#survivor: winners at war

[always-rolling-my-eyes]

I’m surprised by Dee but not by Wendell tbh

Remember his relationship with Michele Fitzgerald? And how he treated her during Winners at War? 👀

#survivor 45 #survivor #survivor: winners at war #survivor 40

[jeremycollinsstan]

my hot take is that i wish they kept fire tokens. like yeah they were kind of whatever in WAW but they had potential and they scrapped it too fast b4 we could see it play out

#plus the extortion advantage was hilarious #“that disgusting...DISadvantage” #hes so funny 😭 #maya has spoken #survivor 40 #survivor winners at war

[worstsequence]

i dont have autism with Remember/Facts pronouns which makes me sad like i wish i wasnt constantly fact checking my own zelda knowledge. i usually infodump in broad strokes. but for some reason i do not have this issue with survivor and can remember so many things from like 40 fucking seasons and will do the more classic infodump of reciting facts and statistics like a wikipedia page. i think its that its more formulaic? same with drag race. i have the Reality/Tv pronouned infodumping gender

#new era post winners at war survivor is foggy because its so different #41-44 are so THE SAME that they all blend together #which might seem to contradict what i said in the post about formulaic but #1-40 survivor is formulaic BUT with like different outfits on. #41-44 is formulaic with the same outfit on all the time so i dont remember small details as well #cuz theres not much defining season themes attatched to differentiate #anyway #🕷.archive

[bonelessenthusiast]

if this is the reaction to karla turning on cassidy i do NOT want to know what survivor tumblr was like when denise turned on sandra

#survivor 43 #survivor 43 spoilers #survivor waw #survivor winners at war #sandra diaz twine #survivor 40

[aerial-ace97]

50% of Sandra’s lines for Game Changers: The queen stays the queen.

The second someone calls her the queen in Winners At War: Don’t call me that.

#survivor game changers #survivor winners at war #sandra diaz twine #we love her though

[katyasghoulfriend]

good morning everyone. Yul won survivor🥰

#i knew he would tbh but it made me so happy regardless #im gonna start the fans vs favorites season now but tbh i cant wait to see yul on winners at war:) #yul is actually one of the best and most intelligent survivor contestants there has ever been i think #and his gameplay speaks for itself

[sanctus-ingenium]

What are some of the other countries in the alt-history your Inver stories are set in? Is Armorica roughly where modern day Brittany would be? :0

Because our concept of countries is very modern & constructed it's not quite that Armorica or Hibernia were Countries as we might understand them. They were mostly made up of smaller fractured kingdoms and cultures which were always fighting one another. Armorica was a region which was roughly here (map and history ramble under the cut SORRY i basically didn't answer your question i got carried away)

(this map is from the 1860s! not Finbarr's time.. I still need to make a map of that)

but it was never a country, just a region alternatively ascribed to Inver or Aquitan. It fell on the northern side of the Inver border with Aquitan whenever it was established but the border was put there rather arbitrarily and cut across the region without consideration for the people who lived there.

So there IS in fact a whole other history which doesn't even concern Inver at all. There is a small city-state on the southern coast of Aquitan called Suzette, which was founded by the pseudo-Catholics of this world and used as their main base of operations. It's basically just the Vatican, but an early actually-Catholic historical figure called (Saint) Alexandre led a schism with the church and was successful. The schism dealt with the legality of using magic to advance the church's position, Alexandre argued that it was a moral imperative to preserve the ability to use magic within the ranks of their holy knights. Alexandre became a very polarising figure but his most famous follower was military leader called Renzo who, in the renaissance period, basically upturned and reshaped the entirety of the Mediterranean region.

At the time, Aquitan was a kingdom with an absolute monarchy and the same werewolf-based religion as the nobility of Inver (the winners of Finbarr's war were the Aquitanian werewolves and it became the dominant religion in Inver as well). Renzo led a religious crusade against the monarchy of Aquitan, to wipe out all that pagan werewolf stuff. He blindsided the queen of Aquitan, who had been running her own campaign of expansion against the king of Notte [placeholder name], on the far-western coastline of Iberia. When Renzo began winning substantial victories in the southern countryside of Aquitan, the queen immediately turned around and ""allied"" with the king of Notte, by mounting an invasion against the city of Notte and forcing him to surrender and play nice. She sent him off on an enforced holiday under house arrest, aware that her play relied on not martyring this king while she ruled his country in all but name. With the combined might of these two kingdoms she was certain she could crush Renzo, and this began a decades-long war.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the king of Notte was killed by bandits who didn't even know who he was, before he ever reached his holiday home. The nondescript carriage was ambushed and there were no survivors. The queen, in a panic, chose not to publicise his death.

