Hey, so, I got this crazy idea at work and now it won't leave my brain…
I know it's a game from a while back, but would anyone like it if I went and did a video about the things people missed in The BOSS (and The BOSS Is Nothing)?
Again, I know it's a little older now, but I just have such good memories of it, and now I have the means to give it the analysis it deserves.
Maybe I'd do a full playthrough of both games on my Twitch, too?
DADS DADS DADS DADS. (Read below for a short written scene to add context)
Lucifer purses his lips, echoes of his daughter's words jarring daggers from behind his mind's eye.
“They’re our people too, dad. People with—with hopes and dreams, and—and fears. Like you, and me. I have to do something."
That had been months ago. Same day she left home, along with most things in her room and the knickknacks that had innocently scattered around the house. Once overlooked, now the fractures that chiselled the crack in the wall.
From the corner of his eye, the man’s brow tightens. Lucifer watches shoulders stiffening under a black suit, a red beak pulling into a frown. The imp's eyes remain cemented in the same spot of the table, however, an empty murkiness tredging the edges. Too recognizeable. Too familiar.
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.
I've been binging Batman Beyond recently (Terry ily so much) and thought about how- bc of the JLU twist which I think isn't even canon to the comics BB verse but shhh bare with me- he'd technically be Damian's half brother??? Which is just so ridiculously soap opera to me. I need them to interact in a silly time travel adventure so bad you don't even understand (ID in alt)
TOP 10 WEB VIDEO SERIES ON AO3 FOUND IN FANDOMS > OTHER MEDIA (2010-2023)
To make this ranking, all series titles in the Other Media category on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, and then manually filtered since not all web video series were marked as such.
Locked fanworks aren't included in the count because Wayback Machine can’t view those, only Ao3 users can.
Many authors started locking their works starting December 2022. It's most likely the reason the number of fanworks decreased or slowed down in 2023.
Bar chart starts at 2010 because there were no web series in Other Media in 2009.
The Dream SMP tag was only considered an Additional Tag in 2021-early 2022, which is why it's not listed in Other Media earlier than that.
Please refer to this post for more bar chart races.
Dedicating this post to @vsrobotjulie who requested this bar chart race.💕
Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏
All the jokes about Ken and horses are good but I just wanna say it's such a good parallel to how actual young men get swept into misogyny and the patriarchy.
Like they're told to believe it means men get to be cool and manly and have this power but with that comes extremely rigid commands of what they can be as a man and a cycle of self hatred for never matching those gender roles perfectly. Patriarchy tells men that if they just do exactly what is expected of them, then they get all the "cool stuff" that comes with. That doesn't work though when there's only a small group that actually gets that power, but men will keep trying to fit into those roles in hopes that they can.
In the end there are no horses or the myth men are told, it's just endless cycles of self hatred and ingroup fighting.