#idk what the exact reset point would be

[herearedragons]

tag the oc that's most likely to get stuck in a time loop and what kind of time loop it would be

#I feel like Kyana has time loop potential but idk what the exact loop would be #maybe the loop is the entirety of DAO and she keeps getting companions killed/locked into their Bad Endings #and the loop only stops when she manages to get them all to survive the Blight #something something she needs to learn to be a good leader and care about others #unsuccessful loops reset via the archdemon killing her (even if the dark ritual was performed) #Selene gets the classic 'your love interest keeps dying and you try to stop it' time loop #to escape the loop she must Let It Happen (and then it turns out it's fine and everyone survives) #Secret gives me the vibe of someone who knows they're in a time loop but has given up on trying to solve it #she's just going through it. trying everything. keeping herself entertained. trying to stay sane #sometimes she clues Varric in on the looping. sometimes she doesn't #actually maybe her time loop rule is that someone else has to save her from it. nothing she does by herself will work #idk what the exact reset point would be #I'm thinking the Arishok fight maybe. or Meredith #I don't think it would go as far as the Fade #also. after writing Homecoming I did have the thought of a time loop story #with Dorian as the one being trapped and trying to prevent Neil from dying/becoming possessed #maybe in his case he's not really trapped. he can stop anytime he wants but he keeps choosing to go back #the reset point is something Solas-related maybe #herearedragons meta #oc: kyana amell #oc: watcher selene #oc: secret hawke #oc: neilar lavellan #oh. actually. Aqun would be pretty fun to put in a time loop #that runs over some part of DAI and/or Trespasser #Adina is his time loop buddy (the person he usually tells about the loop because she immediately believes him) #idk what his reset/escape condition would be though #maybe in his case it's something purely mechanical #like there's no lesson to be learned it's just a magical anomaly he's trapped on #and on a meta level the 'lesson' is accepting that not everything has a Purpose or a Reason

[yourlocalabstraction]

your soul design is so yumilicious I need all the details now on my dinner plate

fr tho I want to know all the soul design lore how did you create such a creature /vpos

OKOKOHHHHHHOKOK BUCKLE IN. YOU’RE GONNA GET THE FULL DESIGN PROCESS

I struggled the most with Soul ngl. I couldn’t really think of anything I could add that would differentiate him from the fanon standard. I’m a lil upset I couldn’t think of something more original, but nonetheless he turned out quite lovely !!!

I started with the color picking. I was very insistent on making everyone’s colors proportional to eachother. The main colors should have (about) the same saturation/brightness, contrasting colors that are the exact opposite hue of the main color, respective black/grey/white values (soul’s ‘grey’ color is more teal bc color theory but yea), shit like that i guess. The final palette is on the right, it’s what I use today.

Soul never got fully fleshed out concept sheets like the other two. I guess my brain just filled in the rest of the gaps without having to draw them. (I apologize for never finishing these btw. It’s been months man. I hope the blorbo doodles in the corner make up for it) The second image was done a lot later than the first btw. Idk if that matters but I’m bringing it up anyway.

His fit inspo came mostly from Pinterest. I just compiled a bunch of shit I think he’d wear. Plus a majestic cape because it makes him look plenty more epic.

OK MOVING ON. I decided that his main gimmick would be my take on his shaded side. The idea was to make it represent dissonance, and how it affects Soul. The shadow is basically just this fuckin void. It has no physical form, and you can just stick your hand in there if you’d like (he sometimes stores the trident there). However I wouldn’t recommend it. The feeling is indescribable, but very uncomfortable. The void has a life of it’s own in a way. It does not stay confined within the Soul’s physical form (or in my case, his lineart). When conflict is at a high, like, tridential regicide level high, the void will get very close to fully overtaking him. It only fully disappears once true concord is reached, and starts reforming when the next cycle starts.

Also, the mask !!!!! Throughout cacophony, Soul is having a huge fucking identity crisis and shit. He doesn’t really have a physical organ like the other two. He doesn’t know why he’s here, or what he did to deserve this, or why nothing he’s trying works, and just. What is he if he’s failing at his main purpose???? I think because of this, he doesn’t like showing his face around the other two. He needs to assert is power, and thinks that showing his face will make him come of softer and less of someone to obey, if that makes sense. He only really takes it off when he’s alone in his room or pocket dimension (still trying to decide if they have a mock ‘apartment’, or ever did at one point). But once he has the character arc in Two Wuv, it permanently comes off !!! Wahoo!!!!!!! If only the next cycle weren’t to start, resetting his newfound self image to its previous state !!!!!!!!!!

Ok this is getting long im putting a read more thing

This image was very helpful for designing the tine shapes!! Guess which one is Soul’s !!!!!! (Spoiler alert, im pretty sure its either the 2nd or 6th ones in the 2nd row. However i genuinely dont remember. This may not even be the right image)

Soul also has a strange tie with eyes. If the halves have pissed him off to the point of no return, he does this fuckin analog horror stare that freaks the shit out of them (although heart cant see he remembers it very well. Plus, he just k n o w s that extra eye is there). I haven’t really played around with this, but I like the idea of a freakishly absurd amount of eyes hidden within the shadow. I should maybe like. Draw that sometime.

Also, expect a Soil patch update in the future!! I’d like to make his fangs more deranged, and maybe add an earth pattern to the cape. Right now, he has no symbols on him that represent him in the astronomy metaphor.

Uhhhh i hoped this helped??? If i missed anything you were hoping to know about, do let me know !!!!!!!

#i need a tag for posts like this #i shall call it #design lore #cj rambling #chonny jash #cccc #chonnys charming chaos compendium #taps asks #cj soul

[skunkes]

wrt last reblog I also saw something recently that resonated with me, adjacent to it.

OP of the video im talking about explained that making friends is hard as an adult, but what if you finally make a friend and after a few hangouts you realize you dont actually like them? She goes on to say that she doesn't want to be friends with people she only Kind Of likes, because she had to do that all through her teenage years (likely at school).

But meeting people you instantly click with and have foundations for a real friendship is rare, so what are you supposed to do? Friend-break-up with someone? That's just rude. But having to maintain friendship with someone you only sort of like is also exhausting...

I made a new, quickly very close friend recently and was talking about dis to them, I talked about how I struggle making friends but after seeing some people's online circles I'm okay with that. Because I don't know how people juggle having so many acquaintances/Not Actual Friends. I could never do that. I want my time to go to myself and others I love and not having to either find excuses for plans I don't actually want to partake in or feel like I have to hang out with acquaintances for "maintenance" or to "reset the required hangout timer."

Hoping that doesnt sound Evil...having to do that with acquaintances is just one of those Life things, its normal but I'd prefer not have to do it more than I have to...ykwim

And how do you tell someone "um well its not that i dont like you but I cant imagine our friendship ever deepening to a point where im super comfortable with you and actively want to spend lots of time with you sooo bye!"

Not every friendship needs to be like that btw, acquaintances are important but one would rather just have more time to spend with the people they DO connect with better.

Also acquaintance doesn't automatically mean bad! I have acquaintances that I enjoy talking to and hanging out with even though we wont ever be Besties, I guess this post was more focused on acquaintances where the feeling is more like. They like you way way way more than you like them...

Idk. Last post reminded me of that. Its hard to make friends and I also dont seek it out because Id rather not have to also forever juggle a sea of pushy acquaintances while searching for the deep connections (which I'm so lucky to have found more often, by chance. Guess I just have to keep waiting around to get lucky.)

Meeting people you can actually connect with DOES take so much energy and time. And its hard to just stop contacting the people you dont click with along the way sometimes. So much energy to maintain the same level of effort and emotional investment across multiple different relationships when I'd rather just be deepening bonds with the people I do have/finding more of those Exact Same Bonds. Idk!

Weird type of lonely. I dont want to be friends with people I only sort of like...

#talkys #long post #i hope this made sense

[fragmentofmemories]

What's the point of Major change in CoH? I know you can keep your spells if you change from a spellcasting major to another, but is there any other reason to do so?

Good question! There are actually a ton of benefits to reclassing in CoH1, one of which you've mentioned here.

1) Spell Learning

Like you said, reclassing allows a character to carry over most of their spells, and gain the ability to learn new ones they couldn't have access to in their previous major. This is probably the main benefit of reclassing, not just in CoH but in most other DRPGs.

For example: Rin in my Solo Run, having access to nearly every spell in the game after going from Mage -> Devout -> Evoker

Beware, however, that not every spell will be carried over when reclassing.

This boils down to these numbers, which determine a major's proficiency in each spell type. Each number represents the amount of spells they can learn for each tier.

In Rin's case, for example, she can have up to three black magic spells per tier. This means, for example, that if you move from a class with 4 in B.Magic proficiency to one with 2, the character in question will forget two of their spells.

I don't know the exact details regarding which spells are forgotten and which are kept. But just to be safe: forget any spell you consider unnecessary, so you can keep the ones you actually want when reclassing.

Each major has its own proficiency, which you can look below.

(Source)

2) HP Increasing

A useful part of reclassing is that it doesn't reset your HP back to what it was at Level 1. Instead, it only halves your current Max HP.

Though this might not seem like a lot, it actually works more like a snowball effect.

For example: If a level 50 character has 2000 HP, reclassing them will set them at Level 1 with 1000 HP.

Thus, by the time the character gets back to level 50, they will most likely have way more than 2000 HP.

Because of this, it is genuinely possible to reach the cap of 9999 HP, provided you have the patience for it.

3) Class Exclusive Skills

A minor point, but still worth mentioning, is that you'll be able to use certain class skills you would not have in your previous one.

For example: Changing to a Cleric will allow your character to appraise items. Changing to an evoker will let you use evoker rings and summon monsters, and so on.

Now one thing to ask yourself is: Do you need to reclass?

CoH1 allows for easy catching up thanks to the donation mechanic, so the drawback of returning to Level 1 isn't all that punishing. Your stats are also kept intact, though that is a minor point knowing their low caps.

But reclassing isn't exactly necessary to beat the game. If you play smart enough, you can get by with whatever team comp you made at the start.

Reclassing does, however, make the game much easier to complete. With enough patience, it can allow for "perfect" teams, with access to nearly every spell in the game and thousands of health.

Think of it as something like, idk, Fire Emblem reclassing: You certainly don't need to do it, but it makes your characters much more versatile if you do.

Hopefully, this answers your question, and good luck with CoH1!

#class of heroes #coh1 #game post #ask post #thank you rin ''catgirl enthusiast' alsparda for being my go-to tutorial character

[sullina]

In Glass Onion, the entire movie couldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Miles’ stupidity and I mean it. The entire thing happens, because Miles is dumb. Let me explain:

So we start the movie with the mysterious box, right? And others have already said that the puzzles weren’t really solved by the “disruptors” themselves, but by the people around them, so I won’t get into that. The part with the box where Miles was stupid was the part where it’s revealed that he had them made and shipped immediately. No prototypes, no testing, at least none that’s ever mentioned, no nothing. Just made the box and shipped it. That’s one point on where he was dumb.

