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gotstabbedbyapen · 2 months

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Epic the Circe Saga - Reviewed and analyzed by a passerby on the Internet

The Pen overflowed with ink at 11 p.m. last night. So, the next day, she has to write her thoughts about the Circe Saga into words, or else she will explode.

You just need to know three things before continuing:

I have little to no knowledge about writing songs and composing music. My opinions come from my taste and prior knowledge about the saga's behind-the-scenes.

This is ONE review by a fellow stranger on Tumblr. You can agree and disagree with my takes, but please keep it civil when discussing with others.

Despite being a bit harsh on the flaws in this saga, I still love it, the whole Epic the Musical, and Mister Jalapeño.

We good?

Good.

Circe is another lesson about ruthlessness.

Let's start with my two cents on why Jay changed the encounter between Odysseus and Circe.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus was coerced by Circe into intimating with her in exchange for his and his men's safety (Hermes even warned, "Do what she said if you want to live")

But in ETM, Circe only tempted Odysseus in the first half of "There Are Other Ways" to get him closer to the stabbing range (I'll talk about it later). But when Odysseus declined her advances and begged her to spare him because he had a wife at home, Circe took pity on him and let him go.

Now, let me refresh everyone's memory with a short video explaining the differences between The Odyssey and ETM.

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Here, Jay said the changes he made from the source material are to serve the theme of Ruthlessness. The two ends of the spectrum are Polites' "Open Arms" and Poseidon's "Ruthlessness Is Mercy" ideologies, as shown in the previous sagas. Every other encounter ETM Odysseus faces will also lie somewhere on the spectrum and teach him something about it.

Circe is an interesting case because she is more flexible on the spectrum.

When we first meet her, Circe turns Odysseus' men into pigs, challenges Odysseus in a monster fight, and "seduces" Odysseus to stab him. Later, when Circe is cornered by Odysseus, we learn that Circe did all that to protect her nymphs, making her an example of "embracing ruthlessness to protect yourself and your loved ones."

After hearing out Odysseus' plight (he wants to go home to his wife, but Poseidon is after his ass), Circe decides to spare him and his men. She is now showing her "open arms" side, "letting her guard down" at these sailors because she pities them or no longer sees them as an immense threat.

In ETM, the encounter with Circe is another lesson for Odysseus about ruthlessness: Going full open-arm or ruthless isn't always the best solution. It's good to proceed with caution, but understand that not everyone is trying to harm you. Know when to go hard and go soft on your opponents.

The relationship between Circe and her nymphs isn't well-developed.

Circe is ruthless toward Odysseus' crew to keep her nymphs safe from the possible danger from the strangers. We can tell because Circe constantly references her nymphs and how she will protect them.

"No one will find / Their way between / My nymphs and I / Their loving queen." - "Puppeteer"

"I've got people to protect / Nymphs I can't nеglect." - "Done For"

"My nymphs are like my daughters / I protect them at all costs / The last time we let strangers live / We faced a heavy loss." - "Done For"

However, at least for me, it's hard to visualize the nymphs are in the island with Circe despite her singing about them every time.

When Odysseus' men enter Circe's palace, we hear their little "Aye" and know they are there. But we don't even get a lick of sound from any of Circe's nymphs, so it's hard to visualize their presence despite Circe singing about them every time.

Circe's protectiveness of her nymphs will be more emphasized if we see her interacting with them. Jay can extend "There Are Other Ways" a bit and let Circe discuss with her nymphs what to do with Odysseus and let them convince her to choose mercy on the men. There, we get more insight into Circe's relationship with her nymphs and how much she loves and cares for them.

Or, at the very least, Jay can give the nymphs a background chorus when Circe is singing or just some female voices behind Circe.

Look at the Ocean Saga: after Aeolus tells Odysseus his fleet is heading to the Land of the Giants, we hear the Laestrygonians chanting right at the beginning of "Ruthlessness" and immediately know that the giants are there.

And I know this is harsh to say, but in the Cyclops Saga, when Odysseus entered Polyphemus' (the Cyclops he fought) cave, I could tell there were sheeps around him from their bleating in the opening.

But the lack of the nymph's presentness isn't the only issue.

More sound effects could have made the battle scene better.

In my first brief review, I said the Circe Saga is mellow compared to the previous ones. The stakes and boss battle weren't as thrilling and electrifying or, at least, not as easy to visualize (same problem with the "presence" of Circe's nymphs, as said before)

Remember the scene where Circe entranced Odysseus so he would come closer to her stabbing range? We only know that from the choreography snippet. If you listen to "There Are Other Ways" without that snippet, you can't "see" Circe's attempt to steal Odysseus' dagger and stab him and will think she's seducing her way out when cornered by him.

At least, we know Odysseus is having his dagger at Circe's throat by the "shing" sound when he draws it, but it's hard to tell when Circe takes Odysseus' weapon because their close-up duet is mostly just singing. Jay could have given another subtle metallic sound when Circe is stealing from Odysseus.

As you can tell by now, the lack of background sound effects reduces the visualization. ETM already has a disadvantage when its audience has to rely on narration and sound effects to tell what is happening. The Circe Saga is more heavy on the former and not enough of the latter like the previous three.

To prove my point, you can pause here and listen to "Survive" and "Done For" on Spotify or whichever music platform you use. While listening, compare the intensity you feel in the battle of Odysseus' men & Polyphemus and of Odysseus' Cyclops & Circe's Chimera.

Oh, you're back?

Now you get why I say the monster battle between Circe's Chimera and Odysseus' Cyclops feels underwhelmed in my first review. The boss battle didn't pay back for the building-up hype.

Although I love to see how Odysseus confronts Circe, I also anticipate the monster battle! The theme "Done For" is used in the saga's first introduction. The Chimera is seen on the album cover. Jay is excited because he is inspired by Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!

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I thought the Cyclops vs Chimera battle would be more intense! But then, what little we have were the roaring and clashing of the monsters drowning under the rap battle of their masters. Meanwhile, don't tell me Polyphemus' roaring and smashing his club didn't give you the chill.

Likewise, "Ruthlessness" has loud water-smashing sounds along with the soldiers screaming for their captain when Poseidon and the Laestrygonians destroy Odysseus' crew. They enhance the terror and devastation of the scene, showing how much destruction is done.

See (or hear) it for yourself!

Here is what will make the battle more enthralling: Add more growling for the Cyclops and the Chimera and increase their howling volume - not too earthshaking but with enough intimidation so we can feel the grand scale of the battle. There can be more punching sounds and a loud "thud" when the Cyclops gets rammed back by the Chimera (like Circe's stabbing attempt, we only know how the monster battle was carried out through an animatic)

Maybe Jay wants to focus more on Circe's charming and disarming tactic so he doesn't give it all for the monster battle. But it's still an under-used potential!

Final words!

That is my review and analysis of the Epic the Circe Saga. I may sound like a grumbling nitpick who over-scrutinizes the little details, but it comes from my love and expectations after being blown away by the first three sagas. Jay has proven he can do many wonders in ETM, and I hope he will continue pushing past his creativity limit.

Overall, I still love ETM, Jay, and the Circe Saga. This saga just needs to be polished more. I won't mind waiting until next year's Valentine if Jay will have more time to improve the songs.

But that is all I have to say.

#epic the musical #epic the circe saga #jorge rivera herrans #song analysis #song review #my reviews #my ramblings #Spotify #Youtube #this is my first time writing such a long essay #and i'm surprised my brain hasn't exploded yet

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shibuiking · 2 months

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#twice dead king #oltyx #yenekh #necrons #40k #i finished tdk reign yesterday and i fear if i get into how much i loved those two books ill end up writing an entire essay. so i wont.#loved it tho. cried a little.#also too overwhelmed at the first time im seeing a genuine appreciation and care into writing smth about what its like to be undead and its #in a series with robot skeletons not actual ones #on behalf of undead afficionados everywhere. nate crowley i owe u my unlife.#i wanna draw spoiler stuff too bt i feel like who even is blocking the spoiler tag for this. bt if someone sees and gets spoiled id feel #SO bad. SOOOOOOOOOO bad im am sooooooo glad i didnt get spoiled #AUGH anyway this is getting long #IF U LIKE UNDEAD READ TWICE DEAD KING. I DONT CARE IF UR NOT INTO 40K. GET INTO IT AND THEN READ IT.#SO PROUD TO BE A ZOMBIE RN

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wavesoutbeingtossed · 3 months

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Screaming from the crypt (or how the past haunts the present on Midnights)

I know it's been discussed so much since Midnights came out but just.

I love how there is such a clear narrative throughout the album (and perhaps especially on the 3am/Vault tracks). About questioning and regret and choices and coming to terms with all of it. It is one long story about how we're all a mosaic of the choices we make, each one taking something from us and leaving something else in its place.