Well guess what Renzo was doing with his holy knights' blood magic. With each victory his army grew, because he raised the dead to serve him. Resurrection and immortality were key themes of Saint Alexandre's teachings and although Renzo's war crimes would result in his own religion banning the practice of this type of magic, it was kind of a-ok back then (the Church of Suzette would later go on to be pioneers of medical innovations such as antibiotics, germ theory, and safe anaesthesia). And you'll never guess whose dead body Renzo's knights found one day, dumped on the side of the road. Renzo alone recognised what had just come into his possession, and he formulated a counter-play against the queen by using the dead king as his own pawn. Using the king, he got the entire Iberian peninsula to turn on the Aquitanian monarchy, so instead of it being 2-on-1 against Renzo, it was suddenly the queen who was dangerously outnumbered and deeply unpopular.

The monarchy of Aquitan was finally defeated by its own people sixty years after the war began, and a theocracy based on the teachings of Saint Alexandre was founded there, along with the city-state of Suzette. The final execution of the monarchists had severe ripple-effects that reached Inver, which had been pretty insulated from the war by virtue of being a kinda pointless place to invade and housing a population of faeries outnumbering humans 10 to 1. The monarchy of Inver took pride in its links to the Aquitanian nobility and now that was gone. The result was a death spiral for the Kingdom of Inver, as the werewolf monarchists, fearing their imminent extinction, began to fight one another to grab as much power and wealth as possible before the Suzettes reached them, too. They banned the church at the border, only allowing the harmless priests of Suzette's poor Austerity sect to build their hospitals, though they were forbidden from holding religious services and actively converting the public, you have to willingly join.

The final Hibernian families who bought into the monarchy of Inver included the descendants of Finbarr, who had largely betrayed everything he would have stood for by assimilating into their enemies' ranks. And, as anyone might have predicted, their assimilation did not protect them when the nobles of Inver chose to prune their own ranks to concentrate power. One of these families was the noble and now extinct Mercier family, the family of one of our protagonists of Said the Black Horse (bowman lol). The other two protagonists are a second-gen immigrant Hibernian and a war orphan originally from Notte.

#setting: inver #oh god. hey. do you want to learn some fantasy history #it's not even spoilers. it's just bg info #there's more... so much more....

[capriciouswriter207]

The time draws near again.

Licked lips, hungry eyes. Waiting not-quite-patiently, tasting the blood already. Four times already; four winners, four tasty meals, four times wonderful drama. Four to five, now. A fifth dawns soon.

One. The first, the foundations. Rules and tragedy. Three lives, three chances. Two sides of a bloodthirsty conflict, a terrible war that consumes all. One reluctant victor.

Two. Changes. More lives, more chances to fall, to betray, to attempt to live. Uncertainty - made to kill, made to dread. Trust cannot be cultivated in such an environment. No victor this time, only a survivor.

Three. Love. Three shared lives. Soulmates tied together, tried together, died together. Twin graves and looking over your shoulder for your loved one. The final pair, separated. A tearful reunion. The survivor, now the deceased.

Four. Time. Lives frivolously spent, yet time coveted. Everything to get more hours, more minutes, more seconds. Honesty gets you nowhere; alliances protect you for only so long. Treachery wins the crown. 

Five. The future awaits. Players chosen, a world prepared. The slate wiped clean. What gimmick this time? What alliances this time? What bases to go up in flames? Unknowing victims, marching to the same tune as the last four times, playing the same game, and one victor to stand above them once again.

Will that sate Them?

The Watchers with a Thousand Eyes gaze upon the playground as their toys draw their first breaths in this environment.

