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abybweisse · 10 months

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Is it possible for shinigami to create children with humans? Or with demons?

I know I've had asks like this before, so please look up posts about reaper abilities and limitations. Short answer:

With humans? I definitely think so. Without that, Undertaker couldn't be Cedric, and he's pretty much got to be Cedric.

With demons? Possibly... but few would ever try....

#black butler #kuroshitsuji #undertaker #reapers #grim reapers #reaper abilities #reaper limitations #minnesotamermaid71 #asks #i answer #sort of #answered asks #jul 28 2023

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captainschaos · 1 year

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Gentle touch, killer's touch.

The session has hardly began, and Etho find himself on guard again. It is rare he finds himself at the front like this, but Skizz was behind him, and the influx of people needed to be addressed quickly. The clock is ticking, after all. So he stands beside the doorway, hands brushing against each shoulder that pushes through the doorframe. Bdubs is good, of course, Scott is green, they're good, they're good- Alright. He remains on guard, audible smile and joking toss of TNT to himself broadcasting the attitude he wants the others to see. The boogeyman may not have been chosen yet, but he is dangerous, should he need to be. He glances at Skizz, laughing at his antics, scarred arms crossed and dark halo overseeing all. They're on guard, through the quips and conversations. A battle is brewing.

Careful tongue, killer's tongue.

They go above the surface, and Etho pushes across the group to Skizz. He leans in, mutters the duty they always know they need to uphold. But he says it anyway. "We have to protect." He says it because he knows however deep it is ingrained in them, they have other instincts that fight it. He says it as a reassurance. Of course they will protect, it's what they do best, it's what they always do. Now. With that aside. The hunt is on.

No one, not even he, can see the grin that pulls at his face, but it seems to spread through every one of his faeish muscles. It's a simple thing, the hunt, the chase, but it will never get old to him. He almost forgets about the clock in the heat of the chase, but the seconds are sweet as they spill from Joel's fallen body. It despawns quickly, sand on the wind, and in the remains there's laughter. The fanged fae's laugh, a sharp and dancing tune, captivating and capturing.

Wicked laugh, killer's laugh.

And there are other laughs. Tango's, so similar to his own, faeish and just behind him every step of the hunt. The phoenix has always understood him and his playful, deadly instincts, and now that Etho has had his fun, he falls behind Tango's fiery wing to help his hunt. He burns extra hot, extra red, and Etho can tell he needs the kill. There are other hunters, the whole server scrabbling for sand in their hourglasses. Martyn's hunger is clear as he lashes out toward Etho, who raises his shield and swivels to position Martyn between Tango and himself. It becomes a dance, and when Martyn falls in that pool, the phoenix flicks a fiery finger and tosses the dynamite. And the explosion is musical.

Stark silence. Killer's silence.

In the aftermath, it is quiet. The two check their clocks, check the roster, and see the green is thinning. Of the few left, Tango and Impulse are forefront for Etho and Skizz. Team T.I.E.S. regroups, and the fae and the reaper share yet another glance. We have to protect. They don't say it aloud, but they know, and fall into position. But these are the Life Games, and there's only so much that can be done. Impulse falls, and they all curse under their breath, but they refocus. Tango will be the next target, and now that their hunt is over, the hunt will turn against them.

"Skizz, I'm just gonna hide behind you, okay," Tango squeaks out as he ducks under Skizz's wing. "It's all you can do, man," he laughs back with a smile. Skizz pats the phoenix's shoulder and pushes off, bow in hand. A warmth spreads against the inside of his skin to match the warmth of his friend's flame as he is entrusted with this. To guard, to protect. It's all he wants to do. Not to be so wrapped up in death as a reaper always is, but to stave it off. But some things are inevitable.

Guarding friendship, killer's friendship.