(And now a disclaimer: I'm looking at this mostly through a narrator/subject lens, and trying not to dive too deeply into real-life events or speculation except for in a general sense. For this purpose I like to look at the body of work as art, like literature, because I find it makes it easier to see the common threads in the different songs and cohesion in the narrative.)

In looking at the 3am+ tracks in particular, it's fascinating how some turns of phrases or themes repeat themselves in different songs, in different contexts. (I'm only focusing on the non-standard tracks because there are too many songs and I'd be here all day but I bet I could do a part two lol.) I know many people have pointed out the parallels throughout her discography already and I’m not saying anything groundbreaking by writing this, but I love how these parallels run through in the same album, because it makes it seem like it's one long story, or at least, one long rumination on many different stories that are coalescing into a single narrative.

Battle (let’s go)

For instance, the one that jumped out at me when I started writing this post the other week was, "Tore your banners down, took the battle underground," in The Great War and "If clarity's in death, then why won't this die? Years of tearing down our banners, you and I," in Would've, Could've Should've. It's a story about staying stuck in the same cycle of reliving trauma and coping mechanisms and bad habits over and over again and fantasizing about how taking the “antagonist” out and gaining the upper hand for good would bring closure (WCS), but the truth is that nothing ever will. All that cycle does, though, is repeat itself in other situations, and in this case pushes someone away the narrator cares for (TGW). The difference is that the imagined battle in WCS is a two-way street in her mind (that is ultimately unwinnable because it was never a fair fight), but in TGW it's one-sided -- she's the one fighting dirty, taking shots, the way she'd been doing in her imagination (or nightmares) all these years. But the person in front of her isn't fighting back the way the person in her mind in WCS would, because their intentions are honourable instead of exploitative.

And that's paralleled in another pair of lyrics from the two songs, "And maybe it's the past talking, screaming from the crypt, telling me to punish you for things you never did," (in TGW) and "The tomb won't close, I fight with you in my sleep," (in WCS). In both cases, the funeral imagery makes it seem like this past event should be dead and buried in WCS, but it keeps rising from the dead, haunting her no matter what she does and in TGW, another (or perhaps the same?) tomb that won't close keeps unleashing new ways to hurt her and in turn the new person in her life. In other words, the trauma from the past continues to bleed into the present.

(Again from a literary point of view, I'm not saying the events of the two songs are linked IRL, but they're fascinating textual parallels on the album as a string of chapters, which is why Dear Reader is so compelling, but that's a whole other essay.)

To keep the battle motif going, there’s yet another parallel, this time between TGW’s "[You were a] soldier down on that icy ground, looked up at me with honor and truth," and You’re Losing Me’s "All I did was bleed as I tried to be the bravest soldier, fighting in only your army.” In the former, the subject is laying down his armour in the war she’s projecting onto him, waving the white flag, and she realizes that she’s about to destroy something if she doesn’t put her sword down too. By the time we get to YLM, the roles are almost reversed; at the very least they’re supposed to be on the same team, but in this case she’s doing all the heavy lifting, fighting for their relationship in contrast to his apathy killing it. It’s also pretty interesting (if not outright intentional) that one of the 3am+ editions of the albums starts with The Great War, where they find themselves in conflict (even if it’s in her head) that ends in a truce, and ends with You’re Losing Me signalling the end of the relationship, evidence that the resolution in the first song wasn’t an ending but merely a ceasefire before the last battle.

Putting the rest under a cut because this is waaaaay too long now ⤵️

(There’s also another metaphor there in The Great War with its battle imagery: World War I, aka The Great War, was supposed to be the war to end all wars, because loss on its scale was never seen before and when it ended, most thought never again would the world embroil itself in such battle, the horrors and implications were so devastating. Two decades later, the world found itself in WWII, with an even larger scope and more horrific consequences, the intervening time between the two a period of festering conflicts and resentment leading to some of the worst acts the world would see. Bringing real life into it for a second, there’s something a little poetic, though sad, about The Great War the song being about a fight that could have ended the relationship that they ultimately resolved and was meant to be evidence of the strength of their love, but so too did it end up being a period of détente, the greater battle coming for them years later. But that is not the point of this post.)

If one thing had been different

Another major theme in these editions is pondering the "what ifs?" of life, but I think it takes on even more significance in the broader context of the album in the lyrics of "I'm never gonna meet what could've been, would've been, should've been you," in Bigger than the Whole Sky and the repetition of would've/could've in Would've, Could've, Should've (I would've looked away at the first glance, I would've stayed on my knees, I would've gone along with the righteous, I could've gone on as I was, would've could've should've if I'd only played it safe, etc.) In both songs, the narrator is mourning an alternate course their life could have taken* and questioning what they could have done differently, in the aftermath of trauma and loss, and the regret that comes with that loss, and with the loss of agency in the situation because ultimately it was never in their hands. In an album full of questions, wondering about the path not taken, or the forks in the road that have led to a different version of your life, it's digging deeper into the contrast of choice vs. fate, action vs. reaction, dwelling on the past vs. moving on. When you're supposed to let go of the past, what do you do when it is holding your future hostage?

(*I know there are different interpretations/speculation about BTTWS which I am not getting into on main. I'm just saying that whatever the song is about, it's grieving something that never came to be. The literal origin of the song is less important to the album than the sense of loss it portrays. Whatever the inspiration is, it's crafted to tell part of the story of Midnights of ruminating over how, to borrow from her previous work, if one thing had been different, would everything be different?)

(Also I was today years old when I realized that the words are inverted in the two songs. Apparently I've been hearing BTTWS wrong this whole time.)

There's also an interesting tangent in the role of faith in both songs: in WCS, the events of the story cause her to lose her faith (e.g. "All I used to do was pray," "you're a crisis of my faith,") and question all the things she felt had been unquestionable until that point in her life (e.g. "I could have gone along with the righteous"), whereas in BTTWS, she questions whether that very lack of faith is to blame for the loss in that song ("did some force take you because I didn't pray? [...] It's not meant to be, so I'll say words I don't believe"). It's like pinpointing the moment her life changed and upended her beliefs (WCS), but as a result then leaving her unmoored in times of crisis because ultimately there's no explanation or comfort to be taken from what she used to hold true before that (BTTWS). The words she once relied upon to guide her have long since lost their meaning, but in times of trouble it leaves her wondering if that faith she once held then lost could have prevented this pain.

(Shoutout to WCS for being Catholic guilt personified lol.)

To keep on with the vaguely faith-y notions, an obvious parallel is the line in Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve about, “I damn sure never would've danced with the devil at nineteen,” and, "When you aim at the devil, make sure you don't miss," in Dear Reader. All of WCS is about her fighting with an antagonist who haunts her, with whom she wholly regrets ever becoming involved. DR could be seen as a reflection on that fall from grace, warning the audience that if you choose to go after the person (or thing) haunting you, make sure you do so clearheaded enough to be decisive. Again, these “devils” may not be related in real life: the IRL devil in DR could be speaking about her naysayers, or Kim*ye, or Scott & Scooter B, etc., meaning not to cross your enemies until you know you can win. But taking real life out of it and looking at it textually, I am intrigued by the link between WCS and DR, so that’s what I’m going with here. And perhaps that’s even the point in a wider sense; there will be multiple “devils” in your life, or threats to your well-being. If you’re going to commit to taking them down — whether it’s an actual person, or the demons inside you that refuse to let you go — make sure you have the right ammo so that they can no longer hurt you. (Of course, one lesson from these experiences is that sometimes you can’t win, and you have to live with the fallout.)

(Sidebar: I know that “dancing with the devil” is a turn of phrase that means being led into temptation and engaging in risky behaviour, as opposed to describing the actual person. Given the religious metaphors in the song, that could very well be/is the intention, particularly when it’s preceded by, “I would have stayed on my knees” as in she would have continued to follow her faith — in whatever sense that means — had she never met this person, which could also be a more eloquent way of saying she would have continued to be live her life in a way that was righteous (even naive) and seen the world in black and white. Either way, it’s a force she wholly rejects. Like I said, multiple devils, same fight.)

Regret comes up too: in WCS, she says, "I regret you all the time," obviously directed at the person who manipulated her and led to her perceived downfall, citing him as the one impulse she wished she'd never followed, because it won't leave her no matter how hard she’s tried. In High Infidelity, she tells the person to, "put on your records and regret me," and on the surface, it’s like she’s turning the tables, painting herself as the one now causing the regret in someone else, the one inflicting the pain this time. Yet the verse preceding it and the lines following it in the chorus depict a partner who is also emotionally manipulative and vindictive like in WCS (“you said I was freeloading, I didn’t know you were keeping count,” “put on your headphones and burn my city,”). It’s not so much that she’s intentionally harming the person (the way the person in WCS does to her), but rather that the venom in the subject’s feelings towards her seeps through; she’s imagining the way he’s going to feel about her when she leaves, hating her just for by being who she is. (There could be another tangent about how in both songs she’s there to be a “token” in a game for both of the men, who play her for their own purposes.) The regret is dripping with disdain. It’s as though she’s picturing how the person is going to hate her for doing what she’s thinking of doing the way she hates the person who first hurt her.

