#hes like an onion article if an onion article was a person

[iserlohnfortress]

watching rear window and having the opposite of a good time with it

#rita rants #every time the protagonist argues against marriage i just feel like that one onion article #'heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point' #because he's RIGHT they shouldn't get married they have very different aspirations and lifestyles

[literalgrill]

Do NOT Support Hard Drive On Patreon

You might see friends today suggesting you support Hard Drive on Patreon today. You know, the funny video games version of The Onion? As a journalist, I will firmly tell you DO NOT GIVE THEM A DIME.

The CEO has pushed out all former staff that have built the site up to its current greatness and has been pushing the use of AI. The staff begged to have a Patreon before basically all being pushed out, but the idea was refused until now, when it will only line the pockets of a single person instead of hard working writers.

I know they might have provided laughs before, but Hard Drive is a shell of what it was once. Let it die and support the people who actually made those moments of joy possible. Don't believe me? Check out what former employees are saying below:

Kevin Podas: Okay you know what, I would feel bad saying nothing about this, so here goes:🚨SAVE YOUR MONEY🚨

We passionately advocated for a Patreon at Hard Drive & were aggressively shot down. The talent & people who built the site were pushed out. To see this now is beyond upsetting. For the past few years or so I put a lot of myself into this website. I pitched a ton of jokes, got over 120 articles published, & met a lot of great people. I'm sure if you've been following me for some time you could easily see this.

However, there is a lot of misinformation. I was eventually promoted to Managing Editor of the site & was ecstatic. Grateful for the opportunity. Felt like all of my hard work in the comedy mines was finally paying off. But things took a turn for the worst, & each day there were new surprises that affected our livelihoods. These were all very avoidable surprises, mind you.

A patreon was going to be our hail mary, but alas, for some reason, the power that be did not want it. Causing us to leave a dream job behind. "At least we did all we could," we consoled ourselves afterwards. I put a lot of myself into this project. I pitched all sorts of ideas that could have helped-- we all did. Merch collaborations, Patreon-integrated YouTube content, so much more. And most of them were shot down out of sheer stubbornness and nothing more. To see lie after lie spread, and multiple big publications and YouTubers that I am a fan of promote this Patreon under these pretenses is incredibly upsetting. There are so many receipts.

Please share this and consider pulling out if you've already put money into this. On Hard Drive using AI, also from Kevin Podas: I can't personally confirm that part aside from some of the recent header images for articles on both Hard Drive and Hard Times are being made with AI. As far as writing, it's been mentioned in the past, but I personally do not know. Maybe others do, maybe not. MORE From Kevin Podas suggesting the owner denying a Patreon being set up earlier cost an artist a job that was replaced by AI: We had a social media person who was awesome! He made the images until this AI implementation. He had to leave because ad revenue was low and a Patreon was aggressively refused.

Luca Fisher: at the risk of burning some bridges, i have to back up kevin here. i've only been part-time, in-and-out of hard drive since i got in last year, but i can corroborate that management doubled and tripled down about not hosting a patreon/crowdfunding and that many other suggestions and ideas, including mine (and ones much smarter than mine!), were shot down in really long, apocalyptic threads of everyone left on deck desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the lights on. managerially it has been messy and sad

i've written for multiple publications that have long since died, ones that were in the process of dying, and ones that, in this case, are soon to be put in the ground. it is sad and sucks every time. i don't know what could have been done differently, but i do know that a lot of great writers and content creators were left shorthanded and unhappy by the way things have gone. and it is sort of puzzling to see the sudden championing of patreon after we were all told plenty of times that it couldn't work and we should move on also, just to add my own personal two cents here, i was really disappointed by the shuttering of many different article sections on the site over the past 6-8 months. i understand cutting corners in a deficit, and i know it had to be done. that said…

all in all, i'm really sad to see this all happen. i don't fault anyone, if only because i don't really know enough about how this all can happen to make sense of it. games journalism is in a sad, sorry state, and will likely no longer be a thing in the next decade

VideoSealMan: I'm gonna say this because I think I deserve to. For months, MONTHS on end I was bugging Hard Drive management about a Patreon. Often I got ignored for a week+, but when I actually got a response I was encouraged to - of all things, write up a Google Doc pitching the concept I did it regardless. I wasn't the only one trying to sway management on a Patreon, but so fiercely was I fighting for it that last night, I was accused of making this comment directly by the CEO! With no evidence whatsoever! After I'd been gone for over a month.

I vouched so hard for Patreon because I wanted all the writers and creatives working with Hard Drive including myself to get paid better. When I actually got a response, the idea was often shut down. Eventually due to the state of my company, my pay was cut for a second time I confronted management alongside a couple other important figureheads at the org and told them that if we couldn't do a Patreon - I could no longer financially justify staying there. The answer was still no, so I left. Baffled at the decision, but whatever.

It is unendingly frustrating to know that myself and many other people who put their soul into Hard Drive LEFT because of management's absolute refusal to compromise on a Patreon, to then see them launch one anyway a month later and get over 1000 people pledging money. I'm seeing a lot of things float around about greed and people being fired. No one was fired. Everyone who left, left because they were sick of management's decision-making. And honestly, management is a lot of things but I would not call them greedy. (From my experience.) They did genuinely make an effort to pay people as much as possible. I found the pay very fair for a while. I am not disputing that I was paid what I was owed - yet management frequently feels the need to remind critics of that. Lmao, yes. I was paid what I was owed. No one is disputing payment. You did the bare minimum a business owner should do and paid everyone their due, very well done. I make no allegations of greed, cheating or foul play. I make allegations of poor management and incompetence that has fucked over other people.

Basically the only people left at Hard Drive have been there for about 2 months. They will reap the rewards of this successful Patreon I and so many others passionately fought for for so long. We will not see a dime.

I do not know the new people at Hard Drive, But I feel bad for them. They were haphazardly thrust into Hard Drive's workplace with little to no explanation on how anything works, or given any context on the state of the place. Even now managements feeds them half-truths and misinformation about other people's grievances. I am broke and have been for a while. I had to move out of my flat in Reading and back with my family because of how little money I was making. This has basically doomed my flatmate to moving back in with abusive parents, which is something I feel guilty about every day. If we had gone with the Patreon I worked myself hoarse over back then, this could have been avoided. Some of my other good pals could also not have been fucked over.

It was a bad judgment call, but it's not a crime. It's just management getting it wrong.

So should you give to the Hard Drive Patreon? I don't know! I don't think any of the new people working there to patch up the holes left by the recent mass exodus have any bad intentions. Maybe they deserve it! But it is not the same site you knew a year ago, or even a month ago. Myself and many people who were there far longer than me and did far more for it than I did are all gone now because we could not deal with management's terrible decision-making and dogass communication any longer. That's what you should know, imo

I had an agreement in place with management that I would receive the next 8 months of revenue from the Hard Drive YT channel from my leaving in November. This was a deal I appreciated, and thought was very fair on management's behalf. So far, the deal has been honoured for 2 months. However as of last night I was removed from the Hard Drive Slack without warning, and as an editor for the YouTube channel. This means I no longer have any way of verifying how much I am owed, I just have to take their word for it. I'm sure management will make their own statements full of half-truths and weird language on the many cases being brought against them - I'd take everything they say with a pinch of salt if some of the screenshots I've seen of them talking about me are any indication lol

To management; I do not want to talk to you. I want you to DM me a screenshot of how much I'm owed every month and then send me the money per our agreement until June, then we can go our separate ways. Do that and admit to your mistakes, and maybe you can recover your reputation! That's it from me, lol. If they pull out of the deal and fuck me over I'll have more to say, but most of what I know is other people's stories of incompetence and poor decision-making, lol. I genuinely get no pleasure out of doing this; I do not think management is evil - I just think they're really bad at what they do and it's cost other, more talented people, lol. You should believe the writers imo

One last thing I wanna say btw, management did often stress that no one should try to make Hard Drive a full time thing. They were transparent about that, and that is fair. I was working on it because at a few points, I was lead to believe we actually were doing a Patreon. Many other ppl have similar stories of being strung along by management changing their minds and stop-starting shit every 2 weeks. We all made the fatal mistake of overestimating our manager - who would tell you one thing one day and something totally opposite the next week lol

Hunter R. Thompson:

I'm not your dad, but speaking as a Hard Drive writer, I don't know that funding Hard Drive on Patreon is worth it

The driving talent on the back end—behind the kickass site I joined in 2019—have peaced out over the years as the site's been (in our view) increasingly mismanaged. Mismanagement like, not setting up crowdfunding before the ship sank and all its best crew failed; or publishing a screenshot of Andy Ngo pedojacketing a trans writer, complete with her deadname; or a disgruntled ex-writer getting falsely accused of shit-talk, by actual staff. I'm grateful for the writing I've gotten to produce for HD (and will forever be kicking myself for not writing even more, in the four years I've had to do it!! i'm a dumbass!!!) but it is very much no longer the site I signed up for.

I don't want to resign as a contributor altogether, because I'm open to the idea of the site recovering and bad practices being retired as finances level out-- it would just be dishonest for potential backers to not be Aware Of The Circumstances, I think.

Jeremy Kaplowitz: i truly don't want to start shit, but feel compelled to say: i want to see Hard Drive succeed w/o resorting to throwing former writers & editors, myself included, under the bus. surely there's a way to save the site without building it over the corpses of those who left. my $0.02 i don't blame anyone who wants to sign up for the HD patreon and i support the website, but that includes those who worked on it for years, have complaints, and don't deserve to be treated like bitter assholes like this kind of stuff is just objectively true, meanwhile there's these new writers who joined the site after i left (meaning, in the last ~3 months) claiming people are liars. decide for yourself if you care, but this is what happened! [Quotes this Tweet]

Seth Finkelstein: Writing for Hard Drive has been a privilege the past few years, and it makes me so angry to see people I looked up to get jerked around behind the scenes. The amount of grenades the editors jumped on our behalf is immense, and I don't think the way they're being treated is right.

Other Bits On AI: We do know for sure however that AI art has been used by the site. Its fucking owner confirms it here:https://twitter.com/MattSaincome/status/1743040541603123622. Seems the owner pushed AI written articles as well! TayFabe: My vaguetweet is making the rounds & these made me apoplectic. - owner regularly lobbied using ai. Once he tested it & said ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. - ai images were used on the site & socials w/o consulting the team or disclosing it publicly I found the ai bit relevant to include bc 1) it illuminates a stark change in HD's current direction & leadership, 2) ai images have previously been used on the site and (since deleted) ig posts, 3) ai content fucking sucks, and repeatedly pushing to use it is a telling quality The "handful of writers who chose to leave" includes 2 editors-in-chief (both cofounders who wrote a combined total of >1,000 articles & defined the voice of HD), & at least 3 other editors. These guys put in WORK since 2017, so cool to be corrected by ppl who joined in Nov 2023 [Link to mentioned vague tweet from post.] More from TayFabe: owner continuously lobbied for using ai in every possible way. No one else wanted to do it, but he kept on, saying ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. Also, ai images were used on the site & socials without public disclosure or consulting the team.

The owner has responded now multiple times in a private discord... Thank you for people sharing screenshots! First Screenshot:

Kevin's Response: He banned me from the server for speaking out, so no, I didn't see it. And he gave no indication of a timeline, it was just "we'll do one when *I* say so" and gave every inclination he was totally against it. It bred an environment that pushed our hands to have to leave. Screenshot Round Two:

Kevin's Response: "Starting one in 3 months" is an absolute lie. He denied it, I have screenshots and others who can confirm. No timeline was given. Just "this is what it is now" and like, I couldn't live off of that. I wanted to do more but he was allergic to good ideas from others around him.

Matt, owner of Hard Drive, responds publicly on Twitter.

Matt: Kevin, the patreon launch was delayed because I didn't think it would work. Everyone is happy that it did work. Everyone who left the site because we didn't have money to pay for creative content which didn't revenue is welcome to return home. But unclear why the hostility.

Hard Drive paid out literally every dollar it had, then a bunch more, to creative people who worked on the site. When we ran out of money, we couldn't pay anymore. We did our best.

Kevin: Right, and my point of this thread was that it was completely and totally avoidable. This is reasonable to be upset about. How could I have been any more clear?

Matt: If we knew with 100% certainly that the community would have supported us via patreon, we would have done that. We didn't know. We had tried 4 years ago and got no support. We were wrong this time. We did our best to figure it out. We paid all the money we could.

Kevin: So you knew with 100% certainty this time? Or you took a leap of faith?

Matt: It was a last gasp panic effort after ad rates got cut in half on january 1st due to seasonal spending changes. We didn't know it would work. We were embarrassed to ask for support. We wanted to figure it out.

Kevin: Every site has a Patreon. Every YouTuber, comedy group, etc. But you insisted that nobody cared about Hard Drive. Which is wildly untrue. I know you see that now, but again, I think you can see why I and many others are pretty upset. A last ditch panic effort was long overdue. A couple more things from Matt:

It was about the size of the hole we needed plugged budget wise, the time I had left of personal resources, and the past data I had about us trying a patreon (which turned out to be a bad indicator). I didn't think the Patreon would help us fast enough. I made a bad estimation

aka "if we make $1000 more dollars a month via patreon, which would be 10x what we got last time, we will not solve any of our problems. If instead we try to plow down path B, we might make it out in time." That was the thinking. I chose the wrong path, but didn't mean to Kevin also retweeted this comment from the user Matt was responding to: So you're saying that you're bad at running the business, didn't listen to any of your employees until after they were forced to leave their jobs, and now you're going to get more of the money from the Patreon that was their idea in the first place? Matt's Response: Respectfully, I made a mistake delaying the patreon decision. But keeping a comedy site alive for 9 years is not easy, there are lots of potential ideas, and think overall we've done a good and honorable job. Will leave this thread in peace now to allow people their space.

Sorry for linking to Elon's hellsite (derogatory), but sources need links so...

#video games #patreon #hard drive #ai critical

[morganbritton132]

obsessed w this new saga with David and the other teachers.... perhaps them either coming over again for a small party - "it's mostly family!!" Hence being even more confused when even MORE famous people show up (THAT'S brony Erica???)

I’m picturing the same cookout from this post.

There are three new eighth grade teachers this year. Including David, there is Marissa and Jordan. Then there is Kathy, who has been at the school for two years. They are all trying to figure out what is going on with Steve Harrington.

The man is a complete mystery.

He’s a walking contradiction in a math pun sweatshirt and he is often the topic of conversation when the four of them are alone in the breakroom. Jordan describes him as ‘onion-like’ because he has many layers and Marissa always replies with, ‘yeah, a fucked up alien onion where each new layer is weirder than the last.’

It’s a bit cruel but also, they found an article about Starcourt Mall.

Who is just in a fire? Who saves a bunch of children from a structure fire that collapsed on top of them and doesn’t make it their whole personality for the rest of forever? Who just never mentions it ever?

Steve Harrington, apparently.

After David (and Kathy) left Steve’s house more confused about the mild-mannered math teacher than ever, he went home and googled ‘Eddie Harrington.’ All he found was a link to a Facebook page for some dentist.

So, like, who the hell is he even married to, right? The guy has a Grammy but not a Wikipedia page? What’s up with that?

All David knows is that when Anita (the teacher that’s probably closest to Steve) invites everybody over for a cookout and says that your partners are more than welcomed, he’s going. When Steve asks if it’d be okay if Erica stopped by on her way to the airport and Anita said yes, he’s definitely going.

He is not going to miss the opportunity to see the kid that gave her dad psychic damage by introducing him to the fucked up parts of the My Little Pony fandom. No way.

Kathy informs everybody that she will NOT be bringing her husband, but she will bring booze.

