the opening lines of the shadow of the erdtree trailer remind me a LOT of a certain quote from another game:

and with this in mind, i really hope that the direction they go with miquella is less like the manipulative griffith-esque archetype some people are theorizing, and more like N’s characterization in pokemon black and white: someone very intelligent and powerful but naïve, whose honest attempts at creating a better world might bring about more destruction in the end.

you know, an interpretation of ct that I don't see that I personally really love is that she's a fuck up. like yes she's cool and she has some good fight scenes, but a huge part of her character is that she makes mistakes. the mistakes that she makes are ones that on their own aren't the end of the world, but she keeps making these little mistakes, and they eventually add up until she's out of room to make any more.

a really good example of this phenomenon in action is the actions she took leading up to her final confrontation with carolina and tex.

strike one, she thought she saw something in the water, but when asked by the leader what it was, she brushed it off as nothing when even if it had been nothing, it would've been smart to tell him what she thought she saw.

strike two, she didn't sense or notice florida's presence when the leader did, and she looks at the leader twice, once as she pulled out her magnums, and again after she did a scan of the room, almost like she was looking at him for guidance before he finds florida and takes him out with one good axe throw.

strike three, she couldn't convince the leader to leave when they had the chance to get away, and her cheap tricks were not enough to hold off either tex or carolina in a fight. they were only good for incapacitating her opponents enough for her to get away, which doesn't work when she has no escape.

ct is not tex, or carolina, or south. she is not a one woman army who can get herself out of trouble when she's stuck in tough situations. she needs people who can watch her back, she need a team who can cover her when she does mess up, and the leader and his team were not those people. she couldn't bring herself to trust them, and they couldn't bring themselves to trust her, and that cost all of them their lives.

Not too sure if you keep up with jp twst updates but have you seen the new Halloween update with the fox dude, Honest Fellow? (Yes that's his name, I'm just gonna call him honest John cause his name's an adjective). I am seriously loving how expressive he is, his devious expressions are so good

i am keeping very up to date with what y'all are doing over there and so far i've been delighted by the idea that, while half of the school's named population is experiencing a prolonged hatecrime in a french catholic school, the other half will be running away to nonconsensual join a circus led by a catboy and nick wilde's humansona. i don't know enough about him to have any major thoughts, but rollo was so fun and it seems like they'll be going just as hard for this event as they did for the glorious masquerade. any event with an ortho ssr is bound to slap and i have no reason to doubt that honest fellow (because i refuse to disrespect such a brave naming choice) will contribute to that.

i don't usually read translations for events but i think i might at least find a summary or something, this time. there's just something about a deceptively charming ringleader with a habit of luring people into his pocket-reality fantasy land that feels like it would go really well with what i do here.

rereading my fav lawlu doujinshi bc I want to make myself cry to sleep

the realisation that i have a weird music taste compared to the average person my age is actually world shattering

Gengar strikes me as someone who knows he’s a piece of shit and is trying to embrace that. Emphasis on trying. Obviously there’s the fact that he called his group “Team Meanies” and bragged at people’s doorsteps that he was evil and gonna take over the world and stuff. He terrorizes Pokemon into joining his team and doesn’t even seem to respect his own teammates. The entire fugitive arc is him trying to scapegoat the hero for his crimes.

But two things stick out to me.

The first is that Gengar seems to think that being selfish and cruel is human nature.

In the dream eater sequence, Gengar talks about exposing hero and “showing what they’re like inside” purely on the grounds of them being human. I think that’s pretty self explanatory. He thinks that all humans are bad people. He’s speaking from experience, because if HE’S bad then surely all humans are, right?

The second is that Gengar… honestly comes across as self loathing to me, even if he tries to own how shitty he is. Just look at his dialogue during the crowd scene.

This dialogue combined with this expression come across as cracks of guilt to me. He knows what he did and he knows exactly what he’s doing now. And despite everything, I think he hates that. He hates what he did to Gardevoir. He knows it was horrible of him to abandon her after sacrificing herself for him. And he hates that. But he can’t admit it.

I think Gengar trying to take pride in his cruelty is deflection and denial. He couldn’t help what he did to Ninetales and Gardevoir, it was inevitable! He’s human, and all humans are selfish. He can’t change or control that. All he can do is double down over and over while trying (and failing) to escape the consequences. He can’t fathom the idea that a human can be a good person, so he’s not even gonna try to change.

And he hates hero because they are the antithesis to that statement. They want and try to do good wherever they can, and Gengar can’t believe that after learning that they’re human. He projects onto them, insisting that they have to be a bad person, because they’re human. Just like him. He can’t be good. They shouldn’t be good. Because if being good comes so easily to them, then what does that say about him?

And seeing Gardevoir in hero’s dreams talking about how much she cared for him, with sympathy leaking from hero’s heart, shatters that illusion he shrouded himself in.

Prisma, did you know kirby was white before being pink?

Interesting cause in Japan he was always pink haha. Someone in America forgot to give the boy his colors

It's not necessarily a knock on ppl but man there's something about being in a fandom and seeing people who's lineup of favorite ships are all the most. Like. Hetbait ships? You know what I mean?

And it's like one or two you can go "yeah I get it, there's at least some canon backing to it" but when that's all they're into and it leaves you going like. Where's your imagination dude these are all so... basic. Like it's not even necessarily that they're straight ships it's that they're the most surface level things you could come up with. And some of this is dependent on the way they treat their ships ofc but still

And its not even that they come across as anti-queer (at least outwardly) its just the general feeling that the idea of something that isn't a heterosexual romance even crosses their minds. They live in a little vanilla bubble, and you're watching them floating along, wondering how they can't be so so bored

they should invent skin that doesnt make you want to rip your own face off

Gonna get spicy for a second and say that everyone loves spewing hate about narcissistic (NPD) parents and how awful parents with personality disorders are, but if someone were to make a post with the exact same cadence about ADHD parents they'd get shot in public at first sight

hmm. miku expo 2024 setlist dropped. not sure what i expected but... damn. lowkey disappointing selection.

lmao this is also margarita voice claim since he sounds sorta like jake the dog lol

i love to fucking imagine anton and marg was shopping and just..fucking anton accidentally breaks the clock marg just bought

Shiver to Marina in Suffer No Fools: Your voice is annoying.

Marina:

YoUr VoIcE iS aNnOyInG.

if it's any consolation i think i have a similar problem for different reasons. it's not always someone fictional but i get these hyperfixations with men to the point where it kind of messes up my life bc i'm just thinking about them all the time. your posts about this have actually made me realize that i probably started doing this bc i moved around so much growing up that i missed out on normal coming-of-age experiences and never got close enough to someone to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. it was a way of coping with that lonely lack of intimacy i guess.

thank you so much for sending me this message 💖 feels good to know I'm not alone

it's not always fictional characters for me either (it's just uncomfortable to talk about the rest you know). and what you said is kind of true for me as well, we didn't move around a lot but I still had that experience for other reasons, and I'm sure that made it worse.

if you ever want to talk about this more feel free to message me 💖

Took me a while to realize but I can see similarities in how Asuka seems to process grief and how Guts from Berserk also processed his grief after the Eclipse. They both get so overwhelmed by the wrong that happened to them (father's hospitalization vs the Eclipse and a lifetime of misery) their reaction isn't to seek comfort in others or help/protect their loved one who needs them after the tragedy, it's to go off and inflict their pain on others to self soothe, as if that'll release the feeling from their minds.

The difference is that Guts was called out for this by Rickert and Godo. He needed to snap out of wanting to prioritize ridding his own pain to remember Casca needed him, and that Casca even in the state she was in was all the good in his life who went through the same experience with him. Guts had to remember he loves Casca more than he wants to self destruct. Like Godo told him he was a sword called fear with cracks in it. He feared sitting with his pain and grief and seeing it on the person he loved after so much violation. He feared vulnerability.

Asuka doesn't do this reevaluatation and has no one to call her out for her self destructive coping canonically. She can't sit with anything bad or face looking at it on a loved one either. That's too bad and helpless of a feeling. She's just as much made of fear (primarily from any helplessness as much as violations of her inner ethics) which fuels her anger, but her one personal attachment to her father who needs her isn't enough to make her want to reevaluate what she does at all. Instead his tragedy is the permission she needs to self destruct and destroy in the process, not like Guts who always told himself everything was for Casca and the fallen Hawks, who always reminded himself of the pain to justify the bloodletting.

Unlike Guts I think she'd be stubborn even accepting to listen to someone pointing her behavior out. Though her anger toward Feng did start out carrying a reminder this vengeance is for Dad even if it kills her in 5, even in 5's branching narratives that excuse falls apart when she continues in the tournament for her own pleasure during her route. The moment vengeance is achieved critically injured Dad is out of her mind. Her behavior during 6 repeats this process, preferring to hurt herself and others rather than sit to process a shitty feeling over her and the world's situation. Like Guts in this state she pushes away anyone and everyone else including any comforts because the anger isn't resolved, the fear isn't resolved, the pain isn't resolved.

They're both used to everyone being against them and having to fight for survival until they found joy in it as a side effect. And because of that independence born from isolation when something like the tragedies that happened takes place they put resolving their pain not on sharing with others but into scorching the earth along with themselves.

I don't say this either to imply they're exactly alike or that they have enough similarities to make a true character comparison because they absolutely don't. There's also some stuff I'm leaving out simply because Guts is a far more complex character in ways where there's nothing from Asuka to compare against (I would say Kazuya is the closest, more fitting Tekken comparison for substituting Guts vs Asuka style notes). I just find it interesting that even across wildly different stories the outline for an angry, self destructive, terrified person who thinks self destruction makes them strong and puts them in control uses a lot of the same foundation. And the contrast in their depths really shows how far you can push the concept depending on what you want or need for the character.