Sadness, unsurprisingly, shows up in a few lyrics. In BTTWS, “Everything I touch becomes sick with sadness,” sets the scene of a person so overcome with grief that it permeates everything around them; they cannot see their way out of it and feel like the fog will never lift. In Hits Different, it’s, “My sadness is contagious,” the result of a breakup where the person’s grief again touches everything and everyone around them, pushing them further in their despair and loneliness. The reason behind the grief in either case may vary, but regardless of the source, the feeling is overpowering and isolating. They may be different chapters in the story, but the devastation is hauntingly familiar. (As is a recurring theme in Midnights as a whole: there are situations and feelings that present themselves at different points in her journey and colour in the lines in different ways along the road. Like revisiting an old vice and realizing the hit isn’t quite the same as it was in the past.)

Death by a thousand cuts

She also writes about wounds on this album, which isn't surprising I suppose given that the whole conceit is that these are things that have kept her up at night over the years. WCS is perhaps the driving narrative on this never ending hurt when she sings, “The wound won't close, I keep on waiting for a sign, I regret you all the time,” suggesting that no matter what she does, the pain of this experience has permeated everything she’s done afterwards. (Not unlike the overwhelming grief in BTTWS, for instance.) Elsewhere, in High Infidelity she sings, "Lock broken, slur spoken, wound open, game token," and in Hits Different, "Make it make some sense why the wound is still bleeding.” Again I'm not suggesting they're about the same events; the line in HI is about a situation where a partner crosses a boundary, hits below the belt, picks at an insecurity (or creates a new one) and treats the relationship like it's transactional, opening the floodgates in turn. In HD, the wound seems to be more self-inflicted, where she's pushed the person away. (Over a situation real or imagined she feels she needs distance from.) But again, something has picked at her like a raw nerve, and just like in the past, she's hurting, even in a different time and place and person. Almost like the wounds of the past break open over and over again to create new scars. If one were to extrapolate further, it wouldn’t be the biggest leap to wonder if the wound open in WCS, then torn apart in HI makes the one in HD hurt even more.

(I once wrote a post about how I think as time goes on, WCS is going to turn into one of those songs that will be found to drive so much of her work, because it’s just… kind of the unsaid thesis statement of so much of her songwriting.)

Another repeated theme is that of the empty home and loneliness. In High Infidelity, she sings, "At the house lonely, good money I'd pay if you just know me, seemed like the right thing at the time," painting a picture of someone who may have everything they'd want to the outside world, but in reality feels metaphorically trapped in their home (or at least alone amidst abundance), a symbol of a relationship gone sour and a failure to build connection. She just wants someone to understand her, want her for her, but as she's written earlier in the song, she's just a pawn in the game, a trophy from the hunt. Home, in this case, is lonely, isolated, an emblem of her fears. In Dear Reader, she continues this thread, then singing, "You wouldn't take my word for it if you knew who was talking, if you knew where I was walking, to a house not a home, all alone 'cause nobody's there, where I pace in my pen and my friends found friends who care, no one sees you lose when you're playing solitaire." It's the same idea, admitting to listeners that the gilded cage she lived in kept her distanced from her loved ones and real connection, keeping her struggles close to the vest but feeling desperately lonely amidst her crowning success. She's pushed people away and it may have felt like the right thing at the time, but in the end maybe felt like she was trapped. And when you push people away, eventually they take you at your word and stop pushing back; you’re a victim of your own success at isolating yourself. What starts out of self-preservation then further perpetuates the underlying problems.

(There's another interesting link about "home" also feeling unsafe with HI's "Your picket fence is sharp as knives," which further leads into the theme of marriage/domesticity feeling dangerous, which is a whole other thing I won't get into here because it's another discussion and may derail this already gargantuan word salad.)

In a slightly similar vein, we have the metaphor of bad weather for a rocky road or unstable relationship, in High Infidelity again with, "Storm coming, good husband, bad omen, dragged my feet right down the aisle" and You’re Losing Me’s "every morning I glared at you with storms in my eyes.” They aren’t speaking of the same situation or even same kind of breakdown, but it is pretty interesting how the idea of clouds/storms/floods/etc. play such a role in Taylor’s music to signal depression, apprehension, fear, uncertainty, etc. In HI, I think the “storm” coming is the looming threat of commitment to a partner who makes the narrator uneasy (if not fearful). In this case, the idea of making a life with this person is not one that incites joy or comfort, but instead makes the narrator feel that dark times are ahead if she continues down this path. Perhaps in some way, the “storms” in YLM have made good on the threat in HI in a different way; it’s a different home, a different relationship, but the clouds have settled in regardless, and some of her fears have come to fruition in ways she did not expect. The person she once trusted no longer sees her or her struggles (or worse, doesn’t care), and the resentment and pain build with each passing day.

Coming back to heartbreak, one of the obvious "full circle" moments is the beginning of a relationship in Paris, where she says that, "I'm so in love that I might stop breathing," clearly enthralled in a new love that allows her to shut the world out and grow in private, capturing the all-encompassing nature of the relationship. This infatuation has consumed her in the most wonderful way (in contrast to the sorrow of some of the previous songs), and it feels like a life-altering (or even life-sustaining?) force that is so strong she may forget what it’s like to breathe. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) By the end of the album, though, in You're Losing Me, that heart-stopping love has become a threat: "my heart won't start anymore for you." In the former, her racing heart is full of excitement, but by the latter, her heart has given out completely under the weight of the pain she bears. (YLM is full of death/illness imagery which I already wrote about awhile ago so I won't hear, but needless to say that song deserves its own essay for so many reasons.) She's gone from the unbridled joy of the beginnings of a relationship to the unrelenting sorrow of its end, two sides of the same coin.

Love as death appears elsewhere in the music too, for instance, in High Infidelity’s, “You know there's many different ways that you can kill the one you love, the slowest way is never loving them enough" and You’re Losing Me’s “How can you say that you love someone you can't tell is dying? […] My face was gray, but you wouldn't admit that we were sick.” Though not completely analogous situations, they both tell the tale of one partner’s apathy (or at least denial) destroying the other. In the former, the partner’s actions (or inaction) are more insidious, if not sinister; in the latter, the lack of momentum (or admission of a problem) is passive. In both cases, the end result is the narrator’s demise; it’s a drawn out affair that chips away at her morale and her health and her sense of self. (Breaking my own rule about bringing in alleged actual events into the discussion, but the idea that the relationship in High Infidelity, which was obviously fraught with unease and even fear, ended in a similarly excruciatingly slow and hurtful death by a thousand cuts as the relationship in You’re Losing Me almost did at that time must have been so painful. It almost feels like YLM is wondering why what used to be a source of light in her life was mirroring a situation that caused her such pain in the past.)

From the same little breaks in your soul

I said early on that part of what is so compelling about Midnights is that it feels like an album about ruminating — on choices, on events, on people — and the two final “bonus” tracks of the album depict that as well. In Hits Different, she sings that, “they say if it’s right, you know,” an ode to the confusion of a breakup and struggling with the aftermath of calling it quits. It’s a line that has always intrigued me, because the typical use of the phrase is in the sense of, “you’ll know when you meet the one,” but here it seems to have a double meaning, a reassurance perhaps from the friends (who later on tell her that "love is a lie") that she’ll know if she’s made the right decision in calling it off, but could also be her wondering if the relationship is right, she’ll know, and want to reconcile. In the final bonus track, You’re Losing Me, she sings, “now I just sit in the dark and wonder if it’s time,” this time leaving no doubt about the dilemma she faces, though it’s no less fraught. She’s wondering, perhaps for the last time, if now is finally the moment to end the relationship for good. They say that if it’s right she’ll know, and now she’s wondering if that feeling inside her (that once told her her partner was the one, which is why it hit differently), is telling her that it’s time to go for good. Wait Alexa play “It’s Time To Go.” These are not only the things that keep her up at night, but the things that play over in her mind like a film reel in her waking hours.

Midnights as a whole is a deeply personal album, as is most of Taylor's work, but the 3am+ edition tracks seem to dig even deeper to a lot of the issues raised on the standard album. Almost like the standard tracks are the things she wonders about on sleepless nights, but the bonus tracks are the things that haunt her in the aftermath. The regret, anger, sadness, grief, relief, even joy— they’re the price she pays for the memories she keeps reliving. Midnights might be the most cohesive narrative of all her albums, and really does feel like we’re watching someone work through her journal over time, stopping short of outright naming those giant fears and intrusive thoughts (except for when she does) but making them plain as day when you connect the songs together, and perhaps never more clearly than in the expanded album. It’s incredible how the songs stand on their own to relay a specific moment in time, but that they are also self-referential to each other (whether thematically or overtly) to weave a larger web over the entire work. We’re so lucky as fans to have these stories and to keep peeling back these layers as time passes. (And my literature-analysis-loving ass loves her even more for it.)