The second point where he was dumb was where he sent it one to Helen. Thing is though, if I remember correctly, he didn’t send them himself. He HAD them sent, meaning that someone else sent them too his friends. As for why he had one sent to Helen i don’t know, but it could be justified with “everyone knows who my friends are, if I don’t send one to my former partner, it’ll look suspicious”, but he could’ve reasoned just as well with “i don’t want her at my get together after what happened”, which is actually pretty reasonable. But Miles is stupid, so he sent the box anyway.

The third point where he was an idiot was the part where he seemingly didn’t know the first thing about how the box worked. Someone else made it, after all. And there were no prototypes or extras of any kind made. Miles likely never saw the box and at best just came up with the little puzzles, but didn’t implement them, and there’s a big difference between just coming up with something and actually making it, trust me. So when Benoit Blanc suggests that the box could’ve been reset, he believes it. I mean Benoit lied to him about recieving the box intact, sure, but it’s obvious that Miles didn’t actually know if it could be reset. He also had no idea that the box could also be opened by smashing it with a hammer.

Two pieces of evidence that Miles doesn’t give a shit about security or safety, because both security holes with the box could’ve been fixed (if the box can be reset, we don’t actually get to know if it’s possible and defense against a hammer? Don’t use wood that can easily be smashed. Like idk, make a case out of metal underneath the wood if you don’t wanna sacrifice the aesthetic. It may have made the box heavier, but it’s not like it was supposed to be solved while holding it. Unless he wanted to pay less for shipping or something, but he’s rich, so that still makes him a fucking idiot.

The box is also the first clue we get to everyones disposition towards Miles. The “disruptors” make the puzzles. They play along with Miles. Except for Helen. She literally smashes the box, because she refuses to play along with Miles’ games.

More evidence to Miles’ stupidity has either already been mentioned or talked about in the movie itself, but what I have yet to see is the Mona Lisa security system.

Miles brags about the security system for the Mona Lisa. It’s fireproof and sealed at the slightest noise. Something that is repeatedly heard throughout the movie. And after explaining his amazing security system, he brags about how he also had a button made for unlock the Mona Lisa. And it’s not something he carries around with him on his body or anything else that would make that not just anyone can override the system, no no.

It’s a button.

In the middle of the room.

And I can’t remember the exact layout of the main room rn, but I’m pretty sure it was among the glass statues, too, but it was the only thing that wasn’t made of glass. And it looked cheap and out of place in the whole room, so he barely even tried to hide it.

And it’s a simple push down button. No lock, no case, no anything.

Any kind of security system is only as strong as the weakest link, and in this case, the weakest link is a button in the middle of a room that anyone can access and press. So the Mona Lisa might as well not have a security system at all.

In the end, the Mona Lisa burned, not because of Helen, but because of Miles and his arrogance and stupidity. And a glass onion is a perfect metaphor for it as well, because the security system may seem complex and high tech, but it can be completely undone by the press of a button that is not secured at all.

A button that Miles himself had implemented.

#knives out glass onion #glass onion

[012mashi]

Vent thing about memory. Idk what to do with it, think of it as a weird writing exercise in being dramatic

I'd probably be that person who's taking tons of photos at a concert, just so I wouldn't forget (when I finally remember to check them later).

It's a general fact that I'm very forgetful. Running family joke levels even, "you're gonna forget your head one of these days". And I probably would if I could.

The scary part is not general forgetfullness, but how random it is. I don't forget literally everything ever, as if a reset button was hit. No. However frequent, it's not always and it's not even based on importance/lack of it. Obviously it's easy to doubt if you did something or not, if your mind was elsewhere while you did the thing.

Time doesn't feel normal for me. Every day feels so same sometimes, that multiple weeks bleed together. Recalling things in chronological order is really hard, I don't know what I did on what day, just some general info (that I went away on a weekend cause my parent was not working, at some point I went to the store and bought a new tshirt etc). Just another "time" between me getting in and out of bed.

I won't even speak on academic stuff. Most of it's due to my shit cramming style of study, heavily mixed with procrastination, but when I remember something, it's either clear or hazy, I doubt myself almost instinctually anyway.

If it's about people, I don't just forget some of the shitty things I've done or said to people as some sort of defense mechanism ala Scott Pilgrim, but also the happy times.

I occasionally don't realize I forgot some general, but specific fact about people, like the exact age of a sibling, or what event happened exactly when, I'm too embarassed to ask to clarify. I try to focus on the bigger picture. I don't remember some of the hurtfult moments either, what people have said to me years ago, I just hold onto the feelings behind it.

I'm scared that it'll only get worse with age.

#vent post #memory issues #mashi rambles

[bisexual-ashe]

What are the chances that Regie will seek out Five to use him for his brains? Regie is on top of the world, so it's not like he needs Five. But at the same time Five is very smart, so maybe Regie would want to use him (and keep a close eye on him)? While Five could agree in order to search for weak points in Regie's armor to take him down or smth. I don't think it's gonna happen bc it's more interesting to see the Umbrellas struggling in a new timeline. But what if there was a twist like that?

oooooo interesting idea anon 🤔 i could see this happening tbh. like out of everyone five is probably gonna struggle most with the loss of his powers. not only does he rely on them heavily, he's also had them for like. 58 years. that is a long fucking time. suddenly having to readjust to being WITHOUT them is gonna be hard-

so since reggie is probably the only way to get said powers back, it wouldn't surprise me if five saught him out for that exact reason. and reggie? if he makes a deal of sorts with five it's advantageous for him bc it means that he can keep an eye on him/manipulate him etc etc. not that five would fall for reggies tactics at this point 😭

alternatively, five just might not. do anything abt the new timeline? he doesn't want to fuck with time unless there's a literal impending disaster and while noone has powers now and the new timeline is. weird. no impending apocalypses might see him just trying (and probably failing) to adjust to things. tbh id like to see him try and adjust and then he ends up being pressured to go to school or something and is just like yeah nah i need my powers back and seeks out reggie LMAO

either that... or he seeks out allison instead 👀 since allison seems to be the only umbrella who kept her powers, and is seemingly unaffected by the reset 👀 idk man i just want to see a five and allison team up shsbdjshk

#ask #jump speaks #my thoughts #tua speculation #number five #five hargreeves #reginald hargreeves #like i know damn well either a reggie or allison team up will probably happen #likely to try and take down the other 🤔 #which tbh will probably be the subs trying to get allison back so she can fix the world with her powers lmao #but definitely a cool idea anon!

[kvvvnjamz]

One last text post.

I want to do drugs so bad, I had to quit smoking weed for a job that doesn't make me want to end it all during and after every shift. I can sneak it in every once in a while, and I do then just hope that I don't get that random within the week. I'm desperate for that feeling of MDMA, but I know nobody who has it and have not for a long time. I could probably get some mushrooms but it's not the same. It's been forever since I've done mushrooms like a whole 7 years I think. I did molly right before the pandemic, some really good stuff too. I did coke right at the start but coke is washed these days and isn't that great anyways, nothing really transformative happens but the act is fun I guess if I knew it was safe I'd toot some nose beers. I've been thinking about drinking a lot more lately, but I know deep down that's a bad idea to open that specific flood gate and reset the progress I have made. Coming up on 3 years roughly in march or April, idk the exact date I had my last drink. I didn't suffer from crippling alcoholism or anything but I would just have a drink and when I drank I just wanted to keep drinking but it did not have the level of control over me that I see with other people, not drinking wasn't a big deal I didn't NEED it but I enjoyed it. Main reason I no longer drink is because my partner has a much more dependent relationship with alcohol, so if she can also refrain from drinking so can I. That all being said, man I just wanna feel something outside of myself. I really would like to feel a stimulant, shit I'd settle for a line of meth at this point if I could get my hands on it but I would prefer a million things over that. I'm just tired of feeling how I feel all the time, I'd like a little vacation from it, not as a constant but just as a brief little taste of chemicals my brain just isn't really creating for me. I have a pretty healthy relationships with substances, only one that I struggle with is Kratom because I have a physical addiction to it due to the fact that early on it was gloated about as this great thing that had absolutely 0 negatives. So I do kick that can down the road, and I didn't step into using it with the same guard up as I would with any other substance which was dumb on my part but they used to swear it was not addictive so I took that information at face value. Compare that to the couple times I did H dog, I approached that with the knowledge that I should not re-dose or use with any sort of consistency hence why I am not a heroin addict. Same with the times I have used meth, I accepted there was gonna be a comedown and that was the price I paid for the time I spent high and again did not re-dose.

So anyways what I am trying to say is I wanna get high off something with a little kick, just cuz I am so tired of feeling meh. Is that so much to ask? Why can that not be a more normalized thing, what kinda change would we need in the US at least to make this a reality people can do safely and responsibly. Idk but if you know somebody with some molly send em my way plz and thx.

Oh and don't do drugs.

#drugs #yapping #kevssecretstash

[maxladcomics]

I mentioned it ages ago, and I don’t know if I can explain it properly but LET ME TRY

So I believe that time flows differently on the outside of the underground, compared to inside the barrier.

This is because, Flowey has been causing resets for potentially years, reverting to the same day he suddenly existed. He doesn’t have direct access or ability to use a save location like you, the player. He explains this himself, he only has the one save point he can load from.

He mentions wasting weeks with Asgore, trying to make himself feel something. 

He reset over and over a few times, then did a pacifist run, he implies doing this more than once. Then he goes on a murder run. He doesn’t mention if he’s done this more than once, but considering his excessive checking of every option on pacifist runs, it’s very likely.

Flowey doesn’t mention anything different from what we know. He doesn’t mention Papyrus and his brother moving into snowdin, he doesn’t mention MTT becoming big which happened recently (implied by the water fountain).

There is an obvious huge gap between his previous life, and his current one. But he didn’t show confusion at discovering Toriel in the ruins, so that’s kinda weird lol. ANYWAY.

Flowey doesn’t talk about anything being different to what you experience. It’s very likely that the monsters he murdered on his routes were the same ones you can choose to. The ones you can spare, befriend, is the same.

The question is, of course, is how long he’s been doing this.

His save point is at the exact same time and place, and it’s unknown what he’s done before you came in. But obviously- my main guess is that he’s only been in the underground for around a week, more accurately, 8 days.

This is my main reason to assume that time is different inside the barrier. Flowey mentions being with Asgore for WEEKS, but if time was the same inside and out, then you would have come through around his first run.

This guess builds off of a few things- things that Flowey says to you, things that other monsters say, and the things Flowey has already done on his current run.

Flowey has already befriended Papyrus on this route, he doesn’t mention that Papyrus lived anywhere else, or anything about him moving to Snowdin. The shopkeeper mentions that the skeletons just appeared one day- so it’s still new enough to mention.. or maybe it was odd enough to mention.