#life series #trafficblr #traffic smp #traffic series #3rd life smp #last life smp #double life smp #limited life smp #here we go! new series coming soon! #something not quite serious #i just wanted to write something quick and this was the result #capricious writings

[loquaciousquark]

Game Awards 2023

The Game Awards are tonight, and Baldur's Gate won a bunch of the categories!

Game of the Year Alan Wake 2 (Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing) Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios) Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (Insomniac Games/SIE) Resident Evil 4 (Capcom) Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo)

Best Performance Ben Starr, Final Fantasy XVI Cameron Monaghan, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Idris Elba, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Melanie Liburd, Alan Wake 2 Neil Newbon, Baldur’s Gate 3 Yuri Lowenthal, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Best Community Support Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios) Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red) Destiny 2 (Bungie) Final Fantasy XIV (Square Enix) No Man’s Sky (Hello Games)

Best RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios) Final Fantasy XVI (Square Enix) Lies of P (Round8 Studio/Neowiz Games) Sea of Stars (Sabotage Studio) Starfield (Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks)

Best Multiplayer Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios) Diablo IV (Blizzard Entertainment) Party Animals (Recreate Games) Street Fighter 6 (Capcom) Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo EPD/Nintendo)

Player's Voice Baldur's Gate 3 Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Genshin Impact Spider-Man 2 The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

It was also nominated for Best Game Direction & Best Narrative, but lost both to Alan Wake 2; and Best Score & Music, which it lost to Final Fantasy XVI. Sven Vincke, BG3's director, did accept the GOTY award in full armored breastplate, as promised.

Nominees and winners are selected via a jury of over 100 media outlets from around the world. (via Gamespot).

#baldur's gate 3 #neil newbon #the game awards

[memryse]

Martyn didn’t tell anyone about the voices, not the first time around. He didn’t need that - didn’t need the Red Army, and certainly not his King, thinking he was losing it. They were at war, for crying out loud. Who cared whether there was a malevolent- spirit? entity? occupying his brain? It’s not like it was doing anything other than speaking cryptically whenever he lost a life or was on the verge of losing one, so he was relatively okay with sharing a bit of his brain space with It. Whatever It was. Maybe the others had heard It too, but nobody had said anything because they all thought they were crazy too (fair).

They’d talked about death, of course, on those long nights (there had been many, and little else felt meaningful to talk about, because death and dying was the whole point). Martyn or Etho would ask first, usually - what was it like when you died? Did you… see anything? And Ren would launch into a tale as dramatic as ever about his blood spilling on the altar as his Hand decapitated him, and Martyn would feel a little sick at the memory, and Ren would end the story sheepishly admitting he didn’t see anything. Just darkness, and then he was alive again. BigB would laugh and with measured optimism say he didn’t know, and that hopefully things would stay that way. And so they would go around the campfire like that, swapping stories of the… not the afterlife, but the in-between, perhaps, and when it came to Martyn’s turn he’d give a quick “Uh… nothing. Yeah, it was just- just total darkness for me too. Kind of boring, really, you’d think there’d be something.” No mysterious voices were mentioned, not by anyone, and Martyn wasn’t about to be the first.

The second time, It became Them. The first time could have been nothing, just his brain trying to rationalise death, but this time? Either he really was losing it, or they were real. Or… both, as it turned out one very rough morning after Grian killed Timmy and Mumbo. They were… different this time. Less concerned with his own deaths, more concerned with his kills. Kill, singular, really.

They tasked him with killing Grian, in exchange for Mumbo and Timmy back, and he failed. Miserably. He hadn’t minded trying - he welcomed the excuse, really, since Grian had been the one to destroy the Southlands to begin with - but. It didn’t matter. None of it did. He had been naive to think that it would be as simple as that. And there’d been something else, too. Something too much for his dying brain to comprehend, so much so that thinking back on it even as a green life in peak health made him simultaneously feel like his head was going to explode and like he was being spied on. So for a while, he just… didn’t. The third time was a sort of reprieve, in a way. He pointedly avoided thinking about Them at all, and to Their credit, They also did not bother him for once. Having Cleo in the back of his mind was quite enough stress. They weren’t happy - they weren’t even friends - but they had an understanding. He saw too much of himself in Cleo. Enough that he knew that if he told them about Them, they would believe him. She would believe him, and she would see right through him and pity him. And so he played the game. They lived, they survived for a time, and they died, and for once that was all there was to it.

