nothing to me will ever be more iconic than my beloved mutual managing to get me so invested in a (rarepair) ship for a media i had no previous interaction with that i was actively making my own headcanons abt their potential relationship dynamic and making song associations and engaging in others’ brainrot for months before i ever even considered getting in to said media. and now a year later i’m finally writing fic for them but still know next to nothing abt what they’re like in canon cause i still haven’t made it to that part of the story, the memories of the shared delusion are genuinely the only thing keeping me going.

Share ten different favourite characters from ten different pieces of media in no particular order, then send this to 10 people (anon or not, your choice) 🎥🎬📺 

got tagged by @sometimes-i-talk-a-lot !!!

no idea who to tag so feel free to do it

im not sure youre axtually supposed to talk about them a lot but i did start rambling on with most of them so its going under the read more

kakyoin from jojo's bizarre adventure - the funny gamer man :). i like how i managed to read/watch all of jojo but he still managed to be my favorite through it all. his backstory was just really relatable to me i guess.

Patches from the soulsborne games - hes just kind of a huge asshole everytime you meet but something about hearing his voice after he kicks you down a pit for the 10th time. A lot of it probably comes from his voice actor. he really sounds like hes enjoying himself every time he gets to voice him.

ichiban kasuga from yakuza like a dragon - hes just a very loveable guy. everything from the way he talks with his friends to the way he talks with everyday people makes him just easy to fall in love with. Its also nice seeing how despite what he goes through he still keeps his friendly personality

lady from devil may cry - shes really cool and i like her character a lot. her arc in the 3rd game is just really satisfying to follow from beginning to end. she doesnt get much in terms of story in 4 or 5 but i feel like her character is fine how she is and adding more would kinda take away from it. she did get a nice little moment in 5 though which i liked. Also its nice to know that in a series where all the other fighters have some form of demonic powers she is 100% human. And please capcom make her playable in 5!!!!!

Raiden from metal gear - My favorite boy whos been through so so much. I cant really talk about how i like him since that would mostly involve spoilers and would also make up multiple pages. In 2 i just like the way he develops throughout the story and how he finds meaning by the end. Hes also the protag of one of my favorite games metal gear rising revengance. Despite the over the top nature of the game i still think they did his character justice and its a nice extension of the story of 2 (though nothing compares to that imo)

Sans from undertale - Despite everything i still really like undertale, its world and its characters. And the funny bone man managed to still be my fav. His jokes and his mysterious nature all makes him really likable to me. His fight is pretty enjoyable too. also hes a skeleton so theres that.

Samus from Metroid - Basically everything i wish i was. Shes cool, strong and she still manages all of this without saying a whole lot. I especially like her body language in dread. pls just ignore how she is in other m....

Tienshinhan from dragon ball - this ones mostly an old favorite. he was my favorite charcater when i watched it as a kid and he still is. He just seemed really cool everytime he appeared. Still think its bullshit how he isnt considered the strongest human -3-

Bridget from guilty gear - this ones a very recent fav. i never really knew anything about her before she appeared in strive but she definitely made an impact on me. Something about seeing a trans girl accepting herself in a mainstream videogame just makes me really happy. Also her theme song is soooo good and is soooo relatable to me. Like yeah i also hate the alarm clock i chose and i also taste like vegetables i dont like. 😭

Aqua from kingdom hearts - Shes one of the more competend characters in the series. She isnt without flaws or anything but she definitely gets shit done when she wants to. Her fighting style is also really nice. And of course she has blue hair and pronouns 🙄

Thoughts on Halo Reach's plot and best to worst noble team members?

you know ive actually been a lot more critical towards reach lately because i think it fails on the biggest thing it advertised: noble team. characters have never really been the strong suit of bungie’s writing (idk who destiny is so dont @ me) and while this isnt usually a major issue, it is an issue when a game wants to sell you on this squad of your teammates it wants you to care about or at least be fond of. ODST and Reach both have a cast of characters that could be really interesting but since halo is a shooter and not really a storytelling kinda game series all they really get are a few lines here and there and some cool moments, nothing really solid or anything to get a glimpse at who they are. maybe thats kinda the point though since spartans are all fucked up broken people like inherently. i dont think thats why bungie did that though

as for reach’s actual plot, i think it works well for what it is, a playable tragedy that tells you the conclusion up front. halo fans who are any level above completely casual knew that reach got completely glassed right before the start of halo ce and the advertising of this was very clear. the fact that you’ve never heard of spartan 3′s or noble team before was a pretty clear indicator of what their fates would be before you even turned on your xbox. the game literally opens with your smashed helmet embedded in the ground as a tombstone to your inevitable heroic sacrifice. reach invokes the same kind of feeling as star wars rogue one, you just know things wont end well for our main characters but you know that their deaths will pave the way for the main series protagonist to eventually win the whole damn thing 3 games/movies from now. 

so even with this in mind you go through reach and you think “wow things are going pretty well, we’re holding out own against the covies and even striking back at key targets” and maybe you forget whats going to happen or you dont and you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. and boy fucking howdy does it drop. jorge dies thinking he just saved reach and as you fall through the atmosphere you realize how hopelessly fucked you are. thats where the game enters its second phase, the “we’re fucked but still fighting” phase, as opposed to the first half of the game where things were still somewhat hopeful. noble six wakes up like a week later to half the planet burning and civilians being slaughtered as they try to evac. the first level of the second half of the game features you busting your ass hard to clear an evac point for civilians only to see them all get shot down and die. its brutal stuff, especially for halo who had never shown the conflict though that lense. 

what follows is a parade of squadmate deaths as your numbers dwindle with every level until its just you and emile, and then just you. unlike in rogue one you actually aren’t immediately told what the key item in this quest is, in this case its cortana, the equivalent to the death star plans in rogue one, the most important thing in the universe since cortana will be the one to slipspace jump to halo 04 and kick off a series of events that will lead to the survival of humanity. but once you get this item suddenly it all makes sense, carter is told this is “what his spartans died for” and to you that means a lot more than it ever would to him. 

reach ends with a profoundly impactful epilogue level where you just. are doomed. you can’t hold out forever and even if you could there’s no rescue coming for you. noble six gave their life to save the universe and never even knew it. the fact that their death isnt a cutscene but you actually yourself have to try to stave off death or just take as many elites with you as you can before they get you, it really adds so much to the impact of the final noble team death. nevermind that six isnt a real character it does work in this case because you’re seeing it from a first person perspective.

so overall my thoughts on reach is that despite the major flaw of not making you care enough about noble team (unless you do, this is my personal view) it does its job very well in portraying the desperate struggle of humanity against a threat that they cannot possibly comprehend or rightfully stand up against, but despite devastating loss the small victories they achieved still ended up mattering in the end. 

now as for noble team i wont do a best to worst but ill give my thoughts on everyone

carter: hardass commander type, not much to say imo. his death scene was his best moment and i wish his relationship with kat had been fleshed out more because it was so so funny to see her pull his strings to get what she wants. you can tell he has the respect of everyone, especially emile. 

kat: the only girl! i actually like cat, im glad they gave her a buzzcut instead of trying to make her sexy or anything even if they did give her that ass in her armor. shes the typical smartass better than you genius character but it works, especially with that accent. i wish i could be friends with her, there was that scene right before she died where she confided in six that this was also her first glassing. her death was kind of shock value to me and i wish she could have at least died with a little more dignity like the rest of noble team but alas :(

jun: probably my least favorite. i cant really remember much of this guy. he’s the only one who got to live and i kind of hate him for that because he was the least interesting of the bunch. 

emile: certainly the most iconic of all the noble spartans. he comes off as sadistic but not a maniac, he listens to carter when he speaks and is on good terms with kat even through his obvious inability to really connect to other people. this is certainly because of the fact that he’s a spartan-3, he’s probably the most “inhuman” of the bunch. i wish his relationship with jorge was given a little more, i liked how despite his pushing jorge early in the game he still mourned his death, and yet refused to carry his dogtags because he knew six was the one who was entrusted with them. his death was very iconic i think everyone remembers that. 

jorge: the big man himself, his death is what set the tone for the second half of the game and was probably pretty impactful to most people playing. i always thought it was interesting that he was a spartan-2 and not a 3 like the rest of noble, i wonder why that was. his relationship with halsey was interesting and it showed that not all spartans hated the devil woman for what she did to them. his defining characteristic was his big heart and that was especially interesting for a spartan-2, that he managed to hold onto something like that through all the shit he probably went through. 

Thoughts on Other Students in 3H

in no particular order

Hubert: evil snake boi, i kinda like you. i just wish there was more actual meat to ya then what there is. still, he does his role effectively and unlike edelgard plays into the whole evil empire thing with more gusto so i ironically find him more palatable because atleast the game isnt trying to pretend he isnt shady as fuck.

Dedue: oddly charming despite his straight laced attitude, he gets some interesting nuance in how well he highly respects (cough loves cough) dimitri and likes individual people from the blue lions, he doesnt have any particular fondness for faerghus as a whole which is definitely understandable given his history. hes essentially using the camus/murdoch aspect of undying loyalty and even borrows elements of the female camuses line of romantic interest in their liege however heavily implied it might be and applying that to a male playable character. Plus he just has some fun and interesting interactions with other characters in general.

Lorenz: I have difficulty saying whether i like him. on the one hand, he ended up being more multidimensional then i thought he was going to be with his internal conflict between keeping up appearances for the sake social status and societal order and his desire to pursue his own personal interests and ideals against the needs of his father and thus societal conventions. on the other hand, the game never really runs with this as much as it should and hes still treated as a bit of a joke character so... c+ to b? 

Ingrid: the token heterosexual of the blue lions whos still kinda gay anyways, her whole struggle with being a knight over a housewife seems a bit odd on the surface considering theres plenty of female knights and no one throws much of a fuss in universe, until you learn that it isnt so much that society expects her to do it as matter of course and more so that shes struggling with whether to pursue personal duty to her family or personal desires and ideals kinda like lorenz. in that respect she hits the mark a bit better then he does.

Raphael: kinda insubstantial but i liked him anyways, his sheer exuberance can be kinda refreshing in the games darker moments and hes got a few angles of his own such as his refusal to consider his parents deaths as part of a larger conspiracy so as to not hurt his friendship with ignatz nor ruin his own life and his sisters. plus hes just generally a nice guy. like a big huggable bear. just a shame that being a nice kinda dumb huggable bear is all thats really done with him.

Ignatz: his painting stuff and personal insecurities about wanting to do it over being a knight which his parents want him to do, more of that duty over desires and ideals thing again, is well enough and his probably misplaced guilt over raphaels misfortunes is definitely a highlight of him but he never really grabs as a character for some reason. probably because theres a lot of other characters in the game that hit those same marks and do it better then him.

Sylvain: has a lot of aspects that never really feel like they get proper follow up, his big thing is less womanizer and more so that he covers up his own mistrust and personal feeling by pretending to be a shameless flirt and philanderer. basically, maybe the emotional pain will go away if i flirt with girls and act the fool. but again there never really feels like theres any proper follow up for all this, others comment on it and then its more often then not dropped in story. hes fun enough but never really realized if that makes sense.

Caspar: shonen protagonist is kinda an apt word to describe him honestly, and that idealism of his clashes with the more grey on grey morality of the world hes within which is never a particularly bad direction to take the shonen bois in if done well like hunter x hunter. And he is done well, or at least satisfactorily to the point that hes another one i ended up liking more then i thought i would. his problem is more so that his interactions with most other characters in the main cast which feel duller then they should on most occasions.

Dorothea: probably gonna get a bit of shit for this, but i have no interest in her. her insecurities about her future and getting a good husband is well and interesting but manuela does that better honestly and outside of that dorotheas a bit... not shallow but hazy and insubstantial if you will. she obviously has appeal to people but like ignatz she failed to grab me in part because others did what she did and better within the game itself.

Ashe: soft boi chose to be soft instead of hard, one of the characters i found liking and one i expected to kinda like to begin with. in game he gets accused of being childish and naive a lot but i dont see it personally, hes not naive but more so tries to look for the best in people and in life like lonato did all those years ago for him. that said, the speed with which lonato dies damages his identity as a character a bit by happening before we really get a chance to feel for his relation to lonato, its not to big a bug bear as it doesnt hurt his character all that much but it does feel a bit frustrating.

Felix: teenage angst personified, his main gripes seem to be a distaste of warrior culture and its glorification of bloodshed and sacrifice but instead of approaching it with sadness or pacifism, he lashes out against what he feels is the unfairness of the world. hes not exactly wrong in his feelings and as a character it makes sense and works for his abrasive attitude, and its an interesting twist to the navarre type to have their isolation come not from stoicism nor sheer blood lust or a combo of the two but rather from a rage against the machine of society mindset.

Ferdinand: he got more interesting as i got farther along, and i personally feel he works the best as a character when going against edelgard since thats where more of his personal drama comes from. hes eager to succeed and prove himself worthy of his title over time and holds a chivalrous mindset very similar to others in the cast but his growth is less about learning how to hold onto those ideals in the face of reality for the sake of personal fulfillment but more so about learning to define himself by himself and not by societies needs. ultimately he comes to value chivalry not because its what people tell him to value but because he truly values it and i enjoy that. but its also why i feel he works better on other routes then edelgards since there hes still valuing himself not for himself but for the expectations society or edelgard in this case is placing him under, one tyrant for another in a sense. i admit i dont remember much about him on edelgards route though because i just like him more on the others.

Leonie: poorly timed support aside, she has an odd charm to her that a lot of modern fire emblem characters just dont have anymore. but knuckling past jeralt senpai shes an interesting blend of stingy and work effort that goes to inform itself and her relations to others. and like a lot of the golden deer she has a lackadaisical attitude of ‘i might not know what the fuck is happening, but i do know someone needs an ass whooping!’ and it works especially well in her case since her character is very attuned towards focusing more on her personal matters then the grand scheme of things because she has rent due in a few months. if she was in a more traditional fe set up she would definitely be a beowolf archtype that you need to pay to recruit. in fact im surprised thats not an option on other routes to begin with for her.

Hilda: honestly suprised me by not being a pure serra type. she has aspects of that on the surface with the selfish almost vain attitude towards life and others bur well serra is more about puffing herself up to hide insecurity and contribute towards a desperate desire for grand social status, Hilda downplays herself and her abilities due to living in her brothers shadow if unintentionally and seeing the stress it can bring. they’re both lazy and vain, on the surface anyways, always getting others to do their work for them but well serra seeks more social status to escape it hilda seeks less social status to escape it. plus it was kinda funny to see hilda act as claudes unofficial number 2 you could still recruit.

Lindhart: Sleepy boi needs a nap and thats kinda it really. exaggeration maybe but unlike a lot of characters in the game and the series as a whole he really doesnt have a reason to be there as a character. as a unit certainly but not a character, in terms of motivation anyways. He hates blood, fighting and violence, hed rather sleep or pursue personal interests then work or politics, hes insightful and intelligent but the important players in the plot have other advisers and hes not interested in stepping up in that regard anyways. his only real reason for being there is academic interest and even then a pin has to be put in that when war breaks out. hes not a bad character overall though, his sleepiness and insight make for an interesting double act along with his blunt mannerisms, i just have trouble pinning down motivations for him.

