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suiana · 6 days

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✎ yandere! criminal who is helplessly in love with you, devoting his life to you and keeping your affections solely on him, and him only.

✎ yandere! criminal who can't help but flirt with you despite being so beaten up. i mean you're just so cute! why wouldn't he flirt?

✎ yandere! criminal who always reminds you that he has the upperhand no matter what his condition is like. he likes playing dirty.

✎ yandere! criminal who commits even more crimes after seeing you talk with someone who isn't him. doctor, you just never learn, do you?

"remember doctor, you may be smarter, but i always have the upperhand."

the criminal mutters, smirking as he leans into your touch. you merely click your tongue, grimacing at the his antics before going back to tending to his injuries.

you were his doctor, illegally caring for one of the most wanted criminals in the country simply because he was once your childhood friend. you knew it was wrong, you knew you should have rejected him the second he came stumbling to your apartment one day with a bloody wound.

but you didn't. you took him in and treated his injury, nursed him back to health and even offered your place as refuge if he ever needed medical attention again.

unfortunately, you failed to realise that the man was crazy in love with you, infatuated to such an extent that he would harm others without a second thought.

"please, you must understand, i've only ever wanted you to love me and not some other bastard. if you didn't talk to him i wouldn't have needed to hurt that guy."

he mutters, looking at you with such a fond expression that you would've mistaken for love. you really didn't know how to respond to his affections. after all, he was your childhood friend turned criminal. things would be even worse for you if you reciprocated him.

so you did the best thing possible and just ignored him whenever he went off on another tangent of his delusional rambles. you daren't speak up and reject him again. oh no, it happened once and you didn't want it to happen again.

"you look so sexy when you ignore me."

the criminal coos, placing his hand over yours as he brings it to his cheek. you uncomfortably maintain eye contact with him, grimacing as you allow him to mutter and talk about his love. it's okay... just tolerate it...

"oh baby, don't you get it? everything i do is for you."

yeah, you know. he tells you all the time. bout how all his crimes are dedicated for you or done in your name. of course he never says it to the public, he doesn't want you to get jailed! though, he can't help but fantasize about how romantic it would be if you two were both wanted criminals on the run together.

"why must you torment me like this? all i've ever wanted was for you to love me back."

he sighs, not noticing your pursed lips or obvious discomfort.

"never smile for anyone else. only i should have the honour of seeing it. all those other fools will never worship you the way you should be worshipped."

you can't help but twitch at his words. ugh, he always preaches about worshipping you and stuff. it's so... is he mentally insane too?

you get the love part, but the worshipping? you won't be surprised if he prays to you when he's on the brink of his death.

"no one gets me like you. that's why i love you so much."

your childhood friend mutters, finally letting go of your hand after pressing a tender kiss to the inside of your wrist. you allow your hand to limp by your side, standing like an npc as you continue to stare at him as he continues his dramatic talk.

you never knew he yapped so much before. when he was younger he was more introverted, more silent and just clingy. now he can't shut up. or maybe that's just around you.

you continue to listen to the male yapping, not really processing his words. hopefully it'll be over soon... but your hopes were crushed as you freeze in place, eyes widening in horror as he smiles widely at you, eyes fully deranged as he suddenly brings your hands to his cheeks, forcing your cold hands to cradle his cheeks.

"i mean, don't you love me too?"

shit, how do you answer this without meeting a bad fate?

#yandere #tw yandere #yandere x reader #yandere drabbles #yandere scenarios #yandere concept #yandere imagines #yandere criminal #yandere criminal x reader #gn reader #suiana rambling #suiana brainrotting

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melodyplucked · 1 year

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♫ — tag drop one — ♫

♫ — i can't be everything to everyone ( musings )

♫ — see your face almost everywhere ( visuals )

♫ — is a moment enough ( study & headcanons )

♫ — you keep playing games but the rules are always changing ( memes )

♫ — doing anything we can just to feel something ( starters & starter calls )

♫ — sign our names into the sand so we remember ( edits )

♫ — i can't help but think of all the things that i would say ( threads )

♫ — if i showed up at your doorstep ( answered )

♫ — a soulmate is someone who you carry with you forever ( nini )

♫ — ( ship | ricky x nini ) you're all i've ever dreamed of having

♫ — don't go wasting your emotion ( npc | heather altomare )

♫ — karma's a relaxing thought ( npc | lianna redmond )

♫ — like these silver nights ( npc | ellory peterson )

♫ — flown too close to the sun ( npc | ava kincaid )

♫ — like time we just passed each other by ( npc | emma williams )

#♫ — i can't be everything to everyone ( musings )#♫ — see your face almost everywhere ( visuals )#♫ — is a moment enough ( study & headcanons )#♫ — you keep playing games but the rules are always changing ( memes )#♫ — doing anything we can just to feel something ( starters & starter calls )#♫ — sign our names into the sand so we remember ( edits )#♫ — i can't help but think of all the things that i would say ( threads )#♫ — if i showed up at your doorstep ( answered )#♫ — a soulmate is someone who you carry with you forever ( nini )#♫ — ( ship | ricky x nini ) you're all i've ever dreamed of having #♫ — don't go wasting your emotion ( npc | heather altomare )#♫ — karma's a relaxing thought ( npc | lianna redmond )#♫ — like these silver nights ( npc | ellory peterson )#♫ — flown too close to the sun ( npc | ava kincaid )#♫ — like time we just passed each other by ( npc | emma williams )#tag drop.

