and 3) straight up misinformation from the most prominent people in the tech industry and new tech worshippers in general. like if you trust apple tech support you'll end up believing a lot of wrong things about how computers work but you won't realize that unless you happen to be told by someone or find a search result of people discussing the real mechanics. i do think the solution is better computer education but for the moment youre not gonna get that or even get that considered in schools, what you need to do is teach that 12 yr old how to use qbittorrent yourself.

#c.paradisi #which has kinda always been how it worked? i had computer classes in school and they were not comprehensive #my main education was as stated 1) figuring out how to fix my computer when i fucked it up and 2) people telling me i could do X if i did #ALSO the majority of people arent that tech savvy. they know how to send emails and download files but thats about it #they have for generations this isnt new and as stated tech companies have a vested interest in keeping it that way

[larnax]

octopath 1 protagonists ranked by confirmed kill count

notes:

technically redeye is implied to be graham crossford in the postgame so you could bump her up to one but how the hell was she supposed to know that

it's not confirmed whether esmeralda dies or not but she never shows up again

ok, yes, alfyn does kill one guy, but in his defense,

yeah so i think people either forget or don't notice this but therion doesn't actually kill people if he can avoid it. gareth forcefully engages him in a fight to the death and therion defends himself, but other than that he leaves people alive even when it's actively dangerous for him to, mainly darius but also literally everyone else. i'm told his japanese battle dialogue makes it clear he doesn't even really like fighting, which is a lot more in line with his story/banter personality.

ophilia kills a guy but her story takes place in a childrens picture bible where killing is fine if the guy is ontologically evil so this fails to make her any more interesting

its so fucking funny to me that cyrus kills people. like a lot of people too, hes firmly on the same side of the "killing people" scale as primrose and olberic, the two people whose entire occupation revolves around killing people, and then sitting right next to the assassin is a college history professor. like sure they were all serial killers and two of them turned into big monsters but both of those two were people that he personally knew?? cyrus is the only motherfucker in octopath who takes direct action by killing his shitty boss and im invoking my "call a fictional character a communist based solely on me liking them" card for him. cyrus albright is an ML and we should all aspire to his willingness to cast triple boosted alephan's wisdom lightning blast on those who would keep the working class underfoot by trying to keep knowledge behind paywalls and exclusivity. also that one unrelated serial killer in quarrycrest but thats a freebie he was making people into blood crystals

yeah primrose kills people obviously. she pulls just ahead of cyrus by killing helgenish in chapter 1

olberic only kills one person in his story(werner) but he was a soldier and confirms in a travel banter with alfyn that he has killed thousands of people. neat-o beans

#octopath #c.paradisi #octoposting #octopath 2 has a lot more characters with zero confirmed kills #which makes sense since they removed mandatory boss fights at the end of every chapter #(putting olberics kill count at 2001 to be as generous as possible) the average ot1 protagonist has killed 507.25 people #however as murders georg is an outlier and should not have been counted the adjusted average is only 1.25 #i cant do the same math for ot2 bc i dont remember like any of tems bosses except kaldena and the wiki doesnt have the info

[larnax]

theres a degree to which hyperbolic outrage has just become the new ""edgy humor"" where like. idk i would personally consider talking about shooting a trans woman for being a horny furry out of line even if it's Just For The Bit

#c.paradisi #transmisogyny

[larnax]

outer worlds things i like so far

game does a very good job of the feeling of discovering something that is absolutely fucking terrifying. very clear feedback. im like hmm i wonder what happens if i do X and outer wilds IMMEDIATELY tells me that i have fucked up terribly and am now doomed to slowly asphyxiate in space

in general one of the best "games that initially seems very homey and comfortable and then rockets into horror" because it builds to it at a very natural speed. you get enough of timber hearth to get comfortable with the protagonist's home and then you lift off and probably discover a couple weird things but you're so preoccupied with everything being confusing that it doesn't hit you and by you i mean me that you're in a horror game until The Sun. and even when you ARE fully aware you're in a horror game and you know enough to get to the scary spots the comfortable world doesn't disappear. you can still find the other explorers on the world and have a comfortable place to rest. they always come back and you're constantly reminded that all these things exist in the same universe. which also makes it so much worse that you can't save them.

obv the environmental design is really good. the planets are big enough that you need to know where you're going but small enough that it feels like my fault i am literally always lost. i do wonder how the timber hollow people grow their food though. where are the sugar canes for the marshmallows....