He thought this time might be the same. The constant ticking was enough to drive anyone mad - cynical as ever, he figured that was probably the point, right. But more than that, the fourth game felt like it was designed for Martyn to lose. He wasn’t like Timmy (thank God for that) - he was a survivor. Not a winner, no, but a survivor. What good was that, though, when his time was running out either way? He thought he’d experienced desperation before: desperation to protect his king; desperation to bring Timmy and Mumbo back; desperation to get a kill; none of it compared to the ever-increasing desperation of running out of time, the hyper-awareness of exactly how long he had left to live. He had to get more time. Get more time, and perhaps win one of these damn things for once. Not that it would change anything… probably? He’d have to ask Scott. He’d asked Grian before, what it felt like to win, but all that Grian had said was that it felt like losing.

That night, as they enjoyed a (now blissfully unobstructed) nighttime view, Scott told him, “It felt like being free, for a moment. And then for an even briefer moment it felt like I was looking down on the world, like- like I was outside of it looking through a window, if that makes sense. And then I was dead, so it didn’t even really matter.”

“I might as well not even bother winning, then, I can just go up to Skynet when TIES aren’t looking and that’s basically the same thing.”

“Honestly? Yeah. Not worth it. But we might as well try anyway, because giving up is just kind of sad and I am not letting Jimmy outlive me. Besides, I want to win again out of pure spite, ‘cause whoever’s up there probably already hates me anyway for the boogeyman thing. Both boogeyman things. I don’t kill someone, I get smited literally out of the world for winning, and then when I do kill someone I’m ‘ruining the suspense’! These games are rigged!”

Scott doesn’t notice the change in Martyn’s expression - he’s too busy glaring at the sky to notice something dawning on Martyn’s face, equal parts realisation and apprehension.

“You think there’s someone up there, what, just watching us kill each other over and over?” Martyn asks, his voice measured.

“I mean, maybe? Someone’s gotta be running these - other than Grian, I mean. Grian’s in charge, yeah, but even he can’t change his timer, right? And sometimes even when nobody else is around, like when I’m just mining for diamonds - do you not get that feeling, like there’s someone watching you?” Scott replies.

He was only ever meant to watch.

A fragment of a fragment of memory flashes into Martyn’s mind, and the words spill out before he even consciously processes what it is that he’s remembering.

“Scott, I- I heard them once. Not even once, actually, it was more like, what- five or six times? They’ve never- you’ve never heard them?” he says, but the bewildered expression etched onto Scott’s scaled face tells him all he needs to know.

“Heard them? Martyn, they’re- they watch, that’s all they do, they don’t talk to us. I’ve never heard them. But,” he added hastily, “I believe you. You’re my ally, and there’s just no reason why you’d make that up anyway. What would even be the point, unless this is supposed to be your idea of a ghost story.” Which was as fair a reason as any for believing your friend slash bodyguard’s experience hearing unknowable beings in his mind, Martyn supposed.

“It’d be a pretty crap ghost story to scare you with, seeing as it only ever seems to affect me,” Martyn chuckled a little, his tension already fading away. “I’m gonna be honest, I’ve never actually told anyone about it before. Never really had anyone I could just sit down and talk to about it. No thanks to you last time around.”

“Yeah!” Scott said simply, in the tone of voice that Martyn can’t help but smile faintly at upon hearing it. “I’ve told you and Pearl like a million times, it was your own fault Cleo and I were better soulmates for each other. You’re not doing bad this time though, apart from, you know, trying to boogey me after we became allies. So I guess I can listen.”

Martyn didn’t tell Scott everything - admitting the context in which they had told him they could bring Mumbo and Timmy back was just a bit too embarrassing. But the rest he explained as well as he could remember - it almost felt like it had happened to someone else by this point, and maybe in a way it had. He wasn’t a Hand of the King, or a grief-stricken Southerner, or alone and hated by a soulmate simply because they were too alike. They were him, but not in the same way that the man stargazing on a manmade island with his friend was him. The memories felt borrowed, almost.

“…And you’ll tell me if they come back? Even if they want you to kill me and they’ll reset your timer in exchange or something?”

“Probably?”