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heavenlymorals · 5 days

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Details that I've noticed about Arthur Morgan-

-He, for the most part, despises male touch, especially if it's overly affectionate. He gets tense anytime a man hugs him and wants it to be over as quick as possible (Jamie, Mickey) and he looks visibly offended when Professor Bell touches him. He even sometimes gets annoyed when Dutch touches him on his shoulder, someone who he considers a father figure.

-On the flip side, he does not mind female touch at all. He even initiates it sometimes (Tilly, the girl at Beaver Hollow). Now one could argue that they were high stress situations, but if Tilly was a dude, he would've just set her free, make a snide remark, give her a gun, and then he'd expect her to help him with the fighting. He is completely cool with the nun giving him a hug and doesn't get offended when Mary Beth touches his hand in their therapy session.

- He seems to be pretty well read. He knows Shakespeare, with Romeo and Juliet, and Icarus. He makes other literary references. This is probably due to Dutch. Dutch is clearly very well read and cultured. However, Arthur seems more interested in practical works like guides then philosophy and stories, given that the only book he has on his tent desk is a plant guide.

- He's great at remembering faces and less so on remembering names.

- He does have an amazing propensity to remember physical features, like how he is able to create amazing portraits of the people he meets without consistent reference. It's incredible and works back to the whole great at remembering faces thing. Same goes for animals.

- He is very curious. He is always touching things, looking at things, critiquing things, and trying to understand how they work.

- He generally refuses to be emotionally open with men and does it only with women- this could be due to the idea of the Cult of Domesticity. I've made a post about it before. Compare him speaking with the nun to Reverend Swanson. Compare him speaking to John about Dutch leaving him to him speaking to Sadie about Dutch leaving him.

- He is very connected or is fond of artistic people. He and Mary Beth talk about their journals. He is fond of Albert Mason's photography and helps him out. He is interested in Charles Chataney's artistic work, even if he doesn't like it or connect with it.

- Since a lot of camp members respond to Arthur's antagonizations with something like "not again" or "I knew I'd be next", it's safe to assume Arthur will go off on people from time to time, regardless if you play high or low honor.

- Does not have a fixed temperament. In some missions, he is more energetic and in others, he is more downtrodden. Very realistic and I fucking love it.

- Has direct eye content at all times- will look anyone in the eye and does not give a fuck. NPCs will look away from him if he stares at them.

- Gets mad when men don't behave like men, especially when it concerns women. He gets pissed at John for not stepping up and being a man to his family. He gets annoyed and even pissed off when asking why Beau couldn't have helped Penelope Braithwaite as she is his woman.

- Given how the camp falls to shit whenever Arthur isn't donating, we can safely conclude that Arthur is the most valuable member of that camp, bar maybe Hosea and Dutch.

- He is very reminiscent of the Dark Romantic, which is really interesting as a lot of times, it can be looked at as the middle ground between Romantacism and Realism, two ideologies that were very popular in the 19th century. I will make a full analysis regarding this later.

- Introverted, but not shy at all. In fact, he's very charismatic and is just as good as dealing with people as Dutch and Hosea (The Riverboat Mission) This 'dumb, mumbling' cowboy thing he's dumbed down to in the fandom is an insult to his character.

- He probably acted like a father figure to Jamie Gillis when he was still with Mary, given the fact that he taught him how to ride a horse. Will probably also make a full post about this later.

- Some people say that Arthur is around 5'10-11. Others say He's 6'0-3. Whatever his height actually is, he's still way taller than the average man during this time period, who was around 5'6. Now imagine that with muscles and armed to the teeth- fucking terrifying.

- Very sentimental. He keeps a photo of his supposedly no good Pa and wears his hat. He keeps a photo of his mother who he doesn't really remember at all. He keeps a photo of his dog, a horseshoe that probably belonged to a dead and beloved horse. He keeps a flower from his mother. Keeps a photo of Mary as well. If he had a photo of Isaac, he'd probably keep that too.

-Arthur died at 36 years old from Tuberculosis if you play high honor. The real gunslinger and outlaw Doc Holliday died at the same exact age and the same exact way.