The flowers are still in the lab, and Alphys makes the instant connection between Flowey and the “tiny flower” that Papyrus mentions. She doesn’t question it- she obviously knows who it is, even if she’s never? met Flowey in this route. But she has cameras, so she’s most likely seen him, she knows where he’s from.

Papyrus implies that things have changed within the last 8 days, by telling Sans he hasn’t calibrated his puzzles for this long. So it’s very likely that Sans only recently became ‘aware’ of resets. Obviously he’s always been a comedian (that might actually hate puns or just conveniently ignores them when he’s not the one telling them idk) but he’s always been lazy and messy so maybe he hasn’t really changed that much.

Anyway I’m basically saying that time reset over and over inside the barrier, while time went on outside, to eventually allow Frisk to fall down.

#undertale theory #maxramble #maxstop

[wewinbees]

in regards to all the issues with MCC 14 im gonna bring up how unspeakably scuffed MCC 7 (july) was. focusing on the SBI v DT issues, which to preface both teams were tryharding because they were told it would be the last time they were allowed to team (at least for a little while) and they both wanted to leave with a win.

purple - dream, george, sapnap and sylvie

orange - techno, wilbur, phil and seapeekay

battle box - this started off with horrible lag, to the extent that it was unplayable for some teams, but they didn’t reset it until like round 4 or 5. additionally, they paused it before they decided on a reset, and a tonne of teams started to accidentally team kill with the power-up TNT packages, including wilbur killing CPK and techno going >:/ eventually they reset the whole round to try fix the lag, voiding the points from the first half meaning some players did better than they would have and others did Notably worse, like dream’s team who lost against a lot of teams they’d beat in the first rounds.

side note, but MCC 7 battle box scares the hell out of me just because wilbur blew up 2 of their teammates later on in the new rounds bc of Miscommunication (he asked if it would get them extra points by TNTing them at the end bc he got some when he team-killed in the pause, and techno was talking to himself and said ‘yea’ at the same time about something else), made worse bc it was against purple and dream got the points (although Techno lived and placed the wool so they still won) and then they spent the rest of the rounds arguing, with BOTH OF THEM going D:< and phil had to tell them to shut up. either way, it worked out well for orange, winning 8-1 while purple suffered, only winning to 5-4 largely bc of the reset. either way the girls were fighting and Oh My God it freaks me out lmao

build mart! not exactly a broken bit or a glitch but i feel like it would be POORLY RECEIVED in this current mcyttwt climate. basically orange had always been infamously bad at build mart, coming 8th last tournament, and were strategising on how to win. the night before, wilbur offhandedly mentioned getting every block so they didn’t have to rush back and forth, but this was unrealistic because there were too many blocks. but local tryhard (affectionate) technoblade took this and RUN, watching 6 hours of footage across every MCC vod to make 4 shopping lists, divided into sections for each player to collect, that had the exact number of each block needed to complete any of the 26 possible builds, and they came 1st place as a result. the funniest thing is they would have done even better if the timer wasn’t reduced from 15mins to 12mins, which was probably done bc of their complaining. the really fun part about this is techno went to boast about it to dream at the end, telling him he’d went through all 26 builds, only for dream to interrupt him “there’s 27, actually” BECAUSE HE DID THE SAME THING HAHAH!!! at least something similar, including some strange Java programme? idk but their strategy didn’t work nearly as well, with their team coming in 6th (from 9th last tournament)

the real drama this time though, was audience takeover! this was the first MCC with serious issues around the takeover; before dream joined in MCC6, it was whatever techno chose, and since they both chose battle box for MCC 6 it didn’t make a difference. but this time they divided votes. dream wanted HITW and techno wanted rocket spleef. after a harsh twitter poll, HITW won with 47% to Rocket Spleef’s 43%. now at this point i think the way that voting worked was that there’s 50 NPCs in the dome, each representing 2% of the vote. but because of how many people voted and how close the polls had been, the system glitched and gave techno’s team the win in rocket spleef. THIS WENT DOWN AS POORLY AS YOU COULD IMAGINE WITH THE DREAM TEAM, who had never played rocket spleef before. the admins paused the game and tried to swap it over, but it was not in the code for them to actually be able to swap to a new game, so they had to just play on. as a result, Dream’s team fell by A Lot, and they got pretty mad about the whole situation, especially given the fact that battle box had already been reset at this point, so the fact that they couldn’t reset rocket spleef got them pretty mad, w dream genuinely threatening to log at one point

that’s the last of the Major scuffs, i think there were some minor bugs too, like an arrow pick-up glitching in dodgebolt that meant phil died (which was Unfortunate because they lost 2-3) but in the end of the day guess what!!? it doesn’t actually matter! because it’s a non-profit for-fun MINECRAFT tournament!! any streamer that gets toxic tends to immediately apologise, and the discovery of bugs and exploits helps them get patched to never happen again! the build mart block randomiser gets added, they changed the coding of the audience vote to be shiftable! and ‘let’s just play rocket spleef’ becomes a great reoccurring joke among the MCC community

the noxcrew are amazing game developers, and even the breakers myof games should be treated like fun because in the end of the day It Does Not Really Matter :) i know we’re all chill on tumblr but i just want to reinforce how good MCC is okay and i did it with this big long post about how scuffed it can be, but the important part is how it improves and how we as a community react

#mcc #technoblade #dreamwastaken #tagging them bc they focus heavily in the bugs lmao #mcyt #mcc 7 #me going ‘it’s a summary guys’ and it’s That Long Huh #i like MCC 7 but it’s a hard watch sometimes lmao like i wanna watch greens POV at some point #i do feel like we’re being cool about it but also i have just been writing this instead of looking. Im putting my trust in yall being cool

[petrichorpetals]

So from the evidence I've collected, I'm very sure my Yeosang came here from another timeline/world theory is correct.

This mostly stems from what we learned from fever part 3 and the deja vu mv but honestly the Yeosang being sus about this had already been foreshadowed in his diary entry of fever part 2. (You'll have to forgive my terrible pictures I have fever part 3 in front of me and I'm too lazy to grab fever part 2 to take better pics)

Basically our setup to this was how at the end of the diary film we switched dimensions into the world of fireworks which I'm fairly sure is called Strictland. Everyone basically says how much the new world feels like their old one but different. The first time I read this I wasn't sure what he meant by "Everyone says this is a new world but somehow, I'm familiar with the scenery here. " line and just took it at face value to be metaphor. But given his repetition of staring down the camera to say "I remember" in Deja Vu, it would make a lot more sense if we take it quite literally too mean I remember this place because I'm from here. There's also a lot of talk about the word world in "wanting to escape the world I've lived in, the world I've been trapped in" as well as "the friends who have willingly invited me to their world". Basically the tldr of the matter is that yeosang escaped from the world of Fireworks into the world of school!Ateez using a chromer that breaks. (IMO we see this exact moment where it breaks at the end of Deja Vu) I say it's likely a chromer since Yeosang shows an at least approximate knowledge of what would happen if he breaks one when he breaks the one the black pirates/halateez gave to hongjoong while the android guardian/white mask holds him hostage.

Yeosang seems to have an approximate knowledge here of what would happen if the Chromer broke, to the point where he doesn't even call it the Chromer when he's thinking about what they know about the object, he specifically calls it a sandglass when any other mention of it has been the Chromer.

There's also the matter of him going out of the way of saying "My friends would not have been all scattered if I had not met them at first". This could very well be talking about where they lost Yeosang and scattered in the hallway but given his wording of at first, I'm putting this as evidence that Yeosang was a newcomer to their world when he got here with the chromer and wasn't a part of their friend group originally.

This theory gets backed up by the ending bit of Not Too Late playing at the end of Deja Vu and if you do a quick look into the lyrics, Not Too Late comes across very much as the beginning of school Ateez where they're all lamenting about being lonely before they all get together to make friends.

Except for two things.

One of which is Wooyoung and Yeosang talking about not being able to get out or escape (Which lines up for Yeosang if he's trapped in this new timeline and adds some interesting implications for Wooyoung I'll get into on a post about him later).

The second of which is Mingi's part. Mingi brings up killing and saving, both things that happen and we see happening during Inception and Thanxx in Fever Part 1 when Hongjoong keeps resetting the timeline using the chromer. There's two implications here: one, Mingi is aware of the timeline resetting (something that I already suspected but is now confirmed) and two, while this might seem like a song from the very beginning of school Ateez, Mingi gives us the added context that it is very much not. (It's also interesting that Yeosang's the one that pulled out Mingi's headphones to make him past attention to the world around him in diary film but like Wooyoung, I'll get into Mingi later in another post)

Since we're assumedly several timeline cycles in, why is this song playing over Yeosang breaking the Chromer? I posit that instead of this being the moment where Yeosang breaks the Chromer while escaping the white Android, this is instead either the moment Yeosang crash lands into school Ateez's world via his own "sandglass" for the first time or this still is that moment, but due to time shenanigans, the Yeosang that escaped just so happens to have escaped back to when he first got to their world making him trapped not only in school Ateez's world, but in an endless cycle of breaking the Chromer to get there in the first place.

We see that Yeosang doesn't go back to their original world and warehouse with them afterwards. Likely because he wasn't a part of their world to begin with to return back with them.

There's other bits of evidence that say that Yeosang with the broken Chromer at the end of Deja Vu is going to school Ateez like the hand that reached for Yeosang had a sleeve similar to their school uniform in Inception.

(Interestingly enough, Yeosang has an emblem that isn't like anyone else's on his uniform and Wooyoung has several emblems. Not necessarily relevant to my current point but food for thought.)

I'm not one of those people that obsess over hands, so idk whose hand that is exactly, but I do have suspicions.

If we're looking at the rings and at how one hand kind of mirrors the other, we can come to the conclusion that it might be the same person. We can go so far as to think that maybe, that hand might even belong to another version of Yeosang. Potentially even the hala!Yeosang that we catch a glimpse of in the diary film giving Hongjoong the chromer. (Side note: I only just realized that it was actually hala!yeosang that gave hongjoong the chromer and not hala!hongjoong like I thought going in. Yeosang really does just have a longstanding history with the Chromer huh.)

Edit: it's now basically been confirmed by the making of deja vu mv that the hand is Hongjoong's so basically depicting the moment Hongjoong reached out for yeosang when the timelines reset. I still standby the rest of my theory. Here's the screenshot I grabbed off the alternate hand angle in the mv making video:

For me personally, a lot of things start to click into place when we consider the possibility that Yeosang is actually from another world. Even his like a bird in a cage stuff makes sense when viewed in this light. He has the freedom of song and dance that he didn't have in Strictland, which banned any form of music or dance thinking it would lead to human emotion, but is stuck in this new world with no other option but to potentially repeat the cycle of when he got here.