“I let you kill me to give you time. You are not going to find a better friend than me on this entire server.”

“Alright, fine.”

(my friends and i were talking about how if martyn ever did decide to get anyone involved in the watcher lore, scott joining in would absolutely slay. ive never finished a full piece of writing in about eight years and i wrote this in one go and its 4am now be nice to me olease. and also for clarity this is mid session 4 before martyn actually hears the watchers again)

#limited life smp #limited life spoilers #inthelittlewood #smajor1995 #grian #mean gills #mem writes #<- AOUHHG #mean gills my sillies…

[jeremycollinsstan]

ben and adam argue like an old married couple in winners at war it KILLS me

#adam was tone policing ben #“you can ask me questions it’s just your tone that made me feel like your interrogating me #like???? okay 😭😭😭😭 #maya has spoken #survivor 40 #survivor winners at war #adam klein #ben driebergen

[rawliverandgoronspice]

behold: my second least favorite string of words in the entirety of Tears of the Kingdom.

(it's a little less transparent why this time so I'll explain my thoughts under the cut)

So why do I not like this?

In so many words: because if you remove it, the scene still works, but you lose the moral certainty of what is going on.

This single sentence does so much legwork for the entire game (the kind I dislike), to the point where I'm about 60% sure it's the product of a rework that realized how ambiguous Rauru's position was as the Good Rightful King and needed to nervously reassure the players that Ganondorf Is and Always Was the Invader, Actually.

(no matter that it leaves the gerudos in this awkward in-between state of both invaders and victims, while never dwelling in the specifics of their history and their own agency in the entire thing; brushed off as a sin they have to expiate through loyalty to the winners of that particular strife, but without explicitely blaming them either to avoid the implications of what that would have looked like)

If you remove it, not only do you lose a pretty clunky line that detracts from Ganondorf's intimidating presence (who is he even speaking to? who needs to hear this right now?) that honestly speaks for itself when it comes to his experience with warfare, but also you lose any tension and any mystery regarding why he is attacking in the first place.

You also... kind of rob Ganondorf's motivations of their meaning. "Hyrule will bow down before me" leads to asking... why? What does he want? What does he see in those lands? And what little we get with Rauru and then Link during the final fight begs more questions; why do you prefer hardship to peace? Why do you value strength? What leads you to want to rule a land devoid of survivors, become a king without a kingdom? I don't think we ever get satisfactory answers. If you remove this sentence, on the other hand... Subtextually, it becomes pretty clear that his motivations is that he felt threatened by Rauru's power, which is ripe with subtext and questions about whether this is a legitimate reaction, whether his "no survivor" stance is due to a feeling of betrayal when his own people turned against him post the Demon King shenanigans... I'm not saying it would fix the entire game's writing, far from it, but it would already do *so much more*.

(genuinely, I think he could have stayed completely silent during the Molduga Assault, speaking only in the Show of Fealty before going completely nuts after Sonia's murder, and it would have worked MUCH better in terms of characterization but anyway anyway

EDIT: ALSO!!! that way he wouldn't speak hylian to fellow gerudos, which is weird inherently)

Without this line, the core of the tension between the gerudos and Hyrule comes front in his conversation with Rauru; it allows the cause of his hostility to be Rauru's invitations, that he would have taken as a threat, and would have still made him warlike and domineering without making him cartoonishly flat, because, once again, Rauru is not acting in a particularly more legitimate way when Zelda arrives in Ancient Hyrule; and it would have been... fair to point that out. And make for better characterization for Rauru, and Sonia, and Mineru, and everybody. But the priority was for Hyrule to be pictured as unquestionably holy; always legitimate, always truthful, always beautiful, always just.

Also, and this is more of a nitpick but: why would Ganondorf want Hyrule, specifically, to bow down before him also? Was he at war with the rest of the disparate tribes before, and just carried on his ambitions to the very very newly-founded kingdom as they allied under a new banner? (though it seems to be implies the lands were crawling under monsters in a generic sense, and not Ganondorf's attacks in particular) Why would he even consider Hyrule a legitimate entity worth taking over then, if it is so new, born from the will of a powerful rival, founded by what is basically a stranger to these lands? Why would he covet something so young instead of destroying it and just calling the lands Gerudo Lands II or Grooseland or something?