David arrives too early and ends up helping in the kitchen. He’s slicing up tomatoes with the world’s dullest knife when Steve gets there. He can’t see the front door, but he can hear Anita ask, “Oh, where’s your service doggie?”

“It’s his day off,” He hears Steve joke, “Brought the human instead.”

And then David hears the man of mystery’s man of mystery himself because Eddie says with 100% impulsive thinking and 0% brain-to-mouth filter, “Yeah, he brought his service top instead.”

David just knows that Steve is giving Eddie the same dead-eyed look of unbelievable that is reserved for students that mix their chocolate milk with peas and dare each other to drink it in the silence that follows. Anita, bless her heart, replies as happy and clueless as can be, “Oh, that’s cute. Because you provide a top-notch service.”

“Never had any compl- ow!”

The first time David gets a good look at them, Eddie’s pressed up against Steve’s back, looking over his shoulder at the pictures of Anita’s grandkids she has on her phone. One of his hands is wrapped loosely around his waist and Steve is holding the other one, fiddling with the rings on it. They look so casual, like they’re always standing that close together.

David watches as Anita points in the direction of the drinks cooler and Eddie slips away with a kiss to the side of Steve’s neck and then another to his cheek. They hold hands until they absolutely have to let go. It’s cute. Marissa, next to him, scoffs and says, “Gag me with a spoon, they’re fucking adorable.”

Eddie returns to Steve with two beers and a Smirnoff Ice for Anita, gets another kiss and clearly calls Steve ‘sweetie’ when he clinks their bottles together. Steve throws his arm across Eddie’s shoulders and Eddie tucks his hand into Steve’s back pocket like it’s the most casual thing in the world.

David loses track of Steve and Eddie for a while, catching them in his peripheral as he mingles with everybody. He seems them steal a kiss. He sees them laughing at something Kathy says. He sees them holding hands as Eddie looks utterly lost during a discussion of the baseball season.

At one point, he sees Eddie stand up on the bench of the picnic table and get yanked down by Steve. They’re both laughing and Steve gives him a kiss that is not exactly chaste.

Cindy rolls her eyes at them and says that they’re always like that.

Him and Jordan are playing cornhole against Steve and Eddie. He’s almost positive that Eddie is not as bad at the game as he’s pretending to be, but just likes when ‘Stevie baby’ guides him through how to throw the beanbags. If it wasn’t for Steve excusing himself than he probably wouldn’t have noticed the big SUV parked in the driveway.

His first thought when he sees Erica is ‘oh, she must be adopted’ followed immediately by ‘wait, duh’ and then by ‘hey, wait a minute.’

Steve gets stopped by her bodyguard before he can hug her with a big threatening hand on his shoulder. David’s still trying to figure out why she looks so familiar when Erica says to the bodyguard, “Uh, excuse you. Do not touch him. He was my first bodyguard, have some respect.”

Steve scoffs, “I was your babysitter.”

“I’m sorry,” Erica says, full of sass. Eddie is a couple steps back, grinning ear to ear. He loves when Erica and Steve get into it. “Did you bleed for me? Did you fight for me? Did you, Steve Harrington, get tortured so I made it out safe? I think so. Bodyguard.”

Eddie finally greets her with a bow, “Lady Applejack.”

Erica gives him a flat look and tells her bodyguard, “You can tase that one.”

David is still reeling from the words ‘babysitter’ and ‘torture’ that he probably would’ve missed Marissa in his ear if she wasn’t so goddamn loud, “Holy shit, that’s a fucking US Senator.”

Jordan is quieter when she mutters, “Language.”

Later in the evening when the sun is starting to set and they should all really go home and prep their lesson plans for next week, Anita’s husband lights a bonfire. David is sitting across from the fire from Steve and Eddie and he so tempted to ask what Eddie does for a living when Steve whispers something to him and then stands up quickly.

He can’t even ask what that was about because Eddie gets up and follows him, almost matching Steve’s quick steps into the house. They’re gone for a while, long enough that David gets up to check on Steve. He looked pretty pale when he rushed out of here.

He’s halfway up the stairs when he hears them, and he stops. Steve sounds tired but reassuring as he repeats, “I’m fine. I’m okay. I’m fine now.”

He hears Eddie respond with, “I know, baby. I know, but rest with me for a minute, kay?”

When he pokes his head around the turn in the staircase, he can see the bottom of Steve’s Nikes hanging over the top landing. He can also see the bottom of Eddie’s boots where he’s crouched over Steve. His first reaction is to think he stumbled on them in a compromising position, but he can’t bring himself to move just yet.

“You just had a seizure, take your time getting your bearings, sweetheart. Do you wanna go home?” Eddie asks in a cacophony of jingling metal rings and chains. Steve makes a noise that Eddie interprets, “Okay, do you want me to give you space?”

“No, come –“ The sound of metal clinking together doesn’t get louder, just more and when David pokes his head around the corner again, Eddie is straddled across Steve’s lap. Steve’s hands are on his hips and then higher, pushing up Eddie’s shirt clumsily just feeling him. “Feel floaty.”

“I’ll keep you grounded, baby.”

David knows he should leave, or at least looks away, but he stuck frozen to the floor at the sight of the scar tissue running up Eddie’s sides and back. They’re deep and jagged, and old. It looks like he was torn open and sewed back shut, and it takes David a long time to get his feet to go back down the stairs.

He goes back out to the fire a little dazed and later, it’s only Eddie that returns. He whispers something to Anita and then disappears into the night.

When Cindy makes a comment about Steve leaving without a proper goodbye, David tells her to shut up.

#I made one post about David wondering why Eddie Munson is and followed it up with a post where Eddie introduces himself as a Harrington #I think it’s infinitely funnier if David is trying to find info about this man but has the wrong name #Steve has his one-sided beef with Diane. Cindy has hers with Steve #This one is long and it sorta/kinda answers the prompt this time #This was a great prompt. I really enjoyed writing this #eddie munson tiktok saga #steve harrington #eddie munson

[sylvies-chen]

Hozier writing De Selby (Part 2) inspired by a character in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman makes the music video so much more compelling and absolutely bananas to watch, not just because Domhnall Gleeson is a treasure and delivers a killer performance without even saying anything, but also like… let me get into the lore of this:

The Third Policeman is about this mad scientist/philosopher/scholar who robs and murders someone in the midst of academic pursuit and enters this literal nightmare world where he’s punished by these policemen who are monsters and is doomed to repeat his mistakes forever. And the visuals of Domhnall Gleeson’s character are so similar the drawing of the central characters of the novel as seen above. The shabby brownish clothing, the hair colour, the shovel in hand, it all matches.

The story is also a slight condemnation of science and views trying to establish ultimate truth as prideful and heresy. As an article from The Irish Times on The Third Policeman states: “As a consequence, all theories are crackpot, all knowledge is useless and the only meaning is that life is a hell of endless repetition.”

it also states, on the novel: “To illustrate the futility of scientific theorising, O’Brien uses a recurrent theme of infinite regression. One of the characters has eyes with a pinpoint behind which are eyes with another pinpoint and so on to infinity; the narrator wonders if his soul is “a body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum”; De Selby studies in a series of parallel mirrors infinite reflections of his face going back to early youth; and Policeman MacCruiskeen has constructed a series of nested chests with the last few so small that they are no longer visible to the naked eye. So speculation and experiment are mad activities that literally disappear into nothingness.”

And then we see Dumhnall Gleeson in the music video on a cycle he doesn’t know how to break, some violent repetition where he’s burying himself and going crazy, and the imagery of several versions of one person fits this PERFECTLY.

#hozier #unreal unearth #hozier meta #music #de selby part 2 #domhnall gleeson #de selby part 2 music video

[gatheringbones]

[“The fact that my body has become a source of at least as much misery as pleasure has paradoxically made it easier for me to stop calling myself a lesbian and use the term bisexual instead. I just don’t have the energy any more to hold up facades. Back in 1971, I initially told people I was bisexual, but discovered this meant that straight people saw me as a heterosexual who occasionally dabbled in not-very-serious sex with “other girls,” while gay people saw me as a dyke who hadn’t come all the way out of the closet yet. Nobody trusted me, and nobody would dance with me. In 1980, when Sapphistry was about to be published and my first article about lesbian S/M appeared in The Advocate, I said in that article that if I had a choice between being marooned on a desert island with a vanilla dyke or a leather boy, I would take the boy. I got an extremely irate phone call from Barbara Grier, owner of Naiad, the company that was going to publish Sapphistry, informing me that they did not publish books by bisexual women, and if that was what I was, she would yank the book. Already in the midst of a firestorm about being public as a sadomasochist, I acquiesced, and delayed this coming out by another twenty years. I became “a lesbian who sometimes has sex with men.”

I still think this is a valid category, and remain unconvinced that the most important thing you can know about someone’s sexuality is the preferred gender of their partner. But today I’d rather not argue about it. I need to keep things as simple as possible. Bisexual people are still being excluded from the gay community’s cultural and political life. And I find myself being personally affected by that exclusion. It hurts me and makes me angry in a way that it would not, I think, if I were not on some level affiliated with bisexuals. I would rather stand with a group of people who don’t expect me to turn myself into a pretzel to explain what makes my dick get hard. This doesn’t mean I think it’s wrong or passé to be a Kinsey 6. But I do think a quest for purity of any sort is almost always morally dangerous.

Being more open about having sex with men has brought my own gender dysphoria to the fore. When I put my body up against a male body, what I notice is how hard it is for me to feel connected to my own flesh. Even more important has been the experience of loving someone who is a female-to-male transsexual (FTM), my domestic partner, Matt Rice. I knew Matt before he transitioned, and it has been such a positive change for him. By taking testosterone and getting chest surgery, he not only allowed himself to become and live as a man, he became a much better person—kinder, more patient, happier, sexier, sweeter. (Although he still won’t suffer fools gladly.) The fact that Matt has managed his transition with this degree of success gives me hope that I might be able to find a less distressing place for myself. I expect, like any other coming out, this will have its shitty aspects. But I think it will also create a greater sense of freedom and comfort.”]

pat califa, from layers of the onion, spokes of the wheel, from a woman like that: lesbian and bisexual writers tell their coming out stories, 2000

#pat califa #bi literature #lesbian literature #trans literature #gender stuff

[magical-girl-coral]

Summarizing Mushishi Episodes Like Onion Articles - Part 2

Banquet at the Forest's Edge - Local business owner finds all those stories of people getting inventive ideas while on acid trips might have a good point after all.

The Warbling Sea Shell - Local dad is forced to admit that maybe isolating his only child from other human interactions might not be what's best for them.

Beneath the Snow - "I have never been better" says man who's terrible mental health has reached a level where it is affecting the weather around him.

The Hand That Caresses the Night - Local teen breaks family curse by admitting his father was actually massive shithead.

Mirror Lake - Local teen so damn annoying about her heartbreak that her own doppelganger had to put a stop to it.

Floral Delusion - Local man with a weird ass library and sketchy medicine is revealed to be a major creep, shocking no one.

Cloudless Rain - Local woman loses the ability to cry and somehow it becomes everyone's problem.

Wind Raiser - Local teenager runs away from home to become a professional whistler.

Valley of the Welling Tides - "Is breast milk secretly trying to kill you" and five other fascinating articles written by nutjobs.

Depths of Winter - Traveling man becomes a god's squeak toy for an entire winter and somehow comes out unscratched.

Cushion of Grass - Local orphan ruins an entire ecosystem by liking an egg too much.

Fragrant Darkness - Local family man finally escaped a time loop only to go straight back in it when the future doesn't turn out well.

Lingering Crimson - Top four fun stories to tell before bed that will make your children afraid of their own shadow.

Hidden Cove - How one codependent relationship between two women nearly turned their village into a hive mind.

Thread of Light - Local kid's anger issues mysteriously disappears after finally being allowed to meet his mother for the first time in ten years and gaining a healthy support network.

Sea of Otherworldly Stars - Local girl accidentally enters the twilight zone to get back at her sister.

Azure Waters - Local woman loses everything thanks to several water filled accidents and still manages not to develop a phobia around it which is a bigger miracle than her son being half fish.

Lightning's End - Local woman so bad at being a mother that the lighting that keeps striking her son seems like a better parent in comparison.

Mud Grass - Feel bad about your own brood? This family can't stop killing each other for five fucking minutes!

Tree of Eternity - Local man gains the ability to see into the past in the price of his legs by trying out this totally legal vegan meal.

Bonus:

Path of Thorns - "I am the most normal person I know" says man after confessing he hasn't had a soul in years.

Bell Droplets - Young girl believed to have autism was actually a forest child all along while still being autistic.

#Mushishi

[showingpitytowardsyourownkind]

Still thinking about SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE AWAKENED!!!

Image ID 1: A Tumblr post by rosecrystal that says “unfortunately for everybody i will keep doing whatever i want” on top of Sherlock about to stab John’s syringe into the wall while John stands with his arms crossed in the background.

Image ID 2: A TikTok comment by Laura Malaurakey that says “I have a weird crush on him and I think its because I could overpower him physically but he could outwit me. Don’t worry, I’m in therapy.” on top of Sherlock talking to John, who looks distant and shiny from the rain.

Image ID 3: A Tumblr post by ponprincess-deactivated20170614 that says “My kink? Knowing all the information” on top of a smug and wet Sherlock in his deerstalker with his coat collar turned up.

Image ID 4: A Tumblr post by dorknewton that says “Neither romantic nor sexual nor platonic but a secret fourth thing (bonded like stray cats who cannot be adopted separately)” on top of the sad and bleary-eyed Sherlock and John who are trying to look put together on the dock in New Orleans.

Image ID 5: A tweet by @makeupaguy that says “guy who thinks wearing a different outfit makes tou legally a different person” on top of John wearing a green jacket and yellow bowler hat to look like Barnaby.

Image ID 6: A Tumblr post by vaporwavesimulator that says “i am fine thank you for asking! though recently there has been a darkness growing within me” on top of Sherlock (who looks worse than he has ever looked) raising up his hand to shield his face.

Image ID 7: A ClickHole “NEWS” headline that says “Oh Great, The Fog Is Here: It Is Now Very Foggy On Top Of Everything Else” on top of Sherlock navigating the boat with his lantern on the foggy bayou.

Image ID 8: An Onion “LOCAL” headline that says “Entire Sleepover Spent Avoiding Friend’s Brother With Behavioral Issues” on top of John looking dejected while the Holmeses talk.

Image ID 9: A Tumblr post by 5n4k3c47h3dr4l that says “learns forbidden knowledge on accident” on top of Barnes gesturing excitedly after translating the passage.

Image ID 10: A The Hard Times article by Kyle Erf that says “Desperate Attempt to Escape Mosh Pit Looks Exactly like Moshing” on top of John stuck in the group of cult victims who are all thrashing around.

Image ID 11: An Onion “BREAKING NEWS>>NEWS IN BRIEF” headline that says “Relationship Definitely Hurtling Toward Something” on top of John grabbing the syringe from the table before forcibly sedating Sherlock.   

Image ID 12: A tweet by @cowardlycowboy “sorry for the brief lapse in sanity you still wanna be my friend and still find me fuckable right” on top of Sherlock laying on the couch and looking up at John, right before losing consciousness.

#sherlock holmes the awakened spoilers #shta spoiler #frogwares holmes #sherlock holmes the awakened #I am back and I have come bearing screenshots #there are more where these came from #I do not have a problem I swear

[lambsouvlaki]

For the Hell of it - Crying over Tacos

Character: Jason Todd x civilian! Fem!oc

Rating and Warnings: SFW, mention of past partner abuse (not Jason).

Word Count: 920

Summary: Jason and Andy make tacos and cry. Jason comforts his hurt friend.

Masterlist

Jason was in Andy’s apartment, arguing over taco fillings. 