- Genuinely doesn't give a fuck about movements, social issues, and cultural issues, but does care about individual people.

- I love him

- So fucking much

- 😃

#red dead redemption 2 #rdr2 #arthur morgan #character analysis

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sh1-n0bu · 1 year

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♡︎ 𝙗𝙚𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙖𝙣𝙠’𝙨 𝙙𝙤𝙤𝙧 ♡︎

anon asked: Soo I saw you take requests even for npc's so I figured I'd shoot my shot or whatever though I know you have a lot of asks so if this stresses you out don't worry about it but the fatui pyro agents? The fucker with the fire knives? Yeah that bitch? I firmly belive someone should fuck him till he crys and begs to cum

characters: sub!fatui agent x nb!dom!reader

warnings: overstimulation, orgasm denial, begging, dacryphillia, “master” kink, hair pulling, exhibitionism, degrading, size kink, dumbification, creampie, cock can be interpreted as a strap on!

notes: nobu back in her horny era! on today’s post we have, fucking an npc stupid! repost bc tumblr can’t win against me

how did it come to this? with the strong, reliable, capable agent being railed stupid as his supposed next target keeps his salacious sobs and cries of pleasure silent with their bigger hand, the other holding his leg up. pushing it up further and further into an impossibly hard angle as he claws at the doors of northland bank.

a mewl slips out of his mouth as his target slips their hand off of their mouth, instead opting to keep him up by fisting at his short, grey locks. the tears that were welling in his eyes starts to fall as a drool slips from his lips and down to the floor. legs shaking as his hips weakly, pathetically twitched back to meet up with your thrusts.

“maah-! master! please!! not-noT HEREE MNGGH!♡︎♡︎” biting down on his already bruised and bleeding lips, the agent lets out another sob as he felt his orgasm approaching.

everything felt too much but so little at the same time. he wanted more. more of your cock, more of your cum, more more more!!

the fatuus felt your cock split him open. veiny, long girth breaking him apart as the tip harshly kissed his prostate over and over again. archons, he didn’t even know something like that existed until you forcibly pushed him inside one of the empty rooms of his workplace and had your way with him.

he wanted it, he craved it - no. he needed it.

needed to be fucked by you until his mind breaks, leaving behind nothing but the delicious feeling of your strap forcing him open over and over.

needed to hear you call him degrading names as tears fall from his eyes. sobbing and keening loudly, unable to form any sentences. not even a single plea to save himself and his pride.

needed to trash around as you placed a hand over the bump on his stomach. pushing on the growing bulge of your cock and cum mixed together as he writhes against the wall, sliding down more and more as your large hands on his waist leaves bruises.

needed it as you forced him not to cum again as the strap pours another large amount of cum into his gaping hole. almost falling down to the floor if it wasn’t for your strong arms keeping him up.

needed to beg. whine, wail, keen as you wrap a hand around the angry tip of his cock, placing your thumb over his dripping slit as he begged you in a heap of mess. trying to get the blinding feeling of finally cumming.

“mas-! master!! maste-anngh haah mmph♡︎♡︎!! please? pleasepleasepleaseplease-♡︎♡︎!!” another orgasm denial as you force his smaller body flush against the wall while still continuing to pound into his hole.

the fatuus’ leg shook horribly, standing on his tiptoes as you forced his walls to get used to your size, to remember your shape, to carve every little detail into his mind, into his body. into his prostate.

“you’re not gonna cum haah fuck- until i allow you to. got it, slut?” whispering in a hoarse voice next to his ear, you continued to pound into his sensitive spots. not even caring that the amount of cum you forced him to take dripping down his shaking thighs. some even dripping down to the floor, mixing with his tears and drool.

“yes-! yes master! master! master! my master♡︎♡︎♡︎!!” drunkenly blabbering about some random gibberish, the agent let out another whine as your seeds filled him up again. the skin of his stomach stretching more and more as if his body craved your cum.

finally feeling satisfied with how much you filled him up, you stood up straight to look at the beautiful art you created out of him.

trembling body flush against the wall as his hands desperately clawed at the stone, legs barely holding himself up only thanks to your help. large amount of cum gushing and slipping out from around your strap, dripping down, staining the perfect, wooden floor of the bank.

what a perfect toy you found for yourself.

slipping yourself out, you ignored his babbles about sex drunken shit before pulling out a toy from your bag - a butplug.

fingering the cum back into his fluttering hole, you plugged him close with the toy. a lewd shlick! coming out followed by the agent’s sobs.

“keep them all inside until our next meeting okay, my slut?” giving a warning squeeze to his still shaking thighs, a cruel grin spread across your face as he nodded dumbly.

maybe you should do this to him more often.