I don't think any of that was even accounted for, because, beyond everything else: to me, this sentence is so clearly and painfully crammed in here to shield Hyrule from any potential blame and immediately characterize Ganondorf as Bad without having to remove any of the causes that could lead one to side-eye Rauru's little pet project as equally questionable.

Beyond the clumsiness, it is cowardly --and, I think, a little damning.

#totk #totk critical #when will my brain return from the imprisoning war... #ganondorf #gerudos #rauru #tl:dr it is cowardly and reveals that nintendo knew about the Implications to some degree #sometimes less is more #really in that case less would have been so much more #it is literally ganondorf's first chronological line #yeah sure it tells you everything about the guy but #it's also such a bold commitment to flatness and self-righteousness that... yeah #and before I hear any “at least Rauru wasn't using force” I mean as far as we know though? #the constructs attack anyone deemed an “invader” on sight one of the things rauru does is to apologize for this #(I reread Rauru's initial dialogue in the Sky Islands and it would have been SO GOOD if any ambiguity would have been allowed) #(like the thing about Constructs mindlessly pursuing their useless tasks forever disquieting him...) #(yeah buddy so true that could uhhh almost be a metaphor for something else regarding purpose and lineage or something wow) #and even if he didn't use force directly the power dynamics and repeated invitations are still undeniably questionnable #like my guy why do you want everybody to kneel down to you what's up with that do we unpack this or #at least ganondorf was like.... born and raised a king (not that it excuses anything but he inherited pre-existing traditions) #so did zelda #she was born in an imperfect system and did whatever she could about it #rauru *crowned himself* #he *made* the system

[collapsedsquid]

But what if the competitors don’t agree that they’re doomed? What if they, too, are willing to accept a lower profit rate in order to stay in business? Then the kind of buccaneering behavior that Shaikh presents as a time-honored recipe for competitive success would in fact be ruinously risky — and therefore something intelligent capitalists would try to avoid. This isn’t just a priori speculation. A book on pricing by “three preeminent McKinsey & Company experts” (The Price Advantage) advises managers that “price wars rarely have any real winners — and few healthy survivors.” For that reason, “the best-run companies go to almost any lengths to avoid price wars.” Most price wars that do happen break out by accident, as a result of misperception and miscalculation: “The price war that is initiated as a deliberate competitive tactic is somewhat rare — and rarer still is the one that achieves a positive outcome for either the industry at large or a specific supplier within the warring industry.” Almost identical advice is given in a management book (Confessions of the Pricing Man) by the German pricing consultant Hermann Simon, the founder of the global advisory firm Simon-Kucher. In his firm’s annual survey of managers, 82 percent of those respondents who reported that their company was currently involved in a price war believed it had been instigated by a competitor; only 12 percent said their company had started it as a deliberate tactic. “Unless you have an unbeatable cost advantage which prevents your competitors from responding in kind, it is almost impossible to establish a sustainable competitive advantage through lowering prices,” Kucher writes. The McKinsey experts echo that claim, but they also quantify it: “If you have ever imagined that reducing prices to gain share and increase profits might be a sound strategy for your business, think again. Unless you have a dominant cost advantage — by this we mean costs that are at least 30 percent below the competition — reducing prices all too often triggers a suicidal price war.” (Shaikh at one point characterizes the cost advantage of the innovating firm in one of his numerical examples as “robust, being on the order of 10%.”) Thus, for Shaikh’s theory of real competition to be valid, real-world technical innovation would have to be driven by a competitive strategy that — according to these experts — is rarely seen and almost never works.

Ahh you see capitalism isn't doomed to an eternally falling rate of profit because it's not actually competitive, sorry

[mortalityplays]

these people are never going to forgive us. and we don't deserve to be forgiven after this

I've been trying to think what the narrative of this new century will be like, for future generations. I feel like the 20th century had a fairly clear arc of cause and effect, almost like a story you could tell, and I was imagining the 21st would just have "chaos all the time as the planet boils until we die" as its headline. But I feel like I'm seeing the arc of the 21st being written and it's a lot more bleak than I ever imagined.