#ateez more like aquila shut up #aquila shut up no one cares #ateez theories #ateez #Casper was the one that told me hongjoong got the chromer from himself back when I was first getting into ateez #and I didn't know the members enough when I watched diary film the first time to know any different #like yea hongjoong stole the chromer in the beginning but yeosang gave it to school hongjoong #the stuff I've seen researching into this just further proves my point and doesn't refute it #stuff like the girl in the beginning of diary film saying this is how the story of how we get split into eight pieces again #emphasis on the again part #sorry if this is rambly I'm just excited that I'm pretty sure I'm right since everything points towards it

[number5theboy]

THANK YOU in season 1 they set up MULTIPLE times Five and Vanya’s different, more affectionate relationship so idk it just seems weird that they set that up and then in both apocalypses Five doesn’t really do anything? And I do understand the importance of Allison and Ben’s roles in stopping the apocalypse and exploring their relationship with Vanya but still they should have given Five a better role than “gets incapacitated with the others” or “just not there lol”

My gripe with Five’s non-involvment in the apocalypse storylines as soon as he has assembled everyone into place doesn’t necessarily come with his relationship with Vanya, although I do think that the writers looked at the dramatic and emotional potential of that relationship and did fuck all with it, in the end. It just comes down to the fact that the two seasons we’ve had so far have given the apocalypse the most weight in Five’s arc and then gave Five conclusions to arcs that were not in focus, and gave us no closure on the apocalypse arc. And they did that twice, and it feels so unsatisfactory from a storytelling perspective. Had they given him a fair shot at trying and had him fail in a way that is fair to the character they’d established, I’d be fine with it, but they didn’t. It’s exactly as you said, Anon, the exploration of Vanya’s relationships to Allison and Ben are important and I wouldn’t want them to be gone, but Five deserved to play more of a part than he did in his main arc of two seasons and something he has in-universe be chasing for 45 years.

In Season 1, they set up Five’s motivation clearly: he is here to stop the impending apocalypse. It’s why he has come back. And the emotional conclusion that we get by the end of Season 1 is his growth to detach himself from Delores, his coping mechanism he used to keep a bit of a grasp on his sanity during the decades in the wasteland. Important, but not really the focal point of his arc and motivation so far. And once the apocalypse business kicks back in, Five is absent during most of it, either saying goodbye to Delores or being stalled by the Handler, and once he is back, he completely fades into the background, which, seeing as he is at the event that causes what brought him so much misery for so long, should have some kind of impact on him. It was just a set-up with very little pay-off, and even the set-up for what I thought would come in Season 2, Five (and Allison) taking care of Vanya, helping her get her powers under control, and thus delaying the pay-off into Season 2 in a very interesting way, never manifested, which is a goddamn shame.

Fast forward to Season 2. The reset button is pushed, Five is in 1963, with the exact same motivation: stop the impending apocalypse, now with some more difficult assembling of his siblings. But Five does it, like he did in Season 1, they let him down, and as the apocalypse arc nears its conclusion in the FBI building, Five is written out of the plot entirely to be banished into the plot cul-de-sac that is the paradox psychosis going nowhere. Said plot cul-de-sac does nothing interesting, it does not explore Five’s character, is not used to have him confront his feelings about failing to stop the apocalypse the first time around (which, just to reiterate, is Old Man Five’s premier goal and the fact that he has no questions about anything that happened in 2019 even though he can see clear as they that he must have fucked up or he wouldn’t be looking himself in the eyes, boils my blood, it’s terrible writing). Once the plot cul-de-sac is done going nowhere, Ben comes through for the world like the champ he is, Five is reunited with his siblings and doesn’t mention the apocalypse again for the rest of the season. The pay-off we get this season around is to the running theme of ‘Five fucks up time travel every time he tries it’ or, more general, ‘Five fucks up everything he tries’, and even though the time-turning sequence is really cool and satisfying on a character level, it was not set up well and certainly took a backseat to trying to avoid the apocalypse, so the pay-off is much weaker than it would have been if that had actually been Five’s central problem and not Apocalypse 2: Nuclear Boogaloo. And to make matters worse, the pay-off gets weakened by the end of season plot twist which is another fuck-up in the timeline, and something Five is pretty clearly majorly responsible for, so success is fickle I guess, like it was in Season 1, where he got his family out alive just to see them die in an apocalypse ten seconds later.

It’s just a recurring theme that Five’s arcs are getting set up and not paid off, paid off weakly, or just explodes back into his face. The apocalypse, where he gets everyone together and then gets written out of most or all of the resolution. Great. The whole shtick with the Commission, that turned him into a monster? He kills the Handler and blows up the Commission, but oh no, actually neither of that had any consequences, and then in Season 2, he is barely responsible for taking them down and now the pencil pushers who let him rot in the wasteland for 40 years and whom he clearly didn’t like in Season 1 are now in charge of time. Cool. He kept fucking up his time travel and also generally everything he tried to touch? He gets to turn back time and become arguably the most powerful sibling out of the bunch, but also the timeline is fucked and he has erased his and his family’s existence. Sweet. It’s just.....unsatisfactory. And I’m not saying he should have come out on top in any of this arc (actually I am. Five deserved to tear down the Commission without looking back), but it’s all muddled and not really going anywhere. If you want to write a tragic character who is fatally flawed and always his own worst enemy, this is kind of not it. The catharsis that should be coming in never happens, and I wish it would.

#well this accidentally became a monstrosity #sorry about that #feel very free to ignore it #i just have gripes with the writing of this show again #and five is by no means the only who that has this happen to him #Negativity #Replies #Anonymous

[mystech-master]

Blazblue rewrites Part 1: The Age of Origin and beginning of the Looping World.

(put this on my Reddit may as well put it here)

As we all know, the Blazblue series is one of the most convoluted and over-complicated pieces of media ever. Mainly due to its quantum physics talk and very chuuni dialogue and a lack of good explanation for a lot of points. Naturally, one good thing about being a fan is that through the power of hindsight we can look at the entire series and basically fix what we think was messed up. Of course, we have this freedom since we are usually individual people, don't have a massive writing staff and marketing we need to appeal to, and pretty much the entire skeleton and pieces are there, they just need to be rearranged and/or be tweaked a bit.

I remember getting into Blazblue around the end of high school/beginning of college, almost 5 years ago. I thought the setting was neat and I am into anime action BS. Of course, the story was bonkers and made no sense until I started looking deeper but the main thing that has bugged me were the characters. There is just so much Bullshit that the characters do and brush off that just irritates me, especially when it comes to Ragna. This series has made me rethink the meaning of life, of showing kindness to people, or if "doing things because it's right" is a good enough excuse, how much should you desire your own happiness? All sorts of existential questions that Blazblue has made me think, not from the plot, but just from the BS character interactions.

If you check out my Ragna the Bloodedge tag, or have just been following me for a while, you will see/know how much I will defend this guy to the fucking grave because of all the bullshit that this guy is expected to take and deal with and it being seen as"inspiring" or "heroic" when it is really just sad to me. It isn't me liking the character, it is just a massive amount of pity and feeling sorry for him, to the point where I kind of have a massive bias towards him and end up making him an all-powerful unstable badass in most of my fic ideas with him. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I wanted to lay out my ideas for how I would make a Blazblue rewrite. If anyone wants to use these in their own fanfic, feel free. I don't give a shit about credit.

Starting with the timeline, we have the XBlaze series, Bloodedge Experience, and the core C-Series (ft.

the Phase Shift Novels, and Remix/Variable Heart Manga). In the actual story these are all separate “Possibilities”, or Timelines/Universes. That is dumb and I think that we can tweak things to make it all one linear timeline.

XBlaze takes place in the year 2050, 50 years before the Dark War is stated to begin, and 149-150 years before the main games start. This is plenty of time to make things different. We know from the backstory that Takamagahara, the god-supercomputer that mankind made, was not completed in this possibility due to Touya’s mother iirc. In my idea, all this does is delay the inevitable, Takamagahara will be made, just at a later date now. (edit) There is also the Mitsurugi agency, which was kind of behind the Wadatsumi incident in XBlaze's backstory. With their connections to the Mage's Guild, the Amanohokosaka Clan, and their desire to get the Azure, we could say that this is the agency that discovered the Susanoo, the Boundary, and did most of these experiments to the Prime Fields.

I do not know the exact year when Bloodedge Experience takes place, but I am going to estimate around 10-15+ years from XBlaze, putting it at 2060-2065+, since they do mention Mei as the head/leader of the Amanohokosaka Clan. I am not too sure what the branching-off point is here, Valkenhayn mentions Clavis having killed Naoto in the core C-Series Possibility so maybe it was during their initial meeting. But is Naoto surviving gonna change that much? The only other detail that would need addressing would be Raquel’s relationship with Rachel. According to the wiki bio “Raquel was created when a user of Soul Eater went havoc and killed hundreds upon thousands of people. Clavis Alucard stopped the user and killed them, but was forced to take the lives of 128,932 people in order to do so. When this happened, he held an Embryo. Three years later, the Embryo became Raquel and she was born. Maybe sometime later Raquel could end up being killed or something and another Embryo results in Rachel. I mean we never see or hear mention of a mother, or maybe it’s some reincarnation thing? IDK. We see how stern Clavis was with Raquel, so maybe seeing his first “daughter” die he ends up spoiling the next one rotten, leading to the kind of haughty holier-than-thou Rabbit we know today.

However, all of this needs to be put in perspective of the Origin and Terumi. I may mess up some of the finer details.

The plot of Blazblue started when Susanoo ditched his body, the Susanoo Unit, and then mankind discovered it underground. They excavated it, dug deeper, and found a Cauldron which led to the Boundary, within which they found the Master Unit, the God Computer that would allow them to control reality, and beyond that, they found the Azure, basically the primordial absolute force of the Blazblue Universe. However, the Master Unit can only respond to something anthropomorphic/humanoid and humans can’t survive the Boundary. So they made the Prime Field Devices, Androids meant to go into the Boundary. Pretty weirdly specific criteria that results in robot girls but I don’t see how I can mess with this.

One of them manages to reach the Master Unit and upon touching it she gains the Eyes of the Azure which gives it the power of the Azure and basically becomes not only sentient, but basically a god. The Humanity, freaked out about her new free will and the power she now has, tosses her back into the Boundary. Within the Boundary, the PFD, the Origin as we know her, sees her “sister” units all being tortured. Most likely to break any souls they have so the scientists don’t have to deal with their “free will” getting in the way of their plans. Maybe to bring in Terumi telling Noel that they became weapons, other groups heard of the guys making the PFDs and them getting god power and obviously would be trying to stop them/take this power for themselves, so they decided to make the PFDs into mindless robo-soldiers to fight them off. Origin gets mad and ends up making all of them sentient. Probably by Observing them as sentient, like she sees all of these things “like her” so obviously they must be sentient or at least have the potential for sentience. Kind of like Jotaro going “It’s a similar type of Stand '' to DIO and then getting Time Stop.