same vein open world that's big enough to feel like there's a lot there but not so big that most of it's filler. big little world

clapping my hands like a fucking seal for the worldbuilding i love the nomai writing system it's so cool and the creative uses of the quantum crystals for architecture are so awesome. the foreshadowing in the museum is still my favorite though

the shuttle that just wastes your fucking time is really funny. i spent so long finding ways to kill myself trying to use it. very mean but i respect it

as a deep sea life fan i wanna be a hater so bad and say that anglerfish imagery is overplayed and them being the deep sea creature everyone and their mother uses for horror and how about you do some actual research and find a marine animal that has an interesting trait you can use for unique imagery..... but i must reluctantly admit. that the implementation. is extremely bad ass. and so i'm fine with it

things im not a huge fan of

i am on my fucking knees begging please just let me mark a spot where i am standing on my map. please. i know where the hanging city is i need to get to the specific spot in the hanging city where my thing is. would it be that gamebreaking for me to just be able to mark the location of the tiny entrance into the meltwater district. you don't even have to give me more than one.

not very robust accessibility stuff. the janky controls are intentional but an option for a slightly bigger margin of error for stuff like getting into/falling out of the elevators would really help for us shaky-handed bitches out there. also there are a lot of flashing lights including an unavoidable section every single time you die.

#c.paradisi #owlb #outer wilds spoilers #i guess

[larnax]

#c.paradisi #owlb #outer wilds

[larnax]

[TRAGIC! this gamer has just read reviews of a series he enjoys] guys. the stories in octopath don't tie into each other because it's episodic. the stories are supposed to stand on their own. that's why it's called "octopath" and not "a story with eight main characters" it's because there are eight paths you can go down that are all meant to be their own story. you're supposed to be able to mix and match party members as you want and be able to choose your protagonist yourself. in that vein the actual story not reacting to your party members is a concession to the fact that having different versions of every story beat accounting for every possible combination of party members and accounting for the fact that you can switch party members during story events would be proposing that the devs make at that point hundreds of different versions of a story if they weren't going to just have your dudes standing in the background doing nothing which is stupid, and would ultimately limit the kind of stories they can tell. if octopath had all the stories be the same story and you had to have certain party members at certain times and you had to do all the events in a certain order it again would not be octopath it would just be a normal jrpg. octopath's worst writing is when it gets too attached to the postgame and sacrifices the strength of individual stories to have everything tie into the game's big bad. if the game were less episodic their story would be worse.

#c.paradisi #octoposting #the travel banters r supposed to give you interesting character interactions #the best ones are mostly unconnected to the story and focused on the party members' general dynamics #and like none of this is saying that stories being interconnected in video games with large casts is Bad #it's just not what octopath is doing and . thats kind of take it or leave it. play another game if you dont like the concept #not even discounting the idea that octopath not wholly committing to being episodic is where some of that criticism is coming from #its just insane bc like theres so much to criticize abt octopaths writing #you dont need to get mad at the series' conceit. there are real problems.

[larnax]

man im glad for the time loop bc the first thing i did with the ship was crash it into the bramble planet without even ever once opening the door

#c.paradisi #outer wilds going pretty well. im not making much progress bc i crash my car every time i try to land or make a turn

[larnax]

yeah i dont know about creator dibs or whatever maybe hbomb specifically didn't want his video to conflict with todd's but like it sucks that the most popular video does make it seem like james somerton's biggest sin is plaigarism when . as a little hater the fact that his writing is really bad because the way he plaigarizes means that his videos don't flow coherently and aren't very good DOES make me feel vindicated for thinking his videos suck but 100% there are fellow copyright haters who would see him in the same video as filip whose biggest sin was rewording an octopath traveler review(a crime worse than murder to Me but not on like moral grounds) who would walk away from it thinking that somerton is a bit of a dick and kinda misogynistic/transphobic in the way a lot of cis gay men are but like. whatever. and not know that he has repeatedly said that most nazis were gay men and made a whole video talking about how buff and hot they were and he has repeatedly talked about the devious chinese being the cause of disney's homophobia

#c.paradisi #al capone being arrested for tax evasion situation #like i think that james somerton accusing and manipulating people who talk about the plaigarism the way he does is wild #but thats because i think using your fans to attack people who criticize you and accusing anyone who does of being a violent homophobe #is independently bad #also hbomberguy specifically exonerating his cowriter when hes either in on it or equally lazy Also sucks #goes hand in hand with not focusing on what exactly somerton was plaigarizing or making up #personally even if i thought it was his own work i would not have signed off on the nazi video. if it were me

[larnax]

it was pretty bad that the poll guy was literally campaigning for their favorites from the beginning esp when he made an entire list of all the ships he supported. not just bc its totally fucking the sanctity of the poll you want us to be taking very seriously but also because its fucking annoying. propaganda should be shared by actual participants so you only see it for ships you care about from people in your circles like i dont. fuycking care about your podcast guys i will not vote for them especially if you tell me.

