When I say I love shitty RPG Maker games, I don't just mean low-rent graphics or goofy sound design. I mean jank. Give me a player character where half of your abilities don't do what they say they do, and the other half don't work at all. Give me impossibly snarled dialogue trees that loop back on themselves and sprawl haphazardly across three different revisions of the game's story, none of which correspond to the version that was actually published. Give me side quests that can't be accessed without glitches or save file editing because somebody fucked up the event triggers. Give me an ostensibly nonlinear world that breaks hilariously the moment you do anything in an order the developer didn't anticipate. And most importantly, give me a game where all of this is true not due to lack of care, but because the scope of the developer's ambitions vastly exceeded their ability. Like, yeah, most of the time I want my games to, you know, work, but there's something in playing through the wreckage of an artistic effort doomed by its own hubris that no amount of too-clever deconstructionist posturing can replicate.
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chewing on big 3 kids being capable of absolutely devastating natural disasters and apocalypse-level outbursts of power.
Percy who creates hurricanes complete with lightning that pummel titans and flooding and whirlpools that can trap god-powered crocodile kaijus. Earthquakes that erupt volcanoes. Hazel who sunk an entire small island entirely on her own with her final breath, against giants and a primordial goddess of the earth.
If Nico dramatically wilts plants and cracks the ground when he's mildly stressed, and disintegrates enemies down to their skeletons with a single touch or rips their souls out of their still-living bodies, and can command armies of the undead, what happens if he tries to cause destruction? Even outside of total zombie apocalypse or insta-killing a crowd, he's shown enough geokinesis to absolutely be capable of the same destruction Percy and Hazel can manifest.
What about Jason? He can control the winds and storms. There's no way he can't create the most destructive tornadoes with casual effort that he can never justify using for the collateral damage they'd cause. With a single thought he can rip up a town and launch the remnants 50 miles out. (Jason in the center of a Dead Man Walking tornado, vortexes responding to his movements like an avatar...)
And what can anyone do to combat it? How can you fight the wind lifting everything you know and love into the sky, or floods sweeping you away, or the ground giving way beneath you? The Big 3 kids are scary because they are forces of nature, and their whims are the only thing preventing you from witnessing that at any given moment.
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there's something to be said about how public unawareness about aspec identities contributes to the infighting within the aspec communities.
for example, I've seen a lot of "don't say ace people don't have sex because that's harmful to the sex favourable aces" and the opposite: "don't say ace people can have sex because what about the sex repulsed/averse?"
and they're both valid points, but because of it, aspec posts have to cater to the entire spectrum or risk starting arguments over this. Ideally, people could look at an aspec post and accept that it's for a different part of the aro/ace spectrum to where they are, but that's where the public unawareness comes in
because outside of the aspec communities, there's so little understanding of what the terms mean, that people within the community have to make every post generic so that the unaware won't see one post and make an assumption for the entire community based on it.
I see where every side is coming from, but infighting doesn't really solve any of the issues. The only thing that can start to solve it is more expansive aspec media representation, and spreading the "aro/ace identities are a spectrum" posts as much as possible to reach outside of the community, rather than trying to make specific posts fit that generic message.
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Your Ancient History, Written In Wax
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Danny knew he should have put better security around the Sarcophagus of Eternal Sleep. It wasn’t even Vlad who opened it this time! The fruitloop was too busy doing his actual mayor duties because for some godforsaken reason, the man got re-elected.
No, it wasn’t Vlad. And it wasn’t Fright Knight, either. Nor the Observants. Who opened the Sarcophagus, then? Danny didn’t have time to find out as Pariah Dark promptly tore open a hole in reality and hunting Danny down.
The battle was longer this time. He didn’t have the Ecto-Skeleton, as that was the first thing Pariah had destroyed. The halfa had grown a lot over the past few years, and learned some new tricks, but apparently sleeping in a magic ghost box meant that Pariah had absorbed a lot of power. The bigger ghost acted like a one-man army!
Amity Park was caught in the middle of the battle, but the residents made sure it went no further than that. Vlad and the Fentons made a barrier around the town to keep the destruction from leaking. Sam, Tucker, and Dani did crowd control while Danny faced the king head-on.
Their battle shook the Zone and pulled them wildly between the mortal plane and the afterlife. Sometimes, residents noticed a blow from Pariah transported them to the age of the dinosaurs, and Phantom’s Wail brought them to an unknown future. Then they were in a desert. Then a blazing forest. Then underwater. It went on like that, but no one dared step foot outside of Amity. They couldn’t risk being left behind.
It took ages to beat him, but eventually, Danny stood above the old ghost king, encasing his symbols of power in ice so they couldn’t be used again. He refused to claim the title for himself. Tired as he was, Danny handed the objects off to Clockwork for safe keeping and started repairing the damage Pariah had done to the town. The tear he’d made was too big to fix, for now, so no one bothered. They just welcomed their new ghostly neighbors with open arms and worked together to restore Amity Park.
Finally, the day came to bring down the barrier. People were gathered around the giant device the Fentons had built to sustain it. Danny had brought Clockwork to Amity, to double check that they had returned to the right time and dimension.
Clockwork assured everyone that they were in the right spot, and only a small amount of time had passed, so the Fentons gave the signal to drop the shield.
Very quickly did they discover that something was wrong. The air smelled different. The noise of the nearby city, Elmerton, was louder and more chaotic. Something was there that wasn’t before, and it put everyone on edge.
Clockwork smiled, made a remark about the town fitting in better than before, and disappearing before Danny could catch him.
Frantic, Danny had a few of his ghost buds stay behind to protect the town while he investigated.
He flew far and wide, steadily growing horrified at the changes the world had undergone. Heroes, villains, rampant crime and alien invasions. The Earth was unrecognizable. There were people moving around the stars like it was second nature and others raising dead gods like the apocalypse was coming. Magic and ectoplasm was everywhere, rather than following the ley lines like they were supposed to.
Danny returned to Amity.
The fight with Pariah had taken them through space and time. Somewhere along the way, they had changed the course of history so badly that this now felt like an alien world.
How was he supposed to fix this?
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In the Watchtower, The Flash was wrapping up monitor duty while Impulse buzzed around him, a little more jittery than usual. The boy was talking a mile a minute, when alarms started blaring an alarming green. Flash had never seen this alarm before, and its crackling whine was grating on his ears.
Flash returned to the monitor, frantically clicking around to find the issue, but nothing was popping up. No major disasters, no invasions, no declarations of war. Nothing! What was causing the alarm?
Impulse swore and zipped to a window, pressing his face against it and staring down at Earth. “Fuck! It’s today isn’t it? I forgot!”
“What’s today?” Flash asked. He shot off a text to Batman, asking if it was an error. The big Bat said it wasn’t, and that he would be there soon.
“The arrival of Amity Park. I learned about this in school; the alarm always gives me headaches.”
Flash turned to his grandson, getting his attention. “Bart,” he stressed. “What are you talking about?”
Impulse barely glanced over his shoulder. Now that Flash was facing him, he could see a strong glow coming from Earth. “The first villain, first anti-villain, and the first hero,” he said anxiously. “They all protect the town of the original metas. They’re all here.”
“Here? Now??”
“Yeah? They weren’t before, but they are now. The first hero said there was time stuff involved, which was what inspired me to start practicing time travel in the first place.”
“I’m not following.”
“It’s okay. We should probably go welcome them before they tear apart Illinois, though. The history I remember says that some of them freaked and destroyed a chunk of the Midwest during a fight with each other.”
“WHAT?”
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