All Skizz wants is to be a good friend. As he runs with the pack, it's all he wants, to be like the guardian angels he watches with such admiration. But he is not one of them. As much as he wants to be, his halo is dark and spiked, and the weight of the scythe is always a shadow on his hands. Eventually the pack turns on his own, and he knows with a crushing weight he can't escape the death he ferries. He cannot guard against the hoarde, not as long as Tango needs him to be able to, so he goes to Tango while Etho and Impulse pulls the pack away. His protection intermingles with his deathly duty as he shields the phoenix by turning him to ashes.

Pounding touch, killer's touch.

In the aftermath, Etho and Skizz stand side by side. Both with time that wasn't theirs in their hourglass, both standing, watching the allies they find themselves guarding this week. Etho leans into the reaper to teasingly elbow his arm. We'll protect them. Skizz puts on a little smile and elbows the fae back. Of course.

They can't seem to escape it. They're killers. When push comes to shove, the fangs sink in, knuckles turn white and red. But at least they'll put it to good use. Right?

[There will be one of these for each week! This is 4/?]

First // Previous // Next

#trafficblr #limited life smp #team ties #ethoslab #skizzleman #tangotek #impulsesv #captain's words #week four! I Really liked this week #just. the grim reaper who wants to be a guardian angel. only being able to protect tango by killing him. hwa #took way too long on this but still don't feel like it's all that great but still <3 enjoyed writing it!

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insanemoe · 8 months

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💀🍂 Discover the Perfect Sticker for this Fall. Get or Give Free Hugs at my @etsy Shop! 🤗 https://moeteesshop.etsy.com/listing/1151650804 *Limited Quantities + Free Shipping code : FREESHIP

#Sticker #Illustration #EtsyShop #etsy #canada #autocollant #fall season #halloween #spooky #free hugs #limited edition #grim reaper #limited series #collectibles

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kayoi1234 · 4 months

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nursing sunburns from digging in the yard...writing milgram fanfiction by way of doing weird niche multi-crossovers...such is life I guess...?

#kayoi bullshits again #txt #sun burns are the fucking worse wear sunscreen and a hat fellow australians #also the milgram thing isn't a joke but like there should be a limit to my bullshit #Muu is a reaper from Twewy now. how is this my life.

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ferusaurelius · 1 year

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Mass Effect Universe Meta - 1

I suppose I should call this ‘mass effect critical’ but it’s really more a meditation on the questions that the series poses and the ones it chooses to ignore ... with a focus on ‘choice-based’ narrative, character-driven storylines, and geopolitical philosophy.

If any of the above annoys you, I’d recommend not hitting the read more. This’ll probably be the first part of a series. xD

This first one is just a meditation on the choice-based narrative implementation in ME as a series.

I’m sure I’m not saying anything someone else hasn’t already covered, in fairness, probably better or more extensively than I’m doing here ... but this is kinda where I have to begin in order to tackle my other themes.

If you just get annoyed by this sort of navel-gazing, probably best not to proceed past the cut. I’ll totally understand!

So You Want Choice-Based Story In Your AAA-Shooter

Starting with the above: much ink has been spilled on the way that gameplay implicates and frames morality. Back in the day, Mass Effect (2007) on release was stirring up controversy because it let players choose a lesbian relationship with Liara! We’ve come a long way since then.

In some respects, Mass Effect is a product of its time and also another milestone in BioWare’s narrative portfolio. Which, before Mass Effect, included other games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Worth noting is that BioWare as a development house has refined its use of morality systems and mechanics over time! We’ve seen everything from lightside/darkside sliders, to paragon/renegade, to the innovation of ‘party approval’ ratings in the Dragon Age franchise. Of note is that once BioWare establishes a canon morality or choice-rating system, those mechanics tend to remain in place or consistent throughout a particular world.

There’s a notable (and expected) departure in Mass Effect: Andromeda because the writers felt like the Paragon/Renegade system was too tied to Commander Shepard, specifically, to be used as a basis for Ryder.

What makes these game narratives so engaging from a player viewpoint will also be necessarily limited by the under-the-hood mechanics of the systems and how they are capable of responding to the player. Without a set of key markers to help the game function and implement narrative choices, and without a highly-structured narrative framework that can accommodate or reflect those choices on-screen in ways that are emotionally resonant, we get ... whatever happened with Starchild.

