#which connects since the memory dream meme is also called Death | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mooncustafer · 3 years

Text

Recover, Regroup, Roadtrip

Agent Dale Cooper disappeared in March 1989. The case is still open. Agent Dale Cooper disappeared in October 2016. The case is still open.

for @laughingpinecone /

/ @countdowntotwinpeaks‘ WONDERFULXSTRANGE 2021

“Diane, I am uncertain of the date and time, or indeed if such concepts have any meaning in this place. Nor do I have my recorder, but I find verbalizing my thoughts helps me to resist the confusion and lethargy. As for addressing my words to you, even though you’ll never hear them— well, old habits die hard.”

It pleased Wally Brando on a profound level to discover that a few pay-phones remained in Philadelphia, that reaching out was not yet the prerogative only of those who could afford a landline or a mobile. He could also have checked his email on a terminal at one of the city’s Public Libraries, and indeed, made a note to do so within the day so that he might catch up on the news of parents and former school friends. The pay phone was also blessed with both the yellow and the white pages, and the number he sought appeared under “F.” Getting transferred to Dr. Albert Rosenfield was a more complex quest, but he was persistent as well as polite, and after a few minutes he was able to speak to Dr. Rosenfield’s voice mail, if not the man himself.

He introduced himself with salutations, and was about the explain the nature of his request when a beep signalled that the allotted time had run out.

“To listen to your message, press one. To re-record your message, press two,” said the voice of the machine.

Silently cursing his volubility, Wally pressed two. This time he simplified the introduction, and asked if Dr. Rosenfield would be good enough to meet him that evening at the Morimoto Japanese restaurant not far from the FBI offices, to discuss a matter of deep concern connected, he believed, with the little town of Twin Peaks. When the beep came this time, he listened to his message and then, satisfied, hung up. The restaurant he’d named was slightly above his means, but he was meeting a friend of his godfather, and wanted to do justice to the occasion, even if the reason for it was one of peculiar anxiety to himself.

“Diane, I have tried so many times to escape— on the last attempt I really did get out into the world, but my plans, I fear, had dire repercussions for you, and to no end— my course still led me back to the Black Lodge. Some flaw in my own nature keeps trapping me in this loop; perhaps it’s what they sometimes call Saṃsāra.”

It was Agent Tammy Preston’s custom, when scraping the internet for information relevant to one or more recent cases, to check her email inbox every seven minutes— to do so every five minutes would disrupt the flow of her work, but ten-minute gaps might let something important go unanswered for too long. Just now the inbox was due another glance, and switching tabs she saw that two minutes earlier Director Bryson had replied to Tammy’s email of that morning with an invitation to come by her desk at her earliest possible convenience.

Tammy locked her screen, paused ‘Soft Fuzzy Man’ on her playlist and removed her headphones. Picking up the folder marked Missing Persons, 1989– Palmer, she slipped back into her pumps and made for Bryson’s office. The door was open but Tammy stopped at the threshold and rapped on the wall.

“Come in,” said Director Bryson, looking up from a folder. Bossa nova music played softly in the background as Tammy entered and pulled up a chair. It sometimes puzzled Tammy that apart from herself and Director Gordon Cole, no one in this particular division of the FBI seemed to have any interest in music recorded after 1979. (The first few times she’d heard ‘Du Hast’ pounding through the walls of Cole’s office, she’d wondered if this taste for metal was the result, or perhaps the cause, of his hearing loss; but after he’d joked to an unamused Agent Rosenfield about how these were difficult times and difficult times called for Dave Brubeck, she’d looked up the reference in case it was a coded message, and then the next day had overheard Gordon whistling ‘Mister Sandman,’ a song she knew primarily from an internet meme, at which point she concluded that the ear wants what it wants, regardless of demographic.)

“You told me you’d found some serious inconsistencies in the records surrounding Twin Peaks and the Palmer case?”

Tammy nodded, hesitated:

“I believe there may be inconsistencies as well in my own perceptions of the case.”

“Well now, that I find a little harder to believe.” Bryson smiled, but then her voice grew serious: “I’ve looked over the notes you made, and it confirms my own doubts about events.”

“Worse yet— the fact that I truly left the Lodge and then returned to it, will enable the beings that inhabit this place to take another twenty-five year turn in my likeness, unleashing even more evil on the world. The only thing stalling them is the doppelgänger I had MIKE make for the Jones family, but I don’t know if he’s still under the White Lodge’s protection.”

After all these months it still surprised Harry Truman there was so little physical pain, and so much boredom, to dying. Oh there’d been pain at the beginning, when he’d started treatment and had had to stop drinking; the memory of detoxing still made him shudder. But now he only felt a tiredness too huge for sleep to make any dent in it; and since he couldn’t sleep all the time, there were a great many hours during which all he could do was lie in the hospice bed or sit in one of the hospice chairs, and think.

At this point dying didn’t even sound so bad— it wasn’t like the past three decades had been all that great. He imagined going to sleep, just filling up a big bowl of silence and darkness and sinking into it, and then he felt bad for thinking that because Frank had already lost enough people without Harry lighting out too. Anyways, with the things he’d seen over the years he’d be a damn fool to think there was anything peaceful about death and whatever came after. So he’d lie awake trying to find some other topic to ponder, and that’s generally when the boredom set in.

Right now, courtesy of the nap he’d had in the afternoon after today’s treatment had left him especially exhausted, he was lying awake in the wee small hours. 3:52 am, said the clock on his bedside table beside the stack of paperbacks Frank had brought him on his visits— Harry wasn’t afraid of e-readers the way Lucy was of cellular phones, but he found the smell of paper comforting. It reminded him of the Bookhouse. The hospice tended to smell of disinfectants and sweat and soup. The food actually wasn’t as bad as the food at the hospital in Twin Peaks used to be, not that any food could be as bad as the hospital food in Twin Peaks used to be, but it made no difference to Harry, whose appetite had been gone for months. Frank always brought a slice of Norma’s pie too, carefully sealed in an old cookie tin to keep it fresh, but Harry could never manage more than a couple of bites, and they didn’t always stay down.

Being awake in the middle of the night in a hospice wasn’t as bad as being awake in the middle of the night when you were alone at home— the occasional voices or footsteps from the corridors beyond were reminders that whatever might be happening to Harry, life went on for the staff; and the lights from the city outside showed that life went on for others outside the hospice walls. When he’d first arrived, those city lights had made it hard to sleep, but now they substituted for the starry sky above Twin Peaks. There were fewer birds to watch in the city, though sparrows, pigeons or a starling sometimes lit on the ledge outside his window and peered in at him, or maybe at their own reflections. The frequent rain pattering against the glass— well, that sounded the same here as it did in a cabin.

Frank had called to tell him about Margaret Lanterman. Harry sometimes wondered if he should have stayed in Twin Peaks and died in his own home like her, instead of lingering in this hospice like the doomed heroine of some nineteenth-century novel. Or like Annie Blackburn. Or Audrey Horne.

The rain was spattering now against Harry’s window, bending the light from the Japanese stone lantern in the pocket-sized garden below. Harry couldn’t remember what the hospice building looked like from the outside, but he guessed it was similar in style to the mid-century one next door where the day-patients came for their treatments. A flash silhouetted the roofline; five seconds later came the thunder-crack. Harry settled back and closed his eyes.

Sleep pulled him into dreams of an espresso machine, like the one in the coffee place down in the lobby next to the gift shop for visitors. This machine filled a whole room, metal pipes feeding back on themselves like some kind of espressouroboros, neither steam nor coffee escaping from the grotesque contraption. Agent Cooper stood wearily before it with two empty coffee-cups. Harry was just wondering who the second cup was for, when Coop looked up and met his eyes:

“What year is this?!”

Harry sat up in bed, listened intently for two full minutes, but he didn’t hear Coop’s voice again. He sighed. Sometimes the mind pulls imaginary sounds out of the background noise. False pattern recognition or something— Coop would have known a word for it. Harry had little hope left they’d ever find Cooper, or if they did, that he’d still be the man he’d known. Yet he’d carried on, more (he told himself) out of habit than any real hope. He’d kept in touch with Agent Rosenfield, even when it meant letting him know about the cancer— not that Albert would blab the secret to anyone in Twin Peaks.

“Hello?”

“Good, you’re still alive.” Albert’s personality hadn’t mellowed with the years, exactly, but familiarity had worn the edges off his jibes.

“Shut up, Albert. So what have you found?” Albert’s calls generally came every three months, but never at nine in the morning, and he’d last spoken to Harry only two weeks back. Something important must have happened.

“Actually, Sheriff Truman, I’m the one coming to you for information.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not easy to do investigations from a hospital bed. What can I tell you that you can’t get from other sources?”

“I need you to summarize the Laura Palmer case back in 1989, and the actions of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks at that time.”

“Albert, is this one of your damn cognitive tests? You already know—”

“We’re both too tired to argue, just humor me.”

“How detailed do you want?”

“An outline will suffice.”

Harry took a deep breath and briefly listed the finding of Laura’s body, and the living but dazed and injured Ronnette, and the arrival of Agent Dale Cooper to lead the investigation. He skimmed over the crimes of Jacques Reneault and some of the other peripheral drama that had occurred in the town around that time, noted that Leland Palmer had murdered his own daughter, albeit while not fully himself, and was beginning to recount Cooper’s temporary suspension and Windom Earle’s campaign of terror, when Albert interrupted:

“You’ve still got the unofficial version, then.”

“Unofficial?”

“According to FBI records and your colleagues at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office, Laura Palmer is an unsolved missing-person case.”

Harry began to feel sick.

“Goddammit, Albert, you did the autopsy. I punched you and you fell across her body. You found a broken poker chip in her stomach—” Albert broke in:

“I hadn’t disclosed that detail to anybody I’ve questioned about this.” His voice was a little shaky. “Listen, Harry,” he continued. “Last Friday I was contacted by a young man wearing motorcycle leathers and talking like Jack Kerouac on quaaludes.”

“Wally.”

“Naturally I supposed him to be from your iodine-deficient neck of the woods even before he introduced himself as your godson and the offspring of those lieutenants of yours. He told me he’d come because he wasn’t sure where else to turn. Apparently he keeps in touch with his parents as he rides across the continent, but in their most recent conversation he’d noticed their memories of certain events had become confused. I was about to tell him I wasn’t the least bit surprised, when he added that he’d checked with other townsfolk, including your brother, and they all seemed to have had the same— how’d he put it? ‘The walls of their memory painted over like a childhood bedroom converted to a study.’”

”That sounds like Wally, all right.”

”Eventually he got round to explaining why he’d come to me. The message that had prompted him to call home was from Lucy; she said she’d shot a suspect who was attacking your brother Frank. She’d also mentioned some FBI agents arriving a few minutes later.”

Harry swallowed. He tried to imagine Lucy shooting anyone:

“Frank never said anything about this.”

“And when Wally called home, Andy and Lucy not only denied it had happened, they had no idea what he was talking about, not that I’d guess that to be an unusual state of affairs. Anyway, after I sent your godson away, I began to have contradictory memories myself of what Cooper had told me about the case. I remembered the poker chip after waking in the middle of the night from the worst dreams I’d had since medical school. I’ve been telling myself it was a false memory, maybe a composite of all the young female murder victims I’ve had to examine in my career, but I told myself I’d make one more phone call, just to check. And now you confirm it. Also, in my recall you knocked me across Leo Johnson’s body. Thanks for the correction. Are you still there?”

“Yes,” Harry answered, glad he was already sitting on his bed.

“Now that that’s established,” said Albert’s voice on the other end of the phone: “here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: when do you remember Agent Cooper disappearing?”

“March 1989.” Harry tried to keep his voice steady, as though he was giving evidence in court. He briefly explained about the Black Lodge and Coop’s reappearance and unsettling behaviour and how he’d checked himself out of the hospital and was never heard from again. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “Are you still there, Albert?”

“According to FBI records and, up until two days ago, my own memories: Coop disappeared this past October while driving to Odessa, Texas for a case. The last record of him was a credit-card charge at a motel just outside the city.”

“What was he investigating in Odessa?”

“Missing person. I’ve tried looking into that case, but it seems to be a dead end, especially since Coop never seems to have arrived at the diner where the man he was looking for had allegedly been running drugs.”

“Sounds like the kind of establishment where nobody’d admit anything. Maybe Coop did get to the diner.”

“Gee, you’ve cracked it Sheriff, we would never have thought of that. The diner was old-school, but not so old-school they didn’t have a security camera trained on the front counter. We went over three days worth of footage. I admit we can’t be sure he didn’t slip in through the back for some reason; but you knew Coop— can you honestly picture him entering a diner and not ordering a coffee?”

“Not the Coop I knew, but— I already told you he was acting pretty erratically just before he took off.”

Harry heard Albert sigh.

“I’ve been checking with a few of my colleagues who were involved in the original Palmer investigation. I think Gordon knows something, but being Gordon he’s saying nothing, and as loudly as possible. Denise— Director Bryson, now— remembers the unofficial version, and according to her so does Agent Preston— oh right, you never met Agent Tammy Preston, the poker-faced glamazon computer hacker— I’m not sure she was even born yet in 1989, but she was on a case in Twin Peaks in October 2016, and during the course of the subsequent paperwork, she started noticing a lot of records and statements didn’t match up, and then she realized her own memories didn’t match up. Which brings up another problem with trying to reason this out by conventional methods: something in that Salem’s Pacific-Northwest Lot of yours is rewriting memories, documents, maybe the facts themselves. But so far it’s predominantly affected the people who were on the spot this past October.” Albert’s voice rasped a little from the long phone call, and he paused to clear his throat. “Unfortunately, that also means the people most likely to remember the original version of events are people who weren’t in the Sheriff’s Office during the incident that seems to have triggered the change. At the risk of sounding like one of those bullshit shows on the History Channel, we may never know exactly what happened that night.”

“Wait, what even was the case that brought you all back in 2016?”

“That’s the problem— I’m one of the people who was there, and I only have vague and disconnected memories of a British man with a gardening glove, the chorus of Guys and Dolls, Agent Cooper leaving the room with Diane, his secretary who quit the FBI decades ago, and Gordon, and only Gordon coming back.” Albert paused again. “It goes against my personal feelings and medical opinions, but would you be willing to let me visit you in person? I’ve some vacation time and enough frequent-flyer miles that the trip will probably cost less than the long-distance charges if we continue this conversation.”

Harry opened the drawer of his bedside table and took out the key to Coop’s old hotel room:

“Yeah, come by.”

“Diane, I am currently alone. I realize that statement implies that I’m not always alone here, and indeed I sometimes have a companion, who I still think of as Laura Palmer, though I don’t know if that’s her identity anymore; I’d hoped, after my last attempt, that Laura would no longer be in this place at all. She comes and goes, or perhaps we both come and go and our orbits occasionally intersect. I’ve tried to find some pattern to it, but with no reliable way to measure time, I’ve had little success.

The last time we met she told me about a room she hadn’t seen before, all white walls, in which a dark-haired woman was contemplating a mirror with a puzzled look. I can’t help but feel this parallels my own situation.”

“Frank sent me this last month. But when I thanked him the next time he called, he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.” Albert hesitated before taking the room key:

“Great Northern Hotel,” he read, turning it over. “Twin Peaks. Isn’t the front desk going to want this back?”

“Unless I miss my guess, it’s from 1989 when Coop was staying there.”

Albert’s ears stuck out more noticeably, or perhaps it was his face that was thinner. He’d spent the first part of his visit scrutinizing Harry and questioning him about his case and what the doctors were doing for it, until Harry told him to quit it or he’d run out of time to discuss Coop’s disappearance before visiting hours ended, and anyway weren’t Albert’s patients usually dead to begin with?

The trouble with the subsequent discussion was that it went in a circle— the people who’d been present for the 2016 Unknown Event had uncertain memories of what had actually happened; and the people who clearly recalled the 1989 Palmer case as a murder hadn’t been present for the Unknown Event. The one thing that seemed likely was that there was some connection between the 1989 case and the 2016 case, particularly since both had been followed by the unsolved disappearance of one Agent Dale Cooper.

“I hate to say it, Albert, but I’ve given up hope on ever finding Coop.”

“What’s hope got to do with it?” Albert asked. His tone was not sarcastic.

“Diane, I’ve decided that, if only to keep my mind occupied, I will go looking for the white room and the woman with the mirror. I’d feel happier if I had a ball of twine or some breadcrumbs to leave as a trail back to the waiting room, but I’m coming to terms with the idea that’s there’s no advantage to remaining or returning here— it’s not as if I need food or drink in this place, and I cannot be any more lost than I already am.

So far, I believe I’ve walked down five identical red-curtained hallways, and turned left five times. It therefore seems likely that I’m following a counterclockwise, roughly spiral path, although I’m uncertain if I’m proceeding inwards or outwards.”

“If this search is going to require juggling two sets of memories, then I’d better come along so you don’t get brainwashed again.”

“Sheriff Truman, if you haven’t noticed by now, you’re in a cancer hospice.”

“I just finished a round of treatments, I’ve got a couple of weeks free.” Albert snorted and Harry added: “You can monitor my health while we’re on the road.”

“I’m already thinking of your health. You’re immunocompromised, travel is too risky.”

“We’re crossing a few state lines, not going to the other side of the world.”

Albert pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Fine. I’m driving. Which also means I get to choose the music.”