#c.paradisi

[larnax]

do you have any idea how disappointing it was to visit stormhail before picking up temenos and see this and be like "oh hey octopath 2 is actually gonna reckon with the Implications of having an all-powerful psuedocatholic church the entire continent follows which has a standing army" and in general see that the church was being painted with any degree of moral complexity as opposed to ot1 looking you dead in the eyes and having the clerics story be violently suppressing the only alternative religious leader bc he is an evildemon satanist, only to pick up temenos, and it turns out that the "complexity" is that the evildemon satanist brown woman has infiltrated the church and corrupted it and also the entire thing with the beastlings backstory and also temenos' path action is literally interrogation but uhhhhhh its actually Fine, when he does it, because he just uses his empath powers and so it totally doesn't hurt them at all and also all of his deductions can be trusted completely

#c.paradisi #octoposting #im playing ot2 again bc i got the emulator working. just another normal playthrough i might do low level or challenge later #when kaldena was revealed i literally said to myself. oh. i shouldve known that the only brown character was gonna be the twist villain #literally what in temenos' story couldve possibly made me as hopeful for kaldena as long as i was #but no i kept being like. well maybe theyll turn this around! #i kinda wanna rewrite temenos' story but i just know i would end up getting bogged down in worldbuilding for 3mil years #i do kinda wanna do castti and osvald rewrites #the thing with those is that theyre both Good but i think they couldve been Better

[larnax]

AND THATS THE THING in the last assignment she literally did go point by point on my video and explain sentence by sentence what the problems were and i actually understood that she was grading me down for having my hands too high or at the wrong angle or because the signs looked too smilar to another sign and attached a video that demonstrated the right sign while mouthing it and i was like OH i see now i fucking. understand what the problem is and then on one of the tests she had the wrong answers explain what the signs actually were or why X was wrong and then she just. stopped doing that. got bored i guess. whatever its fine im not trying to learn asl or anything. i actually came here just to be told that i dont know asl. that was my goal

#c.paradisi

[larnax]

finally managed to rewrite a version of thronés story i actually like

first we have to decide what thronés story is like. about. on a material “what happens in the story” level and then on the thematic level of why those things happen. right now i think thronés story is probably supposed to be about getting freedom and something something family abuse but what actually happens is throné trying to get this weird collar off which she does by performing a very convoluted paternity test she didnt even know she needed to do until halfway through the story and its About how fucked up it would be if this one weird horny guy had too many kids that he was evil to. that sucks ass so we’re gonna change it. im fine with the “what happens” being throné trying to get her collar off, i actually think it works pretty well as a way to symbolize her being trapped in the blacksnakes and you can do a lot of interesting things with the degree to which her metaphorical collar even can come off the way a physical collar can, so thats what the story is actually gonna be About. the focus of the story should be on the conflict between thronés desire for freedom and a Normal Life and the fact that shes never Had that and the life shes had instead is extremely difficult to get out of

the single biggest problem with thronés story is that i cant emphasize this enough at the finale it suddenly nosedives into her being told about her biological family history and then needing to go on a quest to find this one random fucking dude who she has never met before and who is so blatantly evil he might as well just be a generic villain and then she has to kill him and then the story immediately ends. its not ‘bittersweet’ because im still feeling whiplash from a completely different story busting in at the last minute and the story claude is from is so morally simple(should this evil immortal rapist be killed? yeah, probably???) that it literally cant be bittersweet because it was definitely good that he died and throné has no reason to care about him

i understand that ot2 wants to have the character’s stories all tie into the postgame(except agnea lol) and honestly i dont even hate the idea of taking the theme of grooming her story has and giving that exaggerated form in this immortal organization but for the love of fucking god the leader needs to actually be a part of the story before the eleventh hour and it makes me insane that hes not because its so so so fucking obvious: Father. you know, Father? that guy who was introduced in chapter one and who throné actually has an established relationship with and who has actually been the one grooming her for her entire life before the story? why the fuck is the climax of his death preceded by a confusing and boring account of his relationship with thronés biological mother who she never knew who cheated on him with a complete stranger all of which happened before throné was born and that she did not know about until just now and is mostly irrelevant because it doesnt change her relationship with him at all because she just kills him. what is going on where am i.