It was the first time he’d accepted an invitation and she had been afraid it would be awkward. She was awkward about a lot of things, and Jason could be skittish at the best of times, and after telling him about her abusive ex a week prior surely everything would be strange and feel forced. 

It wasn’t and it didn’t. 

“There’s already plenty of peppers in the beef,” she said, eyeing the innocent bowl of diced avocado. 

“Only ancho and poblanos, and you cut most of the seeds out.” The tack-tack-tack of his knife against the chopping board didn’t slow down in the least. 

“Yeah but you didn’t see how many habaneros went into the salsa this morning. And then there’s fresh jalapeno for garnish. What if we’re getting carried away?”

He scoffed. “Carried away, we’re not going far enough. The target, the mission, the holy grail, was spicy birria tacos. If they’re not even spicy then what was the point of getting up this morning?” 

“At this rate we’ll never get up ever again! Where will our poor taste buds find reprieve?”

“So dramatic,” he sighed, like he wasn’t the most dramatic person she’d ever met. “The onions aren’t spicy. Neither’s the cheese. Or the tortillas.”

“We’re frying the tortillas in spicy fat from the beef,” she said flatly. 

He made direct eye contact and scraped the sliced chillies into the guacamole. 

She sighed. 

“Now, how much of the…” he began as he reached for a bundle of cilantro with one hand and scratched his eye with the other. 

She gasped. 

“Ah fuck.”

The next fifteen minutes was spent washing his eye out with milk. 

Andy resolutely did not laugh at him despite it being one hundred percent his fault. She’d been maced before and cried like a baby, capsaicin was no joke.

He handled it like a champ. Barely a whimper, despite the angry red of his eyes and tears streaming down his cheek. She was as impressed as she was sympathetic.

After he’d had as much fussing as he was going to take, he sat at the island bench with a bowl of milk and sulked.

She skimmed the fat from the top of the meat sauce with a ladle and let him feel sorry for himself in peace. She’d give it at least a week before teasing him relentlessly over it. She could call it the serrano incident. The guac fiasco? His taco troubles. Maybe she would send him pictures of chopped up peppers when he was being annoying. 

“Andy.” 

“Hm?”

“Come look at this,” he said. His voice was gentle. 

She looked over her shoulder. 

He slid his phone across the bench. “Maybe sit down first.”

She quirked an eyebrow and picked up the phone. 

A headline in sensible Times New Roman script on a white background read: ‘Local Entrepreneur Kieran McLeod Arrested.’ 

She dropped the ladle. Sauce splashed on the stove top. She scrolled through the article with greasy fingers, her eyes speeding through a tasteless opinion piece praising Kieran for all the jobs he created, describing what a respectable pillar of the community he was, and his troubles with a violent ex partner who did worse to him than the accusations he was currently accused of. Four paragraphs in it mentioned that he was arrested on domestic battery charges and had been denied bail. There were rumours of some vigilante being involved but no details had been confirmed by the police. 

The article ended on a candid photo of his current partner and latest victim, a nineteen year old woman who looked a lot like Andy. 

She dropped the phone. 

Jason caught it. 

She hadn’t noticed him standing next to her.

“Are you okay?” 

She nodded like a bobble head. She choked on a laugh. 

“I’m fine.” She couldn’t even focus on him with the tears flooding her eyes. She laughed again. He squeezed her shoulder. Her heart felt like it was going to burst.

She went to wipe her eyes, and he caught her hand before she could. 

“Careful. We’re all out of milk,” he said. 

She had no idea why, but that was what freed the broken sob stuck in her throat. It felt like it’d been trapped there for years. 

He folded her into his arms, and held her while she fell apart. 

A little later Jason sat her down at the island bench and took her place at the stove. 

She sniffed while he stuffed and fried the tacos. The news sank in. She wished she knew which vigilante it was and what he'd done to run a foul of that crowd, if the rumour wasn’t made up. Probably some New York hero she’d never heard of. Who even operated in Newark? 

Jason slid a plate of obscenely, transcendently spicy tacos in front of her, as well as a beer. 

She raised the bottle, but couldn’t think of a toast that quite encapsulated what she was feeling.

“To creeps getting what they deserve,” he said with a quiet intensity.

She clinked her bottle against his and took a swig. She smacked her lips. “And to that poor girl getting away. I hope she’s going to be alright.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners with a smile. “I think she’ll be okay.”

Feeling lighter than she had in years, she stuffed a generous bite of taco into her mouth. Kieran was in jail and she had good food and even better company. Life could be a lot worse. 

“I reckon this guac needs more peppers,” she said. 

“I told you!” He pointed with his bottle. 

She laughed. 

Next>>

#jason todd #dc #jason todd x fem!reader #jason todd x oc #jason todd x reader #red hood #red hood x oc #my fanfic #for the hell of it #slow burn romance #hurt/comfort #slice of life #domestic abuse mention #Red Hood doing his thing behind the scenes

[alpaca-clouds]

(The concept of) Canon is like an Onion

It has layers.

Okay, I just gotta be the fandom elder here, because there is a thing that is kinda bugging me. And that is the tendency of especially younger fans of stuff to point at all sorts of suplementary material (artbooks, interviews with creators/actors, articles in magazines and what not) and go: "See, my interpretation of this and that is totally canon!"

And the thing is that... it is a bit more complicated than that. Because what is and isn't canon... Well, it is something people argue about a lot. But the general thing is, basically this. Canonicity can have multiple levels - and the top level of it is basically just the text itself.

Like, older fans of the Star Wars Fandom might still remember Lucas' five (or was it even six?) levels of canon. And those were just based on actual stories. It had become a necessity back then just based on the fact that a lot of the extended universe stuff was at times contradictory - even with the stuff that Lucas himself had done. So according to Lucas, the main canon was just the stuff he had been a part of creating. And then there were levels of things going from "most canon" to "least canon" basically.

But yeah, generally speaking: Canon is the information given within a story itself. You can argue about additional story material maybe being canon (like tie in novels to a movie, for example), but generally even those are not... necessarily canon to the main-thing itself.

I know that these days there is this big thing happening of creators just being very, very accessible to fans. So, the temptation is big to tweet or mail or comment on a twitch of your favorite media's creator/your favorite character's actor/whatever and be like: "I have this theory/analysis. Am I right?" Which is... fine. But you also have to keep in mind that stuff that people privately say is not necessarily authoritatively.

As some of the followers of this blog might know: My OG fandom is Digimon. And boy howdy, can I tell you stories about Digimon's "Word of God". Because... look people, if it is not a book, there is not a singular creator. And the people who were in charge of Digimon, had at times very, very differing ideas from each other.

With Digimon Adventure/02 I interviewed several of the writers. And guess what: I at times got opposing opinions from them. And those opinions were also differing from what the producer and the director said in official interviews and sublementary materials (like artbooks or the novelization).

Two examples are Sora's age and Hikari's crest. Sora is shown to have her birthday in movie 2, which is set in March. Given how Japanese school law works, this would make her 10 during the events of Digimon Adventure and 13 during DIgimon Adventure 02 (because the cut-off date is April 1st). According to Reiko Yoshida, who wrote that movie, this is true. According to the producer, however, no actually the movie is set in April, she is 11 during the events of the first season. And the other fun one: What does Hikari's crest of "light" actually mean. We asked five different people involved and got five different answers.

And the big thing is, that you cannot assume that someone, who is engaging with media, does also engage with ALL THE INTERVIEWS and FOLLOW EVERYONE INVOLVED ON SOCIAL MEDIA. Because most people don't.

I see this happening a lot especially in regards to people interpreting the canonicity of ships - and character sexuality.

Let me use an example where I totally agree with the person in question: Isaac from Castlevania. According to his voice actor Isaac is queer. I totally absolutely read the character this way, no question. But... technically it is never confirmed in the text. So if you come away from it not reading him this way, yeah, that is totally understandable. You do not need to know everything every voice actor said.

And if stuff within the actually story itself is kept vague, you cannot just go and say: "Person XY who also was involved in creating media X said this, so this is the only correct opinion." Because if the text does not confirm it, it is not necessarily "canon" and either interpretation is valid.

And if there is multiple entries as source material, also try to think of what people will usually think of, when you say "Fandom X".

Like, to get back at my own fandoms: Yeah, no, most people will not know about the novelization of Digimon Adventure. Most people will also not have played the Wonderswan games (that also at times outright contradict the primary text in form of the anime). Or with Pirates of the Caribbean: Most fans have never read any of the tie-in novels. Heck, most people do not even know they exist. Meanwhile, also a ton of people do not consider movies 4 and 5 canonical to the Gore Verbinski trilogy, given that again those movies outright contradict some of the stuff stated in the trilogy.

What I am trying to say: Canonicity is, if anything, a spectrum, not a binary. So for the love of all the gods, please stop the entire: "Well, the guy who did the storyboards for three of the scenes in this show agrees with me, so I am right," stuff. I know it is tempting (believe me, I KNOW). But... If it is not in the text, other interpretations are valid.

Also, headcanons are always valid. Always.

#canon #canonicity #fandom #fandom culture #digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #castlevania #castlevania netflix #pirates of the caribbean #star wars

[zoobus]

hey, it concerns me to see you reblog that post about bin laden's letter to america without any commentary because like, youre usually very good at being smart and critical about things, and that post seems to be promoting a letter that, legitimate critiques of american and israeli imperialism aside, is also viciously antisemitic and homophobic and promotes a worldwide islamic fundamentalist theocracy. I hope that I'm misinterpreting your intent in that reblog because I really enjoy following you and think youre very cool.

Let me get this out of the way: you do not in any way "have to hand it to" Osama bin Laden. I didn't consider the implications of reblogging the archived letter without commentary and I haven't personally seen whatever teens are saying about it on tiktok. my thoughts while reblogging were not as clear as I assumed, so I'll write them out now.

Everyone is correct to say the letter is wildly antisemitic, homophobic, and not an entirely correct reflection of reality. Bin laden is not an admirable, sympathetic hero for writing it. In the specific context of young people reading it for the first time, my read of it was that the letter itself is eye opening to the extent of which Hamas and Israel's actions are logical, regardless of cruelty. Probably even more significant for young people experiencing their first major war-related historical event, this might be their first time reckoning with:

time is a flat circle and history can feel like it's predicting the future

the US and its allies get absurdly disproportionate amounts of leeway and sympathy

The people you've been taught as irredeemably evil driven by baseless hatred and jealousy of your great nation probably had more grounded, logical motivations than you're giving them credit for, and that makes the black and white perception harder to maintain. Osama specifically called out that 3000 Americans deaths makes the world kneel but all the much higher death toll of Iranian children meant nothing. It's not difficult to find parallels.

gives at least a little context as to why US politicians are teaming up to ignore a very loud and bipartisan demand for ceasefire.

I didn't reblog it because I think homosexuals are evidence of the US as the worst civilization in history, I reblogged it because my best faith outlook was that tiktokkers who actually read the letter might start thinking about why 9/11s and 10/7s happen, whether Israel's current actions will really just end here with no future consequences. It might be obvious to us, but I think it's very likely the majority of people (especially the very young) don't think about these things too deeply unless compelled to. You shouldn't take his letter at face value but Osama bin Laden explaining why he was orchestrating acts of terrorism is significant

I don't want to call it nuance or shades of grey. I shared it for similar reasons we share that one Onion article:

#but i admit i never saw what the tiktoks actually said. i projected this read

[cinnamonrollwar]

Who is the one Cinnamon Roll to rule them all?

Welcome to the Cinnamon Roll War! Inspired by the greats, such as @indieswag-competition, @adhdswagcompetition, @gotalittletoosilly, @autismswagsummit, @weirdgirlshowdown, and @mad-scientist-showdown I’m running my own Tumblr poll showdown! I seek to answer one simple questions: who is the purest cinnamon roll? I am taking my definition off of urban dictionary:

A character that is very kind and sweet but faces more hardship and suffering than they truly deserve. Comes from the usage of an article headline from 'The Onion' titled 'Beautiful Cinnamon Roll Too Good For This World, Too Pure.' to describe a person or character that is very good but faces a lot of pain in their life.

Based on that definition, I am looking for two factors in you submissions:

Sweetness: They need to be above averagely kind to those around them.

Hardships: They must face a lot of hardships despite their sweetness.

You can submit your nominations here! I will not be super strict with the above and will try to include a good amount of the characters submitted. My only rules are the following:

No real people, including personas like Vtubers. I’m looking for 100% fictional characters here.

I will not be including any Harry Potter characters. I might add other fandoms I refuse to include in the future, but for not that’s it.

You can submit multiple characters, but only submit each character once.

I’ll only include one character per media unless you give me a very good reason to break this rule.

Animals are fine as long as they demonstrate a human level of sentience. Of course a cute little puppy is going to be a sweet cinnamon roll. We aren’t looking for that.

I will automatically be including two characters. The first one is Nico Di Angelo. He must be included because he is literally cited in the top urban dictionary definition. I also love him.

I’m also including Molly Blyndeff. Why? Because she should be cited in the definition. She’s great and deserves better.

PS: The first person to guess what I got my profile picture from gets a free instant submission. Use it wisely.

#polls #cinnamon roll

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jerry Coyne

Published: Jan 7, 2024

Oops! Scientific American did it again, this time with an op-ed that could have been ripped from the pages of The Onion.  As is so common these days, the piece proposes that we change the language of science (astronomy in this case), since some of its terms are bad in four ways:

a.  They are violent, sexist, and triggering b. They are not “beautiful and elegant” like astronomy is, but grating; and they are “not kind” c.  They are non-inclusive, presumably helping keep minorities out of astronomy. d. They are untruthful and distort astronomy

In my view, none of these claims holds up, for the article is all Pecksniffian assertion with not a shred of evidence. Author Juan Madrid assumes the role of a bomb-sniffing dog, snuffling the field of astronomy for linguistic mines.

Click the headline below to read and weep, or find the piece archived here.  The author is identified this way (my link):

Juan P. Madrid is an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

The piece begins by describing a collision that will take place, 4 to 7 billion years hence, between the Milky Way and its closest galaxy, Andromeda.  Immediately the word “collision” is seen as triggering. One of Madrid’s students described the future collision instead as “a giant galactic hug.” But the person who sent me this link added this comment:

My wife says that if Andromeda doesn’t want the Milky Way to hug her then it’s interstellar sexual assault.

Indeed! But Madrid hastens to instruct us why using “collision” is not only grating, but misleading:

The kindness, but also the accuracy, of the language my student used was in sharp contrast to the standard description we use in astronomy to explain the final destiny of Andromeda and the Milky Way: “a collision.” But as astronomers have predicted, when Andromeda and the Milky Way finally meet, their stars will entwine and create a larger cosmic structure, a process that is more creating than destroying, which is what we envision when we use the term collision. A galactic hug is scientifically truthful, and it’s led me to believe that astronomers should reconsider the language we use.

First of all “collision” doesn’t mean “destroying”, but simply two objects hitting each other. In this case, two galaxies “collide”, but their stars are spread so far apart that they’ll simply merge into one big galaxy and star will not hit star.  You could say “merge” instead of “collide”, but that also implies that perhaps the stars will absorb each other.  If you want to convey the idea that “nothing gets banged up,” then, Madrid suggests using “galactic hug”. He actually wants astronomers, their classes, and their textbooks, to adopt this new, kind, and romantic term. (There are, of course, more salacious terms that could be used.)  But they won’t be because they sound dumb, and in fact “galactic hug” is just as inaccurate as the other terms, for “hug” implies that there is some mutual enfolding, when in fact, the entities merge and do not remain separate, as humans do when they have a (temporary) hug.  When Fred and Sue hug each other, they don’t merge into one person. . .