In fact, they went most of the way by plane, after Albert weighed the odds and decided five hours in a tube of recycled air would still be easier on Harry than a two-day road trip. Some of the passengers threw suspicious looks at Harry’s N95 mask, but they’d cleared it in advance with the airline, and Harry had briefly removed it when he went through TSA, and Albert was prepared to flash his FBI badge, but the flight crew were understanding.

They picked up a car at Midland International. Someone, presumably an employee of the car-rental company, had left a bundle of tourist-attraction pamphlets on the front passenger seat.

“According to these, Odessa has replicas of the Globe Theatre and Stonehenge,” Harry observed once he’d got himself settled.

“Why?” Albert asked.

“Got me there. The pamphlets don’t explain the motivation.”

Albert reached up and pulled down the car’s sunshade on Harry’s side, though the Sheriff insisted his cowboy hat was protection enough for his pale scalp:

“We’re not in the northwest where it rains every fifteen minutes,” he muttered, “and I’ve been looking up the side effects of your meds— you sunburn easily now.” Albert’s driving skirted the city, and they did not pass the Globe or Stonehenge.

The Pearblossom Motel, last recorded location of Agent Cooper, proved to be closed down. They’d noticed the papered-over windows as they pulled up, the sign unlit, not even to say NO VACANCY, but Albert got out to knock anyway. Harry watched him from the car; eventually he clambered out and slowly walked over to join him.

Albert was peering through a spot where the paper had torn away behind the window-glass. He stepped aside for Harry, and the sheriff took a look into the motel’s dim interior. He saw an ordinary, rather old-fashioned registration office, wood-grain panelling on the walls along with a few faded posters for local attractions. Rows of keys still hung on a board behind the desk, and a daily calendar read October 15, presumably the date the motel had closed, or the approximate date— Harry could imagine a concierge might not bother to keep tearing off the pages if they knew it was their last week on the job.

“I now realize that despite everything, I’ve still been harbouring hopes of finding my way back to the waiting room, hence my continual choosing of left-hand turns, as if attempting to mathematically navigate a maze. I must make a true leap of faith if intuition is to guide me, so I’ve closed my eyes and spun around several times in this corridor, first clockwise and then counterclockwise.

Now that I no longer can tell which direction I’ve come from… Diane, can you hear that? Of course you can’t, I don’t really have my tape recorder. I’m going to fall silent and listen for a bit.”

There seemed little else of interest at the motel (Harry, feeling a bit silly, had even tried the Great Northern’s room key on all the doors), so they turned back towards Odessa to look for the diner Cooper had been investigating. The motel was only a mile behind when they saw, ahead of them, a tall woman walking along the highway, her fire-engine-red hair, black t-shirt and pencil skirt out of place in a locale that was rural to the point of emptiness. Albert swore under his breath.

“This can’t be a coincidence,” he told Harry. “Roll down your window, I’m pulling over.” But the woman only threw a glance at the car as it slowed, flipped them the bird, and kept walking, though she stepped gingerly and Harry noticed she was barefoot on the asphalt. Albert leant across him and stuck his head out the window:

“Diane!”

“Fuck off, guys. I’m not Diane, and whoever she is I bet she’d tell you the same.” Harry gently pushed Albert back and leant out the window himself:

“Sorry, ma’am, mistaken identity. Are you all right though? I see you’ve mislaid your shoes.”

“Looks like somebody ran off with them,” the woman answered, her tone mocking despite the tired set of her shoulders. “I haven’t been up to anything illegal, officer. Just a bit of fooling around.”

“We can give you a ride into town,” Harry offered. “If it helps, you’ll be alone in the back seat— means you can get the drop on us if you start to feel nervous.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at the offer, then abruptly barked out a laugh and opened the back door of the car, took a seat and folded her long legs in after her. “Only because I need a lift,” she insisted, rubbing her bare feet. “I knew office romances were a bad idea, but he didn’t have to be a dick about it. Nothing to do now but go home and drown my sorrows in Hallowe’en candy.”

“You’ve still got candy left over from Hallowe’en?” In the mirror above the dashboard, Harry saw Albert raise an eyebrow and the woman in the back seat frowned, insulted:

“No! I may not have a maternal bone in my body, but I’m not going to give the trick-or-treaters candy that’s a year old.”

“Ma’am,” Harry asked, thinking about the calendar back in the Pearblossom Motel office, “what date d’you think it is?”

“Mid-October,” she began. Harry saw her reach into her purse with her black-and-white nails and pull out a mobile phone. Her eyes widened at the date: “No, it’s March. The fuck?—” She ran a hand through her scarlet hair. Harry wondered if it was dyed or a wig. Perhaps she was bald too. “Must be losing it. I was so sure it was October. And it’s not like I’ve could’ve been wandering around this desert for five months.” She tapped her phone screen. “5,230 messages?!” She looked frightened now, raising her head to meet their gaze in the mirror. “Where the hell have I been? And you guys— you’re feds, aren’t you?”

“No,” Harry began.

“I am,” said Albert. “He’s not.”

“Well, can you tell me what’s going on? Or is it classified? God, it’s not aliens, is it? I always assumed alien conspiracies were bullshit to cover up real conspiracies.”

“It’s probably not aliens,” Harry answered, unable to keep doubt from his voice as he remembered Major Briggs, “but I afraid it’s not going to sound any less weird.”

“To start with, we’re in the area investigating a colleague who disappeared in October,” began Albert, “and then you turn up, apparently amnesiac since that date.”

“And with my messages unchecked since then.”

“Yes, but there’s another detail— you look exactly like a former colleague of mine who was close to our missing man. That’s why I called you Diane when I slowed down.”

“I need a smoke.”

“No.”

“Albert,” Harry interrupted, “I’ve already got cancer, what’s the worst that can happen?”

“Do you want me to answer that in detail?”

“No I don’t.” Harry turned to look over his shoulder at the woman in the back: “Just roll down your window first.”

“We’ll pull over and she can step away from the car,” said Albert.

He stopped on a shoulder, and their passenger got out and lit a cigarette. Examining the packet, she called to them:

“Three left. That’s fewer than I remember having on me in October, but not by much.” Albert, meanwhile, had pulled a shopping bag from the back seat:

“You should eat something,” he said to Harry, producing a sealed cup of applesauce and a box of plastic spoons. Between rounds of treatment, Harry’s nausea receded, but his appetite was still pretty weak. “There’s saltine crackers, too.” Harry chuckled in spite of himself as he tore the foil off the applesauce:

“This all makes me feel like I’m home from school with the ‘flu.”

“You’ll have to watch Roadrunner cartoons on your own phone, I’m not paying for the data,” Albert snapped.

“I’m surprised we even get reception out here.” The red-haired woman had strolled back to the car with her cigarette, though she took care to stay downwind from Harry’s rolled-down window. “Guys, is it just me or is this highway really deserted— like, Rod-Serling-voiceover deserted?”

“We were just thinking Roadrunner cartoons.”

“Can’t be, there’s no weird rocks.” She flicked ash onto the pavement, “Though it does feel like if someone painted a tunnel entrance on a wall around here, you might be able to drive into it. If you weren’t a coyote.” She took another drag and glanced at the power lines humming above their heads. “Maybe it’s the hum from those wires that’s giving us brain cancer— oh sorry, dude.” She broke off and looked at Harry in apology.

“It’s all right, ma’am,” he said when he’d finished swallowing his mouthful of applesauce. “I’ve got leukaemia, not brain cancer. And the sound from those lines is unpleasant. Like the whine of mosquitoes in the woods.” As he spoke the hum intensified, becoming a loud crackle. Albert glanced up as a shadow fell over the three travellers and their car.

In the sky a dark, nebulous shape twisted, circled, formed a comma or an apostrophe, and dove towards them.

The first few grackles, out of thousands, came down on the roof and hood of the car. Harry could see one pecking at the windscreen and glaring at him with hard yellow eyes. He suddenly remembered Coop had been afraid of birds; until now, he’d never been able to imagine why. He turned and pushed open the back door as the woman dove inside the vehicle. Around them, the flock blotted out the landscape.

“Hope they don’t scratch up the finish,” Albert shouted over the sound of wing-beats, “or I’m not getting my deposit back.”

“Is this nesting season? I mean, are the grackles round here normally this—”

“Oh fuck, one got in!” came a yell from the back seat. Eardrums ringing, Harry turned to see a small black shape ricocheting around the car’s interior as the woman flailed her long, bare arms. The grackle made for the gap between Albert’s seat and headrest.

And got stuck, its beak not quite touching the back of Albert’s neck.

Harry reached for the little feathered body, thinking of how to pin the wings against the bird’s sides to avoid injury to it or the surrounding humans, but the moment his fingers touched it, it crumbled. At the same time the din outside the car ceased.

“That— that’s not natural.” Their passenger was covering her mouth with her hand. Even Albert looked shocked. Harry stared at the palmful of ash that was all that was left of the grackle.

“Let me get a sample bag,” Albert muttered. He pulled out a small clear plastic bag, and held it out while Harry poured the remains in. Then he handed him a packet of wet wipes. “You all right, Diane?” The woman in the back seat did not correct him on the name this time.

“Couple of scratches,” she said, examining her right arm. Albert passed her a mini first-aid kit. Got to give him his dues, he prepares for everything, thought Harry, adjusting the brim of his cowboy hat.

“Y’know,” he said, “This could be a good sign. In that it’s any kind of sign. There’s nothing worse than working in the dark, waiting for some hint you’re getting warmer or colder— that’s the kind of thing makes you wonder if the thing you’re looking for is even out there at all. But this—”

“Someone tipped their hand, you mean, when they tried throwing a Hitchcock movie in our faces,” Albert cut in. “But what exactly did we do to worry them?” His glance, and Harry’s, moved to the dashboard mirror’s reflection of their passenger.

“You think the birds were after me, or wanted to break up our merry band?” She raised an eyebrow. “Trouble is I know a token effort when I see one.”

“Or a warning.”

“We found the Pearblossom Motel;” Harry thought he saw the woman flinch at the name. “And then left it, to head for Odessa.”

“Are you suggesting we drive around in circles and see if they attack again?” Albert muttered.

“I think that’d be a little unfair to our passenger.” Harry turned to her: “Ma’am, I believe Albert when he says he knows you; but I also believe you when you say you don’t remember him. We can drop you anywhere you like— your call.”

“Give me a few minutes, fellas. Given all the weird shit I’ve just been through, I’ve got to think about whether I’m safer away from you two, or sticking close by. Plus I’ve got messages to check.” She took her phone out again. Without taking his eyes off the road, Albert pulled his own phone from his suit jacket, passing it to Harry:

“You’d better check mine. Maybe Tammy’s got some news—she’s been looking up everyone connected with events in Twin Peaks, but not living in the area. She even emailed some couple in Japan, though I’m still not sure what they’ve got to do with this.”

Harry peered at Albert’s phone screen, occasionally commenting if something looked to be of interest:

“Gordon’s sent a grudging OK, tells you to be careful. Also tells you to look after me. I’d always imagined he’d type in uppercase— didn’t realize it was him at first. Hm. Do you know a coroner?”

“I know lots of coroners, we get together for an annual poker tournament and lucky draw. And when I say draw…”

“Do you know a Dr. Talbot in Buckhorn?” Harry interrupted. “Autopsied a headless body last September that turned out to be Major— wait, he— is this one of those revised timeline things?”

“Not exactly.” Albert brought Harry up to date as best he could on Major Briggs’ disappearance and decades-later reappearance. “I certainly remember meeting Constance,” he added, after a pause, and cleared his throat again. “According to Tammy, I made a favourable impression on her, which is… unusual among my acquaintances, even those who share my profession. So what does she have to say?”

“Something about a wedding ring and Schrödinger’s Cat?” Harry looked at the message again. “She says Tammy spoke to her, and was going to contact you too… a gold ring they found on Briggs… sorry, in Briggs… keeps disappearing from her office’s records and the FBI’s evidence files, then coming back again?”

Albert frowned in thought as he drove: “Does it have anything engraved on it?” Harry tapped a message on the phone screen, CC-ing Constance and Tammy.

Outside the car, suburbs, or at least car dealerships and big-box stores, were beginning to sprout up along the highway.

Albert’s phone pinged and Harry read the message from Constance:

“Yes, scribbled it down last time I could find the record. This ring any (wedding) bells? TO DOUGIE, WITH LOVE, JANEY-E”

“Janey-E,” said Diane from the back seat, and Harry heard her drop her phone. Turning around he saw her wringing her hands, the nails now robin’s-egg blue. “Albert,” she gasped, “Oh, Albert, I was almost lost again.”

“I believe the change in method may have led to a breakthrough: I haven’t found any rooms leading off of the corridor I’m following, but the decor has gradually changed from black-and-white flooring and red curtains, to dark brown linoleum flooring and institutional green walls hung with large relief maps of different parts of the world. The maps appear to have been manufactured some time between 1954 and 1965, as they show North and South Vietnam as separate nations. I’m just passing the continent of Antarctica, now, and… oh. I think there might be…

Diane, I found the white room, and when I call it that, I’m not simply echoing Laura’s name for it. It was like a cross between a sanatorium and a snow cave, if a snow cave had furniture. There was a bed with white blankets and a white metal frame like a hospital bed. Audrey was sitting on one end of it, wrapped in a white bathrobe and looking at a round mirror that stood on a little white table. She turned as I entered, and her face was older, drawn and, for a moment, frightened. Then she looked at me again and relaxed, saying ‘Oh, it’s really you.’ I fear she must have met one of my nastier doppelgängers at some point.”

At Diane’s request, they stopped to eat at a fast-food chain before approaching the diner Coop had been investigating in at least one timeline.

“I’m hungry, but I’d be too nervous to eat at the place where Dale might have… well, if they’re a front for something, then the food’s either spectacular or terrible, and I’m not feeling lucky right now. I want to be someplace as bland and mundane as possible for a while, so I can regroup.”

“Well this place has a twenty-minute limit.” Albert jerked his thumb at the sign.

“That’ll do.” Diane curled up beside Harry in the booth as Albert went up to the counter to place their orders. She still wore her pencil skirt, but on on of their stops she’d purchased tennis shoes and a couple of fresh t-shirts— the one she was wearing at the moment read NOT TODAY in flowery letters. “Now he’s got two of us to worry about,” she said under her breath. Harry decided to reply:

“Someone needs to worry about him.” Diane nodded, and Harry offered his hand: “Sorry, we never did the proper introductions did we? Harry S. Truman.”

“I know.” Her expression relaxed slightly. “I see why he likes you.”

“Not sure Albert likes anybody, exactly—”

“That’s not who I was talking about.”

Albert returned with a eye-searingly-orange plastic tray:

“Mushroom burger, cheeseburger, buttered biscuit for you, Harry, because they can’t just serve toast like a real restaurant and those things they claim are bagels are made out of lies.”

“Don’t worry Albert, I’ll survive a biscuit.” Harry picked up one half of the baked item and took a bite. It wasn’t too bad, actually.

“Diane, the ring that jogged your memory—”

“My half-sister and her husband. Don’t ask me how they’d be mixed up in this though, Janey-E’s aggressively normal.”

“And her husband?”

“Never actually met him. Janey-E and I don’t talk much,” she explained. “But from her comments he’s… passively normal. Works for an insurance company, drinks too much sometimes, the whole man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit thing.”

“I’ve been talking with Audrey, or the version of her that existed in the white room. You’ll notice I use the past tense. Still sitting on the bed, she raised a finger and pointed to the mirror in front of her, saying:

‘The other me— she ran away from home, like she thought Laura had done. I’m amazed she survived her first year in the big city, but look:’

Diane, I saw Audrey searching records online, tailing suspects, testifying in civil and sometimes criminal courts. It’s a life that can make a cynic of the kindest soul, but there are situations the police don’t or can’t investigate, and those were— are, I suppose— Audrey’s bread and butter, in that mirror world. And they seem to pay well enough she can afford to do some pro bono cases.

‘I wish I were out there,’ she said, and the mirror clouded and shifted. She patted the bedspread, and I sat down beside her. ‘You know how,’ she began, ‘when you’re a kid, and you’re reading your favourite book, and a little after the halfway point, you start to think ‘I’m getting near the end of the book?’ And really, you’re not— there are pages and pages left of scenes and pictures. You’re always surprised just how much more there is. But it’s not enough to shake the feeling it’s putting off the inevitable. Dawdling before bedtime.’ She stood up suddenly, bent and kissed me on the brow. ‘Say hello to the other me, if you ever run into her.’ And then she was gone, Diane. Not in flame or fadeout, just gone.”

I look up, and Laura is beside me.

The diner, when they found it, was not what Harry’d pictured. Instead of a lonely Edward Hopper tableau, or a grimy spoon where toughs whispered to each other along the lunch counter and cast knowing glances in the direction of the men’s room, “Wispy Dreams Cafe” was a blandly cheerful donut shop, the logo rather obviously altered from that of a national chain.

“Looks like they’re under new management.” Diane observed as they got out of the car. “Or else they got tired of paying for the franchise?” The three of them made their way across the parking lot the cafe shared with the landscaping company next door. Inside, the sound of chattering customers and a hum from the coffee machine both soothed and overwhelmed. Harry steadied himself against a gleaming, cream-colored formica counter. The woman on the other side— not a fresh-faced high-school senior or a kindly-faced matron, just a woman with her hair in a ponytail and circles under her eyes, doing her best to smile— threw him a glance and Harry nodded.

“I’m ok. Albert, Diane, what do you two want?”

A couple of minutes later, they sat by the window, feigning interest in their donuts and coffee.