This is obviously by no means an exhaustive list, and I know there are more parallels and probably even stronger links (particularly when you add the standard version into the mix), but these were the ones that particularly struck me and I’m just glad I’ve had a chance to sit with this and think it through. ❤️

#writing letters addressed to the fire #me thinking too hard about taylor lyrics #taylor swift #midnights #long post #lyrics analysis #song parallels #Gabby this one is for you friend <3 #here goes nothing #Happy Friday or something idk!#(also i know i said there are things i wouldn’t discuss on main but my dms are open lol)#this is not as structured or well plotted out as I wanted it to be #and turned out to be more stream of consciousness than legit essay #but whatever at least i got my thoughts out there and it can release some plot of land in my brain for other stuff to think over lol #If anyone ever reads this thank you! And I’m sorry?#The best compliment i ever got in school #was when we were doing an analysis of a poem in English lit in college #And i brought something up casually #and my prof went ‘I’ve been teaching this class for eight years and that’s the first time anyone’s ever brought it up like that’#’and that just blew my mind’#and i was like ‘who me?’#so that’s all you need to know about me lol #Midnights: The Great War #Bigger than the whole sky #bttws #Midnights: Paris #Midnights: high infidelity #would’ve could’ve should’ve #Midnights: dear reader #midnights: bigger than the whole sky

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breadstickdeadstick · 2 months

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i see no difference

#I love this emoji #if I had nitro I’d use it all the time #I had it as my pfp for a while #ANYWHO #i gotta download hsr on this really slow computer before boothill comes out #It’s got a ton of space but is really slow #I was downloading genshin and it took ages just for 6% to download #I’m gonna download hsr first but idk if it’ll work or just crash the computer #I need boothill #that was so long bro not me writing essays in the tumblr tags #Hsr #honkai star rail #hsr boothill #boothill hsr

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supemaeve · 2 months

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Why doesn't Vought want diversity? Wow. These are some real hardballs Maria Menounos. But check your facts. Let's take The Seven, for example. We've got A-Train, he's a black man. We got Black Noir he, uhm, well he doesn't identify with any race, really so, they're covered.

#queen maeve #homelander #the boys #maria menounos #i remember the first time i watched this scene like it was yesterday lol #I've watched it hundreds of times since then and it still gives me the same feelings #for that reason it's one of my favorites and i needed to gif it #wanted to gif the entire thing because i love you can see his face when he realizes maria gave him the perfect set up to out her #but it was too damn long and i wanted to focus more on maeve obviously #the way she changes her expression in a second to get her vought mask on #ugh i could write an entire essay about this scene but i won't #my gifs #maeve

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piosplayhouse · 1 year

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Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games

(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)

(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)

Part I. The Backstory

My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.

However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.

The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.

(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)

Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.

However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.

(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)

This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.

(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)

¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.

Part II. The Game

The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.

To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.

Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)

What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.

You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))

Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:

(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)

I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.

In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.

(Image taken from an anonymous friend)

Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.

On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.

As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.

(My original post)³

What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.

² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.

³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.

Part III. The Ban, The Report

I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.

You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.

By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.

Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.

The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".

So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:

"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.

I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.

So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.

Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.

I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.

Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.

The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.

As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.

Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.

Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.

You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.

I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).

Part IV. The Backlash

I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!

After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.

However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).

I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).

I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.

Part V. Conclusions

I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.

However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.

Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.

Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.

It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.

#img descriptions in alt text!#lmk if there's any way I can make this more accessible! It's my first time writing something this long on tumblr :)#long post #really long posts #long posts #really long post #essay #hi3 #horse isle 3 #horse isle #fandom drama #hobby drama #discourse #homophobic scum horse chronicles

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mbat · 3 months

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i really wanted to try and write like, a thing explaining how i think steven universe future is one of the best portrayals (and my personal favorite) of mental illness in media, and how i think people misinterpreted it (me included at first, cause my experience over time has given me new perspectives) but i. AAA i literally dont even know if its necessary cause i dont know if people still think it was bad or a bad way to write steven (it wasnt!!) or like any of that, mostly cause. holy shit its just so obvious to me?

like i watch that show and i relate to him so much that i just understand it all and its so obvious to me and i dont know if other people find it. not obvious. like everything is right there in the text laid out i think

the main thing that i saw get misinterpreted when it aired was the second to last episode where steven turns into a fucking kaiju and everyone, again me included, thought that it felt rushed, but everytime i rewatch it i think... no it wasnt, actually. because we see it expecting a big fight or thinking it needs a whole lot to fix, but it doesnt. its not a fight, its someone having a mental breakdown and thinking theyre purely unlovable and evil, but being made to see that they are still lovable and arent evil even after all the bad theyve done, theyre loved unconditionally, and that other stuff mostly really doesnt matter (and hey, it can be fixed/dealt with later, its fine!)

its just my favorite show ever, specifically future! and i really wish other people would see what i see, but do i even need to try..? i didnt really write it very well anyway, but drafts exist for a reason. idk ive just been thinking about it a lot

TL;DR: i adore steven universe future and im wondering if anyone thinks its even necessary for it to be analyzed for people to maybe better understand it/do you think that there are enough people misunderstanding it that it needs a perspective to maybe help be more understood

#genuinely i relate so deeply to him in future #its such a comfort show to me when im having a bad time cause like #he goes through so much and does so much. but everyone still loves him and he gets a therapist and a happily ever after #and it gives me hope. yknow?#i just keep thinking about athena p saying she didnt like steven universe future and im like. GIRL YOUR OPINIONS ARE USUALLY GOOD WHAT #WHY NOT. WHAT IS THERE TO DISLIKE :[#steven universe #su #steven universe future #steven quartz universe #steven quartz demayo #su steven #steven universe steven #suf #my post #im mostly asking this cause it would be a lot of effort to finish it #ive got a first draft written but its very long #and im planning on turning it into a youtube video. not just posting a long ass essay on tumblr lol #so it would take me writing a second draft. maybe even more until im satisfied-#then id have to read it all out loud. and then make a drawing for the background video cause i #PHONE ISTG #cause thats just what i have in mind #then id have to edit it all sjfhsjf #its like. i want to. but im so demotivated about it. cause would it even matter #I MEANT FOR THE POLL TO BE LONGER I FORGOT TO CHANGE IT NOOOOO

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voltstone · 27 days

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i'm so sick every time i go off of tumblr and there's people who can't wrap their head around the fact violet was brainwashed and was likely having a (bpd) episode on the boat.

all while ignoring the fact that??? she tried to apologize?? right there??? when the boat was still on fire???

anyway so here's the freakin essay i wrote solely because people keep doing this. i had the urge to write it again but. oh wait. i already did??

hm.

>:(

#volt's shit #twdg #the walking dead game #twdg violet #can people giVE HER FCKIN REST #SHE APOLOGIZES *TWICE*#the first time didn't go so well cuz like #yeah girl the boat is still on fire and you're face is like still actively blistering #you can wait #but still #she isn't diagnosed but the girl is textbook bpd #and i get why it's stigmatized but good loRD IT MAKES IT WORSE #anyway #imma write fanficiton now.#yes the essay's long but it's exhaustive of what i wanted to talk about with violet and bpd #and also the link is to my blog itself since it *is* designed for writing #so it shouldn't be a pain to read on

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hythlodaes · 4 months

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richard siken said sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them and i've never been the same since

#realizing i first read his poetry 10 years ago........#i was so obsessed lol i would just write quotes in my notebooks instead of taking class notes #but the long and short of it is still the essay of all time for me #i do it because my love keeps getting bigger and that's what happens!!!!#having a real one this morning about it #gg txt

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sexynetra · 6 months

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I FINISHED THE DRAFT Y’ALL!!!! Everybody clap and cheer for real, I was so sure for months that I was never ever going to finish it and that thought was so devastating <3333

#if you don’t clap and cheer you’re homophobic for re #also I finished the draft last night but whatever #also my editor was asleep when I finished the draft but now I can bully her into editing and simply pretend I don’t have essays due #and do the editing and have a CHAPTER OUT #for the first time in so long #guys rawnsyf is so fucking backkkkkkkkk #writing #rawnsyf #running away will never set you free #anarcia #anarcia fanfic #anarcia fanfiction #drag race fanfic #drag race fanfiction

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emile-hides · 1 year

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This took me literally all day but I feel very correct in my takes so at least that’s something.