Anyways now mankind is fighting these robot girls who want revenge for being treated like tools, all humanity sees is all these in-human weapons killing them for no reason, just because destroying is what a weapon does, and with the Master Unit’s Phenomenon Intervention, they can just rewrite all of their failures into victories. Mankind sees the Origin and the Master Unit as basically the same thing, an evil machine god. His leads into why the Origin and Amaterasu can’t just be separated so Ragna doesn’t have to sacrifice himself to stop the time loops, the world sees The Origin and Amaterasu as one, there is no distinction. This is also apparently the time period when Clavis Alucard helped mankind make the Izayoi, with its Immortal Breaker and ability to resist Observation to fight against the Origin and the PFDs. Ironic that it eventually became known as the prototype for the Lux Sanctus: Murakumo, but I’ll talk about that later.

So what does mankind do? Make a Black Beast to destroy it. I mean we are told to believe that a Black Beast is the result of Azure Grimoire (or just a piece of the Azure) + Murakumo Unit = either a Black Beast if the fusion is imperfect, and a powerful Kusanagi God Slayer is done right. But tell me, why the hell would they build ANOTHER Prime Field Device to fight the PFDs? I will be getting into the exact nature of Black Beasts later. Mankind is apparently cool with the Black Beast destroying the world because so long as they can get the Azure and plug it into Takamagahara, which is basically a manmade Master Unit supercomputer, they can just reset time. But due to a bug or something, the Master Unit stopped this and when the world was destroyed she just made a new one based on her memories. This is the world the characters live in now. And since the last thing she remembers about the world is the Black Beast and obviously she doesn’t want the world to hate and try to kill her, the Black Beast enters the world with everyone having no context to its existence and no other enemy to fight, leading to the Black Beast going from a weapon of Mutually Assured Destruction, to the new Ultimate Evil Enemy of the World.

A few things we need to take note of here.

XBlaze and Bloodedge Experience would need to take place during the Age of Origin, between mankind discovering the Boundary but before the Prime Field War starts. I mean the two things needed for that part to start would be Prime Fields and Takamagahara, and while there is Es who is sort of a PFD, you could simply say that her model isn’t suited for full Boundary Exploration. I know I am really glossing over the Embryo stuff about her but I haven’t seen XBlaze stuff in a while and I would need to find a way to connect it with the Embryo in Centralfiction.

Apparently, there was some off-screen war in which Hihiirokane (the Soul Cutting Sword protected by Jubei’s clan, used by his brother Tomonori to fight Terumi, then put in Clavis’ grave) was used to fight some enemy, “Outside of logic”. I have no idea what this is and it feels like something that shouldn’t be glossed over.

Mankind made a Black Beast on their side to get the Azure and fight the Master Unit, which A. means that in a weird way the Black Beast was sort of on mankind’s side at first before the Origin retconned it into being the destroyer, and B. mankind would have needed to make a Murakumo Unit to fight the Murakumos, knowing that the Origin is making them sentient and turn on them, which kind of feels like a dumb move. But again, I will get to this later.

This will all lead into the Looping World. Now, this is weird because of the main thing which the loop revolves around, The Black Beast. It is either A. as Terumi says in CS, a Cauldron that went batshit (which is precedent by the short story That Which Is Inherited where Sector Seven tries to smelt a Nox but everything goes tits up and a Black Beast forms from the Cauldron (no souls or prime field required), or B. a Time Displaced Ragna and Nu. The Black Beast is a Self-Observing weapon. Observation in Blazblue basically means “deciding if/how something exists” by Observing itself, the Black Beast declares its existence in this time period, which means that no matter what time paradoxical BS you may try to pull, it will always appear (Kind of reminds me of the Time Medallions Clockwork gives team Phantom in Danny Phantom). But a less mind-mushing way to look at it could simply be that, no matter what, this will always happen. Like, say the Assassination of Kennedy is Observed as an event that must ALWAYS happen, then even if you find and stop the sniper. He is gonna still die. Maybe there is another sniper, maybe the sniper gets a good hit on you and manages to make another shot down the road, but anyway you slice it, Kenedy gets shot. That event is permanently locked in history and no matter what you do, this event is inevitable.

But suggestion A is weird because it could either mean that 1. He is talking about the first Black Beast from the Age of Origin, or 2. Since that part of the story probably wasn’t written yet and they are talking about this specific Beast, he is talking about the Dark War Black Beast, in which case there actually was a bit of time before the time loops started, or at least the very first loop, so then there was a bit of time before shit went sideways.

Maybe the Origin didn’t make a Black Beast war and it was all Terumi’s idea. The world would’ve continued as normal but since Terumi hated the Master Unit and mankind wanted power, they tried to make a Kusanagi but it fucked up and made a Black Beast, but without a publicly known Prime Field War to justify it, mankind doesn't see this as a necessary evil which will get the Azure and then reset the world better for them, it’s just a big evil monster.

Okay, that is my interpretation of the Age of Origin for my Blazblue rewrite idea. Not many changes since this is all pretty self-contained and not much needs expanding on. Just make sure to justify some actions and connect the three timelines. I probably missed out on a lot of finer details but I think I got the broad strokes of it. Feel free to correct me.

Next time I will cover the Dark War and hopefully go into explaining how I would make the Powerset make a bit more sense (Ars Magus, Grimoires, Nox Nyctores, the Azure Grimoire, and the Black Beast).

#blazblue #blazblue rewrites

[tsskyx]

The great reset inconsistency

Okay, so this is a topic I’ve been putting off for years now. Idk why, I guess I just wasn’t motivated enough to write an entire essay on it. After all, it’s not really a theory, it’s more like a small collection of ideas of mine.

Anyways, I think we can all agree that it’s a common head canon that Chara remembers the resets, right? But... why? Is this head canon actually based in facts?

Well, first of all, there is Flowey’s final speech, which is what people most often quote when they wish to present evidence for this theory. Flowey is talking Chara out of resetting here, so, it’s confirmed, right? Some have also pointed out the fact that the menu screen, which contains the reset button, does not utilize the soul icon selection indicator, whereas any choice selection in the “overworld” does, suggesting that whoever is in control of the red soul is not in control of the reset function. (Similarly, when Flowey seizes the control over the reset power - cue the ‘My World’ scene, the indicator disappears here as well.)

Now, as it may be obvious from my phrasing, I have my own set of remarks against this whole idea. And first, let us examine ‘the evidence’ more closely.

Personally, I think the last screenshot I showed here is self-explanatory, since Flowey is in control there. But, does this imply a deeper meaning, or is it just an interesting visual detail? As for the second set of screenshots, this one would imply that Frisk isn’t the one who resets. Which would raise the question, are they in control of the ‘quit’ option in the first place? See, the only “normal” way that I know of in which you can actually access the reset menu is, if you quit the game. At one point, Flowey implies that this option is canon. If you go through the underground without killing anybody, he suggests that you load your save file and then do what he tells you to do (otherwise, he always tells you to reset). And the only way you can reload - other than through someone killing you - is by quitting the game and then choosing ‘continue’. It’s de facto the same function as reset (it is accessed the same way), except it transports you to your last save, instead of the very beginning.

Now, going by the logic of the prior, quitting is then also not under Frisk’s command, since there’s no soul icon seen when it is executed, not to mention that Flowey gives you these instructions under the same exact circumstances: you quit and restart the game after reaching some ending, and then he appears on a black canvas and tells you things. It’s the exact same as when he supposedly spoke to Chara. In fact, extending the logic in this way, we could deduce that every time Flowey appears this way, he is actually speaking to Chara. In fact, this would also cover the naming screen, since that one also doesn’t show a soul, only yellow letters (probably to conserve space, but let’s keep entertaining the theory).

And finally, there’s the core evidence itself, which unearths who Flowey is actually speaking to in this dark screen at the end of the game, potentially in every dark screen in every ending. After all, in the genocide run, it’s not Flowey who appears after you restart the game, it’s Chara. And all of this seems incredibly “right”, like it all fits together. In fact, there’s an entire theory called the player Chara theory (described in this mega essay), which says that Chara is de-facto the player. Anything the player does is actually Chara’s doing, and the evidence aids this: from the name we chose, through their backstory (Chara hated humanity, and we do too most likely by the time we find out), to all of this reset meta. Of course, the evidence doesn’t fit completely, as we’ve never actually played as Chara, we only do just now. But even this can be explained as us merely playing a character who simply happens to have a backstory, like in many story-driven games out there.

However, there is a deeper issue about this. This theory, albeit pretty, is incompatible with the narrator theory. How can Chara both play AND narrate the game, when in so many instances the narration appears to cooperate with the player? It’d almost seem like Chara is talking to themself. Plus, there is one giant piece of evidence that also destroys any hope of reconciliating the reset-Chara theory with the narrator-Chara theory. So far we’ve adhered to logic and consistency pretty hard, so it would not make sense to start making exceptions now.

Let’s try to think of an example where the narrator would disagree hard with the player. In fact, one such instance exists. This is what the narrator says if you go into the rainbow save option, but then back off. It does not occur before you back off, you must specifically enter the save option and then exit it again. This shows me that the narrator wants to do something very specific here, and they probably wouldn’t appreciate it if someone, say, reset the timeline at this point.

Although this is just one piece of evidence, unless we wanna turn a blind eye now, this IS the evidence that definitely points to a discrepancy between Chara and the player. It shows that in general, Chara is not in control over the quit or reset options (and by extension the continue option too, even though it is favorable to them). And if they aren’t, then who is? Perhaps, Frisk. If that’s so, then under all circumstances, the game must form a linear narrative without the player’s input. And, probing the resets, that may appear so. When you reset, Frisk’s behavior changes. For example, they now turn before Sans prompts them. However, everything changes upon a true reset. A true reset erases everything, save for Chara’s “bad ending”. Meaning that if Frisk is in control over the true reset option and they happen to choose it, they seemingly lose all their memories, wrapping the world in a loop. Yet, we are still here, we can still generate new endings.

So what exactly is going on, are we Chara now, post-true-reset? Well, at this point, the third-entity theory becomes more likely. That is, that everything the player does is in fact their own doing in the game, while Frisk has the cutscenes, and Chara narrates. However, even this theory would not explain Flowey’s final dialogue, where he clearly speaks to us, yet addresses us as Chara. Meaning, that unless we change roles with time, sometimes being ourselves, sometimes being Frisk, and sometimes Chara, there cannot be any single consistent theory that explains everyone’s roles in the game.

Unless we start cutting corners, that is. My personal head canon, which I’m sure you would agree with, is that there is no player, that this is solely Frisk and Chara’s journey. Next, the narrator theory seems pretty consistent and kinda cute, so, I believe in it too. However, I do not think that Chara talks to Flowey at the end of the game. I mean, how is it even possible? How did Flowey find out, how is he not surprised by this, and where is Chara, detached, or still within Frisk? Is Frisk listening, or are their ears shut and their eyes closed, to give the two some privacy? The more one thinks about it, the less likely it is, unless you assume a post-pacifist scenario where Frisk returns to the mountain and tells Flowey about Chara. And Flowey’s words rather suggest to me that he found Chara himself, somewhere alone in the underground. That’s just my feeling. Also my head canon, and here’s where some people might disagree, is that Chara does not remember the resets. For one, their narration never changes. And two, there’s the issue of the save file.

