ngl I'm not a fan of how the very necessary discussion of how autistic girls (and many poc for that matter, not that we usually remember this) often end up masking hard due to the pressure to "be ladylike" or "not be too angry" and therefore end up being seen as "very polite" and "mature for your age" and so on and so forth is morphing into being less about how social pressures may impact how autism presents and more about saying "so there's Girl Autism and there's Boy Autism and Girl Autism makes you nice and polite and pleasant but Boy Autism makes you gross and annoying and rude and offputting and no it's not ableist at all to say that being overly excitable or trying to get a turn to talk when you don't know when your turn is or struggling with arbitrary rules is rude and annoying because Girl Autism exists uwu"
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one of my favorite garak mannerisms is whenever someone says something to him he clearly finds completely wild and his eyes briefly widen like
before he reacts properly. when someone tells you something SO fucking stupid that you momentarily turn into a muppet
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Red Hood stared down at the small child holding up a box. It was wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine, but was very clearly meant to be a gift. The kid bounced on their toes, trying to hold it up higher.
"I made it for you!" They exclaimed. "Don't worry; it's not a bomb, I promise!"
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in regards to orym only admitting how badly he's struggling to dorian/always reaching for the sending stone instead of his current party members, I suspect it's because dorian's not with the team right now, and therefore he's not someone orym feels he needs to be strong for. orym has been told he's the moral center of his party numerous times (ashton has even admitted to him that this isn't fair! but it's still how he's perceived) in addition to being a keep-a-stiff-upper-lip-and-support-your-friends kind of guy. if he cracks, he's got to be afraid that's going to have a ripple effect on the stability of the group. so of course he's going to reach out to the one party member he doesn't feel he has to support, where it won't effect the larger dynamics of the group, who also happens to be someone who is removed from/untouched by the kind of trauma and heartbreak the party has been dealing with and feels more connected to a past that was kinder. dorian is the ideal candidate for orym to open up to emotionally, well beyond any shipping lenses
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Splatoon 3: Side Order is good, but not great. I still highly recommend it, but if you care about the story, you're going to be disappointed. Quick review: spoilers ahead.
Side Order was the devs experimenting with Splatoon's gameplay loop. The campaign is a rogue-like, and it works amazingly well. Super fun, super challenging, building my deck and fighting through challenges with the stakes of resetting really scratched an itch in my brain. They did a great job with it.
Unfortunately, I feel like priority went to game design rather than story. Much of the mysterious artwork we saw in the first teaser trailer was completely unused; turns out, all of that was just concept art that never made it into the final product. Side Order failed to make me care about what was happening. I don't know why the protagonist had to be Agent 8; it could've been anyone else and the story would've worked the same.
Octo Expansion was the absolute peak of meshing story and gameplay. The campaign's hook is insanely strong; we immediately empathize with Agent 8 because we know from previous lore that octolings like her have been trapped underground for all their lives. We care about her fight to the surface because it's a fundamentally ideological fight for freedom. The plot stuff about Tartar and the Thangs is just nice set dressing; 8's fight for freedom is the real story.
There's none of that in Side Order. I don't particularly care about Marina's metaverse, even if it's tied to Octo Expansion's story. I don't know why Acht is there other than backstory stuff. It really feels like 8 is just told to do something and she does it because she's the protagonist; she has zero personal stakes or motivations in the conflict. This is a story blunder the devs did in Splatoon 3's default campaign––forgetting to give the protagonist a personal reason to fight––that I hoped would be fixed here, but alas.
What makes it worse is that the gameplay and story progression are completely out of sync. I beat the entire game on my third run in 4 hours. With each run, you get up to two keys to potentially unlock bits of story. That means you'll get about one piece of the story every two runs. There are twelve pieces of the story; I got the first and then beat the whole damn game. Now I have to go back and grind to see the remaining story when I've already beaten the final boss and resolved the conflict. I missed the entire story because I never had to reset because I blazed through the gameplay! It's just a real shame that I experienced everything without knowing... why it's happening. The final boss had me asking myself what the hell is going on because I don't know the backstory at all.
Again, I still really recommend. The devs did a great job, but Side Order remains in the shadow of Octo Expansion's incredible success. Like the default singleplayer campaign, there's just a lot of lost story potential here that, while not necessary, would have really elevated this DLC into something amazing.
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