... but we didn’t get there all at once.

Mass Effect 1: Cosmic Horrors and You

At a very high-level read, Mass Effect 1 sets the scene for the rest of the trilogy to follow and makes very clear the stakes and the plot-related questions it’s going to tackle. In the first five minutes of the game we’re confronted with eldritch horrors from beyond the stars, the return of the geth, AND Saren Arterius killing his friend, Nihlus Kryik!

I kinda knew right about then that the game was not going to be tackling plot questions (and cultures) in ways that were interesting to me, since if they were going to do that ... it would have made more sense for Nihlus to live. I have been (politely, affectionately) boo-boo-the-clown ever since.

While I still loved the aspects of universe exploration and getting to know my human and non-human crewmembers (Ashley, Kaidan, Wrex, Tali, Garrus, and Liara), the shocking moments of Virmire where you -- and I’m pretty sure this isn’t a spoiler at this point -- have to determine who lives and who dies and it’s a scripted loss?

Narratively powerful because you’ve spent a while getting to know both characters, but problematic from a mechanics standpoint because now you have to maintain a universe that more or less hangs together throughout the game no matter “who” you chose to survive. Death-as-choice becomes a notable proxy in Mass Effect’s storyline for morality and impact.

Mechanically, you’ll also note that a lot of “moral choices” are framed as kill/don’t kill, to various and sundry effects. Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the binary choice framework underpinning most of the game’s critical moments.

And rather than be totally critical I’ll just spotlight the one choice I DO remember: with enough paragon points, talking Saren into shooting himself before he gets reanimated as a Reaper abomination.

In fairness, I think it would’ve been nice for that moment not to be gated behind a Paragon points check, since it was a NEAT narrative flourish that I didn’t see structurally repeated in other areas in the game.

As much as I fell in love with the universe, the idea of the Protheans, and what Vigil and Ilos implied about the murky past ... I was less enamored of the Reapers as a universe-ending threat and more intrigued by the internecine conflicts between the various species of the galaxy. Other game-defining options which carried over into ME2 included whether or not to save the Council (cake or death?), who to appoint as humanity’s first Councilor (slightly less death-driven), whether or not to shoot Wrex (also cake or death).

The amount of “save or kill” decisions and the lack of other equivalents (and those that WERE provided being given less narrative weight than the life-or-death elements) clued me in to the design philosophy that what the game and the narrative would most remember about the world state was who was still alive.

On the one hand, the narrative impacts of presence or absence are obvious for the player! We know these decisions are significant. On the other hand, as you’ll see in my description of ME2, this design choice did start to paint the team into a corner.

Mass Effect 2: About That Suicide Mission

Much as I loved the new squadmates for ME2 and the overall pacing of the story, as well as the interim character development for each former squad member, the clue that most of this was going to happen off-screen or not at all was that these developments occurred while Shepard was not present -- conveniently killed by the Collectors.

Again, this was my hint that this story was going to focus on different questions!

Cerberus, who played the role of minor mooks in the first game, were upgraded to a level of influence that would be a conspiracy-theorist’s dream. One of my personal soapbox “dead dove: do not eat” elements is “but the conspiracies were REAL!” So this was honestly my bad.

Favorite moments in this game included getting to know new squad members, reuniting with old characters (including Wrex! and Grunt, who has one of my favorite arcs in the game alongside Garrus). YMMV about which characters and squadmates you connected with the most/least, but we can all agree that The Suicide Mission was Certainly A Choice.

With that said, it’s possible for no-one to survive and to avoid recruiting the new squaddies. Because choices, remember?

Unfortunately this also has the impact of “kill/save” being, once again, the primary impactful narrative game mechanic.

One can forgive the developers and narrative designers for getting a little tired at this point, because we’re not sure who survived or how much narrative content we’re going to have to adapt to another totally new character in the third act, based on who survives The Suicide Mission. Which does rather put a crimp in the amount of relational development we can presuppose in the third game.

