i am a firm believer of aziraphale sleeping with famous writers throughout the ages
“Tell me just one more,” Crowley says, laying with his head in Aziraphale’s lap and his legs hooked over the arm of the sofa. “A juicy one and I won’t imply you’re a filthy tramp ever again.”
“You’ll say it outright?” Aziraphale murmurs, amused, not looking up from a book that looks incredibly dry to Crowley. Certainly not more interesting than he is.
“I’ll be a veritable angel,” he says, knocking the book gently out of Aziraphale’s hand, making sure it floats down to the carpet with the bookmark moved to the correct place.
“I’m sure,” Aziraphale says, dryly but with a look so fond that Crowley aches a little, smiling stupidly up at him. “Just one and you’ll accept that they’re no more relevant than all the glasses of wine you’ve drunk?”
“It’s all human indulgences,” Crowley says, dutifully.
Aziraphale tilts his head to the ceiling for a moment, like he’s thinking carefully, and as much as Crowley wants to see the rolodex in that head full of brief entanglements with fascinating men, it’s probably better that he not be jealous of the long dead humans that Aziraphale has happened to spend nights with.
Suddenly, a thin folder flies out from a shelf and Aziraphale drops it lightly onto Crowley’s stomach.
“Visual aid,” Crowley murmurs, opening it to find a single piece of torn paper behind plastic, smeared ink and messy handwriting. He mumbles the words aloud then shuts the folder suddenly and says, “Walt Whitman?”
“I happened to be in America. . .” Aziraphale starts.
“Why would you ever!” Crowley says, sitting up suddenly. “Be in America!”
“. . .well, to meet Walt Whitman,” Aziraphale says, pulling a face, “but I had received some manuscript pages for Leaves of Grass that I needed to authenticate. And it turns out they were false but he very generously shared some of his own pages with me and then. . .offered me a drink."
"Angel, love, it's hard to not call you a tramp when you're letting yourself be seduced with manuscript pages," Crowley says, laughing when Aziraphale huffs and leaning in to kiss him softly. "What did you do with him?"
"It doesn't matter, dearest," Aziraphale says, voice slipping low and serious. "He was a glass of wine. And you're my. . .whole world."
". . .talk like that, I'm starting to think Whitman was the one who got seduced," Crowley says, resting their foreheads together, head feeling swimmy with all of it.
". . .not impossible," Aziraphale says, quickly, distracting Crowley very efficiently by pulling him into his lap.
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been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).
also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)
& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)
the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.
admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy
but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.
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alright, so if we do end up fighting Kris in the last chapter of Deltarune, we will most certainly win. For we are the player, and we have the power of saving and loading. Debatably, Kris has this too, but either way the end result is the same- This will be a fight of iteration and endurance.
I hypothesize that this fight will have two (or three, depending on how you look at it) endings: You persist, or you relent. Persistence would likely look like a LOT of grinding, figuring out which actions in what order will allow you to "win" and take control back over Kris. And relenting, or perhaps convincing them to relent, would look like A: fleeing or mercy, or B: the same thing as persistence, but choosing to pursue mercy. The third option would be death, and subsequently giving up.
Now, we must remember that Deltarune is a 2018 video game developed by American indie developer Toby Fox. Deltarune originally came from Toby's fever dream portraying the ending of a video game. So there's every chance that rather than having the option to either fight to achieve mercy or simply give up and die, you can only die. That IS the only way to free the game from the player. Any other way, and you'd still be in control.
This option also would align with Toby's "there is only one ending"- The ending is persistence, and taking over Kris again. The other "endings" are just death.
This alone makes me inclined to believe that that's exactly how it's gonna go. The only thing that makes me doubt this is how Deltarune is a commercial venture, and that's a pretty unsatisfying "ending". But I could absolutely see Toby doing it anyway.
For we are the player. And if we fight for it, we WILL win. But winning means making Kris suffer, and the only way to avoid that is to no longer fight.
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Guys, we can all agree that Simon and Johnny are fan favorites (I love Alejandro and Rodolfo is my bebe but I'm speaking statistically rn). We can also agree that Ghoap (be it romantic or not) is the most popular relationship in whole mw2 if not in entire cod franchise. They have actual Character Development, they actually like each other, it just makes sense. You can't mistake them with anyone else.
That's why I think we should already be prepared for their death (probably one of them, for dramatic effects. Survivor guilt and stuff like that.).
Now let me explain.
Yes, they're the main characters of mwii. Yes, they're loved by fans. Yes, it will cause outrage in fanbase. Yes it isn't fair that they just gave us characters we love and now they're taking them away.
And?
This is a game about war. War is brutal. War isn't fair. War doesn't discriminate. It kills people, good or bad. Majority of 141 will never live till retirement. They're soldiers - dying is part of this job, risk is always present. It happens.
And sometimes it doesn't have any purpose. "They could live. Their death doesn't change anything, other than them being dead."
And that's why I think it will be mundane. I think it won't have greater purpose. I think it will be entirely avoidable. It won't be fair, but
Who said it would be?
There is no justice in war, violence gouged her eyes and now she's blind to suffering.
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