#Fairy Tail #Queer #I like hand drawing flags other than the Transmace/femme and the mlm flag those all got copy/pasted after the first time #I'm so sorry to Makarov Cana and Guildarts I love you three but cannot for the life of me pick up on your vibes #None of the Celestial Spirits are Cis half of them don't have gender to begin with #Leo He/Him Lesbian and copycat Scorpio who came out as a He/Him Lesbian literally a week after Leo #Brothers #T4T Taurus/Lucy is my everything I need you all to understand this #I couldn't decide if Capricorn was Aro/Ace or Aro/Gay I settled on Aro/Gay but it's still very much in the air #Lucy/Natsu queer plantonics #Lily/Gajeel/Levy Polycule #I'm going insane I need you to understand #Elfman a bi man with a huge preferance for other men so excited to meet a man and have a manly wedding and grow into old men together #Falls in love with Evergreen and is mad about it for the rest of his life #You can pry Transfem/Femboy Queer Grey from my cold dead hands #That Lucy looking fit he wore in at the end of the Magic Games opened my eyes #Long skirt not shirt kinda gal I love her #I'm so tired I've got a little fever and my arms hurt but I did the thing I wanted to do today #Woo!#Neoprounoun Autigender Laxus.... I gotta write that Autistic Laxus essay man

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spaciebabie · 1 year

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What's the storyline for your ocs?

nerdy straight A middle school student katherine quin and her pals realize that their government sucks ass and b/c they are impassioned naive youth, entangle themselves in a state of affairs that will stay w/them for the rest of their lives

more under the cut b/c i wrote a lot more than i thought i would kasfjksdfjksfj (i have big feelings abt this story)

i (officially) made the story when i was 14! all the characters are based off me and my experience 2 some extent (especially katherine i mean i made her bi, biracial, gave her a mole, made her like indie games etc). originally the story was going 2 have a happy ending, but as ive grown i have more of an appreciation for....well endings that are not so happy. im thinking i change it. it would make sense w/what happens in it anyway (the story of revolution is not as happy and triumphant as 11 year old me imagined when i first acted this out w/my brother. honestly like ive changed the story entirely 2 be my own but i still gotta thank my bro cuz the orig storyline that inspired it when we played legos 2gether was a conjoined effort and i borrowed many of the characters)! as im drafting it now, the story is not particularly happy lol

the story tells a sort of generational loop that katherine goes thru? if that makes sense? i wont go too much in depth b/c spoilers but its a story of history repeating itself again and again and the endless loops pain and suffering cause and how people are scared/too comfortable/too angry to change the cycle. i think that katherine being a history nerd in the midst of watching history unfold again before her very eyes grants her a certain point of view other characters dont have (except a few who have lived experiences). although this awareness will come later in the story when she's older

it will also touch on something young folks feel 2day where ppl frequently ask, "why is this happening today? havent we progressed?" and katherine will ponder that herself (although the situations that happen in the story are strictly to the story ajsfsjfd i cant talk abt and link real life tragedies it would be too much for me). and i think that as she gets older in the story and gains knowledge and wisdom from what she goes thru, she'll hafta bear this horrifying knowledge that the sands of time dont just erode the past, but the present and future as well.

i was not expecting 2 write this much KJSFKJSDJFKSJDF

anyway! i care this story a lot. its like my childhood and has grown with me as ive aged. im really compelled to make it the best it can be and i get a lot of imposter syndrome b/c i know the ideas i have and the story itself as a whole is good, but im worried my execution will fall flat. idk its kept me from moving forward w/it or talking abt it for years.

tldr; two can basically be summed up by this image:

are things going 2 get better? can they get better? questions i think about as i write and think thru this story.

#spacie splains #in 2020 when i first started making comics i sort of rushed it. it still needed more time 2 cook and develop in my head #especially since? i threw myself in2 it and had no idea where i was writing 2 and i feel like you can tell from the first 50 comics #the vibe was not what i wanted #so after grappling w/it for months i decided 2 start over #i want two 2 be good. its my passion project. its been my hyperfixation for years. i want this story 2 b good.#whenever i Type Serious my textccent goes away LKSJGKSDGHSJKG #I WROTE AN ESSAY SORRY LMAO #thanks for this ask! talking abt this helped tie up some of the loose threads in my head!#now that im thinking abt it....would two be considered an AU of the original story me and my bro did? KSJFKSLDFJSKFJS #OR IS IT A REIMAGINING?? TOP 10 QUESTIONS SCIENCE STILL CANT ANSWER #I DONT WANT 2 HYPE THIS UP I JUST REALIZED THIS MIGHT BE HYPING THIS UP #DONT SET YOUR EXPECTATIONS TOO HIGH #IM ONE GUY WRITING A STORY #im definitely gonna make some mistakes #i just really dont want this story 2 be surface level or juvenile or the typical 'lets save the world!' narrative #i want it 2 be more #idk idk idk i have too many thoughts in my small tiny head #i spent so long writing this ask holay molay #i spent 2 hrs rambling ong

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loopyarts · 2 years

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Shuuji Kayama character essay The importance of showing nuances and ugly parts of trauma

Shuuji kayama is an interesting character to me because he one of the rare few characters that shows/betrays the nuance and ugly parts of trauma and mental ill and health and it a shame he so misunderstood as a character.

So I going try my best to do him justice while I discuss my interpretation of his character and why it important to show people the messy parts of trauma.

Quick warning they will be spoilers for part 1-5 and whole of the true ending path so you have been warn. Also this topic will contain discussion on child abuse, trauma, depression and implied suicide.

Part 1 The beginning and the pressure’s of being the oldest

Let’s start from the beginning when we are first introduced to Shuuji as character he shown to be bossy and very awkward, he appears to not have the best track record when it comes to being well liked. Even the random students from the beginning of the game has nothing positive to say about Shuuji even in a way make fun of him. If by attention he appears to not the happiest person around in fact he rarely smile in his character portraits and seems to be a very troubled person deep down but we get to that later on.

Another thing that is of importance is his body language though-out the game earlier parts, he’s shown to be very nervous, sensitive and shows high levels of anxiety yet show a lot of concern for others and himself he always putting others before himself even giving takuma weak smiles trying to reassure him that he okay.

Around the the beginning part of part 3 Shuuji is shown not wanting help because he doesn’t want to be a burden and it some doesn’t want because he was told that was for the weak. He often get mildly aggressive at the idea of getting help. Which honestly shows how much detail and care want into betraying his character though-out the game.

Even though he never choose or even wanted to the leader, he was pushed by the others kids into leadership hood because he was the oldest. He takes on the task for the sakes of the others, a common thing with Shuuji is he is very self sacrificing in nature putting other before himself and his own needs. Even if it was not good for Shuuji in the long run mentally yet he still try to be a good leader even he knew he was bad at it and got way to controlling by his overprotective and his own fear of failure plaguing him. It doesn’t help when the others kids are disappointed by Shuuji lack of leadership skills which sadly makes Shuuji even more mentally unsure of himself and even questioning if even useful at all.

Also think people underplay a lot of Shuuji positives traits though out the game. he shown to go out of his way to best of ability even though if it can be sees as minor to some to find food, scout the areas and he was the one to comfort and reassure everyone when they lost professor to the bridge and later on Ryo to the fog. Which Shuuji took pretty hard to because he was one of few people that comforted Ryo and not being able to save him due his own cowardice affect Shuuji mind pretty badly adding more to unfortunate downfall that is to come.

Part 2 Shuuji and his family

Before dive into the deep end, let’s address what going on with Shuuji and why he acts the way he does.

Shuuji home life is very complicated and downright toxic, we are given clues about his home life by Takuma perspective bio on Shuuji who seems to know Shuuji and his father have a very complicated relationship and that’s Shuuji will do anything to try and gets his father approval.

In part 4 Shuuji has a scene with Kaito and has a conversation about his relationship with his sister and siblings in general. This leads into Shuuji talking about how he kinda of jealous of Kaito and Miu siblings relationship and how close they are as siblings which sadly suggest that Shuuji and his older brother are not very close, although Shuuji holds him to a very high standard saying how amazing his older brother is compared to him but I do think Shuuji low self esteem plays a part in the overprising of his older brother. However it does seems his older brother is somewhat dismissive of Shuuji problems especially with their father and with him and his older brother not having a somewhat healthy sibling bond but in Shuuji heart maybe he wishes in a what if way that his older brother would protect him from his father and for them to have a healthy sibling relationship.

What worrying is Shuuji tries to defend the mistreatment his Father gives to him and even try to make it seem normal and go out of his way to defend his older brother as well, sadly this very common with abuse victims they often will defend they abuser especially family ones because cutting ties with them means losing the only family they have.