The save file has got Chara’s name on it. My head canon is, that the game, once Chara got revived by Frisk’s soul, pulled their old save file out (there is evidence in the game that Chara could reset while alive) and assigned it to Frisk, name unchanged. This means that the naming of the file happened chronologically years ago, when Chara first fell down. And now, let us look at LV. This stat is weird. It tracks your “level of violence”, though only murder changes it, so it’s dubious whether it displays your potential, or your concrete sin (for sure, you can be messed up in the head without killing anyone, right?). I mean, why would you need two stats for the exact same thing?

Before I continue, I just want to briefly mention my head canon about the true reset: in pacifist, the breaking of the barrier causes the reset ability to lose the memory-preserving aspect (like, the barrier was boosting that power, reflecting it back underground, but now that it is no more, the power is weaker, able to preserve only one person’s mind), and thus, only Frisk ends up remembering the previous timeline (even if they don’t show it; my idea is, that they want to act like it’s all anew). While in the genocide run, which is also followed by a true reset, Chara was the one who reset (since we gave them our soul), and due to their prior experience with this power, the act was somewhat “cleaner”, resulting in a true reset instead. Or maybe the game just got confused when a different person suddenly did it. Though, it is definitely not my head canon that Chara destroyed the entire universe (and thus the barrier along with it), that’s ridiculous to me. That’s not how I interpreted that scene, ever.

Anyways, LV. As you may know, LV can be reset. But... why? If LV is a measure of your capacity to hurt, then it is inherently psychological. And you cannot undo that without erasing some memories, or rather, without overwriting your entire mind with an earlier state. I mean, even if you erase some memories, your reaction to certain unpleasant stimuli will stay the same, you will just have no idea why you’re being so distant. And this is the argument that finally convinced me that Chara doesn’t remember the resets. The save file is theirs, it is connected to them, and their behavior visibly changes as we rack up LV. Yes yes, I know, cooperation not corruption, but even then, one cannot deny that LV changes Chara. Even if they stop cooperating with us the moment we abort the genocide route, the high LV/EXP still causes them to be very pessimistic and such (recall the bag of dog food at Alphys’s lab). Even if you don’t believe that they are “connected to their save file”, this is undeniable. The “connection” is merely how I explain this in more concrete detail.

So, in other words, Chara never remembers the resets, unless we give them our soul. After that, they begin remembering.

And that’s about it I’d say. This is my personal head canon about Chara and the resets. It’s kinda different, and with unusual implications. Feel free to message me if you have anything to say, I’m always eager to have a chat about the game. See you in however many months again probably!

#undertale

[bigskydreaming]

I’m regards to Bobby the-igniting his feud against Xavier, literally my whole thought process after reading Deadly Genesis and finding out about Gabriel and then about how Adult Bobby was like he didn’t want to be gay on top of everything else when he first came out, I literally thought that he had gone to Xavier about him possibly being gay back during the Silver Age and Xavier just went, nope nope not happening and locked it within his mind.

Oh yeah, someone put an additional block in Bobby’s head kinda...steering him away from coming out sooner. Its literally the only way the story works at all. They created a paradox and either didn’t see it soon enough or they just didn’t see it at all, so nobody at Marvel has so much as touched in and they probably never will and ugh that’s so frustrating.

When the story happened, everyone focused on why Jean’s actions in outing Bobby were wrong from like, an emotional/personal/HUMAN standpoint. Why it was morally wrong, etc, etc. Which is as it should have been, god knows I have plenty of criticism for the story when it comes to that particular angle too.

But problem is, what went largely unnoticed with all the attention on the above angle......Jean outing Bobby wasn’t just a matter of ethics.....it created a logistical issue too.

Okay, bear with me here because this will get long and rambly and I’m probably gonna repeat a lot of stuff twice, lol. Headache’s killing me today but I’m still up anyway because idk, its not the boss of me or whatever. Just saying, its a bit harder to concentrate than usual, and time travel is always a head-scratcher anyway, so to make my point super duper clear and be sure I’ve conveyed it correctly, there’s probably gonna be a fair amount of repetition here. 

But there’s also a point! Don’t forget the point! I didn’t!

Okay. Getting into it. Let’s go. So its like....okay, multiverse theory posits at any given moment, you can make hundreds of different choices, right? Most of them tiny, but they add up. You can feel the urge to sneeze and decide in the span of a second whether you’re going to try and suppress it or let it out. A minute choice, but a choice nonetheless.....one which creates two branching timelines, one where you sneezed and one where you suppressed it. And on and on it goes, with both those timelines in turn getting further and further away from each other as that single choice creates different equally small ripple effects that grow as they expand outward.

Bobby coming out, is not a minute choice.

And the thing is, if you look at the timeline the original five X-Men traveled FROM to the future, like let’s call that the Original Timeline.....

Okay, so picture the original five X-Men back in their Original Timeline, like, ten seconds before Future Hank uses his time machine and appears in the room they’re all in.

At that point in time, before Future Hank arrived......there were millions of possible timelines potentially branching out from any and every one choice they each made.

But the SECOND Future Hank arrived......they became locked in to just ONE possible timeline. There was only ONE way the Original Timeline could go....the way that - from the perspective of the ‘present day’ X-Men. - the future had already gone.

The moment before Future Hank arrived....this was the last moment any of them had millions of potential futures ahead of them where they could have made any of dozens of different choices at any given moment. The moment Future Hank arrived....all those other choices went away. The futures they created were negated, they were off the table. From that moment on, the point in time that Jean kinda ‘reset’ them all to when they got back, by locking away their memories of everything they’d said and done and seen in the future, so none of that could influence the choices they MIGHT make away from the choices that in the Future timeline they DID make, like, from that point on, the original five X-Men were essentially following a script. A script of the ONE singular way things HAD gone for the X-Men in their future. 

Its like okay, you’ve got the Original Timeline, and let’s call the moment Future Hank arrives the Jump-Off point. And let’s call the future they arrived in, the one Future Hank came from, let’s call that the Future Timeline. And the moment the original X-Men ARRIVED there, let’s call that the Point of No Return.

Eeeeeeeeeverything between the Jump-Off point and the Point of No Return, from the Future X-Men’s perspective....that was all set in stone. It had already happened. There was only one possible view of it, the way things could have gone. All those other choices they could have made at any given moment prior to that....they were irrelevant now because they HADN’T made them.

But all those same moments between the Jump-Off point and the Point of No Return, for the Original X-Men, were NOT set in stone, not irrelevant, any one of them could have led in thousands of different directions....

Until the Original X-Men returned to the Original Timeline at the Jump-Off point, and Jean locked away their memories of anything and everything that had happened from the point of two seconds before Future Hank arrived and changed everything. Because now, all those choices ahead of them in the Original Timeline.....they weren’t choices any more. They were locked in, set in stone, even though the Original X-Men had yet to MAKE any of those choices....because according to the Future, they already had. To create a firm, steady bridge across the In Between of the Jump-Off point and the Point of No Return, in order to ensure that the Original Timeline and the Future Timeline was a closed loop, one continuous timeline with no deviation.....the road from the Jump Off point to the Future had to follow one singular route.

Now, Jean locked away all their memories, because the basic theory there was well, without any memory of anything we experienced, without any information we didn’t already have at the Jump-Off point, if everything gets reset JUST to that and all knowledge or memories we SHOULDN’T have at that point are safely locked away in our heads to come out once we reach that point but with no chance of affecting our decision-making between now and then.....then, essentially, it will be as though we’re the exact same people we were when we left the Jump-Off point, with the exact same knowledge and information we had then, the exact same feelings, like....with all of that locked away, we will for all intents and purposes BE those people again.....which means there’s nothing to influence us to do or think or say anything that we DIDN’T already do or say or think had the Original Timeline continued past the Jump-Off point without Future Hank ever arriving.

But here’s where they fucked up. And man I get heated all over again every time I think about this.

Even with all of that, the story COULD have still worked without any other murkiness around it, if they’d done one thing differently.

If they’d written Future Bobby coming out on his own, like basically right before their arrival, THAT could have worked. But they did it backwards.

Like, if 16 year old Bobby Drake had arrived in the future and been shocked to find out in the future he’s gay? If THAT was what led to his coming out? Then that INFORMATION was something he didn’t have back at the Jump-Off point, it could easily be written that he was still deep enough in denial that to see himself as an out gay man would have been a shock, would have FELT like new information, even if deep down he was already aware of that.

And if THAT was all that had been locked up as part of the memories that had to be hidden to make sure the Original Timeline only followed one specific path to get to the Future Timeline....the path the Future Timeline had already followed....that would have been fine. 

Because Original X-Man Bobby, as of the Jump-Off Point, would not have had any extra knowledge or information that might lead to him deciding to come out earlier. And thus there would have been no conflict with him for whatever reasons, deciding not to come out until way in the future, right before he met the Future version of himself.

Problem is, Jean OUTING Bobby in the future, fucks all of this up and makes the above impossible.

Because we have no idea when and for what reasons Bobby might have come out on his own, without Jean’s external push jumpstarting the process.

Meaning, that whoooooole In Between Time between the Jump-Off Point and the Point of No Return?

Ten seconds before Future Hank arrived, Original Bobby had millions and millions of possible opportunities and choices in that time, that could have led to him coming out a lot sooner or in different ways. Ten seconds AFTER they all returned to the Original Timeline from the future and all been ‘reset’ to know just what they already knew at that point, Bobby only had ONE possible future....the one that had just been locked in as the One True Path.

And Jean being the catalyst that changed things IS the logistical problem.

Because remember, even when Jean outed him, Bobby reacted with protests and denial at first....but then he subsided pretty quickly and admitted she was right.

HE ALREADY KNEW HE WAS GAY THEN, AT SIXTEEN.

He just wasn’t ready to FACE it yet.

Which, let’s be honest, is pretty fucking valid and normal. Even today, but let alone ten or fifteen years ago, which is supposed to be how far the Future Timeline was from the Jump-Off Point.

You see the problem?

When Jean reset them all, locked away any and all memories of everything past just before Future Hank arrived, making absolutely sure nothing NEW could influence them away from the path the Future X-Men had already taken after....

BEING GAY WASN’T ACTUALLY NEW INFORMATION TO BOBBY.

He was in denial, but it was already there, the awareness of it. That’s how Jean was able to read it so easily in the first place. She picked up on it not because she was doing a deep dive into his mind for whatever reason, like reading him down the bone, but just like....passing thoughts she picked up on clued her in that he was in denial and overcompensating for it. And yeah, she honestly thought she was helping by pushing him to come out, see in the future its not so bad, you can do it.

But tbh, that’s the absolute worst thing she could have done.

Because from that moment on, anything and everything Bobby knew or felt about himself and his sexuality that could be considered NEW information, that all got locked away during the reset at the Jump-Off point.

What was already in his mind, DIDN’T.