“Well, we’re living the cop cliché,” whispered Albert. “So, what do you think? Soulless suburban hangout, or den of villainy?”

Harry gingerly sipped the brew in his cardboard cup and eyed the other customers. You couldn’t say the place wasn’t busy; the woman at the counter had already served a family of four in the time it had taken Harry, Albert and Diane to seat themselves with their coffees, and another customer had just come in the door.

“That counter’s been installed recently. Deep-fat fryer’s been replaced too.”

“And they don’t know how to use it yet. You could wax skis with these donuts. That’s hardly a crime, though.” Diane looked around at the blue and yellow walls painted with large trompe l’oeil sprinkles. “Doesn’t seem to be anything else funny about the place— I hate to say it but this place might be legit.”

Harry watched the new customer lean in to the counter. Harry couldn’t quite make out what he was saying— presumably the man was placing his order, but it seemed to be taking a while and there was something tense in the woman’s expression. Beside him he heard Diane swear under her breath, and faster than he could turn his head, his peripheral vision took in that she was getting up. She strode towards the counter and Harry had a glimpse of the angry red scratch on her arm as he struggled to his feet.

Diane was leaning on the counter now, trying to insert herself between the customer and the worker.

“What did you just say to her?” she was asking.

“Look, I come in here all the time, we joke around. What makes you think it’s your fucking business?”

“What seems to be the trouble?” Harry loomed up behind the customer— he might have only half his usual strength but he was still a good six inches taller than the other man. Behind him, he guessed, Albert was approaching. Harry knew the agent was unwilling to use physical force and not exactly skilled at defusing situations through diplomacy, so he turned his gaze on the customer with all the quiet confidence he’d used as Sheriff. In his ear Diane hissed:

“It’s nothing to do with the case, this asshole’s just creeping on the staff.” She must’ve locked eyes with the man too, for he was staring at her now, his bland pink features shifting expression from anger to terrified fascination.

Rather an unimpressive face, thought Harry, and then, what’s Diane doing? He turned to look at her sharp, smiling profile, and saw a tear slide from her eye.

“No,” she said loudly and abruptly, and blinked hard. “Do you want us to escort him out?” she asked the woman behind the counter; but the man was already out the door and running for his car.

“Diane,” Harry whispered.

“Diane,” whispered Albert. Diane was passing one hand across her eyes.

“I could have fried him. Just now. Something wanted me to; but I just wanted him to back off.” She beamed at them as Albert held out an arm for her to steady herself. “I think I’m back to normal. Well, normal for me.”

“Are we the only two left here now?”

“I’m not even here anymore.”

“I don’t know how to get back to the waiting room.”

“It doesn’t matter, the coffee’s cold.”

Somehow, the white room has become even more featureless, despite that being both a logical and a grammatical impossibility. Only the bed, the table and Audrey’s mirror remain. A moment in the glass catches my eye, and I look to see— oh Diane, I’m so glad you escaped! I see you travelling with Albert, and… oh, Harry…

…the cafe’s fluorescent lights flickered as the background hum, noticeable since their arrival, now rose to an ear-splitting volume then died away just as suddenly. As the three of them looked on, an old-fashioned hospital bed, its steel frame painted white, materialized between the counter and the booths, replacing two unoccupied tables. At one end of it sat Agent Dale Cooper, fully dressed in his suit and tie, a look on his face of mild surprise that turned to the familiar joy as his gaze met theirs. Coop had grown older like the rest of them, sharper angles in his face, but he looked hale and well, and his eyes did not have the cruel gleam that chilled Harry’s memories of their last meeting.

“Harry,” he said, as though a quarter-century hadn’t passed. In response Harry silently doffed his cowboy hat, revealing his pallor, his naked scalp. Coop’s smiled wavered a little. “I’m sorry I was gone so long,” he whispered, and rose from the white bed. In the background, the cafe staff and patrons continued to chat and serve and drink and eat coffee and donuts as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on right in front of them. Albert made a hesitant noise in his throat and Coop raised his hand in that just a moment gesture he always used to make, and in that moment Harry knew his friend really was back from wherever he’d been all those years.

“Apologies for being brusque,” Coop said, “but there’s a family in Las Vegas who I’ve reason to believe are in danger right now—”

“Janey-E?” Diane asked.

“Right on the button. For personal reasons which I’ll explain later, I can’t get in touch with them myself. The Mitchell brothers might be able to help, but I don’t know how much they’ll be able to recall of our last meeting.”

“Tammy and Constance are already on it.”

“Good,” Coop looked relieved, and Harry stepped forward, shaking a little in spite of himself, and as if the motion had at last given him permission, Coop sailed forward and embraced him— very gently, as if he feared Harry might break. He’s gauging by touch how much weight I’ve lost, thought Harry, but it’s all right. He’d forgotten how warm Coop was. He became aware of Albert and Diane joining in, arms circling his shoulders and Coop’s. If I died right here and now, it’d be all right.

But this embrace was not an epitaph, or an epilogue. Outside, somewhere else in the city, was an imitation of an ancient stone monument; and a copy of an old theatre where real audiences watched real actors. Somewhere the forces that had sent the dark cloud of grackles prepared another attack, and somewhere Tammy Preston was moving to protect Janey-E and Dougie Jones. Elsewhere Audrey Horne walked the mean streets and was not herself mean. This was an interlude, but let them have it for a while.

A couple of patrons turned their heads to smile at the reunion going in their midst.

#wonderfulxstrange #@laughingpineapple #twin peaks #@laughingpinecone

10 notes · View notes

ecoamerica · 24 days

Text

youtube

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

6K notes · View notes

cosmiciaria · 4 years

Text

Assassin’s Creed Unity Review/honest thoughts/discussion - SPOILERS (long post)

So I decided to finally settle on a proper review – although this one is going to be more of what here in Argentina we call a "sincericidio": basically I will spit my guts out and cry in one corner, while being completely honest about my feelings. I will try to keep most spoilers at bay, like I always do, but there's just one thing I cannot not talk about which is THE spoiler so – I want you to be considered warned.

Before I start, I should state, since this is my review and reviews are quite personal actually, why this game is so important to me and why I wanted to play it so bad. There's a combination of factors, and obviously this game isn't going to strike the same chords with everyone, so bear in mind that this is strictly subjective and, right now, personal.

First factor and I think the most important one: I like writing. Wait, don't leave the review just yet. I like writing and creating characters. I have many. Lately I've been revisiting a character that had a very sad backstory and added quite long happy ending for him. I made him fall in love again. He's black haired, wears a short pony tail… his new love interest is a redhead with wavy hair… ok, you get me now, don't you? And what's worse, is that their story takes place in a fictional world that resembles quite much Europe of 1800's. So clothes and ballrooms and palaces and big, fluffy dresses are a thing in this story of mine. I think that, if you've ever created a character, to find another fictional, similar character in any medium is going to draw your attention to that product right away. It did happen to me with Cal Kestis from SW Jedi: Fallen Order, I have another redhead baby boy that needs to be protected at all costs. It's a way for us to 'see', let's say, or imagine our characters being brought to life.

Second factor: I love Paris. I visited Versailles and Paris back in late 2018, and I went there with zero expectations, only to fall in love with France. I love the Château de Versailles. I love palaces. I love the Seine. I love the Louvre. I love it. All of it. If I could, I'd live there. Sadly, I'm poor and speak little to no French at all.

Third Factor: I'm learning French! I dream with the day I can speak like five languages as well as I speak English (I studied it for ten years so… it kinda makes sense that I feel comfortable with it). I'm still struggling with French, but I will get there someday. I will. Because I love it. I love the language. Oui.

Fourth factor: I also really really, really like the French Revolution, and I've never, much to my surprise, watched or played any series, videogame, movie or anything that takes place in such a context (if you have recommendations, please drop them right away!). And I say "to my surprise" because I really like that part of History! So, to live in almost first person how the French Revolution unfolded – to hear the chansons and to see people gathered in crowds at every corner, listening to a liberty preacher wielding the French flag – that was glorious.

Fifth and yeah we're done: I love Les Misérables. I know it happens way later than the French Revolution, but since this musical (and the 2012 movie) became my 'home', I can't help but feel a stronger connection with everything I said above. I can watch that movie over and over and I will still sing Empty chairs and empty tables with tears in my eyes, despite its flaws.

I had like every reason to play this game. And it paid off.

Before plunging into it, I did read the novelization. Sadly, it was only to satisfy my soon-to-be-fulfilled obsession with the game, since I don't think the quality of the narration was, uhm, that good – it felt like you needed to have played the game before reading it. And I get it, it's a videogame adaptation, that's fine, but when you look at it as standalone book, it doesn't stand alone that good. What disappointed me, though, wasn't the narration, which was what I totally expected it to be, nor the dialogues or the ending – it was Élise. I was bit weary about this because she came across as completely different character than what I had in mind about her, and I didn't like her. At all. In the book, at least. I didn't like her because she had a few comments and took some decisions that made her look like she was stupid and/or selfish. I can understand the selfish part; I do not want to even believe that she's stupid. So that's why the book was a bit of a letdown for me. I recommend it, though, if you're a fan, because there's a book exclusive character that really gets the plot moving and he's endearing: Mr. Weatherall. Oh, what a man.

Now, regarding the game itself – it shouldn't come as a surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed it. As I've stated in another post, this game is barely an Assassin's Creed, since you delve like zero into the AC lore, and it's just an excuse for your character – Arno – to know parkour. Which in fact he knows before becoming an assassin, so it begs the question, why is this game even in this franchise? I digress. It's an AC game at the end of the day and that won't change.

But do not jump into this game expecting it be your average AC story. I firmly believe that the creators wanted to convey a different story here. For starters, Arno is no hero. Arno doesn't want to save the world. Arno doesn't care about any artifact or magic or creed. Arno only wants to discover who's the man behind De La Serre's death. That's his main driving force. And behind that, there's this undeniable and yet quite destructive feeling that pulls him forward: Élise.

Élise and Arno's relationship goes deeper into this story than it's noticeable at first glance. When you look back upon the plot, you discover that without their love 'subplot', there's no plot at all. If I may be so bold, I would even argue that Arno's story is a tragic love story. All the assassin's lore, all the betrayals, the first few assassinations, it all falls back into the background when Élise returns to the stage almost halfway through the game. And even though they only share like one kiss or two during the 40 hours of gameplay, there's still this latent, persistent motivation behind each of Arno's actions, that he wouldn't be doing what he's doing if it wasn't for Élise.

And it all comes down to that one line: What I wanted was you.

I cannot stress enough how much I loved all of the drunkard memory of Versailles. I think it embodies Arno's perfect character development. The constant rain and the bluish filter on every framerate added to the overall depressing atmosphere. I felt miserable while playing those quests, and the moment he steps out into the entrance of the Château de Versailles and reflects on his past decisions – decisions that have been stolen from him, because he could never defend himself nor change the course of actions on his own accord – that exact moment that he sits down and cries, I cried too.

Because all the game, all the memories, all the dialogues go in a crescendo only to crumble into this abyss. And this, in turn, creates a fleshed-out character, with a believable development, believable feelings, believable motivations. I can feel for Arno, I can understand him, I pity him, and I want to hug him. The whole game reaches its peak in its main character's worst moment: when he realizes that he's screwed everything up.

And not always do we get a story where the main character doesn't win. He just doesn't. Underneath its revolutionary streets, this story reeks of inexorability and fatality. You know it, you know it in the back of your head, but you push that thought apart because you want to enjoy jumping over rooftops and finding the best strategy to kill that man. There's this underlying, looming melancholy in every memory that you play in, and that's why the end doesn't surprise us.

It makes us cry, of course, but it didn't come as a surprise at all. If you're shocked about the end, then you haven't been paying enough attention to Élise's dialogues, to the tone of the story, to her letters, to where this plot was going. Because, like I said, the story is about Arno and Élise's relationship, it isn't about defeating the bad guy. And there was only one way that story could end.

*cries in French*

*Je pleure beaucoup*

I know the game has been panned by players for its performance. And being the 2020 year of our lord, I cannot say I reject those allegations, since it's been 6 years since the game was released. I hope enough patches were implemented to salvage the bugs. I only came across one bug in my entire playthrough which bothered me a little: some NPC's would sometimes pop into cutscenes and phase through the characters like nothing. At first it was funny, but then towards the end it happened two more times, in important cutscenes with our lovely couple, which kinda destroyed all immersion, if you know what I mean. The rest was fine: it never crashed on me, I didn't encounter the infamous, horrendous bug that unleashed memes in internet, never a T-pose or something that rendered the game unplayable – nothing, only that funny bug I mentioned. I did see the drop in framerates, specially in very crowded areas – but to be honest I never saw a game with so many NPC's together in the same place, like, hundreds of them, each with unique animations and varied models. I only come from playing Syndicate, and even there the number of NPC's was lower. Here is jarringly unreal, I didn't know the French Revolution was THIS jam-packed with people!

On a graphical department, this 2014 game still holds up. Very well. I think it even looks better in some scenes than some of its successors. The cutscenes were sometimes very cinematographic, with close ups, zoom outs, certain angles, with quite real lighting and shadows. I know it's not Naughty Dog and it doesn't have the whole Sony battalion behind, but damn if some of the character's expressions were really good. It didn't happen often, so when one of them had this very specific face I was like *insert surprised pikachu meme*.

I also enjoyed the music a lot. I don't know why but the one from the main menu stuck with me for a while. All of the songs have this Versailles, aristocratic tone to it which put me in the mood.

I have only one minor complaint and its entirely optional, let's say – I want to platinum this game. But I don't own PS plus, because it's, uhhh, expensive in my country (do not want to indulge in dollar exchange rates right now). And there are like two trophies only obtainable through multiplayer, which renders my trophy hunt useless. But, alas, I knew this before buying the game. I think that games shouldn't come with multiplayer trophies for the platinum. If you have to pay extra for something, it must be completely optional. And so should be the trophies related to it. It's a bit disappointing, though, because after finishing this game I want so bad to return to it, but if I can't platinum, I don't see myself coming back to it soon. Either way, I could still earn the rest of the trophies, but that would only enrage me more when the last 3% is going to be locked forever *cries again*.

All in all, my major question at the end is: why does this game receive so much hate? I guess if I came from a hardcore fan standpoint I could understand it more. If I had played all its predecessors before this one, I would also feel that the gameplay and the objectives are repetitive. That the challenges are bs. But the stealth aspect has been improved, the parkour has been redesigned and adapted, and as of now, bugs aren't a problem anymore. I want to believe that when a remaster for the PS5 comes out or, I don't know, if someone by divine grace has an epiphany in the near future regarding this game, people will change their mind on this one and will appreciate more what it wanted to be, than what they made it to be. After all, this is Arno's story. Arno's tragic love story.

Also this game is beautiful JUST LOOK AT IT LOOK AT IT!!!

Sorry couldn’t help myself

#assassins creed unity #assassins creed #ac unity #arno x elise #arno dorian #arno victor dorian #elise de la serre #assassins #templars #review #videogame review #ubisoft #assassins creed syndicate #germain #play station 4 #rant #long post #versailles

65 notes · View notes

bittybattybunny · 3 years

Note

Did Kai have any sort of family after losing her foster family and becoming the Demon King? Or did she only have her husband?

Yes actually!!! A lot of Kai’s own story involves her own found family collection (i say collection just. cuz she tends to outlive them)

I’ve briefly mentioned she has a few kids and you see them in one of my sketchbook tours

but she also has a group of friends who she was close to

and the opening chapter of one of her ‘stories’ involves her dealing with the loss of a close friend she considered family (she even tried to go through legal means to see him but when humans turned around and said fuck you she snuck in. I can actually post this writing if people wanna read it?)

She also has some of her adoptive family still alive tho the bloodline is thinner. The Hellsing family she was raised in still exists to a point in her story (before the great catastrophe at least) Her whole ‘became the demon king’ thing happened when her uncle attacked her but she was able to get her sister in law and unborn nephew to escape while she distracted the rest (i have a whole ass animatic planned for this to the song “monster” from frozen’s musical. someday. someday I’ll be able to sit down on it weep)

This nephew was the one who hired Ren to help find “the king of fear” as she was known at that point. Alex is a good boy. His son was the one who went to find his great aunt after Ren’s death and she fully became a fallen god and offered her a place to stay and just. try to relax. She ended up falling into a deep sleep for a while and his family was the ones to build the ‘tomb’ she normally rests in when ever she has these extreme ‘low energy’ periods which can last between 5 years to her longest one was 5000. Typically she’ll rest for between 20-50 years at a time. and there’s a legit reason she does this too. But that’s not about family---

Point is that family is still very fond of their matriarchal demoness and she helped them found “Prometheus” a group to help humans deal with monsters and monsters live in peace. (cuz boy howdy do people have trigger fingers) there are other groups in their world with either similar goals or ones to ‘suppress’ monsters (example: The Order is a group who sees monsters as tools and lesser beings. sometimes Prometheus is forced to work with them and normally they send strong demons or dragons and such so that The Order can’t do anything to their operative. it was on one of these collaborations that Kai kidnapped Booberry from them. she regrets nothing.)