And so Madrid, combing the literature for other terms that are jarring and, he says, misleading, finds more, as of course he would. (You can do this in any field of biology, chemistry. or physics; all you need is a sufficiently diligent Pecksniff). I’ve singled out Madrid’s instances of bad language below by adding my own links, and putting those words in bold.

For instance, in galaxy evolution we invoke imagery strikingly similar to what you would expect if you were eavesdropping on Hannibal Lecter: words like cannibalism, harassment [JAC: no instance found],  starvation, strangulation, stripping or suffocation. There is a rather long list of foul analogies that have entered, and are now entrenched, in the lexicon of professional astronomy. We have grown accustomed to this violent language and as a community, we seldom question or reflect on its use. Strangulation is a particularly cringeworthy term in astronomy, referring to the decline of the number of stars born in some types of galaxies. This is a vicious crime where most often the victim is a woman; the perpetrator, a man. Yet, we use this word mindlessly to describe a slow astronomical process that takes millions of years. Under certain conditions, some galaxies use up or lose the gas that is the primordial ingredient to form stars. When that happens, galaxies make new stars at a lower rate. But these galaxies do not die or suffer great harm. They will continue to shine and will live their natural evolution. This is but one of many examples of violent language in our field that actually describes something gradual, slow and perhaps even gentle.

Madrid was savvy enough to impute misogyny to one of these terms: “strangulation”, giving some woke heft to his thesis. But if you look at how the terms are used, only someone who wants to be offended would be.  Moreover, they are not inaccurate. “Starvation“, for example, refers to something that cuts off the flow of gas that galaxies need for new star formation. I don’t find it inaccurate at all. In fact, none of these terms are inaccurate—what Madrid really objects to is that they are “triggering” and “unwelcoming”. He tries to sell his campaign to deep-six these terms as being “untruthful”, because he doesn’t want to look like an ideologue, but I’m not buying it. Also he allows “explosion” for the creation of a supernova, in most cases he finds this language “needlessly vicious and [promoting] inaccurate connotations.”

In short, Madrid finds this language triggering, for that’s the only explanation for why we should avoid this kind of “vicious” language.  And, as he says below,

The use of hypercharged words in our field ignores the fact that this violent imagery can trigger distress in colleagues who might have been victims of violence.

But there are two points to be made here. First, as I noted in a recent post, giving the relevant studies, “Trigger warnings don’t work” and can even cause more trauma. There is no evidence that using this sort of language somehow harms the students. In fact, the remedy for those who are traumatized by certain words is not to avoid exposure to them, but to learn to not be upset when you are exposed. There is therapy for this.

Second, as is so often the case in these screeds, Madrid gives no examples of how the “bad language” upsets people. He should be able to produce at least a dozen cases on the spot, like “Jane got upset and left the class when she heard the word ‘strangulation'”, or “Bob reported Professor Basement Cat to the university for using the term  ‘cannibalism’ on the astronomy exam, which, he said, made him think of the Donner Party and prevented him from completing the exam.”  In nearly all of these language-policing articles, there is a surfeit of outrage and a dearth of examples or evidence of harm.

But Madrid circumvents the lack of evidence and simply suggests ways that we can censor this language, again pretending he’s interested mainly in scientific truth:

To shift toward more welcoming and truthful language in astronomy, scientific journals can push to change the currently accepted language. The referee, or the scientific editor, can ask the authors to consider more appropriate descriptions of the physical processes involved. Referees, editors and editorial boards can step up to enforce scientific accuracy and stop the use of violent, misogynistic language that is now pervasive. This is a call for scientific precision. The use of hypercharged words in our field ignores the fact that this violent imagery can trigger distress in colleagues who might have been victims of violence.

“Can”, “could have”, “might have”. Where are the examples of this? The sweating professor gives none. And isn’t it amazing that the more accurate language is always the kinder language?

And, as expected, Madrid manages to drag race, inclusion, and diversity into his discussion, even though none of the terms above have anything to do with race. And this belies his faux concern mainly for scientific accuracy:

As astronomers, we must strive to create a more inclusive and diverse community that reflects the composition of our society. Valuable efforts to provide opportunities for women and minorities to succeed in astronomy have been created. However, by many metrics, the progress made towards gender equality and true diversity has been painfully slow. We must listen to the new generation of astronomers. My student showed me that while some astronomical processes can be intense, the universe revealed through astronomy provides us with the most fascinating sights known to humankind. Like many other young scientists, she thinks that when we explain astronomical phenomena with wording and phrases that share our excitement and appreciation, it also encourages others to join in and wonder what else we can discover together. The universe is beautiful, elegant and ever-changing. Astronomy would be wise to follow its lead.

And so, in the end, we see that this kind of misguided effort, concentrating on words rather than science itself, is part of the corruption that has entered science via DEI and its ideology.  What we have is one more attempt to control thought by controlling language.

There is no evidence that minorities and women are being kept out of astronomy because they don’t find its language “inclusive,”, though that’s really the thesis of Madrid’s piece.  But the very idea that this thesis is true is laughable. Promoting the idea that galaxies hug each other is not going to bring people pouring into astronomy.

Once again Scientific American, trying to ride the woke bandwagon, has fallen off the train. Blame not only the author, but the editor, who actually approved this nonsense.

==

These people are fucking lunatics.

#Jerry Coyne #Scientific American #SciAm #astronomy #DEI #DEI must die #DEI bureaucracy #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity #equity #inclusion #religion is a mental illness

[the-arson-author-gamer]

How Likely Each Stardew Valley Villager Would Give Me Drugs If I Asked For It 

(and other related matters)

Ok, before I begin, this wasn't an original idea, I got inspired, and unlike some people (ssstalkerwolf) I like to give credit. So here it is!

Either way, after watching a video by the stardew youtuber, Nino Kito (go subscribe) and reading the article that he read (which is hilarious by the way), I essentially went 'could I do this in my own way?'

And I did.

I find it worth it to at least read the article before you read this because there are some references and I think one should go back to the original source if they can.

Also, this was for fun, and my own amusement watching my friends slowly lose their perception of who I am as a person.

As you can already tell, this is going to be long, so everything will be under the cut for the remaining sanity of you and myself after I post it.

#45: Jas

First, a literal child. Second, she knows what drugs are, and it would traumatize her for life if you asked because she absolutely knows what drugs do to Marnie after her 3-day work week and Shane after another depressing night at the saloon. That kid can’t witness another addiction come into place, her childlike whimsy is depleting at a rapid pace.

#44: Vincent

90% sure that this kid doesn’t even understand the concept of war, let alone what weed is and why mom keeps getting upset when dad doesn’t act paranoid for once in his very sad life. There’s no sense asking him if he doesn’t even know what it is, which is why he places above Jas, who knows what drugs are. If the kid ever learned how to read within the several years you’ve been in the valley, he might learn what it is, but that chance is highly unlikely considering Penny’s report cards, so you’re safe for now. Or at least until he asks Jodi.

#43: Leo

Leo’s third because that’s also a kid, but also because Vincent could figure out what drugs are, Leo will never. Considering all the research done on the few surviving feral children (because society keeps fucking it up) it is even a wonder that Leo can still speak, let alone read. That kid will just squawk at you like a fucking parrot. Another waste of your precious time, but at least you aren’t potentially traumatizing any more children than you have to for your drug quest.

#42: Jodi

Christian stay-at-home housewife to a man of war? Jodi gives me homophobe vibes, let alone you asking for a bit of the good stuff. That woman is calling you the spawn of Satan and then tries to hit you with her purse. You get away easily because beating up monsters in the mines does wonders, but you aren’t seeing the likes of Vincent ever again, considering we all know how those people are. You can still see Sam, but that’s because her closeted bisexual son knows how to evade her and how to get easy drugs (Sebastian).

#41: Demetrius

Yeah, Demetrius could cook up meth like Walter White but the dude’s a wet blanket. Not only will he say no, but the guy is going to follow you around like a lost puppy asking if you are okay or need addiction therapy. If you make the mistake of asking him, that’s on you for thinking that the man that embodies 90s romance movie father of the girl next door will ever give you drugs.

#40: Morris

Yeah, the man is totally an asshole. He would ban you from ever being hired at Joja, but he technically can’t block you from entering or buying any Joja product without causing the third Joja scandal of the month (It’s the 12th of Summer). If pollution’s mascot bans you from their stores, not only are they losing their precious small town pennies, but also getting another parody article from The Onion that blows up on Twitter. Still not getting back into Joja though after you fuck up so bad on the farm there’s no point of return, but that’s probably for the better.

#39: Governor

That feathered fedora says all, the man has drugs, but there will be no allusion to it due to the fact that he requires those important republican/conservative Christian mom votes. You can ask him, but there’s no way you will ever get any from him. The only thing you are getting from him is the place where he gets those hats and a governmental secret that you’re forced to take to the grave. Congrats, your knowledge of the valley increased by 0.17%!

#38: Penny

Similar to the governor, Penny has drugs, but she isn’t giving them to you, or even telling you that she has them. That shitty toddler teaching job is the only thing preventing her and Pam from going out on the streets. If she gets her online bought teaching licence revoked, she’s done for. It’s best not to ask her for both of your remaining pieces of sanity.

#37: Marnie

She also has drugs, but her already thin supply of ketamine is running thinner by the continued amount of days that Shane has been in the valley. If you ask her, she’ll just say sorry and try to sell you another cow for more drug money and an apology toy for Jas for putting up her remaining family’s bullshit.

#36: Clint

This man is the biggest pussy in the town, you really think he can handle anything more than a single pint of beer, then you’re wrong. He would panic and then cry in the seclusion of the machinery of the blacksmith’s opening your 28 magma geodes if you ever asked him for drugs. I also think he would up the coal prices again if you asked, and nobody wants to dust sprite farm more than they have to. Or pay thousands into Clint’s Emily shrine in the closet for a few morsels of coal.

#35: Harvey

Another pussy, but instead of saying no, he just quakes in his dress shoes at the counter while he hands over you some of the hardest drugs ever prescribed to man. But you will never consider him as an option considering his status as the town’s top scaredy-cat and the only ones who will ever know this is Maru his only employee and Pam who was just bold enough to ask.

#34: Robin

Robin grew up in construction and carpentry, the concept of drugs does not scare Robin, therefore she isn’t going to freak out like everybody so far on the list. But she has none for you, because she is apparently some kind of good samaritan. It must be all those rants from Demetrius and the science behind hearing enough of a concept makes you believe it.

#33: Goblin Henchmen

The only drugs the henchman will give you is the delicacy of void mayo (if you can even gain any friendship with the fellow). So unless if the mayonnaise from magic void chickens does something interesting, it may not be worthwhile to you. The only reason he ranks higher is that I don’t know the hallucinogenic properties of void mayo (yet).

#32: Marlon

Yeah, the guy has drugs, but he won’t give them to you, considering that he knows you would absolutely take it into the mines and snort some cocaine while completing the wizard’s prismatic jelly quest (I don’t blame you, that quest is hell). He’s already lost too many members to drug use in the mines, it’s kind of embarrassing at this point. Though, if you have drugs on you and are out of the mines, he’ll totally join you as the first member (and only sane member) of the Nightmare Blunt Rotation Circle™. 

#31: Pierre

Remember the secret stash cutscene? Pierre has drugs, but he isn’t letting go of those narcotics at all. Good luck trying to get out of there with your perception of that family intact. You will have no drugs, only another couple of secrets that you have to take to the grave. At least now you know why Abigail’s hair has remained purple after never dyeing it.

#30: Maru

While Maru does not have drugs, she is chill about them and will even occasionally join Sebastian once in a while. She will probably just direct you towards Sebastian, if anything. But considering the kind of game Stardew is, this is essentially a long side quest, but instead of getting a tool or another ridiculous single use item it’s just drugs… Wait.

#29: Gus

Despite the fact that Sebastian is dealing right under his nose (what do you really think he’s doing every Friday night? It obviously isn’t beating Sam at pool, he’s done that hundreds of times already, there’s no thrill to it anymore) Gus believes that his saloon is free of drugs. Which is a stupid assumption considering that he deals with both Pam and Shane on a regular basis for their alcohol. He’ll just say no and then watch you avidly for the next few times you visit on Friday to hand out an assortment of iridium rabbit feet as if it’s completely normal.

#28: George

Poor man is in possession of nothing more than some expired Tylenol in the back of the medicine shelf that he can’t reach. George should probably be on some serious opioids but considering that state of that wheelchair (which I’m pretty sure is growing mold) he probably has nothing for you. But if you offered him anything, you would gain more friendship than giving him an iridium leek on his 87th birthday.

#27: Grandpa

When Grandpa was alive, he had complete access to drugs (Working with Qi will do that to you). But it’s not like he’s alive enough to give them to you, unless if there’s some kind of astral plane/purgatory narcotic that he can hand out (which would be sick as fuck).  But besides Grandpa’s lack of drugs, he totally hanged around Willy and Linus in ye olden days, creating the first edition of the Nightmare Blunt Rotation Circle™. You’ll get some great stories through the dream realm but no drugs.

#26: Gunther

I think Gunther would get bored at the museum, waiting around for your once-a-month visit with a bunch of ores or artifacts. Of course, he gets excited to have those, but he goes through inspecting them so quick that he’s done only a couple of days after your visit. So a bored archaeologist has to do something… drugs. He does drugs. It’s not like the poor lonely man has anything to offer you, but if you offered him something, he would be quite excited. The only way, the man has access to some magic mushrooms is following you to the mines and going down to floor 80 to pick up some stuff. At least he’s responsible enough not to go alone or do the magic mushrooms while in the caves, unlike the entirety of the now dead Adventurers Guild.

#25: Haley

Yeah, article’s right, Haley would not have drugs but would absolutely be able to lead you to them. This girl knows everybody, and the next party she’s going to? That you were only half paying attention to because she kept insulting your taste in fashion? Yeah, she knows a guy, who knows a guy, who’s friend’s sister’s step-brother is going to be there and has got a great stash that he’s willing to share. 

#24: Sandy

Sandy’s shop lives right off of Qi, her business essentially relies on that man, 110% that she would return the favour to Qi by directing you to him. Sandy is a solid contact if you really need some good drugs.

#23: Bouncer

Akin to Sandy, the bouncer works for Qi, of course he has access to drugs, not like he’s going to hand them out willingly, though he will direct you to Qi for more business. He and Sandy got a solid deal with Qi if that they promote the drug business in the desert (to the trader) than they get more money in their pockets and some free stuff to themselves, are they going to deny a great deal? I think not.

#22: Dwarf

As we know, the Dwarf doesn’t have a basic concept of personal property, so any of the drugs he has are stolen from Linus’s stashes around the valley. So yes he will give you drugs, but you just don’t know who it’s from. If you are fine with risking getting caught with somebody else’s drugs that have been second-hand stolen, then go right ahead! Dwarf’s got you!

#21: Pam

I feel as this is self-explanatory, Pam has drugs, she gets them from Harvey, but she much rather join you for drinks than for drugs. She has them, but I think what’s left of Pam’s moral standing wouldn’t exactly feel 100% okay giving a 20-something year old hard drugs (not that she knows what Penny does when she isn’t around). You’d still have a great night, it just wouldn’t be drugs.

#20: Professor Snail

Article’s right again, that Snail man totally survived off of magic mushrooms inside that caves. If you ask him for drugs, he would just shakily point a finger towards the mushroom caves.

#19: Willy

I think Willy would be a complicated man, I don’t think he would do drugs, but I think he wouldn’t care if you did them, maybe he would oversee the Nightmare Blunt Rotation Circle™. At most would do a bong with you while night fishing, but he wouldn’t go apeshit like anybody else, so that’s a plus. 