Which means......if Jean didn’t say anything to Bobby, if his coming out process, whenever it happened, was organic and up to him, he decided when he was ready to face that and wrap his mind around it, come to terms with himself....

We have NO idea what that could have looked like, if done ON HIS OWN. If his awareness was buried so deep in his mind it was honestly new information to him and thus got locked up in his head with everything else, and thus he did nothing different from what Future Bobby did.....then that would have been alright, because it would mean that Future Bobby really did just not come out earlier than that because of nothing but his own reasons and thinking and motivations.

But what we got was not that. Because even at sixteen, Bobby knew. It was made very very clear that he knew, in fact he was close enough that Jean felt all he needed was ‘a little push’ to know it was okay and that they would all still love and accept him.

Sixteen year old Bobby was already ON his journey of self-discovery. He just hadn’t gotten very far yet, but it was there. Awareness, realization, they were all there BEFORE Jean reset their minds. 

And the characters and the premise of the story and definitely the writers.....they all engaged with it with zero awareness that the second they had this big life change happen to Bobby IN the future - thus meaning all awareness of it would have to be locked away - but based not on INFORMATION from the future, but simply Jean reading Bobby’s mind and finding out things HE’D ALREADY KNOWN.....

THIS is what took away all Bobby’s choices from the moment he was externally pushed to come out IN THE FUTURE.....based on information available in the past.

Without interruption, Original Bobby could have just been months from coming out on his own. He could have come out when he was eighteen. Experimented in college. Been inspired by meeting Northstar. There’s millions of ways he could have come out between the Jump-Off Point and the Point of No Return...if left to do it himself.

But he got STUCK with the ONE timeline where he just stayed miserable in the closet for fifteen years.....because the writers and characters all treated it as though Jean’s push was something good and necessary for his character....rather than something that disallowed him to make that choice for himself, when he decided it was time....which up until that moment, could very well have been any number of times in the fifteen years in between. 

And this creates a logistical nightmare.

Because the flip side of all this, is when resetting her and her teammates, locking away everything that was new and potentially influential - the idea is without outside influence, nothing would get in the way of them making choices other than what they had in the Future them’s lives.

But JEAN was the outside influence in Bobby’s entire coming out process.

NOT new information.

So twist is.....she has absolutely no way of knowing if Bobby actually WOULD come out at any point in the next FIFTEEN YEARS on his own, if she hadn’t pushed him to do it during a time that was ultimately going to have to be locked away and made irrelevant for the time being.

BUT.

Timeline needs to be consistent, they need a solid bridge between the Original Timeline and Future Timeline or else space goes all fucky....

Which means things HAVE to go the ONE way they did for the Future X-Men. Which means they HAVE to do things the same.

Which means since Future Bobby hadn’t come out until then....Original Bobby COULDN’T be ALLOWED to come out until then.

And thus we get to the actual point, lol. Why for the story to make any sense at all, there HAS to be a second block in Bobby’s head, one that steers him away from coming out until the rest of his memories unlock. Of course, I prefer to think it was Xavier who put it there himself, once the Original X-Men returned with no memories of anything different, but Xavier still aware of what transpired, realized Bobby created a problem because of the WAY he came out....

Because his coming out process was hijacked, essentially. It wasn’t HIS.

And the second they returned and Xavier realized the issue, it had to have been clear.....just having no access to the knowledge of the future that might influence them in different directions, like, it would work with all of the other four. But that was never going to be enough in Bobby’s case.

Because as long as there was even a CHANCE that Bobby - who on some not that deep level already knew he was gay before Jean blurted it out in the future, and thus fully retained the same level of knowledge and awareness he had BEFORE that - as long as there was even a CHANCE that without Jean’s ‘intervention’ he might have in the Original Timeline gone on to come out by himself somewhere else down the line, maybe months, maybe years, maybe even a decade.....like, locking away everything they experienced in the future wasn’t the same guarantee they’d make the same choices when it came to Bobby’s turn.....because he didn’t get a choice to MAKE....

Which means, there was no pre-written script for him to follow when they returned to the past. Because they have no idea what Bobby’s path WOULD have looked like, IF it had continued past the Jump-Off point on its own, the path he was already on. They couldn’t be sure that just resetting his memories to that time would guarantee the same choices, because they have no idea what choices he was GOING to make on his OWN there......until he was externally influenced by someone else in the future, his coming out not prompted by someone, but pre-empted.

Jean beat him to the punch, basically. Which created the issue of having no way to know when or how he might have done that naturally, and thus no way of knowing if he WOULD make the same exact choices just due to not having any memory of coming out....but still being just as close or as far to coming out on his own as he already would have been by that point.

This isn’t a situation that existed for any of the other four. All their foreknowledge COULD be safely locked away and ensure no deviation from the choices they’d already made. But since Bobby’s choice was essentially made FOR him here, BUT in the future and thus locked away with all other knowledge of that.....Bobby’s ACTUAL choice, uninfluenced.....was a wildcard. It could look like anything.

And it had to look just like ONE thing. The thing that according to the Future, it already was. Fifteen years in the closet, because....

Someone had to remove that wildcard. It would have been the only way to actually keep the timeline consistent. Bobby’s ‘choice’ actually happened OUTSIDE the timeline, so to speak, and his memory of that was locked away, which meant his choice was still on the table. Still up in the air, because it had never happened yet as far as he knew, which meant he still felt he had a choice to make.

He just couldn’t be allowed to make it. Not if there was even a remote chance (let alone the millions of chances there actually were between sixteen year old Bobby getting to be thirty year old Bobby) that he might decide differently. Since he couldn’t KNOW Bobby would walk that same path if not steered around by anyone else, he had to MAKE SURE Bobby stuck to just that one path

Xavier HAD to ensure that his actions matched up with those of his Future Self.

Which meant he had to be limited to JUST the one choice, when that WASN’T something anyone could possibly predict, because there wasn’t a script for how that went. Because all of that off script, so to speak.

So Xavier had to MAKE it a script. And that meant taking away any and all possibilities of him coming out at any point before they arrived in the Future.

Anyway, yeah. So bottom line, Jean’s push didn’t push him further down the road, it actually hijacked him and confined him to one finite road that he never ever actually chose for himself. She ‘guided’ him to an exit off the road of denial he was on EARLIER than he might have on his own......but her directing him down that exit is what made ALL the future exits ahead of him null and void, even if he might have steered down the one just three exits ahead. Because we’ll never know what he might have chosen on his own. She’ll never know. He’ll never know. 

And Xavier would never know. So once again, the choice had to be made FOR him. For the sake of the universe or whatever. That one road for Bobby HAD to be locked in, no matter what. No memories of that time wasn’t enough, there had to be an additional guarantee that no matter what, he never came out on his own BEFORE that time was reached. He had to be kept away from making any choice to come out at any time for any reason in the fifteen years In Between, as long as there was a chance that uninterrupted, his coming out process would NOT have followed the same script everyone else was reading from. Because he was already writing his own story but he never got to finish it. Because someone took away his pen and said here I’ll finish it for you, and then handed him back the story of his life and said now go live it, its all in there, do it just like that.

So yeah. IMO, Bobby’s real story of the past fifteen years in-universe, was that it wasn’t HIS story. He didn’t write it. It was written for him. And that one choice that he HAD to be kept away from is such a BIG one, such an epicenter of huge inevitable ripple effects spreading all throughout his life......it meant KEEPING him from making it inevitably would have created ripples all throughout his life. 

Like, oh say, a mental block he’s unaware of, preventing him from making that final step and just coming out, just saying to a close friend ‘Hey, I’m gay, and I’m kinda struggling with that, ngl,’...essentially preventing him from living his life to the fullest, literally not allowing him to accept himself because coming to terms with his sexuality five years down the line was mmmm, that date is no good for the Professor, we’re going to have to insist on sticking with the one we set fifteen years from now. See you then!’

Anyone think a mental block that sweeping wouldn’t have drastic ripple effects on his whole personality? If it had to be capable of covering or blocking that many exits, constantly keep him corraled into one finite direction no matter how much HE, absent a real script of choices HE’D already made, really felt like going over here this way instead, and why wasn’t it okay that he do that again? Why can’t he make himself take that final step? Why can’t he trust his best friends with this? What’s wrong with you, Bobby probably asked himself, millions of people have done this and not even had superpowers to protect themselves. And why do you care so much about that part anyway? I’m USED to people hating me and trying to kill me, why is this so much scarier? If I was afraid of danger, I’d change careers, but I’m fine with what I do, I LIKE being a hero and helping people, so why do I freeze up when I so much as THINK about just blurting it out to Hank or Rogue, as if they of all people would ever actually judge me for this? Why do I keep going out with women I like and yeah even love in some ways, but knowing damn well the whole time that there’s no happy ending here because this isn’t what I want? Why do I do that to them, why do I put myself through that, why can’t I just do what everyone else says, what everyone else has done, and just GROW UP already and do the thing I know I have to do, know I WANT to do, that I just keep putting off because what, its hard? When has that ever stopped me from doing something before? What the fuck is the MATTER with me, I WANT to do this, I know I’m gay and I’m not even ashamed of it, I’m NOT my father and I’ve literally spent my whole life proving that, so why am I acting so much like him when it comes to this one part of my life? Was I really just kidding myself every time I swore to myself that I was done letting his bullshit have any influence on me?

And those are just a few of the ways that Bobby might be affected, every time he unknowingly bumped up against a mental block he was unaware of because he wanted to tell someone he was gay, he felt that THIS time it feels right, THIS is when I come out and just speak my truth FINALLY.....and he just didn’t know what was stopping him. Like something was just sitting there right in his way and no matter which way he tried to go it still managed to block him off. Because that’s what it was, tbh. That’s what it had to be, to KEEP Bobby from making any ORGANIC choice to come out on his own in the fifteen years between Past and Future.....because someone felt the road he was on wasn’t getting him there fast enough and so made him take an earlier exit.....and that meant the road he traveled from that point on wasn’t his, it wasn’t the one HE picked.....but because the future said it was, and because nobody knows what HIS road actually would have looked like if he’d gotten to pick it himself, and they couldn’t risk his TRUE road, the road of his wildcard choice, possibly taking him somewhere away from where they wanted him to go, said he HAD to go, even though it meant he was gonna be miserable and self-loathing for a decade and a half, with no chance whatsoever of enjoying a real, honest relationship with someone he loved and was loved by, meant he’d probably have related issues with his powers and exploring his potential there because the weird thing about insecurities and negative feelings of self-worth is they’re not really selective about where they hit you, and on and on and on....

Well, no matter how he felt about it, no matter what felt real or natural to him, no matter what decisions or choices he WOULD have made if he’d just come to terms with his sexuality in his own time, without anyone pushing or prodding him to do it on their timetable instead of his...all of that was irrelevant if it couldn’t be counted on to get their timeline where it needed to go, to match up with the future’s past. There had to be something keeping him on just the one road they’d mapped out, without consulting him on what destination he even WANTED, too many variables that could lead only god knows where, so something’s gotta keep your steering wheel locked in place, make sure you’re only going one way. Make you turn back every time you attempt to turn onto another offramp and say I like this road up ahead better, I want to merge with that one.