Kai often just refers to the current descendant as just “her nephew” as she’s too lazy to shove the amount of “great” in front of it because she’s old. there’s only one case of a niece and that’s where the bloodline ended (again that’s another story all together)

When Kai woke up after the Great Catastrophe alone she ended up meeting a young man named Leo (who if you look in Kai’s tag on my blog you can see him!) Who she bonded with and she likes hanging out with (and there’s other things but I’m not gonna talk about it)

There’s also her ‘generals’ and a few of them are gonna show in TLC soon (just a brief cameo) A group of 4 who’ve met Kai in a few incarnations and they always tend to get along. Original names were Matt, Trisha, Faith, and Maki is Maki (she’s an elf so she lives longer) Current names are Byron, Tiffny, Jacob and Maki. These four actually form Ren’s party when he’s trying to find his wife at the actual start of “Nightmare’s Dream” and you learn they each have a connection to Kai through the story.

Matt/Branden/Byron; he’s featured in the writing I mentioned up top, he’s kinda similar to Leo in the way he interacts with Kai as an almost human morality pet for Kai. He used to be Kai’s student when she was teaching, and his father was the warden at the jail her friend Sammy was in (this is the friend she lost) Matt can see through her disguise when she’s showcasing nightmares. Kai can cause hallucinations on targets using her ‘fear’ hence her title “king of fear” and normally they are only visible to her and her target. But Matt can see them.

He ends up getting in trouble a few times; once with a tribe of demons who want to turn children into imps, once with the literal Anti christ, once with a haunted house. And each time Kai was there and ends up saving him.

Matt later is in an accident and ends up reincarnating as a winged human named Branden and has all his past memories. So when he starts working at Prometheus as one of their ‘informants’ (aka he goes to gather information in both human and supernatural affairs. he’s referred to often as the angel of trust because of his silver tongue) and he meets her again he shouts something from one of his classes with her causing her to snap back on reflex until she realizes (running joke is Kai loathes Julius Ceaser and if you say his name she always whips around shouting “WAS A SLUT AND A HARLOT” in a very aggressive tone. It makes people laugh when she does and she always gets embarrassed afterwards)

The two of them end up working together for a while and become good friends (and maybe a bit more but they never state really) but then when with his new work partner Trisha (nicknamed angel of death, she works in the sector that deals with cleanup) he ends up betraying Prometheus and Trisha rips his wings off and kills him (this is the context between the ‘redraw’ meme I do every few years of a man with a bleeding back drowning)

Trisha is also someone who grew close to Kai (hence she killed Branden because his folly led to Kai nearly going berserk) but she was killed by a sleeper agent from the order. And this is how Kai lost two of her close friends.

Now backing up to Sammy the inmate one; he was with her when Kai met her first child, the young moon goddess Artemis. Arty is a constant for the demoness ever since she picked her up in the woods (her arc also has one of my favorite kai lines: (which i can’t find the direct line but)

Sam shuddered as he looked around the woods, “Do you ever feel like there’s 100 eyes watching you?”

“Yes but it didn’t work out so we broke up.” The demon responded flatly as she looked around with a deep set scowl.

While she was out with Sammy when he was hunting they ended up finding a little girl who turned out to be a new goddess and her elder sister was kidnapped by the embodiment of Greed in his attempt to become a god. Kai ends up stopping this but also kinda ends up becoming Arty’s mom. While she doesn’t raised Arty fully she does do a lot of teaching and such for her and does refer to her as “her daughter” and Arty calls her mom. when the great catastrophe occurs, Arty is one of the few gods who remained when the rest went to new ‘realms’ or simply vanished and is considered one of the main gods of their world because of this.

And then there’s her son Ganon, an Orc Lord she adopted when his village was ruined. he currently poses as her ‘demon king’ while she pretends to be the chancellor (this is the ruse she uses. normally heroes will fight the ‘king’ and lose but if they actually are a threat or have poor reasoning she kills them from behind. this is also how the story starts as someone found a spell to try and incapacitate her buttt)

There’s also morte and her daughter demeter (I’ve shown them before, a set of necromancers) who she’s very friendly with. Demeter even calls her aunty Kaya and loves to sit on her lap and such during meetings. (i have one snippet when Kai was recruiting someone to their side but hadn’t told her yet she was the REAL demon king and Demeter was sitting on her lap laughing) Morte is thankful to Kai for saving her circus (Morte runs a circus that helps those stuck in limbo pass on but at one point demons of sin over took it in a way to gather souls)

There’s also her friend Ciera, the daughter of the girm reaper. she’s Kai’s best friend for the most part of her life, and is the one who helps Ren when the gods of life and death try to prevent him from reincarnating again (which is like other things a whole other story) (she also briefly shows in Bone Stealer at one point. While visiting bunny’s sick grandmother, Bunny and Steve run into Ciera as she’s leaving. Steve stops Bunny from attacking her) She’s over all chill.

There’s also Nicki. Kai’s ‘twin’ brother. He’s the ‘bad guy’ through the arc that contains Leo and sets up ‘the great Split’ that Kai will cause (this is lore/plot stuff) He originally was raised to hate her by their maternal Uncle who’s a arch mage like Ren however he’s fallen due to his hatred of Kai’s birth. Nicki is not really her brother (in the first life) but a failed clone of the demoness. When Kai is reborn Nicki gets to actually be her brother and the two get along really well and he’s very protective of his sister now that he understands what her actual deal is and not the bs his uncle fed him. Before the rebirth too Nicki helped kai solve some stuff and worked with her until his death (unlike her, he was not immortal)

And then Kai actually has two bio children with Ren! Akito her son takes after her and he’s the one who takes over her role as the true demon king of Tir-Na-Nocht so she’s able to die and try life again, and a daughter, Rei who takes after Ren in looks but... she’s a himbo. pure moron. she got her grandpa’s himbo gene strong. She’s a cat girl who works with her brother and she is the head of the guard.

Aki actually has his own story where he grew up in a ‘mundane’ world but then his entire class got ‘isekaid’ to another. it gets shown that this isn’t truly the case. the great ‘split’ mentioned above was Kai literally broke the world in two realms. She made one primarily humans and high tech and then the other was magic and mostly monsters. there are a mix of both but it cut down heavily on the murder. She raised Aki in the human side for his and Rei’s safety due to them being the children of a fallen god (mama worries) and Aki inherited his mother’s odd ‘status’ “Hero/Demon King” so he has to not expose his demon nature and also stay below the radar (it turns out the person who summoned them was attempting to break a centuries old treaty) until his mother and father can figure out what happened to him (thankfully he can go to a church and his older sister Arty can act as a messenger but there’s a bit of a time split in the worlds) That world is actually the one “Fae Rules” takes place in o7o.

She also is friends with a dead prince named “Shade” (yes this is who you think it is) as well as her ‘cousin’ Sena (who she loves to give shit to)

And in her second life she obvs has her brother, cousins, her father (her father’s boyfriend/her manny), aunt’s etc!!!

So yes; she had family other than her husband!!!! And she cherishes them all.

#ask #anon #nightmare's dream #sorry this got long #but i have so much stuff on kai's story and lore and just sfjdokjfkdsgsf #SHES MY BABY OKAYYYYY #KAI HAD FOUND FAMILY BEFORE I EVEN KNEW THE TROPE NAME #also i have a wip animatic of her dad's bf #when she was a kid after rebirth #and she just abused the guy unintentionally

2 notes · View notes

the-mundivagant · 6 years

Text

Masterpost of Lise’s MCU fics on Tumblr [part 1]

Last updated August 10, 2020 (post 7 of p.114)

I had to split this post in two since it exceeded Tumblr’s link limit by a long way. [quick link to part 2]

General info

Links are taken from Lise's fic tag, #a wild fic appeared (chrono).

All the tags I link to are /chrono versions (posts listed in chronological order).

I included the page each fic is on so this post can be used as a directory of sorts to a web archive I made of the tag, but it’s not needed/optimal as long as the actual Tumblr is up and running.

As of August 2020, I’m still planning to keep this more or less updated...but I have absolutely no idea how often that’ll be. (It used to be approximately monthly in 2018. The most recent two updates were a year apart.)

Spoilers for the MCU (including Endgame) are unmarked.

Many thanks to Lise for answering my ridiculous number of questions, being very helpful and encouraging in general and also, of course, writing these incredible fics in the first place. :D

For reference, here’s a post listing some of the frequently-appearing prompts (”amuse me,” “break me,” etc.). The “first sentence” prompt meme is described here.

Main categories: Verses, Relationships, Other, and Tumblr Verses

Format: [page] [word count] title / “prompt” (notes)

VERSES

Gehenna

(Fics crossposted to AO3 are in Predation)

[p.19] [306] “zip me” (nsfw)

[p.28] [642] “nurse me”

[p.28] [268] “break me” (nsfw)

[p.32] [1756] love me like the devil loves (nsfw)

[p.36] [183] “then there’s tongue”

[p.51] [869] “call me” (Tony & Loki, before the beginning of Privation?)

[p.53] [229] “dysfunctional Loki/Natasha”

[p.61] [121] “before the beginning” (pre Privation)

[p.67] [721] untitled (a morning after one of their sessions)

[p.71] [807] “things you didn’t say at all”

[p.98] [577] untitled (Natasha PoV of Purification) (nsfw)

Life In Reverse

[p.35] [561] "Coulson PoV of Loki’s arrival on Earth"

[p.37] [173] "Life in Reverse!Loki meets canon!Loki" (AU)

[p.60] [2008] "Natasha PoV of Loki’s capture by Doom and subsequent rescue"

[p.61] [1223] "Jane PoV of her diner conversation with Loki"

[p.62] [1332] "Natasha PoV of finding Loki after his meeting with Thanos"

[p.62] [1496] "Tony PoV of meeting with Loki after rescuing him from Doom"

[p.63] [1767] "Darcy PoV of Jane coming home after the diner conversation"

[p.74] [787] "Dr. Fisher PoV of her first meeting with Loki"

[p.85] [1332] "Jane PoV of going to see Loki while he’s being held by SHIELD"

[p.86] [645] "Natasha PoV of first meeting Loki"

[p.86] [605] "Natasha and Clint talking about Loki"

[p.87] [541] "Clint PoV after Loki’s rendezvous with Thanos"

[p.103] [1315] “Steve PoV on breaking Loki out of prison”

Now Three

[p.55] [325] untitled (planning for Sarah to bring a snack to class on movie day)

[p.56] [365] untitled ("uncle Thor being cute and loving")

[p.57] [385] “exhausted parents kiss”

[p.64] [1455] untitled ("talking to Sarah about being born a Jotun")

[p.71] [828] untitled ("Sarah’s first day of school")

Remember This Cold

(Fics crossposted to AO3 are in Every Little Earthquake, it’s what you make, and see you on the other side of the war)

(I also have a separate post here in which I attempted to collect all fics in this verse and list them in their in-universe chronological order; you can search for [T] to find all Tumblr-only fics)

[p.15] [290] “paint me” (takes place during Disarm)

[p.23] [1053] “telepathy”

[p.29] [238] “Loki vs. crab”

[p.39] [385] “yahoo me” (Tony & Loki, Steve’s birthday)

[p.40] [394] “paint me” (takes place during The sun no longer shines (on your side))

[p.46] [152] “enamor me” (Loki PoV of The sun no longer shines (on your side))

[p.47] [239] “secret meeting” (Steve & Natasha)

[p.48] [1921] untitled (AU) (Loki is controlled by the scepter/Thanos)

[p.50] [501] “join me” (Natasha & Loki, post only when you hit the ground)

[p.52] [228] “basorexia” (takes place before The sun no longer shines (on your side))

[p.56] [406] untitled ("Loki answers the door naked") (takes place between with an untrained voice and reflected in someone like me) (nsfw)

[p.56] [274] untitled ("Vali stalking Clint")

[p.58] [668] “jealous kiss”

[p.59] [3097] Unmade (AU) (Clint/Loki)

[p.60] [851] untitled (follow-up to The Tenth Floor)

[p.60] [821] untitled ("Steve has a nightmare about Hydra brainwashing Loki") (post Collapse the Light Into Earth)

[p.61] [1428] untitled (follow-up to “better together”) (nsfw)

[p.66] [522] "one falling asleep with their head in the other’s lap”

[p.69] [876] “things you said that made me feel like shit” (takes place between with an untrained voice and reflected in someone like me)

[p.69] [420] "things you said with no space between us”

[p.69] [506] “things you said when we were the happiest we ever were”

[p.70] [516] “things you said after it was over” (Loki & Bucky, post Collapse the Light Into Earth)

[p.71] [691] “patching up a wound”

[p.72] [1651] untitled (AU) (Thanos using Loki’s body as a way of “sightseeing”)

[p.72] [1342] untitled (AU) (follow-up to [p.72] [1651])

[p.74] [364] untitled (Steve PoV of (hang on) when the water is rising)

[p.79] [1063] untitled (nsfw)

[p.82] [1122] soldier on (post Collapse the Light Into Earth)

[p.88] [887] untitled (Bruce visits Loki)

[p.90] [1013] I’ll throw away my faith, just to keep you safe (Steve PoV, end of don’t care if heaven won’t take me back)

[p.92] [1554] how you gaze upon my bones (AU) (Doom succeeds in cloning Loki during The Vivisection Mambo)

[p.102] [1327] the world held fast (Sif PoV during This is My Kingdom Come)

Offshoots of the main timeline

[p.31] [1538] untitled (Frigga shows up on Earth)

[p.57] [2463] old friends

[p.62] [1633] untitled (Loki hurts himself doing magic in a fight assisting the Avengers)

[p.68] [1111] untitled (Steve PoV of [p.57] [2463] old friends)

[p.72] [689] untitled ("I thought you were going to die")

[p.93] [626] untitled (Loki & Wanda, "What do you think you’re doing?")

[p.96] [2239] Strange Magic

#the everything is awful au / like the restless sea (verse on AO3 here)

[p.101] [1877] and the deep river ran on

Sam and Loki are Roommates

(Fics crossposted to AO3 are in people wonder why we’re still together)

[p.8] [48] untitled (Thor comes to visit)

[p.9] [103] untitled (Thor & Dean have a conversation)

[p.10] [222] untitled (Sam & Loki clean up while hungover)

[p.11] [344] untitled (sick!Sam)

[p.14] [147] “drink me”

[p.14] [404] “call me”

[p.15] [284] “value me”

[p.16] [409] “yahoo me”

[p.16] [257] “tell me” (may not be canonical)

[p.16] [341] “invite me”

[p.16] [334] “zip me”

[p.17] [455] “paint me”

[p.22] [303] “accidental baby acquisition” (AU)

[p.27] [546] “mourn me” (AU)

[p.28] [509] untitled (sick!Loki)

[p.30] [533] untitled (Steve giving Loki a present)

[p.36] [160] untitled ("Loki believes Steve doesn’t like him back")

[p.44] [673] untitled (Loki PoV of Sam Winchester Is Not Your Therapist)

[p.49] [239] untitled (Loki and Sam acquire a dog)

[p.50] [977] “enamor me” ("Steve trying to woo Loki")

[p.59] [681] “'war’s end' kiss”

[p.73] [1360] Trouble Who’s A Friend of Mine

[p.74] [1871] “I just told you I liked you but now I’m shy and say ‘nevermind, forget it’” (Steve & Loki)

[p.80] [1556] Tides to Pull You Under

[p.81] [841] untitled ("Steve’s attitude to Loki’s gentleman-ness")

[p.84] [1809] untitled (Steve PoV of Into This Unknown Country)

we’re not friends, we’re strangers with memories

[p.30] [457] “I’m sick”

[p.30] [216] “before the beginning”

[p.44] [489] “kiss with a fist”

[p.50] [532] “quiet me”

[p.54] [863] “dysfunctional Clint/Loki” (AU) (nsfw)

[p.62] [696] untitled (Loki PoV, between chapters 7 and 8)

[p.66] [3747] the mistake was mine

[p.70] [588] “things you said that I wasn’t meant to hear”

RELATIONSHIPS

Note: In AO3 terms, the relationships below should be listed as & or / since whether the relationship is platonic or not depends on the fic. I just went with & to make things simpler.

Clint & Loki

[p.4] [131] Pavlov’s Bell

[p.6] [119] untitled ("Clint wasn’t brainwashed")

[p.8] [172] “historical AU”

[p.12] [133] “Arda AU”

[p.14] [255] “kill me”

[p.17] [204] “offer me”

[p.22] [497] untitled (drunk!Loki)

[p.28] [712] “unbind me”

[p.31] [245] untitled (Loki PoV of The Walking Wounded)

[p.38] [163] “cooperation” (possibly from Strange Bedfellows)

[p.39] [183] “haunt me” (same verse as It Gazes Also?)

[p.40] [290] “get me” (possibly from Strange Bedfellows)

[p.43] [94] untitled ("successful helicarrier rescue")

[p.43] [217] untitled (Clint dreams about the Chitauri post Avengers)

[p.45] [380] “mourn me”

[p.45] [313] “remember me”

[p.50] [404] “unbind me”

[p.51] [663] “quiet me”

[p.53] [232] "dysfunctional Loki/Clint”

[p.57] [527] untitled ("Clint with a mistletoe arrow")

[p.58] [536] “kiss on the forehead”

[p.58] [833] “'I almost lost you' kiss”

[p.60] [2476] Clint Barton’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day

[p.61] [1190] Let All Mortal Flesh (nsfw)

[p.61] [2770] A Temple to Be Destroyed (possible part of a follow-up to Monstrosity / Abyss) (nsfw)

[p.62] [373] “before the beginning” (pre Monstrosity)

[p.65] [461] “hallucination induced by lack of sleep”

[p.69] [285] “things you didn’t say at all”

[p.80] [1337] lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate

[p.83] [1739] untitled (Loki appears and heals a mortally-wounded Clint)

[p.85] [1386] In Another Life (Clint PoV of Ghosts That We Knew)

[p.94] [742] “Hands off!” (during Avengers)

[p.94] [839] “Duck, you idiot!” (post TDW)

[p.97] [781] untitled (Clint feels Loki’s - near? - death in Infinity War via lingering-mental-connection)

[p.110] [76] First sentence prompt: “He/she/they shouldn’t have been so delighted.”