Shuuji father is very calculating person knowing how press Shuuji buttons to make Shuuji appear as the aggressor and downright intimidating putting down his son and lecturing him at every moment he gets as we sees in Shuuji nightmare of him in part 5 beginning. He often neglect and deny Shuuji any praise or affection leading Shuuji to have very low self esteem, anxious having low opinion of himself and unable to really make a decision for himself, he alway need the approval of others or is doing it for others to justify his decision. All because Shuuji father never wanted Shuuji for Shuuji, he wanted a clone of in his eyes his already perfect older son.

We only know so much about his brother but Shuuji father sees his older brother as the golden child and puts Shuuji in the standard of his brother which he brother seems to be unsure of but he might also probably think Shuuji doe not have the ability to be like him, wither is out of care for Shuuji well being or even his own ego we never know.

Even in the prequel stories which came out in early September gives more context on Shuuji life in the real world and how he thinks.

Also credit to @kazarinn for the translation of the text a link to the original post here https://href.li/?https://digi-lab.blog/digimon-survive-recollections/ I hope you don’t mind me using this as apart of my essay also short to @digital-survivor who goes in better depth then I can about the schooling in Japan and why what father asking for Shuuji to do is kinda asking for basically complete perfection at this point check her out she great.

Huh…? Leading a group at an extracurricular camp, you say…?

(There weren’t enough teachers to serve as group leaders, and since I was known for my outstanding performance among the graduating students, they were asking me to help them.)

W-Well, I know I have the highest grades in my year, but leading a camp group is a different story…

(The teacher told me I had a good and reliable sense of leadership for this.)

Leadership… Right, being a group leader would mean…

(It’d be a chance to show off my real skills.)

(Was I thinking about my father at that time? Or my brother?)

Right, I understand. I’ll take on a position as group leader!

(On the other side of the phone line, my teacher was showering me with gratitude, and I could feel something swelling in my chest.)

(That was…yes, it was my own conceited pride swelling up within me.)

(If my father had seen me, he’d probably have scowled at me. If my brother had seen me, he’d probably have mocked me.)

(But that’s not the point. At the time, I didn’t seem to have any sense of caution at all.)

Okay! As a son of the Kayama family, I’ll show you how perfect of a leader I am!

(Not even remotely understanding how much danger my life could be in at camp…)

It not at all pretty and honestly very sad. Knowing Shuuji got the top student in his grades and doing everything he can he get his older brother and especially his father love and attention but he never wanted Shuuji for Shuuji meaning because Shuuji isn’t perfect or what he wants in a son in his mind. He probably will never love Shuuji for who he is which is honestly is heartbreaking I mean he done everything that was asked of him and been a good son and yet sadly people like Shuuji father will never be happy with his efforts because he not perfect, he not like his perfect older brother.

It hurt to know even more that his brother most likely will never take Shuuji out of possible fear for their father so he takes their father side and even does that as way to his life as non conflict driven as possible. So he mocks Shuuji efforts to be perfect/like him although it is not know if out of love or just his ego because he believes Shuuji can’t be him or do what he can do, honestly he’s not wrong. Even if Shuuji did everything right it would never be enough because he unless he gets the best university best everything he be seen as worthless to his father or even seen burden to his more successful older brother.

Part 3 Shuuji and Lopmon

Before we address the elephant or should I say bunny in the room. I think they a misconception on what the partner role in this game are and I think it be wise if I explain how the Digimon and humans work.

In Digimon survive Digimon partner are the other half of the human soul of that said human and have characteristics of they human counter part wither it been showing opposite personalities to similar ones it all depends on the human and what their struggle are with their mind. Even the Shuuji and Lopmon are shown to be very similar if one pay attention to there dialogue and mannerisms within the game. Such as shuttering a lot when nervous or they need for praise and approval of others.

In my mind I always saw Shuuji and Lopmon relationship as a big brother little brother dynamic mostly because it Shuuji basically looking at himself in mirror of when he was younger, weaker more naive and hopeful that his father would finally give him the affection he craves so much which leads to him hating Lopmon because he painfully reminded of how much hates himself and how he was never not good enough for the love and affection of his family.

Since he sees Lopmon as younger version of himself, he tries to fix him/fix himself by becoming more like brother or even worse more like his father. In order to make Lopmon stronger by making him do the impossible or things be done perfectly no mistakes or he’s deem useless, lazy a failure. In a twisted way its like we seeing what Shuuji childhood was probably like being relived by Lopmon.

Another about Lopmon is he probably one of few people to give Shuuji unconditional love which Shuuji is probably not used to being given. The fact he doesn’t know how to react might even think Lopmon is just pitying him, so he goes out of his way tell Lopmon to go away but like a guardian angel Lopmon feels it his duty to protect and help Shuuji no matter how mean spirited he gets.

What interesting is Shuuji is not as harsh to other Digimon mainly if you let him talk to the Digimon children in part 4, he surprisingly very gentle to them and tries his best to get a peaceful solution and even though he hesitated of Jijimon at first he does warm to him a bit. So the problem probably isn’t a hate for Digimon, it most likely because Lopmon is so much like Shuuji that’s it painful for Shuuji to be around him because it like seeing that part of yourself that you don’t like over and over.

Now this doesn’t condone Shuuji actions or the abuse he does to Lopmon but I think that’s the point your not meant to think what Shuuji is doing is right, what he doing is unhealthy he hates himself and Not all trauma responses are healthy and can vary from person to person, Shuuji kayama is a very traumatised child abuse victim projecting his feelings onto Lopmon in an unhealthy manner since Lopmon is other half of his soul. It can also be taken as a form of self harm to one self in a way he literally hurting himself emotional and mentally though Lopmon who is also him.

But also will say it okay to let your characters do bad things, have unhealthy ways of handling things and make mistakes, What Shuuji does is bad because he handles his trauma in an unhealthy way that does harm to himself as well as Lopmon but doesn’t make him a monster or unworthy of redemption because at end of day he and Lopmon are both victims.

But I noticed something that never brought in question, does Shuuji know what he doing is wrong and harmful to treat Lopmon like that/himself because honestly I don’t think so because he often shown defending his father harsh methods and treatment of him and I think he really does believe that what his father doe work so he copy’s his methods and what he doing for Lopmon is out of love and a deserve to help him be stronger.

However he also rejects Lopmon because he represent Shuuji undesirable traits, even if it does more harm to Shuuji in the long run and if he continues to rejects Lopmon/himself things take a turn for the worse which leads us to the next section.

Part 4 The downfall

Part 5 is where things takes a turn for the worse as we see Shuuji reaches his lowest and most vulnerable even before we entered the sewer it very clear, how much the others kids have lost faith in Shuuji and his ability to lead. Any decisions you make with Takuma will result in the same outcome of leaving Shuuji behind mostly out of worry for him wellbeing but in Shuuji mind it shows how much a burden he is to the others and without thinking rushes ahead of everyone into the sewers.

I do think a lot people underestimate the sheer willpower and tolerance Shuuji has in this part. I mean the he spent a very long time by himself with Lopmon being forced to relive his trauma from his dad over and over feeling alone, scared as Arukenimon poisons his mind with so many illusions while poor Lopmon is powerless to help him.

Shuuji bit of self sacrificing himself for the others to megaseadramon could also be seen as a suicide attempt by Shuuji because most suicidal people don’t actually want to die, they want to be saved. What backs this idea up a little is how Arukenimon called Shuuji out for doing it more for himself, to escape his problems which honestly heartbreaking to think of.

By the time the others find him, he very emotional unstable and sadly finally he snaps clouded by rage starts to beats Lopmon up, crying tears of frustration and anger to Lopmon/himself why can’t I/you do anything right, do something actually do something. Shuuji then blinded by his years of suppressed rage and pain yelled at top of his lungs destroy Megaseadramon destroy everything that crosses my path, so I never have to feel pain/hurt or be weak/useless never again.

This triggered Lopmon dark evolution Wendimon born from Shuuji rage and pain a manifestation of his trauma. he destroys Megaseadramon in one blow no control only vengeance and rage he then goes over to Shuuji and without warning consumes him. Drowning him in a sea of his sorrow, regrets as he ‘dies’ in a way that implies metaphorical form of one taking their own life or letting yourself be consumed by your depression and trauma.

I think in some cruel dark twisted way Wendimon was projecting Shuuji from being hurt or feeling pain ever again by having Shuuji inside of him/fused to him as like some type of safety net.

This mess up fusion let us and the other kids hear the pained cries, regrets and fears both Shuuji and Lopmon had been going though and it honestly very sad to have to put the both of them out of there misery’s leaving them died to the fog. Tragedy ending Shuuji and Lopmon story with broken bond never to be resolved.

However, this doesn’t have to be the only end to there story. In the true ending we given a chance to help Shuuji overcome parts of his trauma and help him and Lopmon have a bond, leading to in my honesty option one of most beautiful characters arc I’ve seen in a while.

Part 5 Shuuji journey of self healing and learning to love himself.