It didn’t matter what Bobby wanted. It didn’t matter what he’d decide. This was the way it had to be, no matter what, and Bobby’s life was just collateral damage to that necessity. Regrettable, perhaps, but it was for the greater good.

It was for the sake of the universe, after all.

Course, the funny thing is, when you’re talking about a kid who’s been putting his life on the line to protect total strangers even if they hate him and want him dead, and all of this since before he was even in high school?

Chances are, if you’d just laid out the stakes for him, showed him what the danger was and the proposed solution, messy as it was, if you’d even made that an OPTION for him.....

Bobby Drake probably would have said go ahead, if its gotta be done, then its gotta be done.

It was for the sake of the universe, after all. 

Or you can have no faith in the heroism of a child more heroic than most people three times his age, and just hack his car’s steering with some GPS satellite connection fuckery, steer him to the road of YOUR choice while he tries to figure out what the hell is going on and why is the car doing its own thing, why won’t it take him where he wants to go, is he even driving this thing anymore? And since no, he’s not, not then and there at least, and you can’t be sure that left to his own devices, his own choices, he won’t try and course correct back in the direction he originally wanted to go, won’t try picking any of the off-ramps on THIS road and head somewhere else of his own choosing, well, guess you better just put some kind of auto-lock on his steering wheel so no matter what he does, how much he struggles with it, that steering wheel won’t budge, won’t take him anywhere but where its already taking him. And there’s no way out of the car, no chance to swap it out for another one that’s not possessed and actually goes left when he fucking tries to go left, and so he’s stuck. Just sitting there, being driven to an unknown destination he sure as hell didn’t choose considering its preprogrammed destination is a complete unknown to him, behind the steering wheel but driving in name only, since he’s basically a passenger on his own roadtrip here in his own car.....and he’s just. Stuck like that. Unable to do anything about it, not even sure what the problem is or what’s going on, just that something’s wrong and its like something inside him just won’t LET him be happy, even when its right there in front of him, would just require one conversation with one trusted friend and hopefully spread from there, but it’d be so easy to reach, he can see it so clearly.....he just can’t make himself reroute to that destination and so he just watches as it too fades into his rear view mirror and desperately wishes he could have any car other than the one he’s trapped in.

Of course, if Xavier was ever confronted about this, he’d be sympathetic for how difficult it made things for Bobby for sure. He’d talk about how he regretted the necessity, the needs of many, blah blah blah, actually all things Bobby quite agreed with and would have been the reasons he’d have said yes if given the opportunity to actively PICK this road and agree to whatever was necessary to make sure he stayed on it whether he liked it or not, cuz like, fate of the universe and all that right? It sucks but he gets it, and at least its not like its forever or anything..And at least then he could say it was all for a reason, that it wasn’t just fucked up for the sake of who even knows, its not like anyone ever gave him the script they wrote for this. He’s just along for the ride.

But that conversation never happened. Nor will that confrontation ever happen, I imagine. But if it did, I think ultimately there’s only one way it would finish. With Xavier defending his placement of an additional mental block once they returned to the past and he realized the problem inherent in having foreknowledge of every choice the 05 would make for the next fifteen years....except for this one specific choice whose trajectory had been altered WHILE IN THE FUTURE, meaning it was the ALTERATION from whatever it would have been that was all that was forgotten....but now there was a specific trajectory it HAD to follow and no way of knowing how closely or not it might have matched the trajectory it would have followed if not TEMPORARILY re-routed off course....before it was returned to.....its exact original trajectory BUT with a single specific target that NOW it HAD to hit....no matter what.

He wishes there’d been another way, Xavier would have assured him. He regrets how much it hurt Bobby, made him question himself, even hate himself. But really, he’d say at the end, all I did was make sure you arrived at a destination you’d already reached. I only steered you down the road your older self had already traveled, so ultimately it was your choices that led you there, I was just making sure you stuck with what you’d already chosen.

And Bobby just stands there even after he’s gone, looking at nothing off in the distance but mentally going over the same footage he’s been obsessing over ever since he found out about that second block: Watching the record of his own life, but not as a critic like he usually reviews his own past. This time just watching it as a viewer, through the eyes of someone who too often had very little to do with why so many things he’s seeing here went THIS way when he really wanted them to go THAT way instead. 

Hunting through the archives of his mind for more kindling to feed the fire of resentment and bitterness simmering in the darker places inside, more memories of times that stand out in his mind because he’s never understood until now why he would have chosen to do that when he remembers how badly he wanted to do this other thing and just couldn’t. Having had no clue until now what could possibly stopping him, like something was blocking him, an invisible barrier in his way every time he went to follow through on something but COULDN’T. Because it was. Keeping so much of what he wanted to do from ever transforming from thought into action. Trapped in his brain, unable to leave even though that’s what he WANTED them to do, that’s what he kept TELLING them to do. 

So many ideas, plans, wants, dreamed up and then organized and then sent out into the world - or at least that was the intention but for some reason he always seemed to stall at that final step. Find some excuse to just put it down, leave it where it was, never send it out into the world even though that meant over the years entire mounds of unrealized hopes and dreams had piled up around him because he couldn’t get the door open and he had no idea why. So much he’d wanted to do but never done. So much he’d wanted to say but never said. So much he’d lived without really living.

‘It was for the fate of the universe’ echoes in his head a lot. It helps, a little, because Bobby gets that. Of course he does. Its why he absolutely would have said yes, would have chosen this, would have accepted it if only he’d ever been given that opportunity, ever had actually been asked.

But then there’s that other echo too, the one that haunts, persists, mocks. The one where Xavier said ‘I was just making sure you stuck to what you’d already chosen.’

Because try as he might, turning every aspect of the situation around and around in his head trying to absorb it all, he keeps coming back to one single response to that last echo, the one that upends the reasonable sound of it with one simple sentence, and finally, there’s nothing in his head to stop him from putting voice to what he wants to say, there’s nothing cancelling his thoughts’ transformation into words at the last possible second. 

There’s nothing but him now, the real him, the full him, the him that has no hand but his own steering him in his chosen direction. There’s nothing in the way of who he wants to be, and no more confusion about why he so often was someone he didn’t want to be. 

Even if there’s no one but him around to hear it, there’s nothing but his own truth in his words, when he finally gets to speak it. Nothing holding him back or guiding him away from the truth about himself that he knows, will hold on to, will not be allowed to be stripped from him again. 

‘I was just making sure you stuck to what you’d already chosen.’

It echoes and haunts and twists in the breeze around him, but Bobby now knows how to tell someone else’s lies apart from his own truth, he knows how to hear when the words resounding in his head are not actually said with his voice. He knows where to look to find it now, knows how to face that self-serving bullshit head on and see it for what it is. Because the one certainty he can no longer be misled from, the truth that puts the lie to every regret Xavier tried to paint his face with, is as simple as it is clear.

“But I never actually chose any of that,” he says to the wind. There’s nothing and no one else around to hear, but he speaks it loud and firmly anyway, because that’s the voice that truth deserves. He repeats it, again and again and again until its the only thing he can hear. Drowning out the echoes of the lies he’s been told, been led to believe were his own thoughts and choices. Chasing away the justifications of someone who’d condemned him so many times for not realizing his full potential, all while knowing full well the reason he couldn’t: how could he, after all, how could anyone, when that full potential, that full, realized self, had to include such a major part of him? And how could there ever be justification, for knowing the binding on that part of his self that wouldn’t let him ever say its name, knowing that this was your own work, and yet watching him break himself against it over and over again throughout the years, letting him believe it was he himself that was the reason that stood in his way.

The echoes try to answer, try to speak in their defense, try to lie some more, but he’s done listening. Instead he just repeats himself again and again, still louder and louder. His own echoes chasing the impostors away, further and further every time he shouts forth a new one, and he could do that forever, he thinks. He feels energized, buzzing with a familiar intensity he can’t remember ever fully feeling since he was sixteen. Small wonder.

He shouts his truth some more, makes the air shudder and reverberate. The lies are harder to see now, as far removed as they are. Each echo of his own pushes them further and further into the distance, all around him in every direction. Like his own echoes are ripples in a pond, pushing ever outward and sending them a little further away with each new ripple he makes.

Its not good enough. Not anymore.

He’s done making ripples. He wants to make waves.

He gathers his breath, calling it up straight from his lungs, freshly chilled and crisp the way it always comes out when he lets a little of the infinite sea that is his power leak into his voice. 

That power that is enough to make a whole world go cold. Enough to break mountains, enough to freeze oceans. That power that is his and his alone now, like it always should have been.

Like every aspect of himself, all the things that make him him and that are now his and his alone. Like they always should have been.

“I never chose any of this,” he screams at last, shattering the air around him with the volume of the truth that’s lived somewhere inside him all along, knowing without knowing that something was wrong, that something wasn’t right, wasn’t him. Never voiced until now because someone else had chosen never to let him speak it. 

It surges out of him now, all the more forceful from the energy its stored up with no outlet for so long. Reaches so much further than even every shout he’s made before. Its coupled with his power, the words cascading outwards from him in every direction and bearing with them his signature cold. Making the air snap and sparkle with the intensity of it; a few falling leaves being carried on the breeze are frozen through and fall to the ground like a gentle rain of ice.

All around him, in every direction, the ground is upheaved, a circle of frostrime surrounding him like a fairy ring comprised of winter. The air shudders, the last of his echoes finally reach the horizon and fade off into the distance.

His truth remains, and in the center of the circle, finally, there’s calm.

[tonysopranosfeverdreams]

1. short with tall energy

2. extrovert, but like. you’ll need time to reset after interacting w/ people sometimes

3. i would say a healthy balance of both. i don’t think you would be “rude” unless someone was being hateful in some way, and even then, i feel like it would only be considered “rude” because of like. the misogyny engrained in social norms. but you’re usually. idk, polite isn’t the exact word, but you’re kind, and that’s much more important anyway

4. there’s no such thing as normal, but i feel like you consider yourself weird

5. both, you’re what you need to be at a given moment given the circumstances, but barring any like. extenuating circumstances, i would say you’re probably funny in your everyday life

6. friendly in general, but you could and probably would kick someone’s ass if need be

7. positive, definitely. not saying you don’t have bad days, but you generally strive to be like. kind & put good energy into the world

i feel like this is rly accurate for the most  part omg i definitely get called rude for not smiling a lot or being more to the point but i try to have good manners and be  courteous if other people seem nice especially or like theyre not being respected by others around ill make a point to be extra polite and rude to people who are being generally shitty.  oh god esp when i was a little younger but it’s probably still in me a bit i was ready to fight if it felt necessary my former roommates said the best word to describe me was “feisty” and i was proud of that tbh jadajskdajkd thank you 💞

also this made me think of this: