#i still cant believe people like the result of my microwaving. he's too powerful

[chemicalbrew]

[plays zanza the divine on kazoo ominously]

I'll have you know that it's been a whole night and I'm still laughing uncontrollably at how this sounds in my head. I am blessed to have such funny friends fr

(@radellama also sent him in, but he also conceded this is the superior joke, as he should have. Y'all know me so well.)

First impression

I literally went into half a year old DMs for this. You just know this is going to be something else.

Love how this last one is effortlessly dated so you can Immediately Understand the surrounding circumstances... a tragic tale full of yearning and fundamental misunderstandings... because, looking back, I can just see how I had a literal tiny tsundere arc over a character. It's not like I like him or anything... < is going to have him in her head rent-free in about uhh. three months.

I'm struggling to give a more serious answer, because, as we all know, my perception of xb1 is still fucked (more so than usual), so when I try to think back to actually seeing him, all I remember is basically going 👀👀👀👀 and also projecting my own favorite ideas while trying to imagine where things would go next. And naturally, having all that end up in some degree of disappointment (gee I wonder why...). But yeah, nevertheless, I was immediately drawn to how he looked and uh. Sounded... yeah you know what I mean.👍 I just hid it from everyone for a while, including myself.

Impression now

m. man. this guy. He's in the microwave and he also is the microwave. His voice is so ridiculously strong in my head, despite (imo) barely having a chance to digest his character during my cringe fail playthrough, that it's consistently fun to write both serious business and pure shenanigans. He's a poor little meow meow, but he's also here to just fuck shit up. He thinks he's all that, and he is all that, but he will perish anyway. He contains multitudes and is also a fraction of a bigger picture. We would literally have nothing without him, but he ultimately threatens to ruin his very creations without much of a second thought about what they are or mean. He can just do whatever he wants because he's so smart (his job was being smart.), but he's not ever smart enough to get his shit together.

We love to see it. The myriad of contradictions and the rise leading to the inevitable fall that later gets recontextualized... it's so fundamental. Don't look at me. He literally haunts me sometimes.

Favorite moment

At this moment it's honestly easier to pick a moment I wrote myself than something that actually happened. But since I'm not willing to stoop that low... let's just keep it sweet and short and say the experiment as depicted in xb2 specifically. (have you seen those hands? of course you have.) There's honestly not much reason to have a preference for one iteration of it over the other, but I was naturally more receptive to everything it stands for while playing 2, while also being able to recognize it in advance this time around. It was a real oof (affectionate) moment.

If you want something tangentially related, I've been rotating Shulk's 'there are two versions of me' in my brain ever since I bothered to glance at the script x_x

Idea for a story

Listen, there's a reason he's in the microwave. I don't really have anything that resembles an actual story (you would have known otherwise lol), I just want to have more chances to study him like a bug. If I wasn't a coward, I would have probably tried to write more pre-experiment exposition (like I almost did that one time, but it was kinda a glorified vent that should not have turned out as well as it did... like help;...)... since it's obviously important and fun to explore, and you can be so cheeky with it because of the theming of the series (where we used to be, etc, you ALREADY KNOW.)... but nope, it's a bit much for me.

Unpopular opinion

I'm tempted to skip this because I don't really have a grasp on what the 'popular' opinion on him is in the first place - a lot of people either don't really care or are wildly misinterpreting him, and\or being actual weirdos. Because of this weirdness I sometimes feel like half the shit I say about him is unpopular, despite being a pretty good line of thought (if I do say so myself-), but at the same time most of it feels like it's so reasonable that every sane person on Earth would agree. so uh.

This definitely doesn't count as unpopular, but like. months in, I'm still perplexed by how some people seem to think he doesn't look good in DE. That's an objective glow-up, the hell do they mean😭

+ something very obvious, but. You cannot afford to completely ignore what 2 does to the character. I'm not sure how to put it, but just... the connection he as the Architect has to Alrest, a world that, despite best intentions, was so close to sharing the same tragedy he wanted to prevent... and then on the other side, in another world, creations of the same hand having to stand and fight against what their creator brought on himself, being given almost no chance to reason... I don't know, it all makes me froth at the mouth internally. Looking at the two games together just reinforces and strengthens what the first game tried to tell alone... And the second game adds to it in a beautiful way.

Favorite relationship

Must resist the berry jokes.......

Okay, so. This is obviously a byproduct of me projecting and just having a messed up vision\experience\opinion of the game, but also, really, it's just gotta be Shulk. Who doesn't love a vessel for something dangerous and almost otherworldly having to stand up for themselves (while also being dependent, at least initially, on said dangerous being and practically owing him your existence)? And that being further complicated by knowledge of what the ultimate goal of said relationship might have been, received far too late? There's just something so. rotatable about it.

Favorite headcanon

I keep thinking about how we gave him sun-like powers one time because it fits ridiculously well. Like, at this point, if you said any version of him wasn't hot to the touch and almost blinding to the eye, I wouldn't believe you.

Also, I'm still laughing at the idea of him having been an English\bio major. The implications that leaves of him knowing compsci\STEM not because he studied it particularly rigorously, but just because he can... Yeah, it tickles my brain. I like it.

#i need to replay xb1 fr fr fr... i keep biding my time #i still cant believe people like the result of my microwaving. he's too powerful #long post #the divine #zero.txt #uhhh i think that's all.. i dont really want to put this in the xb1 tag