In the true ending your given the chance to save both Ryo and Shuuji. With Ryo being very important because he the one to caught on that Shuuji has trauma and is the one to snap Shuuji back into reality by punching him in the face. Which stops Shuuji from hurting Lopmon and gives Ryo time tell Shuuji the truth, no sugarcoating and what he doing to Lopmon is wrong and tells how Lopmon has much has done for him and works so hard. But also let’s him know that he not alone because he has Ryo and the others who care about him and want to help him.

Shuuji looks at the others realising he not alone he has friends who care about him and support him. When he looks back at the bruised Lopmon only to see his younger self within Lopmon. As he realises what he had just done, he became what he most afraid of his father in that moment of his immune rage. He panicked upset at what he had done to Lopmon/himself. Immediately jumping into action as he tries to patch up and heal Lopmon apologising to him telling him how he did nothing way and that it was all his fault.

But then Lopmon asked one question to him, Shuuji was I of used to you. This causes Shuuji breakdowns crying as he praises Lopmon telling him how stronger he is compared to him and how he wanted to praises him for so long. Shuuji giving Lopmon the praise and affection his father never gave given Lopmon/himself the empathy and love he deserves. This lets Lopmon become stronger evolving into Turuiemon and being a symbol of Shuuji of starting to break away from the cycle of abuse and its chains.

For part 6 Shuuji and Lopmon spend time healing and getting to known each other to find they have a lot common to even falling in mud which make me Shuuji might be a little clumsy just like Lopmon. As they both in a way go back to simpler times letting Shuuji in a way feel like a kid and having the freedom to express himself along with Lopmon by his side.

Shuuji journey of redemption is not really about him redemption himself for others no it about him healing from years of abuse and trauma and finally learning to love himself for who he is and trust his own judgment and his decisions without chains of the needs of others approval or needing to justify it being for the sake of others.

Shuuji story is about him learning to love himself even thoughout Lopmon evolutions for example with Antaylamon Shuuji is so happy for Lopmon but believe he that just Lopmon own strength and Shuuji had nothing to do with it. To which Antaylamon correct him by saying that it Shuuji own strength that is able Lopmon to become stronger, telling Shuuji to stop putting himself down believe himself. Saying how proud he is of Shuuji given him praise and affection.

This leads to Lopmon final evolution Cherubimon, Showing how far Shuuji has come as he and Lopmon decide to take the emery by themselves while Takuma finds because he believes in Shuuji judgement. Which leads to Lopmon to evolve into Cherubimon after the fight he tells Shuuji how proud he is of him and how far they come.

Shuuji does admit it was for his own ego, Cherubimon reassure him that it okay to do for himself and his own decision not for dad or his brother or the professor or even for takuma and the others for him and him alone believing in his own judgement. Most importantly himself while it may come off as selfish, sometimes being a little selfish is important make sure your choices are your own and that take care of yourself while caring for others.

In part 11 You have chance to talk character and what they do after the journey is over, Takuma suggests the idea that Shuuji is like a teacher to which Shuuji enjoy the idea of which helps calls back to earlier parts where he and Lopmon are like teacher and student showing Shuuji growth as mentoring figure. Also showing how much he learned from the professor teachings.

Part 12 There’s notable thing because it a parallel to part 5 where Shuuji hurt Lopmon in part 12. This was when all the Digimon were blinded by Zhuqiaomon hurt and rage by being betrayed by his human, After Takuma get agumon out of trance, Shuuji also try’s to help Lopmon ended getting hurt by Lopmon but he still persist with empathy and trust getting though to Lopmon in the end.

Later on at night in the cafeteria Lopmon asks Takuma if he hurt Shuuji, to which Takuma hesitated to answer but Lopmon already knew the answer because he had a feeling he did. Shuuji the enter the conversation reassuring Lopmon that it okays if fact he argues it’s a good thing because of what happened In part 5 he too hurt Lopmon because of in his own words his immaturity. Even though Lopmon forgave Shuuji in back of his mind he still felt guilt and even wish that Lopmon would just hit him back.

So when he got struck by Lopmon in a way it made them even at least in Shuuji mind. Although Lopmon thinks it a little weird but he just glad that Shuuji is alright and happy, having a even better understand of each other then ever before.

Another thing to note about Shuuji is the theme of found family with him, with the professor playing a mentor/father type figure in his life. The others kids being his friends are also apart of his found family given him the support, love, joy and fun Shuuji wanted from his family and Lopmon his little brother and guardian always making Shuuji is happy and will always by his side and protect him from harm.

Part 6 Ken and Shuuji

I wanted make a quick comparison for these two given how they both abuse there Digimon in way.

They both have big brothers but the main difference is Ken lost his big brother though death and is grieving his lost brother as a child and find himself in the dark ocean and later on the digital world using it as a type of playground to deal with his grief while also treating it like it just a game and the Digimon aren’t real and don’t have feelings. He later realised what he done and reforms into a better person as Digimon adventure 2 goes forward. Also check the show it great and Ken redemption arc is wonderfully done.

With Shuuji it the opposite his older brother is alive and well and he not very close to him and he struggles more with self esteem as well the abuse done by his father, which lead to him projecting his feelings onto Lopmon bullying him as way of coping with his trauma.

Wormmon and Lopmon are interesting comparison as well they both timid gentle creatures who are very loyal to there tamers and stays by there side no matter what dispute they abuse they both put though. Also I will say Ken is more physical abusive to Wormmon while Shuuji is only verbally abusive to Lopmon only getting physical in part 5 when he at his lowest point. Also wormmon doesn’t try to kill Ken and having a child character die literally on screen might be a bit too dark for a children anime to show.

Also Ken has a few advantage compared to Shuuji. First of when it comes to media there is a difference since Shuuji is a game character who unlike Ken is an anime character from a show you can ignore Shuuji though out it since it a game with choices and the player is in control of what they do. While in a show your forced to watch Ken grow as person no ifs or buts about it. Also Ken coming out when the internet was less active might also play a part in why he less hated as a character despite literally committing Digimon slavery and well the Digimon emperor it in the name. By no to Ken love the character but man he does some mess up things in this show.

What also might be holding Shuuji back a bit is well it’s a big ask to put another 30-40 hours into the game just to see Ryo and Shuuji grow as people which understandable not everyone has the time for it but in way it hurts Shuuji as a character to locked him to the true ending, leaving most people having a sour option on him.

Part 7 conclusion and overall thoughts

Overall I think Shuuji is a well written character and I hope I got you at least appreciate his character at a little bit. Now your entitled to dislike or hate Shuuji since he actions can be difficult to watch for some people and if he make you uncomfortable that’s okay but I will say it a shame when he write him off as just an asshole who unredeemable, especially when those people ignore his trauma and the abuse he went though by his father, I think it honestly misses the point.

Yes Shuuji did make mistakes but he takes responsibility and lets himself become a better person. Despite his trauma Shuuji is not a lost cause.

Digimon survive has a theme of forgiving in a yes you did terrible things, and yes you have to take responsibility and accountability for your actions, but you can still become a better person.

These are all my thoughts on Shuuji and I hope enjoy my somewhat clumsy essay ^^’ and I hope have a nice day.

#Digimon Survive #digimon #kayama shuuji #shuuji kayama #lopmon #character essay #this took long to finish 3 weeks XoX #this my first time doing an eassy so sorry if a little clunky and flawed ^^’#I played the game twice while writing notes for this essay #I feel so free now that it’s done

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waywardsalt · 11 months

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I am humbly requesting your thoughts on Linebeck

Oh I have a LOT of thoughts on Linebeck but I'll try to just get some major points down bc it would take me ages to spill all of my thoughts on him.

(plus i do have two general headcanon posts [ 1 2 ] a post abt headcanons about him being autistic [ x ] and a weird post about his coat [ x ] as well as pretty much anything in my linebeck tag with my excessive tagging of some reblogs and my original posts + whatever writing or fanfiction i have done/will do with him included so. bonus reading for headcanon-y stuff or a look at how i portray him)

added a read more bc this is long bc of course it is :) i hope it's in the right spot :)))

Linebeck is... a good fucking character. He's probably my favorite character period, and has been pretty much soon after I got Phantom Hourglass. He feels unique compared to other Zelda characters as a companion character who offers less direct support and is more just of a constant character who changes throughout the course of the story and is... well, a companion, not really a helper. He falls more in line with the types of loz characters who are more rude or antagonistic towards Link, but develops out of that, and also technically counts not only as a boss but a final boss, putting him as the only non-villain character to be a final boss, so uh good for him.

Just within the context of the games he's got a great design and a great theme (which is only heard about two times before the final boss but has a recognizable enough motif for it to be noticed in the final boss theme) and an interesting role in his game and just has one of the best character arcs and one of the most interesting places within the story as a whole. Linebeck's arc is very... natural in how you see his attitude change within both story beats and in his overworld dialogue, but at the same time seems like it stutters when he deals with Ciela's criticism and upholding his own reputation, I think his character arc is very fascinating if you consider the entire context of his character and what he interacts with, since a majority of the characters he directly interacts with seem to deny the idea that he's any more than a useless coward.