so the first thing i would do in a rewrite of thronés story is remove the question of who thronés biological family is entirely. it doesnt matter and in fact actively makes the story weaker. what matters to throné and ideally the player is the people who raised throné who she considers her family and who she actually has a relationship with. even though Father is now an immortal who created the blacksnakes hes not biologically related to the children because thats stupid im sorry its just dumb.

he created a gang of children the normal way by taking in poor children who don’t have anywhere else to go and don’t have anyone to miss them with the promise of a place in the world and food/board with the caveat that they work for the parents Forever. this also means that some of the blacksnakes believe theyre in the organization by choice, or that this is the best option for them(will be relevant for mira), and are willing to accept the treatment not just because of the collars but because of the metaphorical collar of poverty. none of this even needs to be outright said & in fact i would significantly prefer that it exists almost entirely in the inquire/etc options for npc blacksnakes and the player is allowed to simply pick this up through characters who act as if its true. throné specifically will have joined the blacksnakes because she was drawn in by the idea of having a family and a place in the world as a kid who was starving to death in the streets of fucking uhh idk i play in spanish whatever Sotoburgo is. this does not need to be established in a flashback, it can be established entirely through simple mentions about how the blacksnakes saved her life and then the player can just recognize what’s going on.

Mother still exists and is still the primary antagonist of chap 1-2 while Father exists sort of in the background, but she needs to have the simplistic evil turned down just a tiny bit. as it is the blacksnakes’ familial structure feels really shallow because Mother is all vinegar no honey. the mafia boss who is very rewarding and affectionate with well-performing underlings and simultaneously cruel with under-performing underlings is both another character who can just exist and the player will like Get It almost instantly, but is also much closer to how a lot of abusive mothers work. oh also uhhh im. replacing pirro with mira entirely. sorry pirro but mira is the second most interesting character in the story and i want to give her more screentime. mira is Mother’s golden child, shes younger than throné and kind of bad at her job but Mother insists on sending her on jobs with throné anyway and blames her if things go wrong, so when the diamante job goes sideways and one of their crew dies and also they fail to recover the objective Mother does the whole whipping her in front of everyone thing and then demands that she go and singlehandedly complete the mission, which Mother clearly considers to be a suicide mission to do solo right after a failed attempt when the place will be crawling with guards, but throné has no choice to accept it because, you know. collar. so throné goes and tries to stealthily infiltrate the diamante manor and manages to recover it but what then? why, it’s mira! mother has trusted her with her first ever assassination, and it’s to make sure that even if throné makes it to the objective alive, she doesn’t make it out of the manor. throné fights mira and wins, but when mira realizes she might die she begins pleading for her life and throné can’t bring herself to kill her so she flees the manor and decides that her quest to leave the blacksnakes begins Right Now. on her way out of town she’s “ambushed” by Father, who came to congratulate her for successfully making it out of diamante because he knew she would be able to complete a mission no other blacksnake could. throné is conflicted between feeling good that he’s proud and knowing that shes gotta get the fuck out of here and feeling just a little bit incompetent for not being able to kill mira(she doesnt say any of this explicitly, she thanks him for praising her and hes kinda like ‘cmon champ say it like you mean it’ and throné thinks ‘but i dont’). he leaves and throné thinks about her objective— she needs to remove the collar, so she needs the keys from Mother… and Father. she knows that at this time of year Mother goes to visit the orphanage in Sotoburgo she uses as a front for educating and taking in young blacksnakes.

she arrives in Sotoburgo and sees. well look who it fucking is, mira! a normal blacksnake wouldve been executed for failing an assassination(throné was definitely going to be executed either way which is why she needed to leave immediately, this is unstated but you can guess), but mother’s golden child rides again. throné disguises herself as a nun and sneaks into the orphanage to find that mira has been brought with Mother as a punishment for failing the mission, where shes being treated as a child. throné walks in shortly before mira is used as an example to the children of what happens if they fail to succeed in their duties and shes whipped. after that Mother leaves to go to the garden and throné pursues her but when she gets to the garden Mother reveals that she knew it was throné the whole time and mira steps out of the shadows, Mother reveals that mira was spared from execution on the condition that she helps Mother eliminate throné now, there’s a double battle where mira protects Mother but after throné overpowers them both and knocks mira out Mother also begins pleading for her life and uses the fact that she spared mira to prove that throné is actually very kind and all this will be forgiven if she just— and then throné stabs her and as Mother’s dying shes like “damn.. you really are your father’s daughter…” and throné is like ah. the agonies. anyway then mira recovers and realizes mother’s dead and does the whole “SHES ALL I HAD” thing and that shes really gonna kill throné this time Youll See and throné tells her that shes clearly not meant for the blacksnakes either but that the next time they meet, it’s kill or be killed. mira asks throné what other options does she think she has(even if you get the collar off, what will you do then? do you really think you can live a normal life?) and throné… cant answer her. she leaves. Father ambushes her again on the way out and tells her that hes proud of her for killing Mother, and asks her to go on a job with him. throné agrees, and he leaves. throné wonders if this really is all somehow part of his plan