I understand what you mean. I suspect every generation feels like this, thrust into conflicts we were supposed to have outgrown and too small to affect the scale of change we feel gestating in our chests. My grandparents grew up in WW2 and expected that to be the last true era of atrocity they would have to fit into their mental landscape. They didn't cope well with the bitter complexity of the politics they inherited as adults. My parents lived through the tail end of the cold war, and my mum has told me often about the senseless nihilism they felt, even as they chained themselves to fences outside nuclear bases and smuggled news back and forth to friends behind the iron curtain. Everything could be snuffed out any day and it didn't matter. As a kid I was dimly aware of ethnic cleansings in Rwanda and then Kosovo, and I was 11 when I watched planes hit the world trade centre. I spent my teens protesting the Iraq war — around the world it's estimated there were around 36 million of us — and I watched all those efforts come to nothing at all.

The good news (I promise this is good news, in a sense, for the moment we're living through) is that narratives in history are an illusion. 'History is written by the winners' is trite, but it’s somewhat true. It might be more accurate to say history is written by the survivors. For as long as we survive, I think the most important role many of us can play is as witnesses. When we look at the 20th century in retrospect, we naturally hunt for lines of cause and effect that can explain the multivarious stories that survived to reach us. Those explanations are how we exercise agency over situations we couldn't change, and how we express the aspirations we're left with. And despite the way it looks after we've settled on our own retrospective storylines, they are never static or unchallenged. We are forever workshopping the moral of our own stories.

My point is, the present is the sharpest edge of history. It hurts, it sucks, and I don't think it has ever made sense. Making sense isn't something history does by itself, it's something we do to it. So if there is anything at all that we can do as petty nobodies far away from today's conflict, it's pay attention. Listen, watch, record, remember, and be active and loud in the process of deciding what each new fucked up day means. It's not enough, but it's not nothing either. I'm sorry it's like this.

[bestfictionalplant]

Bracket reveal

Text version under cut!

The tourney is split into 4 32 brackets, and the winners of each will go to the semi finals! I'll make a different post about HOW the tourney will run, and this will serve as a pinned post for round 1 :)

Bracket 1, Side 1

Peppino (Vampire Survivors) vs Winged Strawberry (Celeste)

Herb (Monster Hunter) vs Triffids (Day of the Triffids)

Gigi (Xiaolin Showdown) vs Silent Princess (The Legend of Zelda)

Breath of Evil (Wings of Fire) vs Thorn Thallid (Magic the Gathering)

Audrey II (Little Shop of Horrors) vs Farewell Flower (Mistborn)

Togemon (Digimon) vs Silverwood Tree (Witch Hat Atelier)

Golden Apple Tree (Greek Mythology) vs Potbelly (My Singing Monsters)

Sculk (Minecraft) vs MocDonald (One Piece)

Bracket 1, Side 2

Vida (The Promised Neverland) vs Glaze Lily (Genshin Impact)

Dr Brewer's Clone (Goosebumps) vs The Spring (Friends at the Table)

Kite Eating Tree (Peanuts) vs Zotoh Zhaan (Farscape)

Wheel Tree (His Dark Materials) vs Mushtree (I Was a Teenage Exocolonist)

Medusoid Mycelium (A Series of Unfortunate Events) vs Radial (Ooblets)

Chikorita (Pokemon) vs Blast Cone (League of Legends)

Gooloog (AAAHH!!! Real Monsters) vs Venus (Bug Fables)

The Thorian (Mass Effect) vs Yggdrasil (Norse Mythology)

Bracket 2, Side 1

Deku Tree (The Legend of Zelda) vs Blood Blossoms (Danny Phantom)

Hotblonde37159 (Angel: The Series) vs Vash the Stampede (Trigun)

Kinoko (Don't Hurt Me, My Healer) vs Wolfsbane (The Vampire Diaries)

Plant (Monster Rancher) vs Flower of Life (Mesopotamian Mythology)

Truffula Tree (The Lorax) vs Slurperon Enchantress (Internet Scam)

The Brain Tree (Neopets) vs Ginseng Baby (Scarlet Hollow)

Chompy (Bug Fables) vs Whispy Woods (Kirby)

Clavu (Overlord) vs Ivern (League of Legends)

Bracket 2, Side 2

Bulbasaur (Pokemon) vs The Trees of Valinor (Lord of the Rings)