Mercedes: big team mom energy, which i suppose goes along with the whole being older then everyone thing. a bit dopey and airheaded at first glance shes one of the more receptive characters to how others are feeling and well she does try to nurture shes not above scolding if she feels it would help someone more then praise and reassurance. of course shes also very detached to events of the world mostly just there to help the people around her from the bottom rather then the top which is not an insult and more one of the things i find fascinating about her. it all makes for a very interesting character and one of my personal favorites of the cast.

Annette: overworker, issues with her dad, magic bubbly, and hits things with axes. a nice recipe of a character but it never feels as if the game can get it all to blend properly. more so to the point is that most of these elements work independently of each other and not to inform each other despite the games insistence. theres a lot of dramatic potential involving her father as well and though the game makes the best use of those aspects its not to the benefit of the rest of her character. it doesnt hurt her either though and she has some appealing dialogue with other characters.

Marianne: I had trouble getting to like her, perhaps more so then any other character among the other students. not because i hated her but because shes, well, very boring. alot of the characters in the game are into the self deprecation thing already and well her personality aspects of acting quite and submissive to fall into the background from a lack of self confidence it also feels like the game came up with two different explanations for it and couldnt settle on whether it was because of her adoptive fathers pressure or her families history and instead of weaving both together decided to use them interchangeably. Sometimes shes a wallflower because of her father and a lack of confidence to state her mind and self loathing over that lack of confidence, other times its because of her lineage and self loathing over her cursed history. never really at the same time.

Bernadetta: another odd favorite for me. recent support changes aside, the basic gist of her history remains the same in that her father was a tyrant in regards to her future which caused her to grow up with no confidence and a crippling fear of society, so shes already off to a good start as a character by basically doing mariannes schtik but better. well its hard for me to definitely say she ever grows past that as a character, thats fine in my opinion because her development is less stop being a recluse because society demands you dont and more so about making actual friends and learning that not all people are garbage fires just most of them. in most of her supports anyways. she just feels the most rewarding to interact with alright, and she was the one i always felt the most upset to mess up a speak thing with. Let us hug and stay inside watching cartoons together.

Petra: i went in wanting to like her and really liking her at first, but shes hit a middle of the road for me now. her speech gimmick wasn't particularly egregious and gets even less noticeable after the timeskip, but her actual character is a very straight forward ‘national pride demands independence’ package and doesnt really escape past that boundary all that much. its very understandable motivation, id even go so far as to say that shes the one with the best reasons to betray the empire of the black eagles characters, so like ferdinand i feel she works better outside of the black eagles in term of her own character identity and motivation/development as she finally stands up for her peoples right to exist on their own in an fe6 echidna kinda fashion. outside of that though shes... foreign to the other characters. thats kinda it.

Lysithia: as a unit she hits like a truck, as a character shes functional but hardly revolutionary for the series. i mean i did like her since i have a fondness for her archtype of weird magic prodigy poor social skills, but more so that she doesn't hit any particularly new notes in that regard. Shes a lot of lute, with some delthea childishness in her, some of sanakis sharper political wit and dark history, and a bit of miriels scientist on top. that said its all blended very nicely and she has some nice scenes for herself that got me to feel and care for her, some kinda adorable moments, and a history well woven into the games background and more so then most of the other deer and a lot of the other characters from across the houses in general. for a minor character anyways.

you may now all stone me to death.

a reflection

aka “holy fuck mom its been a year”

just warning yall now this is about to get hugely personal and if you’d rather not see insight of the worse sides of me or what’s been going on behind the scenes then i fully understand not reading this. i wont be offended. this is kind of as much for myself as it is anyone else.

so there have been a couple times in my life where ive had to look at myself and go “if i dont reach out for help of some kind, something really bad is going to happen”. around this time last year was one of those times. i was three credits shy of getting my degree and the last thing i needed to do was an internship, which would have started around this time and finished up by the end of 2016. i would have finished my education and gotten my degree.

and then i would have died.

id known this fact for a couple months now but as we were reaching two months from the end of the year i had this thought--maybe i should like, not do that??? so i put the internship on hold. i took a semester off on medical leave. while all of this was going on, kelly and erik had come to me asking me if i wanted to play dnd. i said sure, though i was pretty wary. id only ever played dnd once beforehand and it ended really badly--basically my character died and the rest of the party kind of callously left her behind which hurt and sucked.

ANYWAY i came up with the basic concept for tami. i know i wanted to play an orc because it was always weird to me that orcs are like the stereotypical and defacto villains that most parties are pitted against from the very beginning--what must it be like to be one of those people? but i wanted her to also diverge from the typical orc playable character, in that she was going to be quiet, stealthy, dexterous, and “level headed” (in quotes because yknow her emotions are something she’s always struggling with).

basically tami naruto jumping through the trees was always a key character concept from the word go.

but character creation is easy for me. ive been doing it nonstop since i was 10 years old. i also joined a new roleplay group around this same time. creative endeavors are something i can still pursue rather easily even in the throes of the worst mental breakdowns. in fact, its probably the reason ive survived most of them.

and i had no idea how much dnd was going to be that.

by this point, things were getting really bad and we were basically deciding what to do with me. my support network as ill call them (basically my therapists and doctors) were thinking i needed to be admitted into some kind of program and i agreed with them. but they wanted me to go to an inpatient program--essentially either being hospitalized or cut off from everything while i was taught how to yknow. not die.

but i didnt want to be cut off from everything. i wanted to play dnd. it was pretty much the only thing i had going for me at the time, since i wasnt doing any work or school. not to mention most of my irl friends were still in school or just generally busy and it was pretty much the only social thing i had to look forward to.

of course, that wasnt the only thing. in general, i just really didnt like the idea that i wouldnt be able to have a phone or computer for xyz months, quite literally being cut off from everyone and everything, including all of my essential coping mechanisms that have been keeping me alive thus far. but really, i knew that if i left the campaign just as it was starting for what would probably be months, i wouldnt be able to come back. and i didnt want that.

so i put my foot down and we got me enrolled in a local outpatient program. every day for 5 hours, i had to go to group therapy and learn how to Not Die. i had to go completely sober. i had to get drug tests. it was......hard, to say the least. it was scary and frankly humiliating to get to that point where i had to be constantly monitored to make sure i wasnt a danger to myself or others--even more so that it was justified.

every day we’d have to check in, let them know what our level of suicidal ideation was among other things, and i remember for those first few months, it was never none for me. but as long as it was passive, it was alright. in response, we were supposed to take a step back and look for things to live for, and look forward to. every friday we had to write about what we were planning on doing for the weekend.

and every friday i wrote the same thing: dnd.

it was honestly everything i needed during this time. i was going through a pretty rough period of agoraphobia and social anxiety, but once a week every week i got to be social as someone who wasnt myself. my experience with dnd hadnt been much up until that point, but almost none of you guys had played before. i felt almost an obligation to make a character that was somewhat take charge and open, in an effort to coax you guys out for the same. its kind of hard to remember at this point considering where we all are now, but at the beginning there, i know it was rough for a lot of us. i felt like i had to take charge, which was so the opposite of how i was actually living my life at the time.

and it was...nice. tami is much more confident and forthright than i am, and i had to force myself out of a lot of comfort zones to put myself in that place. but as weeks went on, it became easier, both in and out of character. all yall nerds are busy now but back then we were hanging out practically every night and it gave me a chance to not be alone with everything i was going through. unlike with say, the roleplay group, i wasnt just my character--i also got be myself with you guys. i got to rediscover who i was and could be during a time where i really didn’t see myself as anything worthy, let alone anything at all. plus, my connections to others has always been a driving force of me Not Dying and being able to be a part of such a blossoming close group was essential while living at home with little contact to my other friends.

and this went on for months. in that time, through the program, i was able to learn some essential, new coping mechanisms. i discovered some trauma that was affecting me way more than id given it credit for and was able to start working through it in a way that i hadn’t for years. through helping and supporting the others in my group, i was able to do the same for myself.

while all this was going on, i was constantly doodling tami and others in the margins of my notes. i was singing the praises of the group and the campaign to my program, whose members also became somewhat invested in the story and started asking me every week what had happened. it became such a huge part of my identity and every day that soon members of the program began to identify me with the game itself. it played such a huge role in my recovery.

but by march, i had graduated the program. id started up my internship, and was on my way to getting my degree. i got a nepotism job at my dads company, and i was actually leaving my house on a fairly regular basis. i dont want to say that it was all sunshine and rainbows because it wasn’t. i still had some pretty dark periods, and there were times that if you asked for a check in, i wouldnt be able to honestly say that there was no suicidal ideation.

but i kept on. and the only consistent thing throughout all of this was dnd. i started my own campaign on top of all of that, which has been an adventure in and of itself. tami has been through a lot, both through what has happened and general character development. it would be impossible not to after a year, even if it hasn’t been nearly as long in game. 

i thought i had some sort of linear progression to all of this, and this would be the point where i wrap it up all neat and say that im all better and its all because of dnd but that.....isn’t true. its not true in life OR dnd, and i think thats why i like the game so much?? its narrative for sure, but there’s also so much uncertainty and surprise that you don’t get in general writing or roleplay. not everything works out plainly and neatly, with things being completely fucked just by a dice roll. it can be just as messy as life is. which is funny because thats exactly what i used to HATE about the game, and why i didnt want to play in the first place. i didnt want to not have control over the narrative. i didnt want to not have control over MY narrative

but i needed to give up that control if i was ever going to get help. i needed to put my safety, my mental health, my life into other peoples hands. i needed help and i needed connections--and thats kind of what dnd is all about. and in the end, it still might not matter. our characters can still die, the story can still go in a way that not even the dms are prepared for, we might not save the world.

BUT WE ALSO MIGHT!! we’re going to work together and try our best and do everything in our power to fulfill our own quests, help one another, and create a greater good for ourselves and the world around us!!! and its like yeah, im not fully recovered, i dont think full recovery is ever going to really be an option for me, but i can keep going, and i know im always going to have the support of yall and the people who care about me. that means more to me than you could ever know.

and not to be a downer but like...im still going to die, someday. maybe in the ways that i thought, or maybe not. and in the meantime i might not figure out my life plan or get an amazing job or even move out anytime soon. but for once, that thought isnt as paralyzing and world ending as it was this time last year. its okay for things to be uncertain. its okay that things might not work out neatly in the end. and i think dnd played a huge role in helping me come to terms with that.

so remember like four paragraphs ago when i said i was going to start wrapping this up?? lmao for anyone who made it this far, i salute you and thank you. this game has been really important to me but more so its YOU PEOPLE. you guys are just such a wonderful and awesome group of people and its been a privilege taking this journey with you for this last year--and for many more years to come! we’ve been at this for two months in game and who knows where we’ll all be this time next year or the year after or even more after that. i dont know!!!! and thats okay

love yall im gonna go order a pizza now peace  ✌ ✌ ✌ (i have had nothing to drink thanks)

Oh man I NEVER EVEN KNEW about ‘overshooting’! you dont even notice it in the game but wow that explains why the skullgirls attack animations seem to hit a lot harder than most fighting games. Like seriously, just a split second of one fist going cartoonishly big at the end and then snapping back to normal. Its amazing that its the snapback that does it, not even the exaggeration! It can be such a small size increase, or even just a darkened outline or a move continuing forward further than the actual moment of impact. Like a lil slide after they come back down, but before they jump back into the default position. SO FASCINATING!!! And there was a really cool example from street fighter of a character’s sleeve poofing up when they punch, and then flowing back down, to give the same impression!

And how going off model is necessary for good animation! Silly looking smears are completely fine as long as it leads to a fluid animation. She literally calls it ‘breaking the body’, and encourages you to abandon anatomy for the biggest impact keyframe. “You don’t have to make every frame look perfect, you’re creating one piece of movement, not individual pieces of art.”

Its really interesting to hear how they like.. do animation as the last stage. Well, they do the animation but they dont.. complete drawing it? They make a playable build using their storyboard sketches, and then later their lineart animation, and etc. And they playtest it each time and send notes back on anything that looks wrong while in motion, so they can catch it early and save a lot of wasted work. Thats such a simple yet effective ay to do it! I can’t believe i never thought of it!

Also i really admire that miss cartwright says she’s very nervous giving the presentation, and generally has a very personable honest friendly attitude. I mean, you can tell she’s just a normal person and she may be good at animation but that doesnt mean she could do this presentation effortlessly. It seems like she put a LOT of work into practising for this, and it really paid off! None of this stuff would be so fascinating if it wasnt delivered so well in a really accessable sort of teaching style!

Holding frames at different intervals can make a huge difference, wow! She does say how its super important to work within your hardware and to your boss’s specifications though, some games arent lucky enough to actually be able to have variable framerates. But WOW, Skullgirls looks so much better with it! She showed an example of one of cerebella’s moves, and how it doesn’t read very well at all when every frame goes by at equal speed. It just looks like.. well, if you wave a ruler back and forth? It looks like one wiggly squiggly arch rather than emphasizing what actual movement is happening. When stuff is that fast, you need to remember that the human eye isnt gonna take in the detail of every single frame, so you need to slow down or otherwise emphasize the bits that’re important to the move. Plus also, having an equal framerate means that smear frames can be too SLOW, and be more easily visible, thus breaking immersion! So in the final version the smears run faster than the rest, and the frames at the start and end are slowed down. (when she’s raring up for the attack, and once her fist actually clenches and grabs the foe)

Again, I had NO CLUE that ‘hitstop’ was even a thing! The technical term for the sort of ‘slow motion after the impact’ thing. Its not usually as extreme as it is in the end of boss battles in Kingdom Hearts, for example, usually its more like just two miliseconds of the enemy staying in their downed pose before falling to the ground and bouncing back up. Again, its about speedup and slowdown to emphasize impact! If you just leave the game’s programming as-is and don’t bother to account for this, you have characters recovering from the hit too fast and it doesnt even look like it hurt. I think this is probably related to the concept of ‘mercy invincibility’, too? Thats kinda a way to give the PLAYER a moment to react to the attack!

Another really interesting tip- the reason why games snap back to the idle animation! She says its actually very bad to animate in-betweens of a character returning to their idle pose, snapping back is way better. It doesnt interrupt the idle, and you don’t have to think about animating a return pose that fits equally well with every different attack. plus it slows down combat cos the player cant immediately attack as soon as they’re back on their feet. overly long recovery animations can lead to a character thats disproportionally weak to getting stunlocked! Plus it just gives a sense of speed and badassery to a fighter who can flow so seamlessly back into the action.

I also like that she talked about the things she wasn’t happy with in her work, and used them as teaching examples. That takes a lot of self confidence to be able to talk about! I’ve gotta agree with her, that less frames is snappier sometimes. Its not always about looking the most artistic, in a videogame stuff has to be speedy enough to match with the limits of the action. And I loved the bit where she showed how completely 100% even frame amounts can make stuff have less impact, how removing just one frame from the fist buildup made a punch attack so much better looking!

A funny anecdote: apparantly they went a bit overboard with the first attempt at jiggle physics. They had the problem of too many frames in an idle animation, ENTIRELY because of the boobs! So lol, its nice to know they put the effort into making everything look more realistic and actiony, even the silly fanservice bits.

Oh and at the end she reccommends some sites that archive fighting game animation sheets! Even professionals still love playing and researching other games for reference! zweifuss.ca and fightersgeneration.com

For no reason out of nowhere, I’m gonna ramble headcanons/how to combine the dub and sub into a better dub ideas for the second digimon movie, Hurricane Touchdown! Aka the one that was awkwardly stitched on as part of the first movie in english, aka ‘that one where lopmon is fuckin terrifying and also american’ (oh and I know its a nitpick, but to me it makes sense to call it the second movie instead of the third?? the greymon/parrotmon fight bit wasnt a ‘movie’, it was the pilot episode for Adventure in japan. its more like an ova I think, but i dunno if the company ever gave it an official status in the movie listings...)

ANYWAY WHATEVER WHERE WAS I oh yeah Bunni Really Liked This Dumb Movie And Wished It Was Its Own Season And Kinda Wants To Make A Dumb Rpgmaker Game Of It So, ideas!

* Well... couldnt it have worked as its own season...? One of the only flaws I can agree was a significant problem was that ‘willis steals the spotlight’, tho i dont really think thats totally bad since I liked him a lot more than the 02 protagonists. But yeah, honestly you could kinda have the same movie if all the 02 characters were written out, or if Willis met with literally any group of digidestined from any series, or even completely new ones. The dub made it worse by writing out all of the scenes with the Adventure digidestined, thus writing out the 02 kids’s entire motivation for the whole plot :P And i think honestly this plot could have been a whole season if it was stretched out, and if it had original characters replacing the 02 ones. It would be unique and odd to have our protagonist be a super loner sassy asshole tamer who outright refuses to team up with anyone, fearing they’d just get vanished away by this giant terrifying digimon that’s stalking him. If the backstory was revealed slowly throughout the season it could be a very good mystery to keep us all hooked! And if there were more scenes about the other kids breaking past willis’s shell and becoming a team, rather than just ‘davis cries a joke, suddenly everything is over’. plus there’d naturally be stuff to pad out the season length if we had to be introduced to these characters and give them all their own amount of screentime and development. Or, seriously, if this was just like... a longer movie, or a mini season like Tri... Maybe we could have had the 02 kids in it and not had them feel overshadowed and useless? Maybe everyone aside from Davis could get some screentime too :P

* Maybe it could be an excuse to show off all the armor and jogress digivolutions that this series canonically has yet never used? I think it was budget constraints or not enough time in the season or something, but there was a HUGE amount of unused designs for every potential combination of crests! And all they ever got was to be trading cards and occasionally enemies in miscellanous videogames. (Oh and Lynxmon got to be an enemy in Tamers and Frontier, probably cos its the one that looks coolest animated lol!) Oh and it was odd how Cyber Sleuth seemed to retcon some previously-unrelated digimon into the Imperialdramon of Silphymon. Now Valkyrmon is something Silphymon can digivolve into, and shares the same character model even. Odd! But man it would be cool if it did get officially added to the 02 version of the evo line!

* Potential for giving Yolei and Cody a bigger plot role in the whole thing, maybe Yolei is trying to research into the mystery digimon cos she’s the computer expert? they almost never let her actually do computer stuff compared to how much izzy got to do in the first season :P It could also help thread the plot together a bit! Like, have various scenes of the different kids finding out that the Adventure kids have gone missing in different ways- Yolei could be freaking out cos she cant contact izzy, maybe Cody had a study session with joe and arrived to find his entire house empty.  And maybe have a lil plot of Yolei being like ‘oh god how can we do this without izzy’ and being able to prove herself and gain confidence instead of just living in his shadow. Also she’d just be useful in finding out stuff about mysterious dissappearances that happened in the past, via the internet, and maybe the gang could encounter willis in less of an accidental way and more like they were actively trying to track down wendigomon and THEN bump into him by accident? I dunno, just make them actually DO more. Do more to save their own damn friends. Not just the willis and davis road trip show where davis only exists to tell willis how to do various digivolution stuff :P

* I feel bad that my brain kinda defaults to calling him Willis, even though I still have no clue why they changed it from Wallace. ‘Hey this american name could be a different american name!’ I think its just stuck in my head cos i watched the dub version so much... So lol I dunno, smash them both into canon! Make him wallace but kokomon calls him willis since they’re this child-minded monster thing. (Could also keep calling terriermon gummymon and maybe even mistake the 02 kids for various people wallace used to know as a kid?)

* Dub-added stuff to keep and to toss out! I like the idea of Willis being the person izzy talked to on the internet in the previous movie. I dont like the idea that he somehow created diaboromon! You could write that out and still keep the scene, maybe even still have willis saying ‘its all my fault’ because he’s just recently lost his digimon partner to a mysterious virus and he thinks maybe the same thing is happening here/that kokomon is causing the chaos rather than diaboromon. Oh, and I like the idea of it being stated to be a virus corrupting a digimon, rather than just being... never explained wtf happened. A virus that’s the remnants of diaboromon would even make sense, though the continuity order in the dub kinda makes it impossible. (SO MANY PLOT HOLES lol)

* PLAYABLE FLASHBACKS YO and/or maybe an omake type epilogue thing after the ending like srsly give us a chance to play as willis with both his digimon and how not dead and not evil they are An epilogue would be good as a way to add some more fanon-y headcanons and ideas for what happened after kokomon came back. (or if he even did) I feel like a lot of people complain that the dub ‘changed too much’ by confirming that kokomon came back, and that somehow a happy ending is worse than an ambiguous bittersweet one. Which we didnt even have in the first place cos we saw kokomon’s digiegg in the sub anyway, even if we didnt see it hatching. BUT ANYWAY My idea for keeping that bittersweet element even if we have Happy Kokomon Is Alive Time! Its.... the dub! Or rather taking literally something that was actually just a shameless footage-chopping lazyness XD Cos the dub just showed kokomon in endigomon form in the added scene where he totally came back. Making it rather obvious even to kid-bunni that it was a dub edit, lol! BUT WHAT IF THAT! What if the bittersweet aspect is that kokomon is forever changed by the whole experience? Still having aftereffects of being corrupted, even though he isnt evil anymore. So his evolution line is still a super scary virusized one and he’s stuck unable to de-digivolve from champion level. So we could have funny/cute/sad scenes of Willis trying to live with this very large very destructive digimon, kinda like that one episode of tamers. How do I hide a seven foot tall cyborg rabbit man from my mom?? And it could also be bittersweet because kokomon’s spent so long frozen at the time when he was taken away, and now he has to cope with his two best friends having grown up without him. He’s still this childlike personality stuck in a scary body, even if he’s not dangerous anymore. And it could be very stressful for everyone involved, but also heartwarming! I mean imagine giant scary kokomon being all shy and holding his tiny big brother’s hand while crossing the street! Imagine him hugging willis and squishing him! XD So it could just be a short epilogue episode of willis and partners fighting some sort of villain of the week, and showing slice-of-life antics with them. Just establishing that their problems arent all over yet, but also that they’ll probably be strong enough to deal with it, after all they’ve managed to survive so far. And maybe some cute mini scenes of them still keeping in touch with the 02 kids as pen pals! And maybe even something like an emotional scene of willis finally introducing his digimon partners to his parents, after failing at keeping them secret? Itd be nice to see his parents tbh, i always wondered what they were like! (or does he have a single mother? since he was only talking about her during the movie)

* Random but: personality headcanons for terriermon and lopmon/kokomon! We honestly dont really get much of a personality for terriermon in this movie, he just seems like a sort of generic nice cute partner compared to the Tamers terriermon’s snarky personality. And, naturally, we dont really learn anything about kokomon’s real personality, considering the circumstances :P So! Headcanons! I always headcanoned kokomon as being a really sweet, kind and shy lil babbu before all this tragedy happened. Someone who always relied on his brother and his human friend, so being separated from them hit him extra hard. I feel like if terriermon was the one who was infected he would have had his eldritch horror take a very different form, whatever the virus is its something that feeds on the personal anxieties of the digimon it infected. Also, yeah, it’d just be cuter this way in my hypothetical epilogue fanfic ideas! Scaredy-cat wendigomon!! :3 And I kinda feel that maybe terriermon could stand out more from tamers-terriermon if he wasnt just the more level-headed equivelant, but if he was MORE OF THAT! Like... a more grumpy loner matt-type personality. After all the tragedy that happened to him ans willis he’s become quite toughened and determined to protect his tamer even though he’s too small to make an impact against his giant infected brother. And maybe like how willis has stopped having human friends, terriermon has become more cold too, and they could perhaps have more conflicts together because of it? And like.. the reason terriermon never digivolved to champion could be because of this rift between them, rather than just ‘literally the only reason the 02 kids are here is so that they can tell willis how to use his digivice’. Like seriously HOW DID GUMMYMON DIGIVOLVE TO TERRIERMON THEN?? Plus it’d just have more dynamic to their friendship and flesh the story out more. It could prove how absolutely fire-forged their friendship is, that these two grumpy sassmasters that even sass at each other still care so deeply even if they suck at showing it. Also the idea of a badass tiny terriermon is just aweome to me. Imagine him with a cape flowing in the wind, and sunglasses at night, and then imagine someone who feels like that even when theyre not wearing them. Thats how movie-terriermon always felt to me during the scenes of him fighting wendigomon! And I cheered a whole load at him digivolving and being able to fight toe-to-toe with wendigomon in the BEST FIGHT SCENE IN THE SERIES with the running up walls and GUN PUNCH TO THE FACE and just EVERYTHINGGGG the animation in this movie was too strong

* have i mentioned that i love this movie

* a lot