#18: Kent

“He was in the war!” Bitch so? If you offered that guy some relief from the constant trauma, he would pay off your mortgage. He doesn’t have any drugs on his person because Jodi’s like a personified drug dog but also a bitch. But he does have some stashes around the valley, not very good spots though, considering that Linus took all of them. I think it’s worth noting that when high, Kent will reveal every piece of traumatic information he has from the war, which makes him an integral member of the Nightmare Blunt Rotation Circle™. Because no circle can go without a traumatized adult man!

#17: Granny Evelyn

Granny was the coolest kid in town back in ye olden days, she had anything and everything. Too bad she gave up on it after she married George and took in Alex. Despite all of that, she does have some likely-dead contacts for you if you are interested in whatever the hell Granny was into back in the days.

#16: Sam

Sam is besties with both Sebastian and Abigail, both of which have access to drugs through their respective sources. Despite being down the line a decent bit, Sam has got some shit that even his bloodhound of a mother can’t find, that guy grew up lying to his mom. Anyway, Sam is pretty chill to hang around, he’ll probably talk about music and video games the entire time, but a lot of people are into that stuff, so he’s a pretty good guy to chill with. However, the time it takes between him getting drugs from Sebastian or Abigail then using up a week’s supply is very short, so you must act fast if you want a chance to be with Sam.

#15: Lewis

You’re telling me that the mayor of a town consisting of 24 other people gives enough tax money in order to build a SOLID GOLD STATUE of himself? This statue is solid gold! Not laminated! That either took years to establish, or the guy has a secret drug empire. And I think it’s the latter. Lewis totally buys the drugs from Qi, then sells it at an astronomical price to the Governor. Yeah, the Governor. Why do you think Lewis smooches him up every year at the Luau! Lewis has drugs and is willing to sell it to you, so he can build another solid gold statue of himself, but it’s so pricey that it’s not worth it. Another governmental secret to take to the grave… Yippee. 

#14: Alex

Alex is probably willing to do anything to go pro, including taking steroids. Those books that he never reads but are never dusty? Yeah, there’s a big ass stash behind there. He’s willing to share if you’re a dude and give the ‘right’ reason why you want them (sports rather than anything else logical for a farmer). But if you’re a girl good luck, the misogyny runs strong within him until you kind of send him on a character arc.

#13: Shane

He’s stealing from Marnie, that much is obvious, dude’s so broke from spending his money on alcohol that he has none left for drugs. It’s not like Marnie is going to tell him to stop, so he has free rein of Marnie’s stash. If you get him drunk enough first, then he’s surprisingly willing to join you. Just note that he will drop all his traumas and life story on you, Shane will become an integral member of the Nightmare Blunt Rotation Circle™. 

#12: Elliot

Consider the daily struggle of writers and consider how Elliot can actually write a good book that fast… Drugs, obviously. You see, very few people could have the patience to speak like Shakespeare on a daily basis and somehow still make it understandable to the average Joe, AND still hold the best hair in the Valley (fight me). In fact, I’m bold enough to say that nobody has the patience to do all of that, the obvious answer is a constant influx of magic mushrooms provided by Leah. The main difference between the two is that Leah is more likely to show you all the good spots for forage, Elliot will straight up hand it to you as some poetic declaration of love. 

#11: Gil

After living a long time and serving the Adventurer’s Guild for so long, I think Gil would have to do something to pass the long hours of sitting around. So, despite Marlon’s protests, he snorts skeleton bone crack. Is Gil isn’t out of his mind of skeleton crack then he’s totally get you some, you just have to catch him at the right time (before 2pm, good luck).

#10: Abigail

Abigail has full access to Caroline’s ‘tea’ garden, unlike Pierre, and she has access to whatever the hell Sebastian has on him at any time. So she’s got plenty of people to send you to and plenty of drugs to share. Overall, Abigail is a solid choice to go to, and she’d be cool to hang with as well. Maybe just don’t go to the mines with her to snort crack because nobody needs another grave hanging around the cemetery that Abigail can no longer visit.

#9: Linus

While we are collectively unsure of the reason Linus decided to live out in the wild and cosplay a caveman, I can obviously determine that the man has so much planted around the valley. Weed? Oh yeah, that’s at the train tracks behind the bath house, nobody bothers to go up beyond that point! Cocaine? He talks to the travelling trader a lot. You name it, he has it. He’s also friends with the wizard, which should be enough proof in the first place. The only reason he’s ranked here is that everybody else is practically on par with him. 

#8:  Emily

As long as you are fine with spiritual shit and dancing, then Emily is the person you should go to. I mean, at least Emily isn’t like some of those weird spiritual people that you can sometimes meet, she’s just cool and into crystals and their meanings. Anyway, Emily is cool, would hit you up with whatever she’s got, and you would probably learn about crystals more than you should? 8/10 experience, would go again.

#7: Caroline

That tea cutscene? That greenhouse? Married to Pierre? Yeah, Caroline is not just growing tea in that greenhouse of hers. She is absolutely willing to share because her only friend is Jodi, and we already covered her drug dog tendencies. Also, being married to Pierre is already hell on earth, so she will take anything that she can get (this includes a friend). Should I mention that she totally had a fling with the wizard? Who would totally hand out drugs at any given moment for a solar essence? Yeah, Caroline is cool, and she is a great candidate to ask for drugs and hang with.

#6: Leah

Let’s face it, there is no way in hell that Leah wasn’t high while making that statue, yeah, that one. Also, she just forages around for her food on a daily basis, I wouldn’t be surprised if she came across one of Linus’s stashes. Also, she would hand around Linus and do magic mushrooms, fall in the valley is the best season for them after all. She will show you all the best spots, her favourite is the cliff wall behind the Wizard’s tower where all sorts of weird shit grows. It’s best not to ask the origins of it, only how high it will make you.

#5: Krobus

C’mon, you just know that he has drugs down in that sewer, he probably provides come cool stuff to the Wizard to experiment with every now and again. Also, if you are roommates with him, you will also get the experience with hanging around with the coolest creature around. 10/10, always go to Krobus.

#4: Birdie

The fairy dust is not the only thing that is magical about Birdie, her island based drugs are astronomical. She has access to things that very few can even bother to search for, go to Birdie to have a riveting conversation about the sea while being high as fuck.

#3: Sebastian

Sebastian buys primarily from Qi, in fact, he’s Qi’s best buyer, so it’s obvious that he has stuff on hand, and he’s willing to hand stuff out as well. The thing that makes Sebastian so high on the list in comparison to others is the fact that, like Linus, he has everything. Go to Sebastian, any angsty rants about his stepdad and wanting to leave the Valley will be worth anything that Sebastian has got from Qi. 

#2: Wizard

In your very first cutscene with this guy, you get handed some forestry concoction that could totally be considered a drug. The shit this guy has is phenomenal, and he is willing to give it out as long as you have a couple void essence to spare as repayment. Any failed potions or concoctions are being chucked out the window into the concerning lack of wildlife in the valley, all for Leah to watch crazy ass mushrooms to grow then snort them. 

#1: Mr Qi

Where do you think Sebastian’s getting the drugs? Qi runs an empire much larger than Lewis’s statues, Pierre’s money hounding, and Joja’s corporation desires would ever think of having. Qi is the sole reason why Stardew is still holding a half decent economy before you started mass-producing starfruit wine. If you want any kind of drug, you go to Qi, he’s got you covered. 

Bonus: Hat Mouse

Hat Mouse is cool, go to hat mouse. Hat mouse has drugs.

---

And that's a wrap! I hoped you found as much fun in this as I did for the past 2 months when I found time, and I guess the real questions are:

Who would you go to for drugs in the Valley?

Should I post this to my ao3 for shits and giggles?

#stardew valley #stardew #sdv #I'm not tagging every villager no way #taag talks #Jodi's part is my favourite #but Lewis is really close as a second #Youtube

[dany36]

full totk onion below for my own sanity. super long-ass rant ahead (11k words lmaoooo wow) and also contains spoilers.

so i beat the final boss of tears of the kingdom a while back. took me (according to my switch) “over 100 hours” to beat the game. i did about 110ish shrines, and got like 50 or so korok seeds. did quite a lot of sidequests as well. i was actually surprised how long i played it for considering how much fun i was not having playing it. but of course i wanted to uncover the whole overworld map (excluding the depths) and unlock as many shrines as possible to be able to say that hey, i explored quite a lot and gave this game a fair chance to impress me. which, unfortunately, it did not. if i had to rank all of the zelda games i’ve beaten (which i’ve done all except triforce heroes), i’d put botw in absolute last place, with totk slightly right above it.

before writing this, i re-read through this fantastic botw critical piece on destructoid by Cory Arnold ("Breaking down why Breath of the Wild is highly overrated") that literally hits on all the points on why i hate botw cus i wanted to see if maybe totk had improved on any of those criticisms. the criticisms that the author lists were similar (but much more eloquent) than the hasty list i had made when i first completed the game way back then. i was sad to re-read through it and realize that no, pretty much all of the major criticisms i had in botw were still present since totk is literally an exact copy of botw which some new stuff sprinkled on it, then they called it a brand new game. “but the depths!! the sky!! the new ultrahand mechanic!!” yeah that shit wasn’t fun for me at all (maybe the Ascend ability but more on that later). i literally couldn’t believe that this game cost 70 dollars when there were absolutely no enhancements in terms of the overworld and enemies and was seething through the first 4 hours of the game (or however long it took me to get through the tutorial portion of it). to quote that botw article i mentioned above:

If Breath of the Wild is your personal favorite game or favorite Zelda game, I’m not speaking to you. It’s the people foaming at the mouth at how it’s objectively better than other games, objectively better than other Zelda games, did open world better than other games, and want to enshrine it that I am addressing. This game is far too flawed to be getting this level of praise.

but i’m getting a bit ahead of myself. let’s start with the things i DID like and then i will write a lithany of all the things i hated about this game and why, despite having played it for 100+ hours, i had fun for maybe 10 hours of it.

the good

the ending.

one of the things i absolutely hated about botw was how short and unsatisfying the ending was. zelda wakes up and asks link if he remembers her and links says nothing, which then cuts to zelda and link talking together about…i think all they have to do to restore hyrule. i honestly forget because it sucked so bad that i had no interest in looking it up again. zelda turning human again with rauru’s and sonia’s help, and you having to catch her as she’s falling (a throwback to when you couldn’t catch her at the beginning of the game) were things that made it already looking better than botw’s stale-ass ending. zelda’s “link, i’m home!” was really sweet even if we once again get no emotion from link even though he knows the incredibly weighted decision zelda had made when she decided to turn into a dragon to restore the master sword. but whatever, more on that later.

i’m NOT saying totk’s ending is perfect, in fact i’ve seen some legit criticisms of it that i agree with, but in my opinion it wasn’t TERRIBLE like with how i felt with botw’s (and trust me i take every opportunity i get to bash on botw/totk). seeing link, zelda, and the four sages together at the end as they swear to protect hyrule and its princess was really cool and actually made it look like they were all in it together as friends/companions, in contrast to botw where we get no reference of the new champions in the ending at all. while this ending was better than totk, it’s still not like…at a level of it making my heart ache of joy/satisfcation/sadness (if you know me even the slightest i get very emotional with videogames and i will cry at literally anything lol) like in tww when hyrule floods, or SS with granny and fi leaving, or tp with midna and the mirror. which damn now that i think about it, it looks like zelda has a lot of bittersweet endings, so i will give totk +1 point in that there are no bittersweet moments at the end. i especially liked that they cleared up that no, zelda wasn’t aware or fully conscious about her hundreds of years roaming the skies as a dragon, because even the thought of her being aware of her time as a dragon was making me go insane. like, you mean that in botw she was trapped in the castle for 100 years keeping calamity ganon at bay and NOW she had to spend another 1000 years or whatever as a dragon? hell no. so thank you totk ending for making that clear that she doesn’t remember that at all and that it actually felt like she was asleep like with SS Zelda. :)

which brings me to the next thing that i liked, which is...

princess zelda overall.

i think it should come to no one’s surprise that her decision to turn into a dragon really elevated this zelda’s status to just completely fucking badass. like, damn, i say that’s my baby and i’m proud. the incredible amount of courage that zelda had to have to make that decision is just something that i don’t think we’ve seen other zeldas make. i guess there’s TP Zelda giving up her life to save Midna but, is that a worse fate than be unconsciously roaming the skies as a dragon for hundreds of years not knowing when you’ll come back? and SS Zelda knew that link would come back to wake her up from her slumber, so…. i mean, the scene of the last tears of the dragon memory was just so impactful, and it was probably the only scene in the game that really punched me in the emotional gut. the whole dragon transformation scene was just so heartbreaking to watch and when you see those tears come out of the dragon’s eyes and realize that’s where those memories come from that you’re watching….i’m telling you it made me almost catatonic. like. what the FUCK. probably one of the best cutscenes in zelda history, if I’m being honest. when the memory ends and it leaves you in that field of silent princesses i just needed a moment to breathe. i didn’t even wanna move (both in-game and irl lol). what a beautiful sequence. it’s something i don’t think any other zelda game has made me feel. sure i cried like a fucking baby when granny “dies” in SS or when Fi says goodbye (and i swear i always cry at the beginning of tww when link says goodbye to his grandma oh god), but with the dragon scene it just left me fucking speechless. A+++ work.

now, do i HATE that zelda is once fucking again stuck somewhere else in the middle of the story waiting for us to rescue her instead of being a more active, nuanced character like in ST, TWW, or OoT? absolutely yes. can nintendo fucking do something new and interesting with zelda like (dare i say!!) HW did and give her some personality instead of just being a damsel in distress yet fucking again?? but plenty of people have already ranted about that so i will just leave this to say botw/totk zelda has gone through enough shit and deserves to rest and be happy without going into other things about her character that other people have already talked about in greater detail than i ever could. :)

yunobo and riju.

yunobo was absolutely one of my favorite characters in botw, and so it’s no surprise that he’s a fave here too. his attack was super useful when exploring those boring-ass caves where i had to clear mountains and mountains of rocks without having to use my limited supply of bomb flowers or wacking away with a boulder sword. also one-shot killing those annoying-ass ice lizalfos with his attack will always be funny. the thought of a goron leader having such a child-like voice and huggable face just makes him such an interesting and fun character to me. as for riju, although i didn’t really care for her in botw, there was something about her in this game that just made her really grow on me. some of it definitely has to do with her new design which i thought was fantastic (minus the heels in the fucking desert), but also her attack is just so badass and useful. also helps that the portion where you have to defend gerudo town from the gibdos reminded me a lot of hyrule warriors, aka one of my favorite games ever (unironically!!). so yeah, yunobo and riju really were the oasis in the desert of uninteresting NPCs in this game!

dragon head island.

out of all the boring-ass sky islands in this game, dragon head island was such a welcomed surprise. from the mysterious thunder clouds surrounding it, to the eeringly relaxing music that plays, it was a breath of fresh air. all of the sky islands in this game look almost identical and yet it was really nice to get something different with music that made me go, hey, this is actually great to listen to and will have to add it to my list of zelda music!

the path to the wind temple.

the rito village was the first village i headed to and i was really hopeful for this game when i had to climb up to the wind temple alongside tulin. that portion where you have to jump from one trampoline to another was fun as hell. i was like wow, this definitely feels new and refreshing. i’m also pretty sure that the music was changing as you’d get higher? either way, this part really felt like something from a zelda game and was just overall a blast to get through.

the wind and lightning temple bosses.

again, because the wind temple was the first temple i did, was REALLY impressed with how fun the colgera boss was. sky diving and using tulin’s ability to dodge the boss’s attacks was just so intense and exciting! ALSO the music that played during it was a remix of the dragon roost island theme from tww, which was so fitting and badass. and speaking of badass, the lightning temple boss was, although super disgusting, so cool as well!! i already talked about how fun riju’s attack is, so the part where all the gibdo hives come alive and start surrounding you was just soooo intense. like damn, i can’t remember any of the botw bosses being so damn fun. if i could re-do those two portions of the game, i definitely would.