One gets the idea that Liara was the favorite child in part because she is more or less impossible to kill. She will survive all the games no matter what choices you make, unless that choice is getting killed by Harbinger’s laser beam at the very end of ME3 and failing the game.

Small wonder that, in many respects, one of the ways the game develops Liara’s character is actually taking away player choice to avoid having to do an “impactful kill/save” option that would otherwise render her permanently inaccessible to the narrative.

Mass Effect 3: Enter the Starchild

So, what are we to make of the “kill/save” and “presence/absence” dynamic as the most narratively impactful and important? Ironically, these choices have impact only insofar as they determine what resources and relationships your Commander Shepard has access to in the game. The narrative does not so much branch as continue on, with slightly different details, depending on who you saved or recruited.

There will still BE a Tuchanka mission with or without Mordin or Wrex, and you will still conquer the Reaper capital ship alongside Kalros, the mother of all thresher maws (which is a pretty cool moment, let’s be real).

From a narrative design standpoint, these moments are what’s absolutely critical to a functioning storyline -- the character-development bits are secondary, as they must be in a game where the suicide mission can deplete your squad so thoroughly that nobody is left.

I won’t spend too much time on the original choice to lock Javik behind a DLC gate, but that’s another unfortunate choice that limited the baked-in narrative options for the third installment of the game.

Outside of the Commander-Shepard-Driven set pieces on each world, at this point, character relationships were more the icing on the cake than the narrative bedrock, something as a consequence of deciding early in design that killing characters is the clearest way to communicate narrative impact.

However, the other side of this choice, is that killing off characters when you have no narrative attachment to them and no stake in that sacrifice, ends up having progressively less and less impact, even in a AAA-shooter where the whole point is to reduce endless waves of mooks into a fine mist...

... which is where Starchild comes in.

Commander Shepard is locked into a final color-coded narrative choice of who to kill and who to save. That’s the narrative’s way of making sure you know that the choice is important -- because, without that design choice, there’s really no other established way for the game to communicate significance.

Which is a tragedy in and of itself. So many other moments are often significant or meaningful ... and I really think the choice to go with life-and-death as the biggest, baddest, most narratively-supportive element is what essentially painted the team into this final corner.

If You’re So Smart, What Would You Do?

This is easy, since it’s ultimately what BioWare and its narrative designers decided to implement in its next games: party-based approval and relationship systems that operated separately from a Paragon/Renegade personal scale.

Yeah, yeah, a cop-out. I know. Essentially, this is just external evidence that the narrative designers learned from the limitations they encountered in the Mass Effect universe and applied those lessons to their Dragon Age games.

Which again is not to say that I’ve seen concrete evidence of leaning LESS into the “kill/save” dynamic as impactful (remember the Witherfang quest in DA:O?). But it’s the thought that counts!

Branching out to other choices being signaled and framed as impactful is a key to choice-based game design and storytelling being able to incorporate character-driven narrative alongside the raw individual plot.

While this ultimately didn’t happen in Mass Effect, I am interested to see how the mechanics will be implemented in DA4 to detail and interweave other motives and questions into that storyline.

That’s What Fanfiction is For

Watching the canon Mass Effect universe default to “kill/save” decisions as the framing morality structure is pretty much why I write fanfiction designed to fill in and detail out the other blank spaces in background and backstory, and to imagine what other questions might have arisen in a more flexible approach that would not have been possible before the relevant lessons for narrative design were learned in these games.

My motivation as a writer is to expand in areas that were dropped because they wouldn’t make the cut in a AAA-shooter on a protagonist-driven schedule.

For the same reason that narrative significance eluded the final “controversial” ending of the series, I find that there are enough other aspects of character-driven plot and geopolitical philosophy that remain interesting (and implied-if-you-squint by the codex material) to keep me sufficiently occupied for a number of WIP fanfics. ;)

Which, in the end, is more a testament to the strength of the central thesis of the game (what if humanity is the new kid on the block in a galaxy full of advanced alien species?) rather than the questions the narrative ultimately chose to center.