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itmightrain · 3 months

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I love Brennan's delight when the intrepid heroes call Kipperlily the wrong name. He's so unprecious about his npcs, i remember seeing him talk about developing settings as a dm once and saying that everything in a setting was made for his players to play with, and you can really see that in his work. He's not annoyed if they don't play with his creations 'right' he just enjoys seeing them have fun

#dimension 20 #fhjy

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Humans are not perfectly vigilant

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:

There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;

There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;

Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."

These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense – the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.

For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday). I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a nightmare. I'm speaking here of the reverse-centaur: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.

But an hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently – so good that we miss the anomalies. That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773841546753831283

In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).

But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to reduce the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to increase their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway – that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nycs-government-chatbot-is-lying-about-city-laws-and-regulations/

The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.

But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.

Reverse centaurism is brutal. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Jorge Royan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Two_boys_playing_in_a_park_-_7328.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Noah Wulf (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #ai #supervised ai #humans in the loop #coding assistance #ai art #fully automated luxury communism #labor

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handsomeamoeba · 7 months

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WRONG.

Try again.

Actually let's get into this. As someone who loves a great many fantasy RPGs including BG3, Skyrim, and Dragon Age, let me explain what BG3 gets that Skyrim misses, in my opinion.

And this is the big one: the characters in BG3 feel like real fucking people. They have backstories, demonstrable feelings about the events and the other characters, they react to the things you do and they develop as people as you further your relationships. Even minor NPCs often feel fleshed out with distinct personalities and opinions. Hell, going out of my way to cast Speak to Animals is usually rewarded with at least one charming remark. I have never given even a little bit of a shit about 99% of Bethesda NPCs. I usually choose to travel without a companion rather than with unless I need a pack mule to carry my stuff, because their primary function seems to be to get in my way, set off traps, or attract aggro. I can't remember most characters' names unless I'm actively playing. I'm more likely to casually murder people in Skyrim than I am in BG3 or DA because Bethesda hasn't really made any of their NPCs feel like real people, and consequentially I feel no guilt. By comparison I tried to do an evil run of DA:O and gave up the instant I had to kill Wynne (the grandmotherly spirit healer) when she refused to let me go through with my plans, because I hated doing it. Lydia will watch me gut an innocent man and do NOTHING because she has no life, existence, or personality outside of me, the player. This extends to romances, obviously. While optional in all the games, most people will pursue a romance path in BG3 or DA for the additional character arcs it brings to the characters, the emotional nuances they unlock. In Skyrim romance is a box you tick of tasks to complete. In fact, once you marry them, most marriage candidates personalities change *completely* because all spouses have the same few stock dialog lines. That is, if they had a personality to begin with (again, see Lydia). You know how everyone wants to romance unromanceable characters in Bethesda games? Like Brynjolf in Skyrim, or Nick Valentine in FO4? It's because Bethesda actually bothered to give them stories and opinions.

Honestly, this extends to the player character themselves. To a certain extent every player character is a blank slate, but in BG3 and DA it at least feels possible to develop a feeling about who that character is and what they would or would not say or do. I've tried to do that with the Dragonborn and rarely feel strong feelings about them or have strong opinions about what kind of person they are. The only one I've made who I have much of an idea about is my wood elf Parafina, who is Chaotic Evil. Which again is an option I only pick because no one in Skyrim feels real.

The stakes also feel more real in BG3, more personal. Obviously there's the central quest involving the tadpoles, but more than that, it is about a credible threat to your world and the people and communities in it and the people you love. There are tons of reasons to invest yourself emotionally in the narrative. I have never, ever completed the main storyline in Skyrim nor picked a side in Skyrim's civil war. Why would it? Basically nothing happens if I choose not to. Furthermore, if you're not playing as a Nord (which I usually don't), why would you care about Skyrim as a place? You are a faceless, voiceless (pun intended) outsider who gets microaggressed at every turn being asked to choose between two different flavors of fascist. Also dragons are back but like... listen, I don't care? They get pretty easy to pick off at a certain point, it's like swatting flies, they're just a nuisance on the way to my daily errands. And isn't that such a common story? Don't you know so many people who don't really bother with the main storylines of Skyrim? Yeah it's one of the bestselling games of all time but I feel like the fact that most people don't really care about its narrative should be a sign of failure. We all know it's mostly maintained its popularity due to the modding community.

Ultimately both games have rich worlds which reward exploration with little secrets and environmental storytelling. But BG3 feels more "meaningful" because they give me reasons to care about what happens. The writers worked hard to give the game emotional resonance. So I come to the two games for different experiences. I go to BG3 to engage with an interesting story. I go to Skyrim for the quick serotonin hit of completing tasks and hoarding items.

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #skyrim #skyrim critical #with all the love in my heart mind you #i was considering not tagging this tbh

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