the final ganondorf fights.

and speaking of boss battles, these fights also had me all tensed-up and at the edge of my seat. well, except the dragon ganon part (he turned into a dragon and all he could do was spit fire balls at me?? he literally had link on his mouth ready to crunch him down!! oh my bad these are the positives ahem). for the second ganondorf fight i got seriously stumped because he just kept dodging my flurry attacks or whatever, and then he kept hitting me with the attack that would remove one of my heart containers (which was really cool and new to see a zelda boss do THAT!!!). like, it actually made me think i was gonna get my ass kicked and would have to restart the battle. idk if this is the strategy since i haven’t looked it up online but eventually i figured out that, after he dodges your attack, he attacks you and you have to dodge THAT in order for your flurry attack or actually work. anyway, i really liked the ganondorf fights even if i sucked at fighting him and went through all of my 6 shields but hey, at least i beat him first try lol.

the sages joining you in the phantom ganon fight and when the temple bosses show up in the depths.

again just a really cool detail that in totk we actually see the sages actually fight alongside you and aid you in your quest to defeat ganondorf instead of hey you’ve awoken me as a sage i’m just gonna stay here and do nothing as you go and fight the demon king. plus it’s a cool moment when you see all those terrifying AF bosses show up in the depths and the sages are all like nah don’t worry about us, we got this! like…hell yeah? love you guys stay awesome and thank you for taking care of those bosses cus i did nOT want to fight them again since this game loves to make you fight the same enemies hundreds of times :)

the gloom hands.

wow, what a terrifying and cool enemy…the first time. but just like everything else in the game (which i will talk about later), they beat this concept to death until you just go ‘oh the gloom hands again, whatever’ and keep moving. the first time i encountered the gloom hands i was like what in the FUCK is this and what is this TERRIFYING MUSIC that plays!!! very dead-hand-from-oot of them. i thought that the floormasters from tww were terrifying with those disturbing sounds they would make but they got nothing on the gloom hands. and then when you think you finally defeat them all and you’re free from their creepy clutches, phantom ganon shows up and one-hit kills you. amazing!!

the ascend ability.

i wouldn’t say i LOVED the ascend ability (tbh i wasn’t fond of this whole crap with rauru’s arm abilities like idk it just doesn’t feel very zelda-ish but more on that later) but of the four abilities we get, i’d say ascend was the one i liked the most. took me forever to figure out some ascend puzzles at the beginning because i wasn’t used to the fact that uh yeah you can literally go through ceilings if you want so i for the most part would enjoy whenever the ascend ability would be involved. so i mean idk what else to say except that it was neat and wouldn’t make me groan to use it unlike ultrahand.

voice acting (japanese).

i’m sorry but hearing the last trailer where we hear zelda’s and (what i’m assuming was) ganondorf’s voice just made me roll my eyes and groan out loud at just how terrible and cartoony they sound. as soon as the game started and we hear zelda talk in that fake-sounding british voice, i just had to go in and switch the audio to japanese so that they could sound like REAL people instead of idk forced acting. and my god i’m glad i did. wish i had done that for botw because wow, the voice acting in japanese was just top-notch and actually made me like the characters and not like cringe at how the VAs sounded. so A++ to the japanese VAs but i mean who are we kidding they always excel at that and it didn’t sound like over-the-top or anything. it sounded just right :)

well that was nice. very lovely. and now for the things that i absolutely hated about the game. from this point on i’m going to quote a lot of things from the destructoid article and try to expand on them to fit totk. here we go!

the bad and ugly

the overworld.

oh boy. this is the big one. this is the one that, for the first 4ish hours of the game (or however long it took me to reach lookout landing), was just making me rage on the inside, and for the rest of the game, just continuously shake my head and sigh with disappointment (and still rage from time to time) at just how fucking boring the overworld in totk is. this is one of the biggest complaints i had in botw and, given that nintendo just fucking reused the same world for totk with literally almost no interesting or noteworthy changes, it continues to be the thing that makes me angry the most about this game. like, i’m sorry, but developers need to stop fucking making huge overworlds if they are just going to make them boring as hell to traverse and not be able to make them interesting to explore at all:

The game is all about running around aimlessly with nothing unique to discover, no area-specific secret bosses, and overall very little progression. The only secrets or things to discover are shrines or Koroks, leaving the world with a profound lack of mystery. I don’t understand why people complain about sailing in Wind Waker but suddenly love running around grassy plains and climbing rocks that take five times as long as sailing between islands did. Yes a game this size and length would be amazing if and only if it was rich with content all the way through, but it’s not. Clocktown (from Majora’s Mask) alone has more depth than the entirety of Breath of the Wild.

There’s the mention of shrines or koroks, but totk introduces the new exciting concept of…caves and wells!!! and while at first it might seem cool and exciting to explore, you then realize that at the end of the day, just like everything in this game, each cave is exactly the fucking same and only serves to hide those blue glowing overgrown frogs so once you find one, it’s like wellp, there’s nothing else of importance that you’re going to find in this cave EXCEPT maybe your umpteenth shrine or a treasure chest containing an outfit (i think that’s how i found all of the fierce deity clothes—within caves). and it’s like “well see dany! you found something ELSE within caves other than those frogs!!” yeah no i explored maybe like 50 or so caves and the shrine/outfits were found in like 4 caves i explored or something like that so no i wouldn’t call that exciting or wortwhile considering i never used the fierce deity outfit and i could have found my umpteenth shrine somewhere else. and the wells? yeah turns out there’s like 40+ wells whose only purpose is to report to some lady of how many you’ve found so that i think she can give you rupees? and honestly who cares. i have no idea what the reward is once you find all of them but what could be worth visiting the same boring-ass caves with the same boring-ass design just so that you can say “yep i’ve visited every well in this game!” and mark off yet another boring sidequest in totk.

at least with TP or MM whenever i found a cave i knew i was going to get a unique and interesting experience (that one cave in TP where you have to drop down to the lowest levels with the iron boots is one of my faves). but unfortunately here, any cool puzzles that would otherwise be found randomly in caves are now stuck strictly to the freaking shrines, which takes away any sort of mystery you might get from finding a cave because now you KNOW it’s just gonna be yet another same-y cave with the same damn enemies and really nothing else going for it except a bubbulfrog and MAYBE the start of a new shrine quest. and likewise, when you see a shrine, you KNOW you’re going in for your umpteenth ultrahand/rewind/ascend puzzle to get yet another shrine orb. like…totk’s approach to caves and puzzles and shrines take away any surprise that you might have had exploring its vast yet uninteresting overworld (how many times am i gonna say this in this rant lol).

and like god i distinctively remember this one part in the death mountain area where i was trying to reach goron city and i saw a shrine not too far—as in, i didn’t have to use the purah pad to be able to see it. so there i go, walking/running towards the shrine because what else is there to do in-between the rito and goron villages except hunt for shrines along the way. and it was so fucking frustrating because i swear i was just walking straight towards the shrine with nothing else in between. no cool music like in other open world games that immerse you with its beautiful music (see minecraft, horizon, sonic frontiers, xenoblade x), aboslutely no enemies, no interesting or beautiful terrain, just me walking like an idiot bored out of my mind listening to link’s clunky armor just to get to the shrine, complete it, and have to run all the way back to where i was since the shrine was the OPPOSITE direction of goron village.

and like, this empty and uninspiring overworld is what nintendo took 6 years to develop? “oh look there’s naming references to past zelda games teehee!! ruto lake! forest of time! something referencing the lokomos!!” but it’s like. you pass those landmarks without even realizing it because there is, most of the time, nothing worthwhile to do there despite the cool throwback name. at least with MM, which reused a lot of the same assets as OoT, the world was different and unique and interesting with lots of more background to similar-looking characters we saw in OoT (the cucco lady vs anju, for example). i felt like such a fool the first night playing totk because i seriously thought that this might be the MM of Botw—i hated (still do) botw but thought hey, now that they have the engine and the assets down, maybe they can now focusing on making the world and its characters and story more interesting and fleshed out! instead we just get the same korok seed BS, the same shrine BS that, although mildly amusing at first, gets boring and uninteresting fast as you explore your 73rd shrine and see the 46th korok hiding place.

and you might think “well dany of COURSE things are going to get repetitive! it’s an open world game and they can’t fill it with new and exciting content all throughout!!” ok then don’t make your overworld so fucking huge?? like WHY are these developers so hellbent on gloating about having “one of the biggest open-worlds” ever if you’re just going to be copy-pasting the same shit over and over with nothing interesting in between? you really think that what makes an overworld interesting is to see the same caves, the same damn bokoblin enemy camps, the same “uwu i need to reach my friend!” korok quests, the same “waaah i need to keep this postsign of the construction boss up in place and i can’t leave until i do!” BS, the same taluses/hinoxes, the same BOSSES all over the map?? yeah it was cool seeing the first gleeock out in the wild, i was like wow!! that’s amazing, i wonder if there will be different bosses roaming around like that? and then i saw that, nope! wrong again, dany! yet another cool idea beaten to death by just copy pasting the same enemy (with different elemental powers of course so as to not make it TOO obvious!) all over the goddamn map.

SPEAKING of copy-pasting the same things instead of having a boss or enemy or cave be truly unique, another thing that drove me insane was the mazes that you find in the overworld. i think i only did the one in the upper right, but there’s at least one other in the upper left of the corner. i thought it was a cool idea so i traversed through the (truth be told) rather boring maze just activating switches, which wasn’t really that interesting or challenging, it was just mildly frustrating and confusing navigating through it. and i fought i think a construct III at the end? whatever, you see those all over the sky as well. and what i got as a reward for navigating through the two mazes (the one in hyrule, and the one in the sky) was…one part of oot ganondorf’s outfits. like, ok, great, whatever, but before heading off to the final boss towards the end of the game i was like “well let me go do that other maze and see what that’s all about” but then i stopped myself and said, you know what, it’s probably gonna be the same BS, going through yet another non-engaging maze doing an uninteresting and confusing puzzle just to get either a weapon that calls back to an older game or another piece of oot ganondorf’s outfit. and i was like HMMMM yeah that doesn’t sound appealing or fun at all. SKIP!!!

Breath of the Wild wants you to grind and do repetitive shit all day. Fighting the same things over and over in a massive world isn’t fun, it really isn’t.

like i’m sorry if i’m just predictable and want something more entertaining to keep me interested in the world as i explore along instead of the same repetitive nonsense and then praise nintendo for giving us such a huge overworld for it. people might have complained about tww’s vast ocean but at least it gave us one of the most beautiful overworld themes to date and it made sense STORY-wise (as in, there’s sea everywhere and little islands in between because of the flooding of hyrule). here, and sorry to beat this point to the death but i just cannot emphasize enough how terrible of an experience it was for me to explore the overworld, because it’s just huge, boring, and repetitive for no reason.

and the worst part is, i couldn’t even ride my horse if i wanted to (which would have made exploring this forsaken world less annoying) because for some unknown reason, nintendo has decided that in these past two games, you can’t call for your horse from wherever you are. sure, you can BOARD your horse from the kakariko stable even if you left it far off in the rito village, that’s no problem! but calling your horse from wherever you want? no no that’s too unrealistic!

so no, i don’t care that you can climb every mountain in this game (to find what, another korok seed? lol). that’s not what makes exploration fun for me in a videogame. if i climb a mountain and then find a UNIQUE boss or a UNIQUE cave or a UNIQUE sidequest? now that’s cool. here? just copy-pasting away!

Climbing and watching the stamina bar is not fun, and it’s downright annoying when it begins to rain. Call it a mechanic or whatever you want but it’s not fun. It feels like they added a ton of mountain ranges just to pad the game length and justify a stamina meter when flatter land would have been just as acceptable.

i’d rather sail tww’s ocean or ride around ST’s tracks any day of the week. fucking NEXT!

the shrines.

like i mentioned at the beginning, i did my fair share of looking for and completing shrines because i wanted to get a fair sense of just all that this “new” game had to offer. sure, the first 10 or so are fun and interesting because you are learning to use the new arm powers. oh you want me to combine these two things with ultrahand to complete the shrine? cool! let me do that! oh ok, now you want me to rewind time on this object? omg neat! oh wow, now i have to be aware of my surroundings and use ascend here! cool! and then you do that again, and again, and again, and again, and again again again again until you’re on your 100th shrine and it’s like oh god PLEASE give me something new:

Shrine puzzles are all about the same level of difficulty, as are all the Divine Beasts and their bosses. Again, since they want to let you go anywhere, there is no progression of difficulty in either the bosses or puzzles. You do not learn new things and compound them as the game goes on […] You just do the same things with the same runes over and over. […] All have the exact same aesthetic, same music, and same lack of connection to game’s world. But rather than 120, there are actually only 80. There are 20 “Blessing” shrines which nine out of ten times give you some generic weapon you probably already have, accessed by completing puzzles of sorts outside the shrine to unlock them. Those “puzzles” are often just putting balls in holes, shooting an arrow at something, or fetch quests, though.

putting aside the number of shrines mentioned above (since they vary in totk), it’s like, that’s literally it. unlike previous zelda games, where maybe you’d enter a cave and wouldn’t have the necessary item to complete its puzzle, here, there’s no sense of progression because the game already gives you everything you need to explore ITS ENTIRE OVERWORLD AND ALL ITS SHRINES right from the beginning. and some people might like that, but it’s definitely not for me. because like, after you get all your arm powers, everything just stays exactly the fucking same through the rest of the damn game:

There is never a moment of “I need to comeback here later” which sounds convenient but it takes away from the sense of progression and getting stronger that this game and its fans claim it has. There is no excitement of getting a new mask, new song, boomerang, bottle, or equipment item that lets me do more. No matter where you go, you know you will be sufficiently equipped, and that takes the thrill out of it.

and i feel like that’s exactly one of the issues that i have with the concept of shrines in this game. it’s just the same types of puzzles with the same 4 powers tens of times until you complete them all and you can maybe recall 2 or 3 that you really liked and were like “huh ok that was cool” and move on. truly revolutionary for a game. and i just HATE that all pieces of heart/stamina currency is restricted to ONLY shrines because, once again, that leaves no variety or surprises in the game! you know completing a sidequest won’t yield a piece of heart or a stamina vessel ‘cus that’s all shrines, same for minigames or caves, which was half the fun of doing those things in previous games!! but no, once you find a type of SOMETHING in this game (a cave, a well, a shrine), you bet your ass that THAT same design is all you’ll ever see for the rest of the game.

shrines in this game did introduce a new type which is when they strip you of all of your equipment and only give you basic weapons that you have to use to get through the bunch of constructs that you have to fight inside. and yes, that was cool for the first couple of times, but i swear after my third one i was once again with the feeling of “oh god not THIS again??”. god i just feel like i’m just repeating the same issues i had with this game over and over again: repetition repetition repetition. this game just loves damn repeating itself!!! anyway, moving on…

99% of the side quests and NPCs.

this was a problem i had with botw and i don’t know why i’m surprised that totk did absolutely nothing to fix the issue of uninteresting, unengaging sidequests. remember in SS with the whole Peatrice-falling-in-love-with-you thing? or those sidequests in TWW with the rich and poor girl who at the end switch lifestyles because of circumstances in their lives, and you can help the now-poor Mila come to terms with her new life? or hell, ANY of the MM sidequests and how they actually made you empathize with its characters and actually care a little bit for what would happen to them? here in totk (and in botw) i just don’t feel that connection or need to help NPCs with their mundane problems like i would in previous zelda games:

Breath of Wild has its NPCs, but they are bland and as memorable as my ex-girlfriends’ birthdays. They don’t have unique characteristics, designs, or problems. Looking like they were born out of some generator rather than a human, they send you on shallow fetch quests. Collect 55 rushrooms. Tame that horse. The rewards are almost always just rupees, ingredients, or more generic breakable weapons.

i said 99% of the side quests and NPCs because i think the only one i actually cared for (but was actually tedious towards the end…) was rebuilding that lurelin village because the thought of having your home destroyed by “pirates” (aka bokoblins because god forbid this game have to create more unique enemies) was a bit too much for my heart to take. but i mean, other than that? who cares. oh that guy in hateno village has a creepy crush on that girl sweeping the front of the store? whatever. that whole elections thing in hateno village? yawn. some rito girl wants to cook some new recipe? i don’t know her. there’s really nothing much else i can say about NPCs or sidequests in this game because i can’t think of anyone else other than that guy who helped rebuild the village that actually made me feel SOMETHING else other than boredom. and like mentioned above, most of the time doing the sidequests isn’t really worth it because there’s no cool rewards like bottles, quiver expansions, pieces of heart, or an upgrade to an item because well, that would be taking away from the shrines-and-some-depths-treasure-chests-can-only-give-you-worthwhile-rewards thing from this game, huh?

overall, the villages in this game just feel empty and void of any interesting and captivating NPCs/sidequests that make me want to learn more about their lives. despite hateno village being the biggest village (i think) we’ve seen in a zelda game yet, i just…don’t really care for it or its people. same with kakariko village and zora’s domain, the latter of which just feels so big but just so fucking hollow and honestly boring to explore. tww’s windfall island just had tons of life and compelling characters of which i may not remember their names, but sure as hell remember their small but memorable sidequests. playing cupid between that guy that would walk around windfall and the girl with the orange dress is infinitely much more interesting than any of the so-called sidequests i did in hateno village.

the lack of enemy variety.

it’s kind of insane to me how, given that nintendo had about 5+ years to develop this game, they had a pretty good chance to develop new and interesting enemies. this was a problem i had with botw: fighting the same damn enemies just got old very damn fast. let’s see how many enemies (NOT including varieties, i don’t care that a fire keese is different than an ice keese, and also not mini bosses like hinoxes) botw had according to the zelda wiki: bokoblins, chuchus, keese, lizalfos, lynels, moblins, wizzrobes, yigas, pebblits, guardian scouts, guardians, guardian skywatcher, and…guardian turret i guess. that’s 13 enemies for a game that boasts to have such a huge and unique overworld. THRITEEN types of enemies. just thirteen. compared to Xenoblade 1, which has 30+ types of enemies (i stopped counting really), and horizon zero dawn, which has 24 types of unique machines.

now let’s see how many enemies totk has! there’s bokoblins, boss bokoblins, chuchus, constructs, evermeans, horriblins, keese, like likes, lizalfos, lynels, moblins, wizzrobes, aerocuda, pebblits, gibdos, gloom spawns, little frox, moth gibdo, and…yigas. 19 enemies, 6 more than its predecessor. just, wow, even now just looking at the numbers, the variety in this game is ABYSMAL considering that most of the time in the overworld you run in bokoblins, moblins, and lizalfos like 80% of the time. in caves, most of the time it’s just horroblins but really, the strategy to fight them all is exactly the same except for lynels, like likes, and gibdos, which you have to be more careful with. but really, it’s like…that’s all you could come up with for this huge overworld? i don’t know about other folks but for me, i eventually stopped fighting enemies because it just wasn’t worth it with how this game handles weapons and their durability:

But you quickly stop raiding camps and just avoid enemies in general, just as you slowly lose interest in exploring every ruin, because there is no suitable reward. You expend your breakable weapons, arrows, and food fighting easy enemies to get more breakable weapons; likely weaker than the ones you broke to get to it.

i already had more-than-enough strong enemy spoils to fuse with my weapons, i don’t need to fight my umpteenth silver bokoblin just to get another one of its stupid-looking horns to attach to my weapon and somehow make it stronger (and stupider). and also like, fighting them just got so boring after a while. sure, it’s a bit scary and intimidating fighting moblins when you only have 5 hearts and weak weapons, but eventually you get a two-handed weapon and all you have to do is just constantly whack away at your moblin/horriblin/bokoblin/lizalfos so that you constantly knock them down and don’t allow them to get back up cus it’s not like they have much variety in their attacks either. such thrilling combat if you ask me!! and the way that this game handles difficulty is just so stupid: making enemies “damage sponges” so that instead of 5 hits, now it takes 15 hits to kill a moblin in the same repetitive way—whack them away so that they can’t get up. how is this fun and interesting?

i fought a black lynel once in the wild and that was cool, but then i just never fought another one again because in my opinion the rewards for killing a lynel just aren’t really worth it. you break a couple of your weapons just to get some of its spoils and it’s like, eh, i’ll pass. a silver bokoblin’s horn might not be as strong but it’s not like it makes a HUGE difference in this game whether i have a silver bokoblin horn or a lynel horn. who cares!

the game of course then wanted me to fight a silver lynel on the way to kill ganondorf and i was like hell no, i don’t want to dodge the same moves over and over again and do the same flurry attacks over and over and over just like i did with the black lynel, except now i get to do it MORE times because of damage sponges! how is that exciting or interesting? at least give stronger enemies more variety in their attacks instead of making my hand hurt from just doing the same repetitive (there’s that word again) moves until it dies.

Speaking of Hinoxes and Stone Taluses, during my first encounter I was delighted to have a random mini-boss-like fight out in the open, thinking it was the only one. Then I quickly realized they’re copy and pasted all over the map. I was expecting to see unique mini-bosses or fights in certain locations, but that wouldn’t be possible when they have the loot system requiring you grind enemies over and over to upgrade numerical stats on armor. 

already touched on the point made above a little bit but just had to mention it here as well because as i said, this game takes away any sort of unique aspect to it by beating it to death via copy pasting enemies, mini bosses, and bosses all over its map. you can’t imagine the disappointment i felt when i learned that colgera, aka a boss i really loved fighting at the wind temple, was found again in the depths. and again. i at least fought it three times throughout the game, not sure if it appears more times but when i saw it the second time i was like holy shit, this again?? really? any memory of having such a thrill of fighting it for the first time was quickly erased realizing nintendo just can’t keep something unique in this game. same thing with phantom ganon—encountering it for the first time was cool and intimidating. by the time i rescued the deku tree i was just sick to death of it, so realizing i had to fight it YET AGAIN!!!! at hyrule castle with the whole fake zelda business was just almost unbearable. (man, typing this whole rant out is making me realize just how many repetitive and monotonous aspects there are to this game!!!! and i hate that i keep using that word but what else is there to describe the constant sludge of same same same same this game kept throwing at my face??)

combat gets repetitive very fast.

look, i mentioned it before but i don’t play zelda to custom make doohickeys that can kill enemies. i’m old fashioned and honestly not creative enough (minecraft building wasn’t for me, i just liked to explore), so i like my hand-to-hand combat, with an arrow or two in between. i’ve already mentioned this in the previous section but the combat in this game just gets so repetitive despite the many weapons this game tries to throw at your face. i mean really when you think about it you have three kinds of weapons: your typical sword, the two-handed sword, and the spear. and i guess the bow? (oh and the wands but i’m more referring to the classic combat weapons) but like, for hand-to-hand combat, your overall strategy doesn’t change regardless of the type of weapon you have, which is just wack away as many times as you can, and do some flurry attacks for the stronger enemies like lynels and uh. hmmm. yeah. why not introduce different attack mechanics depending on the type of weapon you are building, like the horizon series does with the many weapon types it introduces in the games?

i’m not saying previous zelda games’ combat was the most exciting or varied, but at least with tww, the special parry attack attack would VARY by either doing a helm splitter or a back slice. but here in botw/totk it’s like…your special sword attacks consist of your classic spin attack and the flurry attack, which just stays (yet again) constant throughout the game. no upgrades like with the hurricane spin or the great spin. with tp and even tmc you had your hidden skills you could learn to vary your sword attacks and even tp gives you a special finishing attack (the ending blow, and actually SS had this too now that i remember!), but these past two zelda games just have failed to give much flavor in the sword techniques you can use. which is kind of stupid when you think about it cus this link is supposed to have been trained in sword combat while tww link is some kid from an island and tp link is just some guy raised in a ranch. i don’t know if this is the game trying to make itself seem more difficult by having removed these types of different sword skills because like, why can’t i side step and do a back slice like in tp? or ANYTHING ELSE other than a damn flurry attack which, if you’re not good at dodging, then good luck with that shit. flurry attacking over and over again just gets old very fast and makes those sponge enemies even more of a chore to fight when i can’t add any flavor to my sword attacks. just yet another thing in the game that i feel severely pales in comparison to past zelda games.

the weapon durability.

speaking of combat variety…i have no idea why i thought weapon durability would go away in totk. do people really like having breakable weapons? it was something i absolutely hated in botw and well, it’s back and HOPEFULLY not here to stay as a staple of new zelda games!

I’m beating a dead horse here, but breakable weapons is not a fun concept at all. It’s tedious and makes finding and collecting new weapons completely moot because “well I’ll be able to use this for a few seconds til it breaks.”  If you want more weapons while keeping the thrill of finding them alive but not having a stronger one that makes others obsolete, then make a bunch of non-breakable weapons that are used differently and better in certain situations than others.

to piggyback on that last point, that sort of matches with what i was saying earlier about having different attack mechanics depending on the weapon that you’re using. i don’t know why the hell we need to have breakable weapons be a thing in this game. is it just to fill the overworld with more treasure chests of weapons you can find like the biggoron’s sword so you can be like “oh, thanks for this, it will break in a couple of hits and then i’ll lose it forever”? having the master sword “lose” its power after certain hits is so damn stupid too. sure zelda roamed the skies as a dragon for hundreds of years to power up the master sword but it still becomes unusable after wacking it against a moblin for a bit too long. this game just REALLY wants you to spend all your time running around and fighting the same enemies over and over again so you can get new weapons/stupid shit to fuse to them to make this game longer than it really is.

the music overall.

anyone who knows me even just a little bit knows how much i love video game music. i’ll even listen to music from games i haven’t even played, and i even cry of just pure joy at listening to some of the video game music out there. but oh god. just thinking about traversing the overworld in this game with just hearing link’s footsteps and the clunky armor is enough to make me go insane. why can’t we have good overworld music in zelda games anymore? as mentioned above, at least when i had to sail around tww’s ocean or ride around st’s tracks, it gave me some damn good music to listen to that, frankly, never got old (st’s overworld theme is still one of my ultimate faves in the series). and it’s not just hyrule, but the sky and the depths have this same problem as well: absolutely nothing but silence or (in the depth’s case) random creepy music from time to time. as if the overworld itself isn’t boring enough, they just had to make its “music” dull and lackluster and honestly non-memorable. when i think of exploring hyrule in TP i think of that badass orchestra-like music playing while i’m riding around with epona. when i think of exploring hyrule/the sky/the depths in totk i think of absolutely nothing but emptiness and boredom, music-wise. SIGH!

but if the overworld wasn’t bad enough, i feel like the locations themselves didn’t…really offer much in terms music that i’d personally want to save in my music collection. there were some exceptions, of course: hateno village (but really it’s just the same music as in botw), dragon head island (really chill music, love it), and…i think the lookout landing had some decent music, but honestly i don’t remember it well enough lmao. boss-wise, sure, the wind temple boss fight music was REALLY cool (dragon roost island sample in there? sign me the fuck up), and the build up as to when you’re going down to face ganondorf was also cool, but…again, for a game THIS damn huge, i’d expect more memorable music, like with the horizon series, minecraft, or xenoblade 1/X. idk, i just am not impressed with the music available in this game given how many iconic songs the zelda games have been in the past. like kakariko village’s theme song in this game is, imo, a disgrace. idk why they couldn’t have adjusted the classic kakariko village theme song to fit the new “aesthetic” they were going for with the sheikah. they did it in tww (where it’s a lively town) and they did it in tp (now in like a old wild west town kind of thing), why couldn’t they do it in botw/totk? ugh, just….so lame and bland.

the depths.

the problem i have with the depths is pretty much the same problems i had with the hyrule overworld except make it ten times worse and also now it’s completely dark. “but omg isn’t it cool how the depths mirror the surface overworld??” yeah i don’t really care, alttp already did that and it didn’t bore me to tears exploring the dark world. seriously, i fucking dreaded going to the depths because if the lack of new and interesting things to do on the surface is bad, then in the depths it’s just so much worse. at least in the surface you can use your horse in some areas to make it go a bit faster, but here? all on foot, baby. imagine exploring the surface all on foot, with barely ANY interesting landmarks, with the same 5 or so enemies, all the damn time, and it’s dark…can’t think of anything worse, game-design wise lmao. seriously, the depths were just idk another attempt to make this game’s overworld seem a lot bigger than it is but god it was just so damn fucking boring to me. i don’t care about the abandoned mines, or the springs, or…well, what else was there? just yet another treasure chest with yet another PART of an outfit? no thanks!!

i specifically remember that getting one part of the TP outfit was such a pain in the ass to get because it’s in that spiral part on the eastern side of the map except well it’s in the depths. it was literally just me running for like 5 minutes straight around this spiral while running past a bunch of bokoblins and other enemies because lmao i don’t want to fight the same damn enemy over and over again as i’m trying to get to the end of this spiral which is actually just part of some abandoned mines with no lore or anything else interesting in it that would make it memorable. and of course what’s at the end of it all? a throwback outfit so that you can think it was worth it to run like an idiot for 5 minutes straight. finding a quiver upgrade or an empty bottle would have felt more rewarding than just yet another outfit that i won’t be bothering to upgrade because upgrades in this game are so damn tedious.