thronés chapter 3 is actually really good so im leaving it unchanged

but ok so chapter 4. throné confronts Father and he tells her how proud of her he is for making it this far and that he knew she would. if she succeeds here, she’ll prove once and for all that shes worthy to lead the blacksnakes. throné tells him that shes fucking off forever after this and he cant stop her. he says he doesnt have to— someone with so much blood on her hands can never live a normal life. even if the collar is gone, she’s still a killer and a thief. sooner or later, she’ll realize the blacksnakes are all she has. throné wants to refute him, but can’t come up with a satisfying response. Father switch to fighting sprite and tells her that it’s time to stop trying to run away from the life she chose, that she was meant for. throné defeats him. his last words are “i love you”. throné switch to heavy damage sprite and after a pause says “i hate you.” she reaches for the keys and unlocks the collar, but realizes that she really doesn’t know what to do now. she leaves the montwise cathedral but on the way back to town is grabbed by a strange man who is just repeating . idk like “i’m lost, help, help, i’m lost” or whatever this guy is one of the broken vessels and throné manages to shove him off and kill him but finds a note in his hand that is a map leading to an X or maybe directions. idk whatever but this is a map to the gondola

throné arrives at the gondola and finds lostseed. i actually love lostseed i think it owns and its one of the coolest locations in the game so im slamming it in just like the writers but at least trying to make it relevant. throné finds the shrine(btw this is the shrine) and goes through and who is it at the end You Guessed It it’s mira. throné is like. what the fuck is going on. mira tells her that this village is where the successor of the blacksnakes must go to receive the gift of agelessness and throné is like. what? she reveals that Mother and Father both wanted to have their successor candidates and that mira was Mother’s. the gift of agelessness is like. a fountain you have to drink from or maybe it is the flame itself somehow, and all the broken vessels are people who tried to drink from the fountain but were unworthy and instead went insane and are now empty husks. mira says that shes going to kill throné once and for all so she cant come back to take revenge and then mira will drink from the fountain and become the successor. throné tells her that this is a bad idea and shes definitely going to become a husk. mira tells her to shut the fuck up and you know what at least she knows her place in the world and attacks. throné overpowers and kills her. mira has a bit before she bleeds out where she tells throné that she always knew throné was stronger than her, and that throné could be the best leader the blacksnakes have. her last words are. ok so this would be easier in japanese but in english even though i feel like its kind of clunky you can still have mira call her “big sister”. throné obviously decides not to drink from the fountain of youth. you dont need to have any dialogue to establish that she has now realized she had complicated feelings about mira but i want to have her unlock mira’s collar and maybe give her a burial in lostseed. her last scene is returning to montwise and buying a raspberry turnover or whatever. she reflects that she still doesnt know where she goes from here, but that she at least knows that no matter what, she won’t be the blacksnakes’ successor. i was debating between her endcard being that or the grave but since temenos already has a grave endcard i think having a version of her endcard that references the raspberries thing is better

OH also her design on her endcard is way better than her ingame design. no thief design is complete without the little mantle and also please give this poor woman some fucking pants. i think she should also have gloves though. tbh i also want to have her skirt be full instead of asymmetrical but i do acknowledge that at this point im basically just describing tressa’s clothes with a longer skirt but in my defense i really like tressa’s design and they could add details to make it different.