-Ferus, out.

#mass effect meta #choice-based story #my writing #mass effect critical #sorta?#i mean i think i'm being pretty fair to the design choices in the end #especially given what later design choices in DA imply about #the relative limitations of these systems of design #and hopefully it explains a bit about why i'm still so fascinated #with the mass effect universe overall #since my fanfic is all fix-it-of-sorts #I just allow myself a lot of room with or without Reapers #ferus chats

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abybweisse · 2 years

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Ch191 (p2), Narrowing it down

Layla is somehow surprised by Ronald's eyes. Doesn't she ever see Undertaker's eyes?

Perhaps Undertaker isn't completely open and honest to her and the other lords of the stars about his own identity as a (former) grim reaper....

Ronald talks about thinking it was Ada he was after, until Layla stabbed Baldo and exposed her true identity as a Bizarre Doll.

How does he know Ada isn't one, too? Couldn't there be more than one on location?

Of course, we know that Ada isn't, but Ronald chases after Layla, so he doesn't yet know that Ada and the others are about to find Baldo and take him back inside for emergency care.

Now we get some information on what reapers can and cannot do, as well as something -- still really vague -- about the reaper organization and its "superiors". This time he calls them the "brass".

Anyway, a reaper cannot see if a person has a soul, at least not until they use their death scythe to release and collect it. That finally explains why Ronald had to hit a bizarre doll on the ship to verify her soul had already been taken. Unlike demons, reapers don't directly detect souls!

What's got me interested about the org, this time, is how he says the "brass" are "observing this world" and making sure every living thing "has a soul". "'Without exception.'" "That was absolute."

That's some odd wording. No mention of a creator, really. Just the "brass" observing and making sure things operate as expected. This is sounding more and more like an experiment. It feels like the "god of this world" didn't really make the creatures but put souls in them and then keeps someone around to maintain the new norm.

Well, since Layla doesn't have a soul, there isn't one to retrieve, but Ronald has to do something to appease his superiors. Besides, Layla isn't like the mindless ones he and Grelle encountered on the Campania, and this is new to him, since he doesn't know exactly what-all Undertaker has done to improve them.

Next post coming up! This chapter has me reeling!!

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rosemaryreaper · 4 months

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Rough first attempt of Ros’s modified synth field helmet. She doesn’t quite understand why people call her the Grim Reaper. She’s harmless.

Okay, that’s a lie. But she still doesn’t like the name.

#when you dress like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse just because you’re an introvert #i don’t know where my pencil is so ignore the wonky lines #my patience for finger painting has its limits #ros markey #rosemary reaper #fallout 4

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green-x-reaper · 11 months

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|| Guys, guys, before you start fawning over Stagnant DM and trying to get your freak on, DON'T-

Regular DM is talk first and attack later and has a soft spot for certain people

Stagnant will maul everyone is sight. Her hands are rated E for everyone.

#;;queen of the undead #;;foolishness #;;reaper commentaries #|| I know monster fucking has no limits but there's got to be some limits

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the-wardens-torch · 1 year

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*Enter Sandman playing from a blown-out car stereo in the distance*

I got to use the RPR LB3 for the first time the other day - I found it rather underwhelming until I went back frame by frame and saw this... Turns out that this class just can’t fight its edgelord nature no matter how silly you make your glams.

The thing is... I still think its kind of cool? I especially love how similar the eyes are to Zenos’ and Fordola’s Resonance eyes.

Also this form looks just like Orcus, which has delightfully creepy implications. Sure it looks like Drusilla killed him at the end of the RPR questline, but maybe he stayed around long enough to sink his claws into our avatar?

I can be yuor devil or your angle, baby.

#ffxiv reaper #reaper #limit break 3 #hyuran reaper #do other races' avatars look similar?#yes i know i can play with LB3s in explorer mode #but i just think its more fun when they're organic

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