[continued in part 2]

#veliseraptor #long post /

188 notes · View notes

orthographewrites · 4 years

Note

also olive and carrot for the platonic ship meme yes

THE PLATONIC SHIP MEME:

Which one is the responsible one and which is known to be reckless? How do they deal with situations the reckless get caught up in?

For once I can say that Oliver is the responsible one, as Caden is far beyond on the reckless scale and he’s pretty much stuck trying to babysit her all the time. Alas, I wish I could say he was responsible enough to stay away from Caden’s reckless situations but we all know that’s not the truth. Imagine being responsible for the future and safety of a whole ass population of mages and deciding it will be a swell good time to go play life and death with a werewolf out in the middle of nowhere. Caden merely knows how to make things worse but neither would have made it without the other, we know that.

@alicemorganwrites

Any personal memes or jokes in between them?

I feel like most jokes are between the muns rather than the characters, as Oliver isn’t really a joking type of person or his humor tend to be a bit dry and one beat. They’re more prone to give each other stupid and dumb nicknames or flip each other off than share jokes. If anything their jokes are probably dumb nicknames they’ve given other people together.

Is any of them prone to throw around compliments like a breeze? How does the other react?

Absolutely not. They’ll insult each other until the end of days and only show that they care about one another through careful actions or when the situation calls for it. Anything else is awkward and out of place.

Who likes hugs and connection the most?

Once again, neither but alas I feel like both are open to it if it’s with the right person. Oliver’s mom is allowed to hug Caden because Caden can’t be mean to that poor lady and obviously Oliver has no issues being hugged by people he’s romantically involved with -- but friends? No. They’ve canonly hugged once and they refuse to speak of it.

How about endearing or ridiculous nicknames? Is there a story behind them?

This definitely goes back to my answer above, as they’re quite open to calling each other idiot, dimwit, annoyance etc but it’s one of those things that started off as attempting to annoy the other but has, over time, turned into something closer to endearing. They mostly use these nicknames for fun these days and, of course, Caden loves to call Oliver “Ollie” because she knows he hates it with a burning passion. Oliver barely uses nicknames on people past that point, as he’s more of a person to call people as he sees them. If Caden is acting like a toddler he will proceed to nickname her toddler for the rest of the day.

Do they trust each other with deep secrets and thoughts?

Yes they doooooo! They don’t tell each other everything but they definitely know the other’s main struggles through and through. It’s not as if they’d call the other up and be all “hey I need to talk about something”, but if a situation arise or a problem occur and the other becomes aware of it they’ll trust the other to know and help.

Do they share a deep secret together?

I feel like their whole existence is almost a deep secret. Oliver only shares his true feelings in regards to himself and his situation with people he fully trust and care for. Caden’s whole life at that isn’t one to flaunt about and Oliver is at that of of few to know the full story. Then there’s also the fact that Caden is a werewolf and Oliver is a wizard but that seems small in comparison and is a secret depending on who they’re up against.

Who would win in a roast? How about a prank war?

Aren’t they always doing a roast war, though? Who wins depends on the situation, but generally they just tend to get bored with it. Oliver would be the clear winner in a prank war, however, as Caden would be more fascinated with the prank as a concept to fully go through with it. Or she would ruin her own pranks by calling them out beforehand or keep them fairly basic, like a pie to your face level of fun.

How do they show each other support? (Heartbreaks, loss, dreams, achievements, etc.)

Oliver has always been pretty good at showing his support to people he care for or see potential in, even if he sometimes show it in weird or off ways. The more secure he feels around you as a person, the more verbal and open he will be. So, for Caden he will show his full support if she goes through something serious either positive or negative and lend an ear or some advice if he has any to give. If Caden needs some company or just a place to crash for the sake of getting past a hardship he will give it to her, even if he might still throw in a quick insult or a scoff to keep them both on their feet. He knows Caden doesn’t enjoy the whole coddling thing and would try his best to avoid it if necessary.

In return Caden is a bit more aloof when it comes to support, she doesn’t always consider other people’s needs nor the fact that actions may be harmful and has tendency to take things a step too far. However, when Oliver needs her she will be there through thick and thin to aid him as best possible. Unlike with others, Caden tries to be supportive when it’s needed of her and obviously wants to do what she can to make him happy. She might not sit there with the best of advice, but she’s the one with a blanket and a cup of tea when things are rough and a “fuck yeah!” when things are good.

They always care about the other, they’re just bad at showing it.

What would a typical hangout look like? Do they share some common activities?

A typical hangout is usually Caden breaking into his house and forcing Oliver to spend time with her, no matter how busy he is. What they do past that point depends on where they are in the timeline and how they feel about the other. And yes, both like mechanical work and getting their hands dirty so I feel like they tend to spend a lot of their common time in Oliver’s workshop. They can both tinker with whatever they feel like and either talk through it or not. If Oliver is in a good mood he might offer Caden some dinner before she heads off, but alas if not she’ll just steal some and bail. (Or steal it and then go crash on his couch.)

If they do not already live together, what would their lives as roommates look like? Do they split chores or is one more prone to take control whilst the other slack around?

Oliver would cry if he had to share his house with Caden or at best eventually end up with a mental breakdown considering how messy and unpredictable Caden is. I feel like he’d come home from a small trip somewhere and always find the fridge empty or there would end up being dirt everywhere across the house since Caden almost never takes off her shoes and is prone to just scatter herself about. She also never really respects that he has a lot work in general and would go out of her way to interrupt him because she’s bored. Oliver is far too much of a neat freak to live with someone such as Caden, he’d kick her out.

Would they ever adopt a pet together? If yes, what kind?

Isn’t Caden basically a pet? She’s about as much work! But no, I doubt it or if Caden would find it in her to adopt a stray pet she’d just dump it off at Oliver’s place and he’d end up caring for it instead and hate every moment of it.

If either suddenly found themselves caring for a child but lacked the support to properly aid for them, how would the other react, or chose to deal with the situation?

I doubt either would find themselves in this situation, as neither is interested in sex and the only way I can see it happen is as above aka Caden finds a stray teenager on the run and decides to dump them off at Oliver’s place and suddenly he’s stuck caring for them. He’d hate that as well with a burning passion but he’d still help as long as the kid has a reason to run off.

What’s a memory they both hold dear?

As weird as it would sound, I definitely think the thing most dear to them would be their “camping trip”. Like yeah sure, they almost died a couple of times and feared for their lives at any given moment -- but regardless it’s the journey that brought them close to one another. It gave them a chance to open up to someone once more, it made them regain a sense of trust and helped them recognize their flaws and strengths as a team. They really didn’t come out the other end the way they walked in and to Oliver it’s always going to stand as his small taste of freedom away from responsibilities and demands. To Caden it was her one way ticket to freedom as a whole. Nothing else can really beat that.

#i wasnt even supposed to do these but i cannot ignore these two #i want my muse back so i can work on drabbles again sob sob #also #i like how his nickname has moved from peter to just olive #their new brotp name should be vegitale adventures #brotp: underneath it all we're all savages

0 notes

raventons · 6 years

Text

99 q/a for 2017

1. What’s the toughest decision you made today? To get out of bed after a 3 hour nap.

2. What’s the toughest decision you made this year? I would say turning around at the airport, not going to Moscow, deciding my mental health is more important than that trip. However, I was just following my fear, which is quite an easy feeling to follow. And I have not once found myself second guessing that call. I am not one to dwell too much on decisions like that. I honestly contemplate more about what I’m having for dinner, or what underwear to buy – and I always end up regretting or celebrating those decisions more.

3. What’s the toughest decision you ever made? Once I spent over an hour deciding if I wanted carbonara or caciatora. I went with caciatora, and that day I learned that if you are in doubt, you should always go with what your dinner company orders. My dad got carbonara, and it was out of this world. If you order the same thing as your date, it might still be the lesser option, but at least you will not know what you are missing. As an intellectual, this is one of the conclusions I’m the most proud of.

4. What have you forgotten? Almost all the math I was taught in high school.

5. If you were guaranteed the answer to one question, what would it be? I would love to know who is answering me, and how they got the ability to answer any question ever.

6. What’s it like being you right now? Better than it has been. A lot better. I’d say good.

7. What makes you nostalgic? Lenny Kravitz, long car rides, the soundtrack of midsummer murders and the smell of old Swedish cabin in a Småland forest (we all know that smell).

8. If you had two hours left on earth what would you do? Sit close to my parents, and talk about our life together. And tell them how grateful I am and how happy they’ve made me.

9. What’s the most beautiful word in the world? The Swedish Blockchoklad or the Russian Nemnoga

10. Who makes you laugh more than anyone? Alex, no doubt.

11. What did your father teach you? How to show affection, how to make people laugh, how to interact with strangers, how to put together a good outfit, how to cook and pretty much everything I know on economy and religion. And how much it means to have amazing parents that never, not even once, let you down.

12. What did your mother teach you? How to not give a shit about anyone’s opinion, how to appreciate simplicity, how to be a storyteller, how to calm down when afraid, how to love without giving yourself up, how to be badass and pretty much everything I know on literature, self-esteem and really bad British crime stories. And how much it means to have amazing parents that never, not even once, let you down.

13. What’s the best gift you’ve ever given? An orange moose I gave to my dad. It was really cheap and dumb, but he had just been diagnosed with a chronical disease (he is much better now) and everything just seemed to fall apart. So I did what any good daughter would do, I bought him a stuffed animal. It made him smile. And he still keeps it by his bedside. It’s called the vomit moose, since that was the most… obvious symptom at the time.

14. Best gift you ever received? My friend Lin gave me a card once with pictures and drawings of us. I love it and still have it ten years later.

15. How many times a day do you look in the mirror? Way too many.

16. What do you bring most to a friendship? I’d like to think I am funny. I talk too much, and always about the wrong and often quite strange things, but when I’m in the right mood and they’re in the right mood; I’d say I am funny.

17. If 100 people in your age group were selected randomly, how many do you think they’d find leading a happier life than you? Very few if we are talking happy as in privileged. I am so very lucky and have had so many fortunate turns in my life.

18. What is or was your best subject in school? Social science.

19. What activity do you do that makes you feel most like yourself? Writing.

20. What makes you feel supported? I do. (Wow, I am actually quite proud of that answer, but it is true. Sometimes I look for help or motivation in others, but confidence and shit I truthfully only find in myself).

21. Whom do you secretly admire? Secretly? No one. I admire a lot of people, and I think I make sure to tell them.

22. What time of the day do you feel the most energetic and what do you usually do in those moments? Noon. Usually waste that energy on procrastination.

23. What’s something you never leave home without? Pants.

24. What’s a recurring dream you have? Teeth falling out. Or organs. I quite often have nightmares about some stuff that is supposed to be inside or attached to my body suddenly isn’t.

25. What makes you feel safe? Blankets and tea.

26. What’s the best thing that ever happened to you? Discovering international law as my field of work.

27. What do you want people to say about you once you’re gone? That I was smart.

28. What’s the coolest thing about science? Well… let’s go with nature science, because my field of research is not cool at all. I think it’s about the fact that nature is there. It’s not something we invent or solve, it’s something we discover. It’s all written, all the answers are out there somewhere. All the equations, all the numbers, they all correspond to a reality we only see fragments of. It’s like humanity is reading a book together, and the physicists and biologists flip the pages. And for each chapter we find out more and more about how the world around us works.

29. What’s the best money you ever spent? My skinny, black jeans.

30. What’s a bad habit you have? Listening to bad music. I don’t want to support sexist or racist producers. Still here I am, having my playlists filled with pop about grabbing pussies. I’m also weirdly addicted to marzipan.

31. What are you grateful for? My professors and a free education.

32. Whom are you envious of? Almost everyone. But it varies, passes and comes back. It depends on the day. Or the hour.

33. What’s an image you’ll never forget? Well, I have to go with a few summers ago when me and a former classmate ended up skinny dipping in a sunset down at Österlen. But actually, the first thing that came to mind was the real holocaust footage that was included in the TV-show The Promise. I had to leave the room, could not finish the series and I still think about it quite often.

34. Describe a near-death experience. My brain thinks I have one daily, but I don’t think I’ve ever had one. Once I got my luggage lost in Russia, and we had to drive around downtown St Petersburg for hours in a shady cab. It was all fine and no hostile environment what so ever, but when I tell the story it really sounds quite near-death.

35. If you had a clone, what would you have the clone do? Dishes.

36. What’s your idea of Heaven? A lot of cozy spots by windows with rain outside. Good food, good tea and good conversation. A book shelf would be nice too.

37. What’s your idea Hell? Bad food, bad tea and bad conversation.

38. When did you know? Did I ever?

39. What can you do better? I could be more structured. I literally have no routines at all.

40. When are you most yourself? When I am alone, covered in loud music.

41. What superpower would you most like to have? Time travelling but without all the complicated world-war-shit to come with it.

42. If you were granted three wishes, what would you do with the second wish? Fix up the UN.

43. What is your actual superpower? I am very, very analytic. I am also amazing at app games.

44. If you won 100 million dollars, what would you buy first? I would love to own a goat. But well, that’s more of a management problem than an actual money problem.

45. What's the best sound in the world? Waves. Or someone biting in chocolate.

46. What’s perfect about your life? My parents. And Amanda. She is a wonderful person.

47. What song do you sing only when you’re alone and what memory does it bring back? Min Kärlek av Shirley Clamp. And there is no memories connected, it’s just fucking brilliant.

48. Describe a moment you were so embarrassed you wanted to disappear. When I was 8 we had a quiz in class, and I answered cow instead of turtle (I will NOT tell you the question).

49. How many times a day do you think about money? Every time I use it.

50. Who has been the biggest influence on you in your relationship to money? My parents.

51. What's one thing you're certain of? Cows don’t have shells.

52. Describe one of your colossal failures. I think I just did.

53. What makes you cringe? People trying to make memes a thing you can refer to in real life.

54. What does your inner voice tell you? To shut up. I tell it the same.

55. What crime have you considered committing? I don’t even bike without a helmet. I am a pussy.

56. What's great about your mom? Her hair is amazing.

57. What’s great about your dad? His hair is not so very amazing (and I inherited it) but he has other good qualities. He collects post-cards for example. That’s pretty cool.

58. Which day would you gladly re-live? The day in third grade when I won the egg-cracking championship at our school.

59. What are you awesome at? Egg-cracking, obviously.

60. What do you want people you meet for the first time to think about you? That I seem decent.

61. When were you most afraid? Berlin, 2014.

62. What are you terrible at but love to do anyway? Sex, probably.

63. What weapon would you carry during the Zombie Apocalypse? An axe or a sword. Or a nuke, if bad goes to worse.

64. Which of your five senses would you keep if you could only keep one? I would like to hear shit.

65. What’s something you love to make? Pancakes.

66. What do you cook better than anyone? This weird ass pasta with butter. It’s unhealthy but so damn good.

67. What do you wish you’d invented? The airplane. Or well… the flying machine or whatever it was called when it was invented.

68. What would you like to invent? A new UN system.

69. Out of 100 random people, where would you rank yourself in terms of your intelligence? Pretty high.

70. Where do you want to be right now? Venice.

71. If you could be someone else for a day who would it be and why? Graham Norton. He seems so happy. And he is funny and smart and his job seems to be really cool.

72. What makes you feel powerful? My Hans Zimmer playlist.

73. What’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said? Considering how empty my brain is right now, I think it has done quite some work on supressing those memories.

74. What’s the meanest thing someone has ever said to you? Actually, most people are nice. I don’t think anyone has ever been really mean to me. Sometimes I get hurt, when people say I am pretentious or annoying. But the only reason they say that (and the only reason it hurts) is it’s true.

75. What three words would you have on your grave stone? Let me sleep.

76. What’s your first thought when you wake up? Let me sleep.

77. What’s one thing you wake up to in the middle of the night worrying about? Usually if I have cancer in the prostate since I need to pee ALL the time. But then I remember I am a female.

78. If you could tell someone something anonymously, what would it be? I would tell my cousin Johan to never be insecure about anything. He is probably the most awesome, complete and admirable person in the world.

79. Whom would you like to forgive and forget? The people who made two and a half men.

80. If you could get rid of one of your responsibilities today, what would it be? Dishes.

81. What type of person angers you the most? Extreme right wingers who grew up in a place where they had a choice. Of course you can’t blame people for reacting to the environment around them, and get affected by their culture – but people who grow up with access to information and without oppression – how on earth did you make those conclusions?

82. What is your greatest strength? I’m confident about my intellect.

83. What is your worst weakness? I’m insecure about pretty much everything else.

84. How do you show your love for others? Tiny surprises. It can be buying them flowers, cleaning their apartment or just answering a two years old text and apologize for forgetting their existence.

85. Why are you here in this room right now? It’s 10 degrees minus outside.

86. When is a time you forgave someone or were forgiven for something? I forgave myself for not doing the dishes. It felt good.

87. What’s the biggest mistake you ever made? Talking too much. I always talk too much. It’s not one big mistake at one certain event. But it keeps on happening and I never fucking learn.

88. What are you hiding? Nothing.

89. What’s your unanswerable question--the question you seem to always be asking yourself? Can there be true objectivity?

90. What are you ashamed of? My fetishes.

91. What is stopping you? Panic attacks. Or walls, mostly.

92. What’s a secret you have? I really have no idea what I am going to do with my life.

93. How do you secretly manipulate people to get your way? I don’t do this on purpose, but I’ve noticed it happening without actively thinking about it. I usually express a will to rely on people, and come across as weak and fragile, making them think I need their help and protection – when I am really just better of on my own.

94. When was the last time you apologized? This morning.

95. What is the biggest lie you tell yourself? That I am a cool and mysterious person that people look up to.

96. What’s the moment you left childhood behind? Probably when I moved out from home and went grocery shopping for the first time. Deciding if I needed milk or not was my first ever adult decision.

97. What's missing from your life? Structure. And home cooked meals.

98. Do you believe in a higher power? No.

99. What are you ready to let go of? About half my closet and my fear of flying.

4 notes · View notes

humblereflection · 7 years

Text

Kakairu for the sleeping shipping meme

Who is a night owl:

Some nights carry on well into morning when they’re together. It’s not because they’re busy with each other, but more about the pleasant feeling that grows in the pit of their stomach when they find the other curled up on the couch when they get home late.

They lose themselves in each other’s embrace, idly just lying there, perhaps reading their books, perhaps reading their books to each other, but regardless, on some nights they lose all sense of what’s outside their four walls.

Who is a morning person:

Kakashi thinks he’s a morning person until the night he spends over at Iruka’s and wakes a little after the crack of dawn. He’s only over there because that’s where they held Naruto’s going away party, and he’s still here because the kids wouldn’t let him go - no really, they had Iruka make seals that dispelled jutsu to flash move and threw a Kurenai approved genjutsu over the front door - and because Naruto suckered him into cooking his breakfast feast.

“It’ll be my last taste of your wonderful cooking for years, sensei!” he wailed, complete with crocodile tears.

So Kakashi musters his strength to get out of the futon Iruka provided him and stumbles - that juice wasn’t as alcohol free as he thought hmm - out into the kitchen to find Iruka fully dressed save for his untied hair, and cooking up a storm.

But Iruka is Dancing. As he’s cooking up a storm. He has to squint, to make sure he’s seeing this right, and use every ounce of self restraint he has to not save this to his sharigan equipped memory.

“You gonna help me or…?” Iruka calls back to him, and for a split second, a very tiny moment, he thinks ‘I could get used to this,’ the concept of waking up with the birds with this man and living in this oh-too-small apartment in complete bliss. He doesn’t dwell on the thought, nor does he cements his crush on the man.

Not until he gets home that evening to review the day.

(is this the prelude to Anko Pulls the Big Jugs Out??? Who knowssss)

Are they cuddlers:

Of all the things Iruka expected when he started dating Kakashi, cuddling was not on the list. Sex, sure, he thought they’d have a lot of mind blowing sex, but it turns out Kakashi is asexual and would rather they just mutually matsubrate. Which is really fine, Iruka has no problem using his own hand - or the collection of toys Kakashi has acquired - when he gets horny and Kakashi declines his invitations to the bedroom for sex. They’ll mutually matsubrate usually, and Iruka thinks that in itself is pretty hot. But when it’s all said and done, and he’s basking in the glow of the euphoria high, Kakashi snakes his way into his arms and just, latches on. There is no removing a Kakashi off of oneself. Not ever. The only hopes he has is a hawk tapping at the window, an uncomfortable urge to pee and threatening to wet the bed, food delivery - Iruka will carry Kakashi to the door, but the man will jump out of his arms upon arrival - and unexpected company that break through all of the seals and guards on their front door. Usually with brute force.

But Iruka likes it, the attention of this relentless cuddle monster.

Who is the big spoon and who is the little spoon:

On the average night in the joint oh-to-small apartment of Kakashi and Iruka Umino, behind the fronds and leaves of all the plants, you shall find Kakashi in a death grip of cuddling with Iruka. On the not-so-average night, say perhaps their wedding anniversary, their parents birthdays, the memorials of their long since passed friends, Naruto’s birthday, their own birthdays, that night Sakura announced she and Ino were getting married, Iruka will be the one to hold Kakashi in his arms.

What is their favourite sleeping position:

If they end up in bed together at the same time, always on their side, facing another. Gives them something nice to wake up to.

Who steals all the blankets:

Kakashi, in the heat of their annual prank war, has once posted posters all over the village detailing the capture of “blanket hogger Iruka Umino.” To retaliate, Iruka had posted posters that read “Wanted thief: Kakashi Hatake. Has stolen stole my heart,” and had won the adoration of the whole village for being the sappiest couple alive. Kakashi was ruby red for weeks.

What they wear to bed:

Iruka has spent many nights changing Kakashi out of his work uniform and into something more comfortable to wear to bed. He’s gotten injured for his efforts many a time, but those were his own fault no matter how often Kakashi kisses the bandages and apologises. You just don’t coax a mission-mode elite jounin out of his bloody, soiled clothes. You weep at the lose of those expensive sheets and sleep on the couch in the sheets that aren’t full of blood or mud.

And when the elite jounin comes to, nudging you awake to apologise for that cut across your cheek, you tell them they aren’t allowed to cuddle until they change their clothes.

Who likes seeing the other wearing their t-shirt:

When Iruka wakes to a stiff neck from sleeping on the couch, he understands completely that the weight on his entire body is a man three centimetres taller than him. He prays to whatever gods keep track of these things, that this man is also not wearing blood soaked clothes. And he peeks down to see that he is not, but is sure as day, that the man is wearing his stupid reverse mermaid shirt he bought for a gag years ago. He smiles, and would have pulled Kakashi closer, if the man hadn’t been already try to fuse with him.

Who falls asleep mid-conversation:

Depending on the day they’ve had, they’re both guilty of this. Kakashi does it when he returns from long escort missions, Iruka does it after a long day of lecturing pregenin. They just settle them into bed and cozy up with each other and go to sleep.

Who wakes up in the middle of the night with nightmares:

Nooooooooo———–

The first time Kakashi eased a crying Iruka into the world of the wake, he was scared. It had been a thing he was accustomed to do, when leading missions where things had gotten out of hand, and friends would die to leave others weary and miserable and scared. He was trained to deal with people crying in their sleep, help them ease out of it. But with Iruka, it was different.

The man hadn’t been on any missions, let alone fought on a mission is such a long time, he hadn’t a clue as to what was wrong. He never broke down in front of Kakashi, almost always sported a happy smile or a sneaky smirk, didn’t show any signs of any sort of distress unless he was grading papers.

Maybe it was him who was the problem, said the voice at the back of his head.

When Iruka finally wakes and collects his bearings, he didn’t recognise who Kakashi is for a moment - terrifying - but the second it connects, his frown melts into the most lovesick smile Kakashi has ever seen - that hadn’t been his own reflection. Irkua hiccups, rubbing at his eyes, he says it was just a memory, of the night his parents died. And Kakashi’s frown deepens.

He goes on to say how it happens once every six months now, but for some reason, Kakashi was there too this time. And it just, just really hurt. Kakashi takes his hand, rubs his thumb over the scars adorning Iruka’s hand, “I’m here,” is all he can think to say.

Who accidentally punched the other in their sleep:

The moment that inspired Kakashi to print all of those posters was when Iruka had ended up cocooning himself with all the bed sheets. When Kakashi went to gently tug a few over his shivering body, he was given a black eye by a sleep talking Iruka, the last words Kakashi can remember before succumbing to the knock-out punch were “try that again you fucker.”

Iruka thinks the whole thing to be some stupid dream, albeit a hilarious dream.

Who can’t keep their hands to themself:

This is getting redundant, It’s hands down Kakashi Hatake for most touchy feelsy partner in the whole damn world.

#kakairu #welcome to ninja dad hell

93 notes · View notes

murasaki-murasame · 6 years

Text

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 19 [Chapter 6 - Trial]

I was going to make some sort of a vague meme about this ending, but honestly I don’t even want to indirectly spoil anyone about what happens, so I’ll just say that this was fantastic.

This probably won’t actually be the end of my liveblog, since I have some post-game content to do, and some optional bonus things throughout the game I might just google and write about later whenever I get around to that. But this is the ending of the main game.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

[Fake edit: hahahaha holy fuck this ended up being 10.4k words long. Good fucking luck to anyone who wants to read all of it, I guess, lol]

Jesus christ, where do I even start with this??? There’s just . . . so much shit that went down. So much.

To start things off, I wasn’t kidding when I said that this was a fantastic ending, overall. I loved it a lot. It was so ambitious and intense and surreal that I couldn’t help but like it. I definitely have SOME issues with things, but I’ll get to them later.

I should at least say that, as you can all verify from my last post, I wasn’t exactly expecting Tsumugi of all people to be the mastermind. I guess it justified her continued existence in the story, after she felt so weirdly pointless.

Though before I talk about Tsumugi specifically, on the whole topic of pointless characters, Himiko was definitely . . . the weakest link by far. I don’t really hate her or anything, but she just had so little going for her as a character by the end. Even the whole thing with Tenko dying and giving her emotional strength and development and stuff felt like it didn’t really change much. So seeing her alive by the end, especially in the epilogue scene, felt . . . awkward. It’s not like I wanted her to die or anything, but I feel like the epilogue might have had a bit more . . . weight to it, if it was just Shuichi and Maki left. I dunno. I’ll talk about the epilogue later.

On the topic of Tsumugi, I honestly think I might prefer her as a villain over Junko. Mostly because this game’s entire ending and it’s overall theme feels way more interesting than everything Junko represented. I’ve said before that I really do like Junko as a villain, and that seeing her come back yet again would have been totally fine, but I think I liked Tsumugi as a villain even more than her. I’m aware that with how Tsumugi’s character works in general, there’s not much that actually sets her apart from Junko, but still. The things she represents on a thematic level are really interesting to me.

I also just appreciate that it was genuinely surprising to me that she was the mastermind. I really didn’t see it coming until they basically spelled it out for me.

I probably should have guessed where this trial was heading in advance. I said last time that the shot put ball and whatnot confused me, but it should have been obvious that it was hinting at Kaede not truly being the first killer. And the detail of the secret entrance to the hidden room being in the girl’s bathroom should have clued me in about Tsumugi. I could easily see someone else figuring it out if they had a good memory and also figured out that the chapter one case would be relevant again, but I didn’t remember the detail about Tsumugi having gone to the bathroom around the time Rantarou died, so that was a genuine surprise. I really like that they actually planted evidence pointing toward her at the start of the game, even though it didn’t really become apparent until you learn stuff much later in the game.

I also really liked the whole detail of how her talent as the Ultimate Cosplayer connected with her role as the mastermind. It really wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

To dive right into the Big Twists, it turns out that my guess about how this would end was basically the opposite of what I expected. I’ve said before that I expected the reveal to be that the world of V3 was a fictional story being broadcast to the ‘real’ DR world, but in the end, if we at least take the ending at face value, it was the entire DR franchise that was ‘fictional’ in the context of V3′s world. So that threw me off big-time. In general things escalated way more than I expected, and there were way more layers of meta going on than I thought there’d be.

But I love how that all tied into Tsumugi’s identity. Like, I totally believed that she was really Junko, or at least some kind of clone or descendant or whatever of Junko, and I accepted the idea that ‘Tsumugi’ was just a fake identity. But nope, Junko is just a character she’s cosplaying! I didn’t consider it at first because of the whole cospox plot point, but then the big twist happened and it became clear that she can cosplay as Junko because, in the world of V3, Junko is a fictional character.

The whole scenario of her continually switching between cosplays was, to be honest, genuinely disturbing. Especially since they got the original VAs to voice their appropriate lines. So it really felt as if all of the previous characters were coming in, which helped make the trial feel really fever dream-y, in a good way. It really hammered in that feeling of artificiality going on.

It’s interesting to me that, with how the whole ending worked, ‘Tsumugi’ was probably still a fake identity of sorts. Like how every other character’s identity was made up, to the point where it was heavily implied that even their names were fictional. So it’d make sense if Tsumugi’s whole identity was also fake. She called herself the Ultimate Cosplayer, but if we believe her story then the whole concept of Ultimates wouldn’t truly exist in their world anyway. But I like the implication that she was basically just pretending. It’s consistent with everything else, at least, and her talent didn’t really play into her actual plot role at all, just her ‘aesthetic’ as a character, if that makes sense. So I like the idea that she was just a random, ‘talentless’ member of Team Danganronpa who adopted a false identity in order to take part in the killing game. The idea that we might have never known her true identity at all beyond, well, her job position and her personality, makes me like her even more as a villain, somehow.

In general, I love how incredibly meta this ending was. I love how cynical it was. I love how it rejects itself as a franchise, and everyone playing it. It’s great. The fact that they openly talked about the Danganronpa franchise, Team Danganronpa, and the entire fandom, was just great. I totally get why the guilt-trip nature of it might bug people, but I like it. It’s certainly hard to argue against the point it’s making. This game only existed because people actively supported this series. Because they genuinely enjoyed experiencing the emotionally thrills and catharsis that the killing games gave them. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the series just keeps going like nothing happened.

I’m aware that the ending wasn’t really intended to be genuinely spiteful towards it’s audience, especially since the final moments of the game are all about the audience changing their minds and deciding that they want to stop the killing games, and to also save as many of the remaining characters as possible, but there’s definitely still a very clear element of spite going on that can’t really be ignored. It’s very vocally aware and critical of the way that people enjoy violent media, even if it also accepts the possibility of people being able to change for the better and be positively influenced by the stories they read.

It just fascinates me that they even went this far. That they took their franchise to such an absurd point. That they created the idea of this fictional future where their own franchise would grow so big and so popular that they’d start killing real people to continue it. That they made themselves, as the people who made this game, the villains. It’s such an incredibly risky move that I’ve basically never seen before, especially if we take into account that this franchise has been going on for like 5+ years already. It’s also part of why I don’t think this ending was 100% spiteful toward it’s audience. Because, at the very least, it also holds itself accountable in all this. The devs are aware that they’re the ones actually sitting down to make these games in the first place. So it’s not like they’re placing all of the blame on their consumers.

The whole back and forth spiral of emotional tension and cynicism and hopefulness and redemption and self-awareness made the whole ending part incredibly intense and emotional. It really did feel like the people making the game were laying themselves bare and engaging in a direct conversation with the people playing their game, to ask them to consider the idea of violent media, and the idea of the authenticity of lies/fiction vs truth/reality.

Weirdly enough, this whole ending reminds me a fair bit of Nier: Automata, and that game’s entire thematic point. They’re very different games, in obvious ways, but they’re weirdly similar.

I didn’t really see the whole Argument Armament section coming, but oh man that part sure was an experience. Thankfully I’ve been slowly getting better at them, but it was still really stressful. But what truly made it special was hearing the voices of the audience during it. I just love the entire concept of you literally arguing against the voices of people saying stuff like ‘ugh, I hate meta endings like this!’ or ‘I’ve invested too much time and money into this franchise for it to just end!’ or ‘I just want to see people kill each other, death is the entire point of Danganronpa!’. And then eventually it just became a bit of an unending scream of ‘HOPE DESPAIR DESPAIR HOPE HOPE HOPE DESPAIR HOPE’, which was honestly the most perfect way it could have ended. With how obsessed this franchise has been with the concepts of hope and despair, and with how more and more emotional weight and baggage has been placed on those concepts, it’s very fitting that this game basically ends with you facing down a horde of disembodied voices mindlessly shouting out that words, and you telling them that you plan to end the Danganronpa franchise.

And on the whole note of that part, I really liked how Keebo played into the ending. Maybe it would have had more impact if he’d been the protagonist this whole time, but the idea of him being ‘the audience surrogate’ was really cool, if only because it set up the aforementioned scene. I also liked that he wasn’t immediately validated in being obsessed with hope. He wasn’t necessarily in the wrong or anything, but he wasn’t able to argue for hope in the face of despair in the way he wanted to. They also didn’t try and suddenly ignore Shuichi in favour of having Keebo suddenly be the protagonist in the end, so that was nice.

Before I talk about the epilogue and some other assorted points, I should say that the part where they explained the game’s title was AMAZING. I loved it so much. The reveal of this being ‘Danganronpa 53′ was such an effective ‘wait what’ moment. And then we got the incredible parody logos for Danganronpa 4-10. That was an amazing scene. And in general I just love the sorta-dystopian future that whole scene sketched out, of the DR franchise going on for such a long time that they eventually decided to hold a ‘real-life killing game’. But anyway, it also completely validated how weird this game’s title is. I guess on some level it’s still a bit unnecessarily confusing for it to have ‘3′ in the title, but I like that they gave such a surprising yet effective explanation for the ‘V’ part. I may or may not have laughed out loud when one of the random lines of audience dialogue said ‘V is the roman numeral for 5′. I don’t know why that was so funny to me, but it was.

The audience dialogue thing was also an amazing concept that added a lot of unexpected comedy to the situation. It did a great job of encapsulating the attitudes of the fandom. It was hilarious to see random lines of text floating about that were complaining about the ending being boring and them wanting to see an exciting clash between hope and despair. There were too many lines for me to remember, or to have even noticed in time, but a lot of them were really hilarious. I kinda lost it when they started complaining about Shuichi, and when they randomly started insulting him over how he didn’t have his hat anymore. That was great. Then we got some random and hilarious lines like ‘Shuichi is so yummy <3′. I think my favourite one was probably ‘Danganronpa 25 was the best one’. That made me laugh. The writers of these games know us so well, lol.

Though, as I kinda said above, I do appreciate that the audience got their own redemptive moment in choosing to allow the franchise to end by not voting, while also asking Keebo to do what he can to save everyone other than Tsumugi. That was really nice.

Back on the topic of the game’s title, I wish they’d kept the ‘everyone’s new semester of mutual killing’, since they ended up name-dropping it during this trial, but they never really brought up the English game’s subtitle outside of the part where the game’s full name was said. I think that the name-drop would have just had more impact if they’d kept it as the game’s subtitle in English. It’s a minor issue, though.

I kinda want to leave my thoughts on the epilogue for as late in this post as I can, so I should talk about some other points first.

I talked a bit about how this trial went back over and re-did chapter one’s trial, but I didn’t go into much detail about it. I thought it was a really neat concept, to go back over such an old case and point out how the conclusion everyone came to was wrong. I thought that that whole trial was complicated enough as it was, but I really wasn’t expecting there to be a whole other layer to what went down in it that was being saved until the end of the game. But it actually made a lot of sense. As I said, we knew from the start that Tsumugi went to the bathroom around when the murder happened, but that didn’t seem to be an important detail until we found out later that that’s where the hidden entrance was. They even took the time back in chapter one to go over her cospox to explain how she couldn’t have possibly been the killer, which did a good job at getting us to stop suspecting her. But as it turns out, she was able to kill Rantarou in a way that avoided needing to use her talent at all.

It also addressed the one thing I disliked about the first trial, at least in terms of the in-universe logic and mechanics of it. At the time, I suspended my disbelief about it, but the idea of someone being successfully killed via a complicated Rube Goldberg machine felt a bit contrived. So I love that the big twist was that Kaede’s whole complicated set-up actually ended with her missing her shot, and so Tsumugi had to rush in and beat Rantarou to death with a spare shot put ball to make it look like Kaede’s idea had worked. I don’t quite know why, but the image of Rantarou just being absolutely baffled by the fact that a shot put ball just fell by his feet out of nowhere, and Tsumugi panicking in the background and rushing in to beat him to death with ANOTHER shot put ball was just the most hilarious thing ever to me. It was great. But I do feel genuinely bad for Rantarou. He must have been so confused about all the unexpected things that happened in the moments before he died.

I’m also very grateful that part of the twist was that Kaede was truly innocent [beyond having had the genuine motive and intent to kill, but you get my point], and that, specifically, she wasn’t even related to the mastermind. After the twin sister reveal, I expected that part of the twist would be that Kaede was in on the mastermind’s plan the entire time, or at best was unaware of it but still related to the mastermind. I immediately thought that it’d be too lame and out of the blue for anything along those lines to be the case, so I’m glad that the twin sister thing was just a red herring, and that Kaede was just a random, everyday person. I guess this also means that her moments of being cross-eyed weren’t some sort of a hint at some kind of ‘mental instability’ or whatever. That’s nice. I didn’t really mention it at the time, if I remember right, since it didn’t really feel important enough to talk about, but I’m very thankful that the game didn’t use something like that as any sort of a sign toward someone being ‘crazy’ or villainous or whatever. I mean on some level they still played into that trope to some degree, if only in order to use it as a red herring, but still. One of my own eyes is kind of crossed, a bit, so it would have been slightly depressing to see something like that be used as that sort of plot point. I sure didn’t expect a game like this to give me a reason to bring up that kind of a personal detail, but here we are!

This also gets me onto the topic of Rantarou himself, and . . . honestly, his entire deal ended up feeling really disappointing. He kinda just served to give an example that backed up what Tsumugi said about the state of the world. We didn’t really learn anything new about him. We just got a bit of context for what killing game he was a part of, and why he got roped into this one. Which is fine. I just kinda wanted something . . . more. I think he’s the kind of character who I might want to spend some time thinking about before I make a final decision on how I feel about his place in the story. I’m at least genuinely curious about how exactly his killing game ended up, for him to end up as the Ultimate Survivor. I’m still not entirely sure how that whole concept works, especially when they casually mentioned that if they executed Tsumugi, then Maki would become the new Ultimate Survivor, which I still don’t quite understand, since she was one of the ones volunteering to die in order to let everyone ELSE survive. Anyway, I think the basic implication is that he was the only survivor of his game, so I wonder if that means that he killed someone and successfully escaped. It’s the only way I could really see it ending up that way. I guess the alternative option is that maybe he and one other person survived and escaped because of the rule about the killing game ending at that point. I’m not sure, though, since it seems odd that only one of them would have been called the Ultimate Survivor and forced into this killing game, and not both of them. Then again there might also be something else to it, with how he implied in his video message that there was some trick to the ‘two survivors’ rule, but I still can’t quite work out what that would be. Either way, with what we know now, I feel like his whole thing of saying that he wanted this killing game to happen makes me think that he was taking some kind of genuine pleasure out of it. If it was just a matter of him saying that he needed to win, it might have just been out of a desire to survive, but in that case I don’t think he’s say that he wanted this game to happen. I dunno. His whole character feels weirdly confusing to me, but maybe it’ll make more sense once I spend some time going over things in my head.

And on a similar note, I said before that I expected the Monokubs to be somehow based upon other survivors from his game, but I guess that one didn’t pan out the way I expected. What WAS the point of the Monokubs, in the end? Was the entire running thing of them seemingly having repressed memories like everyone else a red herring? It felt like their characters just sorta stopped existing early on in this trial after they all got blown up and then never mentioned again. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they were genuinely pointless, but it’d still be a bit lame.

I guess I’m on a bit of a roll here with talking about specific characters, so I should take this time to say that I honestly feel kinda bad for Kokichi now. This trial didn’t really tell us anything new about him, but it spelled out a lot of the fairly obvious things being hinted at, and it made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t really a bad person at all. He didn’t have anything to do with this. He really was completely lying about being the mastermind in order to try and stop the game. Even his gang seems pretty harmless. So it’s pretty hard not to feel bad for him, even if he was still genuinely annoying and irritating as a person. Though now that we’ve gotten to the end of the game, I’m still a bit confused about all of the stuff that went down in chapter four that pointed toward him being obsessed with Shuichi, and jealous of Kaito’s closeness with him. I still feel like there were very deliberate hints pointing in that direction, but it never went anywhere. There’s at least the whole ‘when I find someone I like, I do anything I can to make them notice me, even if it means strangling them’ scene, which seems even more confusing to me now. I dunno. Maybe he DID have his own feelings for Shuichi, and it just didn’t get explicitly mentioned in the game itself. Maybe it’ll be elaborated on more in his free time events, and post-game stuff in general. Either way, it still feels like a bit of a strange loose end. Maybe I’m reading too much into things.

Though it’s hard to unironically call anyone in this game innocent or sympathetic after the whole plot twist about them all being Danganronpa fans who volunteered to take place in a killing game. That sure was a twist. A lot of the ending had a more comedic tone to it, even if basically all of it was genuinely kinda horrifying and emotional and involved the characters finding out that everything they knew was a lie, but that part in particular stuck out to me as being 100% horrifying. Although it was kinda amusing seeing the game point out via Shuichi that there’s already been several detectives in the franchise. Which I guess takes on a slightly different context when you think about this being the 53rd entry in the franchise, but you get what I mean. Everything else was just depressing and unexpected, though. Seeing Shuichi excitedly talk about having planned out an exciting murder AND execution for himself, and how neat it’d be to have a detective become a murderer, was really hard to sit through, especially since he still had that little moment of being flustered about not wanting to be too demanding toward the people running the games, that made it clear that it was still genuinely him saying it. Then we got the part of Kaede saying that she has no real faith in humanity, which just hurt a lot. And then they dragged Kaito of all people into it and I started to genuinely wish the scene would stop because I didn’t want to see what he had to say. But then he went and had the most terrifying audition of the three, where he talked excitedly about wanting to murder everyone else in the game. That really just twisted the knife that had already been stabbed into my heart after the first two auditions we saw.

So it’s hard to be TOO sympathetic of anyone when all of them genuinely wanted this. I guess, come to think of it, this also probably ties into what Rantarou said about him wanting this to happen. He probably did genuinely like the idea of taking part in these games. Which puts a really sinister twist on his character, and also every other character in the game.

In general it’s kinda awkward to talk about any of the characters in the way they’re presented to us, now that we know that all of their backstories and talents and stuff are just lies, and that they’re actually just normal people who willingly took part in a death game. We probably don’t even know any of their real names. But it’s pretty clear that a big part of the game’s message is that just because these things might be lies, it doesn’t mean that they’re ‘not true’. These are still the characters we know and love. These are still the people that they genuinely believe themselves to be. At least after having their memories replaced, they became people who didn’t want to kill others, who were horrified by the idea of it, who banded together to stop it. For the most part. You get what I mean. So there’s still value in the characters as we knew them, even if they were the result of taking existing people and then replacing all of their memories and giving them new identities. There’s still value in the experiences they went through, the lessons they learned, the feelings that they experienced, and even the feelings that we experienced because of them. In spite of this trial’s set of reveals, it really was, in the end, a celebration of the power of fiction. It embraced the value and meaning of fictional characters and their stories. It validated the characters, and the experiences they had in this game. So I’m still allowing myself to see them as the people we knew them as, and to feel sympathy with them because of it.

It’s really disturbing to consider that the identities they were given were just . . . made-up identities that had barely anything to do with who they were before. It’s especially depressing to think about how all of their motives and whatnot were thus completely made-up and pointless. All of their backstories and traumas and whatnot were just fictional. Which makes it really depressing to think back on topics like Ryoma’s self-loathing because of his past, or Kirumi’s dedication to protecting the country even if it meant killing everyone else in the game, or Maki’s history with being trained as an assassin and how that basically broke her as a person. In a sense, those things still hold weight and validity because the characters at least BELIEVED them to be true, but it’s still just . . . depressing to think about how much pain was put onto these characters in the name of giving them interesting backstories and whatnot. This also presumably means that Kiyo wasn’t ACTUALLY a psychopathic serial-killer who had an incestuous relationship with his sister. Huh. He sure got the short end of the stick in terms of how his backstory reflected upon him as a person.

[Fake edit: I don’t know how I forgot about it, but there’s also the fact that apparently Kaito was just given a terminal illness as part of his backstory, which is a really fucking disturbing concept. To think that they just casually decided to make things more interesting by messing with his health like that. Especially since it’s pretty easy to guess that they gave it to him because of how enthusiastic he seemed to be about wanting to kill everyone. So it’s like they were giving him the illness as a sort of dramatic irony, to set up a scenario along the lines of him dying from his illness after he killed all of his friends, making everything he did pointless. And of course there would have been the additional angle of it becoming something that the audience at home could sympathize with him because of, which . . . definitely worked, I suppose.]

But obviously the characters weren’t exactly all clean and sinless individuals before this game, even if these depressing backstories and whatnot are fake. They clearly all had their own problems before the game started. And the characters we know now are probably at least nicer, on average, than the people we saw in those auditions.

And as I said above, Tsumugi was probably no different. She clearly knows all about what her life was like before this game, but Tsumugi as we knew her for 99% of the game was almost certainly a false identity. She was still the closest to her original self out of everyone in the game, but still.

At least we know that, on a visual level, it was only their outfits that got changed. So that’s nice to know, I guess, even if it’s not particularly important.

Now that I’ve gotten to the end of the game, I can finally talk about the last major thing I got spoiled about! Which didn’t even technically end up being completely accurate in it’s implication anyway! Yay!

Basically, a week or two before I started playing the game, I was just scrolling down my dash, and one of the recommended posts was a fucking DRV3 meme about Shuichi rejecting both hope and despair, in favour of dying. Of all the ways to be spoiled, I got spoiled via a goddamn meme, and of all the things to be spoiled about, I got spoiled about THAT. So throughout this ENTIRE game, I’ve had the vague idea of Shuichi dying stuck in my head. Which has been kinda agonizing. I’m so glad that it wasn’t actually accurate, and that he lived, but I still hate that I got spoiled about it. I suppose that I only had myself to blame for not having installed xkit by then in order to blacklist the DR tags, but still. Considering that I had never posted anything about DR before that point, I can’t really be blamed for assuming that Tumblr wouldn’t decide to just randomly suggest me a post about it.

That point, and the point of me having seen a screenshot from Kiyo’s execution, were the main things I got spoiled about. I also thought I got spoiled about someone [aka Kaito] killing because of their terminal illness, which ended up being technically untrue and probably just a made-up example of the sorts of motives in this game, even though it still lead me to the correct assumption of ‘Kaito ends up being a killer’. Those are the main things. I also knew in advance that this game has a really controversial ending, and that it has a bonus dating sim mode thing, but I didn’t know anything specific about those things, so the nature of the ending still surprised me, and honestly the existence of a dating sim mode isn’t really a spoiler to me.

So yeah, those are the things I knew about this game in advance. I wish I could have gone in COMPLETELY blind, but oh well. It didn’t end up affecting my enjoyment of the game as much as I was scared it might.

Anyway, the main character left who I want to talk about is Shuichi. I’ve already talked about basically everyone else, including Keebo and Himiko, and I don’t really think there’s much to say about Maki. I still love her a lot as a character, but this part didn’t really give me much to say about her that I haven’t said already, except for one detail [that I’ve kinda already talked about] that I guess I’ll mention again in a second.

Though I guess it’s also worth talking a little bit about the surviving cast. Which I’m more or less including Keebo and Tsumugi in, even though they died at the very end. The fact that Shuichi, Maki, and Keebo lived until [more or less] the very end was pretty predictable since they’re all so noteworthy, although as I said above I genuinely expected this to end with Shuichi dead, so I suppose it ended up being surprising that he actually lived to the very end. In that sense I guess Maki was the most predictable survivor. And obviously Tsumugi staying alive until at least the final trial made sense, in the end, since she was the mastermind. So other than Shuichi who was surprising for his own unique reasons, I’m still slightly baffled by Himiko surviving. Even in spite of her [relatively minimal] development and focus, she still felt really weird as part of the final three characters, next to much more important ones like Shuichi and Maki. But this sorta thing always happens in these games, and it’s probably a good thing that at least one of the survivors was someone who I would never have expected to survive.

Anyway, on the topic of Shuichi. I still adore this boy with all my heart and soul. He’s wonderful. At this point he probably beats out Hinata as my favourite DR protagonist. He’s such an incredibly good boy who deserved a much better life than what he got. I’m just kinda casually ignoring the stuff we learned in his audition, lol. But I kinda have to ignore that whole can of worms if I want to talk about what I like about any of the characters, really. I really felt horrible for him during this entire trial, especially after the reveals started kicking in. Seeing him go through so much emotional pain, until he decided to just accept death as a means to put an end to the killing games, just kinda broke my heart. There’s several points during the overall trial/ending that I nearly teared up at, and him talking about how in spite of the fact that everything he went through might have been a lie, the pain in his heart was still real, was definitely one of them. That really hit me hard. I loved seeing him be so resolute in saying that the concept of the killing games is horrific and deserve to be stopped even at the cost of his own life, but it was still hard to watch.

I hate to keep bringing this point up again, especially at this point, but I still at least like to believe that he had his own crush on Kaito. I’m very aware, especially now that the game’s definitively over [aside from the bonus stuff], that it’s probably not canon, but I still choose to believe it. I’m still choosing to believe in the way that his story and his thoughts and feelings toward Kaito came across to me. And hey, in spite of the guilt-trip-y nature of parts of this ending, it was ultimately still a celebration of the meaning of fiction and the validity of the things that fictional characters allow us to experience, so I don’t feel too bad about sticking to this interpretation. I know that the game made a pretty clear point to address Maki’s feelings for Kaito while not saying the same sort of thing about Shuichi’s feelings, but still. Though I should say that it’s not like any of this meant that I felt negatively about Maki’s feelings for Kaito and how they were portrayed. I still felt bad about seeing her find out that they were more or less a lie that had been written out as part of her character. I mean, it’s hard to call those feelings a lie when they were based upon the sorts of interactions and dynamics that would understandably lead to such a thing, so I won’t dismiss her feelings or call them fake or anything, but I can also see how the game was organized to force her to feel that way, which is still fucked up.

This is getting more into headcanon territory, there’s certainly something appealing about the idea of Shuichi developing feelings for Kaito without it having been ‘written out in advance’. Again, I’m not trying to imply that that whole deal makes this sorta thing less genuine, but still. There’s something both cute yet tragic in seeing things through this lens of Shuichi developing feelings that nobody had expected or planned for. Especially since, in hindsight, even if it might not be ‘canon’, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kaede was literally written by Tsumugi as being ‘Shuichi’s designated love interest’. They were even literally shoved into adjacent lockers, just to hammer in the fact that the game basically shoved them together. This isn’t some kind of ship hate, though. I actually still quite like Shuichi/Kaede as a ship, as I’ve said a few times before. But with how this ending works and what it says about the game in hindsight, it’s hard not to retroactively interpret these sorts of things through this kind of lens. With how many things Tsumugi specifically pointed out as being part of a pre-written script, it’s hard not to wonder just how many character points and relationship dynamics were similarly ‘part of the script’. And out of basically everything that didn’t get explicitly talked about, Shuichi and Kaede’s dynamic seems like the most likely think that was ‘forced’ to happen. Especially if we assume that Tsumugi might have expected her to survive for most of the game, whereas she died basically immediately and then Shuichi spent most of the game interacting with Kaito [and Maki, to a slightly lesser extent].