MORE IMPORTANTLY THOUGH for crossed paths . its so fucking stupid that her crossed paths is with temenos i fucking hate it here for real. throné doesnt even do anything shes literally just the Specialest Birthday Boy in the world’s sidekick and its so frustrating bc again theres a way more obvious pairing: osvald. obviously osvald. if you asked me which character i would pair with the girl whose main trait is that her abuse was from her father, the guy whose main trait is his relationship with his daughter would be a lot fucking higher on my list than catholic sherlock(partitio can just be kind of there in temenos’ story and in the postgame he suffers a lot less from being completely ignored because The Most Important Guy In The World is the only person that matters for temenos’ torch(no hate to partitio btw i love the spaghetti western man but someone has to be the sacrifice)). throné and osvald are mirrors of each other in a bunch of interesting ways, thronés conflict is about whether or not shes her father’s daughter/osvald was extremely close with his daughter who was a lot like him, throné has spent her entire life in the underworld but wants to live a normal life/osvald was living a normal life but has recently been plunged into the underworld, etc. you could have osvald and throné conflicting because both of them are projecting their father/daughter onto each other and their crossed paths are about them realizing that they need to approach each other as individuals, you could have the two of them ending up falling into a father/daughterish dynamic in a lighthearted way, you could have an inverted mentor/apprentice dynamic where throné ends up teaching osvald mugging tips and tricks or whatever, you could have the two of them sharing the conflict of not being sure if they can ever find a normal life when osvald has dedicated so much of himself to revenge and its not like he can just fucking. pick up his life where he left off and throné doesnt even know what a normal life would be like and hey maybe osvald could share some of what a normal life with a caring father is supposed to look like. if the crossed paths were tied to their main story you could even explicitly have the two of them conflict over what osvald owes to his daughter now that he knows shes alive or have throné react to harvey changing elena’s memories, or you could have osvald get invested in thronés conflict because as a father hes got a personal stake in seeing a father treat his daughter like shit. or i dont. fucking know. thatd probably be best saved for travel banter actually but what im saying is their dynamic is much more interesting and i would pretty please like to allow throné to have an important role in what is allegedly supposed to be Her shared story.

but in the spirit of not completely rewriting everything osvalds crossed paths actually works fine with throné instead since she and partitio both have a get item path action but throné’s motivation for helping regulus will initially just be contrarianism where osvald is like “dont waste your time” and throné is like “hmm interesting. unfortunately i do have to see what happens solely because you seem so upset about it”. i think this story works best where throné and osvald sort of unconsciously fall into a father/daughter dynamic where throné feels a sudden powerful urge to exert major teenager energy. the second entry is again mostly the same but throné offers to steal it instead and osvald is like “no im going to punch this guy”. during the stargazing scene regulus mentions that osvald’s new assistant reminds him of elena and that he thought she was the only person who could drag osvald into wasting his time and osvald is like ill fucking kill you and throné is like ah papá i did not know you were so weak willed that a ten year old could drag you around and osvald is like ill blow this whole building up (paraphrasing). this is definitely on the lighthearted end but thats fine octopath really doesnt like having protagonists conflict which does suck ass but i also understand

for the postgame obviously like i said lostseed is the location of the scholar/thief shrine, the blacksnakes’ founder found a way to harness the power of the flame to achieve immortality and the leader of the snakes is brought into the moonshade order and theyre supposed to sacrifice themself to snuff out the torch, if youre really dedicated to The Sacred Flame Is Unambiguously Good No Matter what you can have lostseed not be the shrine and just keep the blacksnakes leader sacrificing themself bc ik octopath’s canon mythology is allergic to being interesting but either way osvald can be like. Damn you dodged a fucking bullet huh(paraphrasing)

since mira has tragically passed away she cant be the postgame quest but instead the elderly guard/gondola operator being twins can still be a thing so i would like the guard to have a brother and also like. niece who he thinks died, and so he asks you to see if you can find anything that remains of them. the brother is his twin and his niece is the “give it back” girl. the solution is still to bring the guard to his brother, and the brother leads him to the girl and explains that she was another successor candidate but that when she tried to drink from the fountain it turned her into a husk and so he stayed in lostseed to watch over her. the guard and ideally the player realize that all these broken vessels were once full people and decides to stay with his brother to watch over the town in case a way is ever found to heal them

#c.paradisi #i wanted to put this under a readmore but apparently youre not allowed to do that in the old editor and the new one has character limits #so you get big chunky boy. #octoposting #while writing this i was like. hmm. is this too sappy and straightforward. and thats definitely my biggest concern #but like whatever. i really liked octopath 2's stories that were straightforward but well-executed so #yeah idk. its pretty fitting that i think about throné way more even though i thought castti's story was better #octopath loves to give me delicious concepts and then trip on its face trying to execute them and every time im like hmm interesting. #i am going to think abt this for the rest of my life