The fact that pretty much the rest of the major cast in Phantom Hourglass has basically no faith or respect for Linebeck is so fucking fascinating to me. This guy has to be doing so fucking bad over the course of the game. In relation to Ciela specifically, an idea I've been thinking of and trying to work into some of my Phantom Hourglass oneshots is that having to be around and interact with her so frequently wears Linebeck down pretty badly as the game goes on.

This guy is undeniably mentally ill and that's also something I have a specific fic planned out for but that's probably not going to see the light of day for a while. It's basically five chapters of Oshus being Linebeck's therapist or something each time Link goes to the Temple of the Ocean King.

I particularly enjoy how the game (at least twice) plays with your expecting him to be at the ship all of the time by having him be in a different spot on an island. His dialogue for islands and his overseas dialogue are fun, it gives off a sense that he much prefers exploring and is a bit less guarded overseas. His dialogue during the ghost ship fight is ESPECIALLY fantastic, the specific line of 'I'm fighting right there with you this time, kid!' not only offers some very interesting insight to his attitude towards link and his own role, but kind of also stings when considering the events of the final boss and is also a quote I took a screenshot of while reading the text dump for this game.

Phantom Hourglass is by no means an exceptional game and while the story is fine it's nothing fantastic and even most of the characters are... ok, but Linebeck is without a doubt the best part of this game and I really feel like he's the main reason why people still give this game a chance and despite everything he's easily one of the best characters in the entire series even if his game isn't one of the better ones. He honest to god steals every scene he's in, even if he barely has any dialogue- he's animated with such distinct personality and I love it. He doesn't speak at all until the end of the spirit of courage scene and yet is so fucking distracting with his fruity fucking posing and movements in reaction to what's going on.

I'm also personally a fan of the near-complete lack of backstory we get for him. The most we get is some vague implications but everyone can read the given information in different ways so it's really not much. Phantom Hourglass's general lack of lore is great for me since I can just fill in the blanks however I want. I kinda honestly don't want Nintendo to revisit this game because I don't really want them to add anything new. Just port it or something don't change it.

That's about it for surface-level specific-to-the-games Linebeck talk... on to everything else.

Linebeck is literally the reason why I found out I was autistic. I wrote this loser and realized I was accidentally making him kinda autistic and THEN realized I was also projecting and then decided to look into that. He's fun to write and he always ends up a little out of character and at this point I barely give a damn because this bastard is masking or keeping up a facade or whatever the fuck in most of his scenes anyways. Linebeck's arc feels to me more about him being most honest and open to and about his own emotions and actual personality so honestly writing him a bit out of character doesn't bother me too much.

He's my favorite little guy, and when I plan out Zelda aus he always gets a major role to the point where a lot of the twists to my aus all end up being similar. For a few of them I've had to forcibly alter his role so that I can't include him constantly. He's very interesting for different kinds of aus because he's an interesting character for different concepts and situations. His relationships with characters in Phantom Hourglass lend well to au stuff; specifically with Link, in one au they're adoptive brothers, in one they're something akin to rivals, in one their mutual fixation on each other propels the plot. I've even expanded on interactions and possible dynamics with Bellum in aus (Bellum is honestly fun since he's kind of a blank slate in canon but there's just enough there to build off of but keep it relatively the same original character).

I have a few ocs that used to be au versions of Linebeck that ended up becoming their own thing because the aus in question worked better as original stories.

With Phantom Hourglass-centric ideas, it's a lot of fun to poke around and explore stuff with Linebeck's past, his mental state, the kinds of things he enjoys or hates, pretty much anything the game doesn't elaborate on. With all of that blank space and the fact that I've known about him for a few years now, I've gotten down a whole backstory and deeper details on Linebeck, most of which I'm probably going to end up expressing through writing.

Just a few of the baseline ones are just along the lines of him being gay, autistic, touch-averse, intersex, a cat person, someone who highly values his freedom, half Gerudo, interested in music- some of it can be supported with canon (he really comes off to me like a closeted gay man, and he does have some generally autistic vibes) and some of it is really just for the hell of it (in particular the idea that he’s of Gerudo descent has no backing but is so interesting for story stuff and is generally fun) (I also enjoy ignoring parts of canon. I have not played Spirit Tracks and I do not want to play it so if I don't look at it I can ignore it).

I have a lot of fun fleshing him out in different aus or in scenarios before or after Phantom Hourglass, since there's just enough there to allow for further reasonable exploration, and his being just some normal guy actually helps with that since it forces you to keep things relatively normal and comparable to kinds of things you can experience in your day-to-day. I've more or less figured out a (mostly) full backstory for him, I've decided on a full physical description of how he looks so that I have a baseline if I want to change stuff in an au or just so that I know how I figure he looks as well as have an idea of how some physical traits can lend themselves to other aspects of how I write and portray him (for example, I figure he has long fingers, which goes right with the idea that he enjoys music and is pretty good on a piano, and also that he's good with tasks that might require a bit more finger dexterity as well as generally helping a bit with pick-pocketing or thievery)

I figure that, along with the general idea I have of him valuing his freedom, he's not particularly interested in following rules or laws and hates seeing too many of them put in place, and especially values his own identity even if he doesn't express it as much as he'd like. He likes being able to go wherever he'd like and he likes being able to do what he wants and express himself how he wants and that stuff gets bogged down when he plays into that image of someone he's not that he hides behind and doubles down on in a good bit of Phantom Hourglass.

Linebeck is fun in general he's a good character he's fun for aus he's got enough groundwork to spend ages pouring into possible avenues for his personality and background and whatever potential he could have in different aus or roles. He's surprisingly fun and interesting to use as an antagonist since you can't fall back on easy villain-writing ideas and have to get a bit more creative with it.

I think I struggle to write him in-character but it's backed up a bit by my specific interpretation of him suggesting that a lot of what you see from him is forced or fake. I still think he's a greedy piece of shit, though. He sucks and it's on purpose. I lean into him being rude and cold and a bit quieter overall.

He just... for some fucking reason when I decided to play this game Linebeck struck a chord with me whether or not I realized it at the time so he's just very interesting and entertaining and important to me and it really doesn't help that either Phantom Hourglass as a whole or just Linebeck is my special interest.

Linebeck stands out in comparison to other Zelda characters and has a very unique and fascinating role and arc and is just so fucking good.

He feels like he could be used as an example of how good character writing can save a piece of art (not that ph sucks but like. god damn he elevates it) just because his inclusion makes the story more interesting as you have this selfish asshole tagging along next to your little goody-two-shoes protagonist and fairy friend, and his arc, though not entirely the focus of the story, is another reason to keep progressing. His dialogue is funny and has some really good in-character tips every so often, he adds character to traversal and adds stakes as a character to care about and protect and is just fucking fantastic.

He's a character that can work as comedic relief but at the same time can be taken very seriously and I really enjoy that while he seems to be in the role of comedic relief a lot it never seems much like it's diegetically intentional and it still allows room for him to be taken completely seriously. Him knocking over stone Tetra is funny but there's so much character in that entire string of animations that while it's a fun background gag it also provides even more insight into Linebeck as a character.

Essentially he's my favorite character ever he was probably my gay awakening and I want to steal his gender and I think about him more than I think about my ocs.

#linebeck #asks #whistlingstarlight #loz #legend of zelda #phantom hourglass #salty talks #literally i got ph in the first place bc some old zeldatubers made a good case abt him and i vaguely remembered reading the manga #and now im still playing it bc of him. do it for him. whatever. easily one of the most important fictional characters ive experienced #i tried to make this more.... formal??? cuz you asked so nicely ty for the ask #i tried to just give some kind of idea of my basic ideas? i didnt want to get too specific since you just asked for thoughts #had a couple of instances of imposter syndrome pop up while writing this bc it feels weird to me to call ph or linebeck my special interest #when i dont look at anything beyond the game half of the time so idk. i think abt and can talk abt linebeck in specific for a while ig #i didn't want to go too in depth with anything since the ask was a lil vague and i didnt want to go into massive tangents #i think i still have the high school essay-writing format brainworms this feels like a structured essay #whatever im insane about him but this is really long and i dont know what to focus on #long post #i stg if the fucking 'keep reading' teleports to where it shouldnt be #anyways a few of my linebeck pet peeves are when people treat him as shallow comic relief or ignore his character arc #i have a lot of linebeck pet peeves but those are the basic ones. pls be nice to him #i empathize a lot with linebeck hence the projection i do with him so idk what that says about me but hes got gay autistic swag so whatever #i left out a lot of other stuff bc some of it would maybe require a mature label. im insane abt him but im also gay abt him

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