99% of the islands.

i feel like a broken record here so i’ll keep this section short since my issues with the islands are similar to the issues i have with the shrines and the overworld and the caves except now they’re in the sky. other than dragon-head island and the one where you have to like move mirrors so that light shines in certain directions, the sky islands were stale and just a big whatever. i don’t know what else to say that i haven’t already beaten to death here except that the islands in tww are more interesting and rewarding to explore than the sky islands in totk. just would absolutely bore me to tears fighting my nth construct or doing the nth take-this-crystal-to-reveal-a-shrine quest next!

the temples.

again, my problems with the temples are very similar to that of shrines, ‘cus i mean they actually just feel like glorified shrines, but at least in totk they did a better job at having each temple have a different design and feel to it instead of botw where just every beast felt the fucking same (i honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the beast dungeons apart from one another). regardless, i don’t know about you guys but man do i sure as hell miss traditional zelda temples. to quote a person i follow who recently talked about their grievences with botw (waywardsalt):

Older zelda games’ dungeons being tied to their respective items is a big part- to me- of what makes those dungeons so good. […] The dungeons in past Zelda games are practically complex tutorials on how you can use your new items. […] And then you must then use that item to defeat that dungeon’s boss, and you usually have no chance of beating that boss if you don’t make use of the dungeon’s associated item. It’s like a final test for the item, seeing if you know how it works enough to complete the dungeon and use it against a boss’s weaknesses.

much like the beasts in botw, you get to a temple here and they immediately mark the spots of where you have to go. some are more straightforward and simplistic (the water temple) than others (the fire temple—which i think is the best of the four), but they all amount to the same thing: all of the puzzles are just a variation of yet another ultrahand object fusion, or if we get a little bit crazy, you have to use ascend throughout the temple. instead of giving you a mirror shield, the lightning temple just makes you use the ultrahand to move around mirrors to solve puzzles. which was cool at first (who doesn’t love mirror puzzles?), but the temple felt way too damn short compared to other mirror-heavy temples (spirit temple from oot and earth temple from tww), and moving around a mirror that’s laying in the room in plain sight just doesn’t have quite the same zelda feel of “i’ve fought my way through this temple, beat the miniboss, and NOW i finally have a mirror shield i can use to solve the puzzles i had been seeing previously!” ‘cus idk i do miss having that bit sense of progression that dungeon items would add: i DO miss stumbling upon a locked door in a temple and searching everywhere for a key to unlock it, or wondering “wow, i have to get up there, but i think i’m missing the temple item in order to advance, i guess i’ll have to come back here after defeating the miniboss.” instead here it’s just like, ok, i’m in the flashing dot room, what fan/cart/rocket/wing combination do they want me to build yet again??

i always felt like temples were supposed to be a big part of zelda games but, again, other than the fire temple, i felt like the temples here were rather fast to beat, with the water temple just being the worst offender. i mean they can’t all be winners, but considering this game ONLY has FOUR temples, you’d think they’d idk be a bit longer or more difficult to complete like in majora’s mask? there is barely any complexity in navigating temples like with MM’s snowhead temple or tww’s wind temple—the fire temple was the only one that did anything interesting with its navigation and the others were just so fucking flat, much like the beasts in botw. did the zelda team lose its main dungeon designer or something? even majora’s mask’s pirate fortress—a MINI dungeon—was more fun and interesting to navigate than THE fucking water temple in totk. what a joke!!!

the way the story gets told.

i won’t talk about my grievances with the story details themselves, there’s plenty of people who have rightly criticized how simplistic it is and how it doesn’t really make you empathize with ANY of its characters (except, in my opinion, princess zelda): not sorry but i actually laughed when ganondorf killed sonia lol, especially with them being like HA! your fake zelda ways can’t trick us!!! and then WHAM out comes ganondorf and fucking obliterates sonia like lol ok bye girl!!! i hardly knew you and the game gave me no incentive to care about you like i would with medli in tww or grandma impa in ss so your death means nothing to me! oh whoops i need to stop talking about the “story” and its “characters” before i get carried away!

anyway! i absolutely despised how botw told its bare-bones “story” through memories you had to find in the overworld, so can you imagine my utter disappointment when totk has decided to ONCE AGAIN tell its story the same damn way?? i get that they’re going for an open world aspect but my god, some fucking linearity won’t fucking kill you nintendo. plenty of open world games are STILL very much open world while forcing some linearity when trying to tell its story—horizon forbidden west and xenoblade x come to mind. these games still let you explore much of its world as freely as you want while making you progress through its story and make you care about its characters and their purpose along the way. but here with totk i feel no connection to the world or its people—kakariko village used to be such an important place in zelda games and i honestly couldn’t tell you the name of ONE interesting or appealing character from that village like renado in TP or Mila from TWW (what’s the name of that girl that took over from impa? even fucking impa is just another afterthought in this damn game). shit, i’m getting sidetracked again, but god there is just so many things to talk about how poor of a job totk does in making you FEEL something in its damn empty overworld but i got other shit to do and this is already way too damn long (if you’ve made it this far i could kiss you!!!!)

anyway anyway! my main problem with the way that the “story” gets told is that you can collect the memory that explains the bit about fake zelda way early in the game and you’re still running around visiting towns with the new sages being like “omg princess zelda was here and she tried to kill us!! :(“ like, link what the fuck you clearly just saw a memory that zelda is in the past (or has become a dragon if you went and hunted down all the memories right away) and there was a fake zelda back then, SPEAK UP and TELL these people something!!! same thing with those sidequests with penn or whatever, you’re over here hunting down clues about the missing princess, but you already know where she is!! she’s in the past!! the zelda that people have been seeing is more than likely fake!!! she’s a dragon!! but no, because nintendo for some reason couldn’t figure out how to tell an engaging and interesting story while also having an open world (they had 6 years!!!), you have to sit like an idiot as these people talk to you about fake zelda apparitions while you’re just like “gee i wonder what THAT could be!!”

because i found dragonhead island + the fifth sage way before my fight with phantom ganon, one of my friends told me that once you beat him, you can go back to kakariko village and tell people that the zelda that prohibited access to the ring ruins is fake so that they’ll let you explore them and eventually lead you to dragonhead island. but see, i never had to do that so instead i was just frustrated at the game design that i can’t SPEAK UP about fake zelda because the game decided that this is the one time they want some linearity and you won’t be able to say anything about the fake zelda until you defeat her. instead of like, hey, let’s warn the citizens of hyrule that there’s a fake zelda running around and to not trust her?? hello?? just another missed opportunity of having this game somewhat connect you to its characters and surroundings.

likewise with the master sword. i got the master sword before i saw the final tear + learned of the sacrifice zelda had to make, so i was kinda mad cus i feel like the emotional impact of getting the master sword from the white dragon would have been MUCH MORE greater if the game would have FORCED me to see the final tear before trying to retrieve the master sword. so it’s just like, ugh. if i have to play another zelda game that does such a shitty job at telling its story and making compelling characters that evoke empathy and compassion, i will seriously not know what to do with myself. like a mutual (shoutout be-gay-do-crimes) recently mentioned: loneliness isn’t Zelda!!

and i know people have complained about this but like, sitting through the same damn cutscene after you beat the temple bosses was YET AGAIN nintendo showing that they don’t know how to keep things interesting and just repeat the same BS over and over again. why not have each old sage, which of course are just another afterthought in this game’s sea of uninteresting NPCs, add on something new from its POV so we literally don’t have to sit through the exact same story being told and have absolutely no unique perspective from the old sage? is it really too much to ask for a bit of variety for a game that reused a lot of assets from its previous game and had so many years in development? where are the good story writers from past zelda games??

link’s lack of emotions.

i have a full post where i talk about botw link’s lack of emotions and why it was such a disappointment going from tww/tp/ss to….that, so i won’t get too much into this here ‘cus i already wrote another thesis-long post about that that you can find. people defend totk link saying “but his micro expressions! omg!!! you’re OBVIOUSLY not paying attention!!” like ok lmao keep being happy you’re fed crumbs. botw/totk link’s emotions are a fucking joke when you compare to previous zelda games, even oot link showed relief and a smile at zelda when they thought they had killed ganondorf. totk link? exists in a vacuum. to quote waywardsalt again:

the blank stare and limited emoting worked in botw because… there’s a given reason for his lack of outward emotion in the past, plus he has no memory in the present. it makes sense. but this time around, he’s gotten memories in the years between this and the last game, but he just feels like a background character in most of the story beats.

like i’m sorry if i expect link to at least show a fucking SMILE at zelda once she says “link, i’m home!” GIVEN that he knows the incredibly weighted decision that zelda took in becoming a dragon and roam its skies for hundreds of years in order to give link and the people of hyrule some hope that evil will be defeated once again. this is the same girl that spent 100 years keeping calamity ganon at bay waiting for YOU to heal and wake up. and there’s absolutely no emotional payback from link to us the player or zelda now that we know she won’t spent eternity as a dragon? give me a break! botw tried to explain it in zelda’s diary saying that “oh link doesn’t like showing emotion because he feels he has so much responsibility on his shoulder so he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s feeling” but like, girl he’s not made of stone?? 

imagine if we had gotten a fraction of ss link’s expressions with totk link when he’s reaching out to zelda as she’s falling again after turning back into a human just like ss link did when he tried to catch zelda from falling to the surface. or respond to totk zelda’s “i’m home!” with the same smile that tp link gave to midna when he saw his friend was safe after the light spirits bring her back. it’s just ugh so fucking frustrating looking back at past links and how expressive they were and with totk we’re supposed to cheer that he has microexpressions and praise nintendo for making link such an emotionally-complex character through crumbs. it just makes the totk fanart of link and zelda even funnier considering how non-responsive link is to anything involving zelda. botw/totk zelda has gone through so much shit emotionally to just be talking to a wall. just whatever.

miscellaneous questionable gameplay decisions.

why can’t i call my horse from wherever i am in the overworld like i could in oot/mm/tp. this game tries to be sooo realistic with its slipping from walls if it’s raining or striking you with thunder if you have metallic weapons or well OF COURSE your horse can’t hear you whistling from where you are 10 thousand feet away! but sure i can dive from great heights and not die and i can climb mountains like spiderman and swim up waterfalls with a special shirt (but careful ‘cus this same shirt will make you drown with regular horizontal swimming!) and sure it’s fine for the gerudo to run through the desert in heels. like…make it make sense lol.

and why is it such an odyssey to use a sage’s ability. why do i have to chase them down in a chaotic battle for me to use riju’s ability. why aren’t there shortcut buttons for me to do this. who thought this was a good idea?

why is there no shortcut or a menu where i can easily switch back and forth between my most-used outfits? this was especially annoying in the desert when during the night it’d be freezing cold, so there i go to put on the rito pants and shirt. ah but it’s afternoon again so open up the menu and now switch to the gerudo head gear so you don’t die of heatstroke. like, there’s all these outfit options and this game makes it such a pain to quickly pick my most-used outfits, especially considering that each outfit consists of three parts so you have to be switching back and forth between whatever is currently needed. it’s why i never even bothered to get the climbing outfit because i sure as hell didn’t want to be switching back and forth between THAT and my green tunic just so i can climb this game’s dull mountains. there’s millions types of outfits and upgrading them just give you defense stats. to quote the destructoid article:

 OK, I can swim up a waterfall, but why not let me swim like a Zora as you could in Majora’s Mask? How about on top of just climbing faster, upgrading the climbing gear lets me climb in the rain without slipping? How about at least giving me a hotkey or shortcut to quickly change outfits on the fly instead of going through the menu every five seconds? Those would be things worth upgrading for, not just numerical defensive stats.

but of course you can’t use the same gear for climbing faster AND not allowing you to slip—why, what else would they fill the overworld with if not yet another super specific outfit?

the fusing ability was just a big whatever to me. like, just give me stronger weapons since that’s what i would end up doing 95% of the time with the fuse ability. i don’t care about fusing an ugly-ass looking bokoblin horn to my weapons to make them stronger, or putting a mushroom or whatever on my shield. oh i can fuse fruits and keese eyes and bomb flowers to make fire/ice/light/bomb arrows? very revolutionary.

eventually….ultrahand.

i won’t make this long since i’ve already talked about how i don’t play zelda games for customizations or being able to make my own house or whatever else this game tried to fit into it in a vain attempt to make the game seem bigger than it actually is. sure the ultrahand stuff is cool for the first few hours of the game and your first few shrines, but just like everything else that i’ve talked about on this thesis-long rant, it just got boring and monotonous and uninteresting to me. i honestly went through maybe 70% of the game with just the first zonai battery-thingy that you get from the start since i never really felt the need to upgrade it. ultrahand and its weird-ass puzzles just don’t feel zelda to me, i miss items like the hookshot/clawshots, the boomerang to stun enemies, the whip, the sand wand, the hammer, like…i don’t care that i can make machines that can obliterate enemy camps in an instant, it’s not like enemies are that hard in this game once you get to a certain point—i don’t need ultrahand BS for it. good for the people that are having fun with and making all sorts of contraptions, and yes in a game programming sense it is definitely cool and a marvel to think about, but……idk it just wasn’t for me and the game leaned too heavily on it for my liking. doing the same types of puzzles with carts/rockets/fans over and over again in shrines in the depths in the sky in the temples in the overworld just made me hate the ultrahand mechanic. at least with the ascend ability i felt like it wasn’t as overused as ultrahand but well i guess nintendo really wanted to show off its fancy new toy and say see!! this was worth the 70 dollars!!

—————

whew, well, there’s definitely more things i could talk about in regards to why this game is such a huge letdown for me and one of the worst ZELDA games i’ve had the displeasure to play, but i think i’ll stop here for my own sanity. if there’s one thing i’m grateful for this game is that it made me appreciate older zelda games so much more: i have this huge urge to play through tww and st again, hell even through ocarina of time too even though i’ve beaten that game EASILY over 80 times. i also had a lot of fun messaging back and forth with my buddy downpourstringloop as we would play through the game and exchange our thoughts on it (reminded me of our SS days!), so that was really cool as well. just like with botw, i definitely will not be playing through this game again as i would always do with pretty much all other zelda games (man i remember as soon as i beat ST i immediately started a new run for it because it was just so damn great). it just wasn’t fun for me and i don’t want to wade through 90+ hours of BS just to replay 10 hours of somewhat good moments.

so now that i’ve mostly poured out all most of my thoughts on this game, i hope that totk will not be taking up more of time and make me want to go insane at thinking of all the missed opportunities that nintendo had with this game coming from botw. i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: i really hope the next zelda game isn’t in this same lackluster open world format and that nintendo can put back a little bit of the magic that made zelda games great and a joy to replay through. but unfortunately for me, people everywhere love botw/totk to death, so it looks like i will just have to ride it out and wait patiently for this zelda open world hype train to die. maybe then we’ll once again get interesting temples, new unique dungeon items, compelling characters and NPCs, engaging sidequests with worthwhile rewards, fun minigames that are rewarding to complete, gameplay that doesn't feel repetitive and beaten to death, and a story that tugs at my heart like SS or ST did.

PEACE OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ✌️

#junk #totk #totk criticism #legend of zelda #zelda #tears of the kingdom #as a long-time zelda fan i just had to get this all out off my chest #it's no surprise my neighbor and i spent over 4 hours talking about this game lol #THE DEED IS DONE i can finally put it to rest #not tagging anyone mentioned in the post cus idk this is just a personal rant #if i thought my xc3 post was long....lol

[2goldensnitches]

I mean, it'd be equally easy to say you're being tone deaf for posting about hamas while gaza is being bombarded. but that's ridiculous because posting isn't activism nor does it reflect the whole of people's opinions on something? it's also easy to forget on tumblr but what western politicians are actually doing is backing collective punishment on the citizens of gaza while rightfully condemning hamas, so it might seem more pertinent to address that double standard. also Michael Eisen is jewish and it's entirely possible that he privately mourned for what happened

I'm not asking you, personally, to account for his being fired, just saying that if you make a blanket statement about people facing professional consequences only for antisemitism, and then are faced with evidence to the contrary, it's weird to double down.

This is an old ask but it’s still garbo, anon, as public figures are of course subject to public scrutiny and his statement was in fact tone deaf by sharing an Onion article and I will never forgive The Onion for mocking Ukraine, ever.

I wonder how on earth I’m "doubling down" but then you come out with logic like "maybe he mourned in private so he has an excuse"

#asks #sorry I don’t like Hamas I guess

[ikram1909]

https://www.tumblr.com/ikram1909/748648867586867200/musiala-called-our-young-players-including-gavi?source=share

I don't remember much about all the comments about Gavi's victory in the Kopa, but I remember how it bothered a lot of people and this only encouraged the hate he was already receiving. Many grown men contributing to the wave of hate he already received and which was never little. My memory is faulty but I don't remember if there were articles about how he felt about all this, anyway, the hate train that Gavi received was always very disproportionate, even worse when older players contributed to it.

Gavi never addresses any of that shit, he just lets the dogs bark all they want and he speaks on the pitch. I think the only rumor he ever talked about was the Onion thing and even then he didn't talk about the cunt personally he just talked about himself. The hate train was actually so huge I don't think I've ever seen anything like it especially for a player his age who didn't even do anything to deserve any of it. Like it wasn't just hate tweets going viral and shit, it literally happened to his face too. Had stadiums chanting abusive words at him specifically and was insulted while trying to speak after his first national team trophy it was ridiculous. And then there were grown ass men making it worse for him for no fucking reason they're horrible people and if there is any justice in this life then they'll pay for it. And that shit kept going for like a year and we've never heard a single thing about it from him all throughout. He just ignored all and played football like nothing was happening. He's genuinely so admirable and his character is so special.