So even if I won’t really be as bold as to call any of this canon, there’s definitely room to make some interesting interpretations regarding concepts like the sometimes ‘forced’ nature of love interest scenarios in media. In spite of my warm feelings toward Shuichi/Kaede as a ship, I can’t help but me very intrigued by the idea of him not following along with that whole dynamic that was set up from the start, and instead getting cut off from her almost immediately, and instead spending most of the rest of the game with Kaito, in a way that might not have been planned for. I like the idea of a character like Shuichi indirectly rejecting the heterosexual romance set-up that he was basically shoved into, and instead developing feelings for another boy in a way that nobody planned for, entirely of his own volition. It’s just an appealing idea to me. I guess along these sames lines it’d be hard not to also look at Maki’s romantic feelings for Kaito that were explicitly fabricated, but as I said above I have no interest in engaging in ship hate, or denying her feelings. You get what I mean, though. I also can’t help but think back to that one scene where Maki asked Shuichi if he liked Kaede or not, and he just kinda vaguely said that it’d be normal to like someone even in a situation like this, and after that his hypothetical feelings for her pretty much never came up again. Not explicitly, at least. I figured at the time that he ‘obviously’ had to have been in love with her, because that’s how these things work, but after the concept of romantic feelings being fabricated came up explicitly in canon, it’s hard not to look back on that scene and wonder if there was anything more to it.

Another thing along these lines that’s kinda interesting to think about in hindsight was that it was Tsumugi who had that one off-hand line about asking Shuichi if he, Maki, and Kaito, were part of a ‘reverse love triangle’, which he hurriedly denied. At the time I was kinda intrigued by that line’s existence since it, in addition to Shuichi’s whole ‘I shouldn’t talk about another boy like that’ line, made it explicitly clear that the game was at least aware of how romantic his feelings for Shuichi come off as being, but that line certainly gains an interesting new context when you know that Tsumugi is the mastermind who knows everything, including the ‘settings’ of every character. I can’t tell if this somehow supports my whole aforementioned interpretation of events, or if it implies that this whole set-up in my head might have been intentionally planned by Tsumugi. I’m not really sure. It’s hard to tell just based on that one line if this might have been something she specifically wrote into Shuichi’s character. Though the fact that she goes out of her way to basically mock Maki over her fabricated feelings for Kaito, while not doing the same for Shuichi, makes me think that she only wrote Maki as being in love with him.

So for now I’m sticking to this whole headcanon interpretation, partly because I just fundamentally ship Shuichi and Kaito, and partly because I like this hypothetical meta-narrative subversion of romantic tropes in media.

Anyway I think that’s basically everything I feel like saying about the characters, and most of the story beats. Before I talk about the epilogue, and my feelings on the game as a whole, I should probably talk about a few more of my issues with the game.

I think we can all agree that the mini-games were, and always have been, largely pointless and unnecessary. They’re just not very great. They’re definitely more stream-lined and not as clunky as they used to be, but they sometimes feel SO ‘stream-lined’ and simplistic in design that I start to question why they even exist. The Psyche Taxi is probably the biggest offender of that. It’s such a waste of time. It never tells you anything new. It’s just this painfully drawn out procedure of the game spelling out stuff that it just went over a minute ago, and there’s not even any way to make it go by any faster because there’s a limit to how fast the car can go. I never felt like it did anything to help me solve any mysteries, at least from what I can remember. I think that the Mind Mine thing also felt pretty unnecessary, with there being only like one time where I had to think about which option to choose. I also never ran out of time in it or anything. The Hangman’s Gambit was also pretty bad, but mostly just an exercise in frustration where I either know what the answer is but have to figure out what exact wording the game wants from me, or I have no clue what it wants, and I have to awkwardly stumble my way into a solution. Which at least got a bit more manageable when I got the skill that shows the first letter of the answer immediately.

The sword rebuttal game was fine. It’s a neat representation of arguing with someone, though it usually wasn’t too difficult to figure out the logic of what to do, and sometimes the slicing mechanic just felt a bit clunky and hard to control. There were definitely a few moments where I felt stumped by the logic of them, though. The Mass Panic Debates were also OK, though they ended up never being anywhere near as difficult as I expected. I think that they were afraid of them overwhelming people, so they never made the logic of them too difficult. I don’t even think I needed to get that one skill that lets you focus on one conversation at a time. I’m glad I got the skill that silences loud voices, but that wasn’t really part of the inherent difficulty of those parts, and more just an annoyance that I got a skill to get rid of. The Scrum Debates were a really neat concept, but they felt woefully shallow and under-used. It basically always felt like the logic of them was just another Psyche Taxi-esque scenario of the characters rehashing an argument they’d already gone over before, with it just sometimes being guesswork to figure out which keyword was meant to argue against each statement. I really wish that they could have re-worked it so that new sorts of arguments and debates came up during them, that made me think about it from different angles. I also wish that there could have been more than one of them per trial, since that just lead to them feeling really minor, especially since we didn’t even get one in chapter six, so there were only five in the entire game. I think that there was also only one Mass Panic Debate per trial, which similarly made those parts feel kinda shallow and forgettable in spite of how both of them were hyped up as the new mini-game types. I guess I’m glad that they never tripped me up too hard, but it was also a bit disappointing that they never felt very exciting or meaningful.

Also, even though it wasn’t really a ‘mini-game’, I was never a huge fan of the sections where you have to browse your entire list of truth bullets and pick one. Those parts nearly always fell into being either so easy that it wasn’t any kind of a challenge, or so weird in their logic that I almost had to brute-force the answer.

In general the best part of the trials gameplay-wise were just the regular non-stop debates. Nearly everything else feels kinda unnecessary. But the regular debates were really good. They obviously varied a whole lot in difficulty, but that’s fine.

And even though this isn’t a complaint, I should round this section off by saying that the Argument Armament parts were really good and I have no real issues with them, other than that I kinda suck at rhythm games, so it took like half the game before I started getting actually good at them. I can’t really say that they were TOO difficult as rhythm games in spite of my inherent lack of skills at the genre, since I’ve seen a lot worse from regular rhythm games, and I’ve also witnessed the absolute insane nightmare known as Drakengard 3′s final boss, but still, it probably would have been had if they were genuinely difficult as rhythm games, and in practice they were at least difficult enough for me to struggle with them, and they made the finales of each trial appropriately climactic. Plus, as I said before, the one with Keebo was absolutely great as a way of representing the idea of arguing against the entire DR fandom.

The closing arguments have also always been a really neat idea, and I’ve always loved the aesthetic of them. Including the music. They’re always a neat way to end things off in a trial. The puzzle element of them still does feel a little pointless since the entire mystery’s already been solved and so it feels a bit like padding, but it’s not a big deal.

I guess I’m getting off-track in terms of talking about my complaints about the game, but other than the mini-games being largely boring or obnoxious, there’s not much else to go on. Maybe I should go back and quickly give my thoughts on each case’s murder mystery, just to end things off.

Chapter 1′s case is still a major highlight of the game, if not the entire franchise. I love it a lot. I guess it’s probably the most interesting case in the entire game, but most of the rest of them are still very good too, and this wasn’t the one I had the most difficulty with, even if I didn’t see the identity of the culprit coming. I still have general issues with the basic concept of setting up a female protagonist only to replace them almost immediately with a male one, but it still played out in a really compelling and emotional way, and at least fulfilled my desire to see a DR protagonist become a murderer, in a way that I didn’t even see coming even though they laid out hints for it in advance. Though obviously it’s impossible to talk about it without talking about the chapter six twist about how her plan actually failed, even though Kaede herself thought it did. That was a really neat extra layer to that whole mystery. I’m also still kinda sad that they killed off Rantarou immediately, especially since I feel like the endgame did a bit less to develop his character than I wanted it to. He’s definitely someone who I want to learn the most about via free time events and stuff.

Chapter 2′s case was probably the one that at least felt the most difficult to me, at least when I was actually sitting down and going through the trial. It was probably because I was playing it later at night than I should have, but as I talked about earlier in this liveblog, it just kicked my ass. It was the only trial in the game that I had to take a break from and come back to a day later to finish it, though a big part of that was due to me misunderstanding how retrying parts of the trial worked. Either way, I can’t help but commend Kirumi for setting up a mystery that, at least to me, was very difficult to solve. I’m also still sad that they killed off Ryoma early on as well, since he was another favourite of mine, but I liked his role in this chapter so I’m fine with it. This chapter in particular is one of the more depressing ones when you know in hindsight that everyone’s backstories were completely fabricated and forced upon them.

Chapter 3′s case was weird and I think most people also probably see it as a low point of the game. I loved the whole occult aesthetic of it, and the plot twist of killing someone off during an investigation, but it ended up feeling too easy. It was weird, though. Like, the identity of the culprit was obvious from the start, even ignoring that I’d been spoiled about it, but the actual logic behind how the murders happened, mostly Tenko’s, felt surprisingly difficult to me. It was basically at the same level as Kirumi’s case in that sense, but maybe even higher than that since I distinctly remember dying in this trial like five times, but I didn’t need to stop and come back to it later since by this point I knew that retrying parts of a trial if you die isn’t really a big problem. The motive in this case was definitely the most bizarre, not to mention the most unsympathetic. It’s almost weird how in a game filled with mostly sympathetic and understandable killers like Kaede, Kirumi, Gonta, and Kaito, you have Mr. Psychopathic Incestuous Serial Killer thrown right into the middle. It was just bizarre. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the game for killing off Tenko, a lesbian, in a way that was explicitly described as being ‘a pointless waste’. But whatever. I quite liked Angie’s whole sub-plot in this chapter as well, though I’m glad she got killed off.

Chapter 4′s case is still . . . iffy to me. I know that it was intentionally unsatisfying and kinda depressing and out of the blue, but it just really threw me off and felt really disappointing. It’s probably my least favourite case in the game, but maybe chapter three is worse than it. It doesn’t help that this whole chapter happened before Kokichi started getting any degree of redeeming or even particularly interesting qualities, at least in my opinion. I also still feel a bit let down by how the whole climax felt so weird and unexpected that I wasn’t even as depressed by Gonta’s death as I should have been, considering how much I liked him as a character. There were definitely a few parts that got to me, but not too many. I really liked the whole virtual world concept, though, even if most of the mysteries related to it felt painfully easy to guess. This chapter also made me like Miu a fair bit more, and it was pretty neat getting a case about someone’s murder attempt getting turned against them, even if it’s not a completely original concept in this franchise. I also still feel a bit confused about certain aspects of Kokichi’s feelings and motives in this chapter in particular, as I went over before, but it’s not a big deal. [Honestly, my favourite part of chapter four was probably just finishing off Kaito’s free time events.]

Chapter 5′s case was really depressing, and also way more complicated than I expected it would be. I at least remember it feeling pretty difficult, though the effect was lessened a bit because of the weird detail of me kinda-sorta-not-really-but-technically being spoiled about Kaito being a killer, which made the outcome of this case pretty obvious. But it was more about the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ than the ‘who’, in the end. This is where I started liking Kokichi a lot more as a character, which also makes me think back about this chapter positively. And obviously I love every part of the game that has Kaito in it [except for the one obvious exception, lol], so that made it a really emotional ride as well. Having to actively pick him in the vote and have him get executed was incredibly painful.

I guess there’s not much to say about Chapter 6′s case that I haven’t said already, so . . . yeah. It’s obviously not a murder mystery trial like the others so I can’t compare it to those ones in that sense, but it was probably still my favourite trial just due to how incredibly intense it was, and how much of an emotional roller-coaster it put me through. It’s at least easily my favourite chapter six trial in the series.

I don’t think there’s much else to say about the characters, other than that they’re probably my favourite cast in the series, as a whole. It’s hard to compare them to the casts of DR1 and DR2, since they all feel like they’re going for slightly different things, but still. I just love this game’s cast a lot. It probably helps that this was the first game I actually played for myself rather than reading/watching an LP of. There were definitely a few characters I felt ambivalent about to the very end, like Himiko, but for the most part I liked them. And chapter six definitely made me like Keebo and Tsumugi a lot more, in very different ways. I’m still kinda ambivalent toward Keebo, but he at least ended up being more than just pure comic relief, though I still dislike how his ‘persecution complex’ is framed by the narrative, with how he gets treated by everyone in practice. I liked the vague idea brought up of him learning to embrace the things that make him unique, but it fell kinda flat because of how badly his character as a whole was executed. And as I said above, I really like Tsumugi now, after having seen her as boring and pointless up until this point, even though she definitely feels less like her own unique character, and more of a representation of ‘the ending of DRV3′, and all that entails. I still think that I might prefer her as a villain to Junko, but it’s hard to compare them. Again, it’s kinda less about them as individuals, and more about them as the concepts they represent. Anyway, the characters I liked least were almost definitely Himiko and Kiyo. At least with Kokichi he was still a genuinely interesting and complex character who I slowly warmed up to, Rantarou was just sorta disappointing rather than actively bad, and Angie served an interesting plot purpose even if she was hard to like as a person, and pretty flat. Himiko and Kiyo were the ones with least going for them. Mostly Kiyo, whose entire purpose was just to be really creepy and off-putting. I’m more ambivalent about Himiko. I just wish that she felt more . . . interesting, I guess, or had more development. But in general I actively liked the majority of the cast, by the end.

Anyway, I suppose I should finally talk about the epilogue, although there’s not really much to say about it at this point. It was just really good. I was initially skeptical of the idea of the ending ‘backpedaling’ on actually killing everyone off, but at least Tsumugi and Keebo genuinely died, and I really liked the way that everyone else surviving played into the element of the audience themselves having their own redemption moment of sorts. The part where Shuichi says something along the lines of ‘maybe they wanted this lie to become the truth’ was one of the moments in this part that nearly made me cry. I think it put me the closest to actually crying, honestly. It was just a really effective way of tying together this game’s lies vs truth theme in with the whole theme of the power of fiction and the redemption of the audience. The idea of us, as the audience, loving these characters enough to want them to live, to want their ‘lie’ to become a new sort of ‘truth’, really got to me. And on that whole note, I forgot to mention it, but I really loved Shuichi’s whole speech about the love between all of them, and how the love passed onto them from everyone that died has meaning, and can even change the world itself if it could successfully get through to the audience and change their minds. That was a really nice scene. I also couldn’t help but like it when Maki pointed out how much Shuichi was sounding like Kaito, and how obviously Shuichi could do something like change the world, since he’s Kaito’s sidekick. And, of course, the part where Shuichi used Kaito’s catch-phrase about the impossible being possible also really got to me.

It’s interesting that, right at the end, the game basically calls into question everything that Tsumugi said, and made it unclear what the outside world will truly be like. I can see why that might seem unsatisfying and wishy-washy to people, but I like it. I like that, to the very end, you can never tell for sure what the truth is. It really gets across what the game is trying to say about the concept of truth vs lies. And on that whole note, I loved Shuichi’s whole part of saying that you can’t really call either truth or lies ‘bad’, and that lies can be just another way of telling the truth. It’s a simple concept, but it hit pretty hard as the culmination of this entire game. And I quite liked the final line of [from what I remember] ‘If the world can change to even a small degree, then this story won’t end’. That was a nice way to end things off. The whole ambiguity of this ending does make me wonder if they’ll decide to genuinely continue the series. I honestly hope they don’t. Partly just because I really resonated with the whole point about the killing games being inherently evil and needing to be stopped, but also partly because it’d kinda destroy the ambiguity of this ending. We’ll see. I’ll probably be fine either way.

I feel like Tsumugi’s final words about her being a ‘cosplaycat killer’, and her seemingly disappointed or annoyed expression before she died, will nag at my brain for a while. But I think that’s a good thing, that the game’s leaving me wondering about what her deal is, even to the end.

I think I’ve finally, finally run out of things to say, so all I can do is just say that this was a fantastic game. I get why a lot of people disliked it, but I really loved it a lot, even if it had some issues. It was undoubtedly my favourite game in the series, though. I certainly prefer it over DR3 as a conclusion to the franchise. I’m kinda sad that this is the sort of game where you can’t really explain why it’s so good without spoiling people. That sucks. And it’s also the sort of game that only really has it’s full impact if you’ve experienced the franchise up to this point, so I couldn’t suggest that someone go into it blind.

As I’ve said before, I’ll check out whatever post-game bonus stuff there is to do, so that’ll be the rest of this liveblog. I’m not sure how many posts it’ll take to finish it all off, and how much time it’ll take, but we’ll see. I think I might take a bit of a break from the game for a day or two in order to let my thoughts on it simmer for a while, and also so I can do some other things I need to do. Once I’m done with the entire game, that’ll probably be when I allow myself to dive into the fandom, finally. That’ll be interesting. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll reblog fanart and stuff, though, in case I want to keep my followers unspoiled. I dunno. There’s probably a good amount of stuff that’s not TOO spoiler-y that I can reblog. And to be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if I even end up making some of my own fanart. I at least really want to draw Shuichi and Kaito, for obvious reasons. But this franchise in general tends to have the sorts of characters that make me want to draw them, so who knows what I’ll do.

Anyway I need to forcibly stop myself from continuing this post because my brain is starting to melt a little bit and I need to go to sleep, lol.

#murasaki rambles #danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 spoilers #I can't believe this ended up being so goddamn long #then again this part of the game took me like 4-5 hours to play through #and very nearly the same amount of time on and off to actually write this post up

1 note · View note