Leslie (The Amazing World of Gumball) vs Hayzee Dayzee (Paper Mario)

Piranha Plant (Mario) vs Specimen 34/The Blessed Eternal (Wolf 359)

Potted Plant (Wander Over Yonder) vs Morbuzakh (Bionicle)

Jabe & the Trees of Cheem (Doctor Who) vs Black Mercy (DC)

Mr Plant (The World of Mr Plant) vs Feculant Gnarlmaw (Warhammer 40k)

Tree Rex (Skylanders) vs Flowey (Undertale)

Sundrop Flower (Tangled) vs Venus McFlytrap (Monster High)

Bracket 3, Side 1

Pinchley (Long Gone Gulch) vs Frank the Plant (Harley Quinn: the Animated Series)

The Venus (Hello From the Hallowoods) vs Nirnroot (The Elder Scrolls)

Food Fight (Skylanders) vs Paopu Fruit (Kingdom Hearts)

Phillogenous esk Piemondum (Rod Albright Alien Adventures) vs Plant (Wall E)

Tannot Root (Farscape) vs The Broccoloids (The Powerpuff Girls)

Rockbud (The Stormlight Archive) vs Sylvan Hound (Guild Wars 2)

Eldridge Johnson-Mayer (The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy) vs Hyacinth/Hyacinthus (Greek Mythology)

Selas Flower (Kingkiller Chronicle) vs Treant (Disgaea)

Bracket 3, Side 2

Dragonflame Cacti (Wings of Fire) vs Sunflower (Plants vs Zombies)

The Bioplant (The Rising of the Shield Hero) vs Turnip Boy (Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion)

Shambling Mound (Dungeons and Dragons) vs Mandrake (Shin Megami Tensei/Persona)

Cowplant (The Sims) vs Ebony Queen's Apple (Limbus Company)

Devil Fruits (One Piece) vs Donkey-Cabbage (Enchanted Forest Chronicles)

Oaktopus (My Singing Monsters) vs Field Dungeon (Rune Factory 4)

Mushroom Tree (Stardew Valley) vs Jumpkin (Cassette Beasts)

Undergrowth (Danny Phantom) vs Karzahni (Bionicle)

Bracket 4, Side 1

Dreamstalk (Kirby) vs Myconid (Balders Gate 3)

Stingbulb (Fablehaven) vs Treebeard (Lord of the Rings)

Stray Cat (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure) vs Peashooter (Plants vs Zombies)

Giant Turnip (Codename: Kids Next Door) vs Treasure Mushroom (Guild Wars 2)

Tree of Wisdom (Sonic the Hedgehog) vs Fire Flower (Mario)

Stump (The Angry Beavers) vs Groot (Marvel)

Maise (Oneshot) vs Konohana Tree (Okami)

Red Weed (War of the Worlds) vs Pod Plant (Fortnite)

Bracket 4, Side 2

Plantera (Terraria) vs The Grass Snake (Friends at the Table)

Breathweed (Warhammer 40k) vs Campestri (Dungeons and Dragons)

Neo Alraune (Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle) vs Kringlefucker (Homestuck)

Slimefoot the Stowaway (Magic: The Gathering) vs Gatfruit Tree (Space Station 13/14)

Sex Pollen Plant (Fanfiction) vs The Rumor Weed (VeggieTales: Larry-Boy and the Rumor Weed)

Dr Madley Radish (Papa Louie) vs Vervain (The Vampire Diaries)

Yatevon (OCTAHEDRON: Transfixed Edition) vs Echo Flower (Undertale)

Wither Rose (Minecraft) vs Hydramon (Digimon)

#poll bracket

[firefly6591]

I love Cold War rusame in an immortal situationship because they’re both relatively young nations who held unimaginable amounts of power. Everything feels huge to them, but the short time they have together amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of things. Whatever monuments of their love will lay crumbling in front of the survivor, decaying but stubbornly never forgotten. How long can you grieve when your lifespan stretches uninterrupted in the pages of history? There’s a winner, but really, power is not a replacement for love. They will never be happy together. They will never be human

#rusame #I have a fever I’m delirious #amerus #hetalia #I think this looks bad for my digital footprint