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endusviolence · 3 months

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Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?

I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?

In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".

Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.

This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.

Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.

The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]

There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.

This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]

As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.

But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?

Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.

#transgender #trans history #transsexual #transphobia #Magnus Hirschfeld #holocaust #holocaust denial #book burning #j.k. rowling #jk rowling #just in case you missed what i mean by all this: go fuck yourself anon :)#trans people have always existed #and we will always exist #if you really wanna pick a fight with me over well-documented history then you better bring in some sources to back your shit #queer history #queer #lgbt+#lgbta+#lgbt #lgbt history #edit: i finally got around to those damn image IDs. i am so very sorry for totally forgetting that's my bimbo moment of the month #also real quick i thought about adding an image of the actual building but the only one i can find has a Nazi parade in front of it #it was taken the day of the book burning raid and honestly if i were to include it then i'd add it to the first few paragraphs #and i think the story's better told when you uphold the hope Magnus Hirschfeld and all the researchers he worked with had #also keeps being brought up: yes Hirschfeld was a eugenicist. it was a popular belief set that was only discredited after WW2 #Hirschfeld died in 1935. he literally didn't live long enough to see science turn against those beliefs and practices #considering how he changed his mind on transitions i like to think he would've changed his mind on eugenics too if he'd lived

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lunar-fey · 11 months

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& thank god. for medication btw

#the fey speaks #well actually i say that in a non xtian way to begin with. but really thank your fellow man <3 #i won't see effects from the pain meds for prob a week or two #but was having bad guts pain and took the guts pain med.#And What Do You Know. My Guts Don't Hurt Now !#i KEEP forgetting i have those #the one problem with is that it works by. ahem. loosening my guts. which you can imagine. what that causes.#it does also make me feel kind of. weird?#like not in a bad way #but idk how to describe it #i think its just that i can't feel my guts?#usually i feel them All The Time even when they don't hurt and i'm not nauseous #(btw nauseous is a bad word. its nausea. why can't it be nauseas or nauseaus.)#but i feel like. idk. kind of hollowed out? but again not really bad sensation...

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porrigens · 7 months

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💤💤

#p5 #persona 5 #persona 5 royal #ryuji sakamoto #sakamoto ryuji #pegoryu #Guys. I completely forgot to post #i’ll tell you ahat my bf sent me tiktoks of edits used with my art and i was thinking Why only those few…AND I REALIZED I HAVE A TUMBLR PAGE #Guys im a bit stupid..#i have bajillion backlogs i keep forgetting to post.#MORE PEGORYUS!!!!!!!!!#throws up everywhere

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poorly-drawn-mdzs · 7 months

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"See you tomorrow"

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 4 [prev parts]

#better drawn mdzs #MDZS Disco Elysium AU #mdzs au #Lan wangji #wei wuxian #yiling laozu #Happy Belated Halloween!#digital art #Thank you all for your patience as I drove myself into a madness only known by those lost at seas alone.#I put a lot of time into this one! It's not perfect but I am very happy with it + I am so happy to put down the tablet pen.#Digital art has some nice features but I'm sticking with traditional! I need a month to recover from the 2+ weeks of torture.#Okay lets talk about the AU and the comic now #Disco elysium has some of the best existential-horror-dream sequences I have ever seen.#The dialogue here is heavily inspired by The Final Dream - A scene I'd love to talk about more were it not so heavy with spoilers.#My AU is a lot more complex than a simple character swap but I really felt like LWJ + YLLZ fit this scene.#The final dream is about being unable to move on from a lost love. From something You made holy. From something You ruined.#It is about realizing that no matter how smart you are or what you offer or how you try to change -#You will never be able to turn back time. You will never ever be able to fix what is broken. That you also have been broken for a long time #You are a fuck-up who worships the nail covered ground of someone who did not want to be holy. And even though it hurts-#You cannot let this nightmare go. The pain keeps the love close. It is worse to forget. You promised to remember.#WWX died thinking LWJ disliked him. LWJ lost someone he thought was revolted by his love.

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canisalbus · 7 months

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Everyone's talking about how cute raccoons are, and while i agree wholeheartedly, all i can think about it the time i was at camp and i woke up to raccoons in our tent cause one was patting my ass through my cot, and then another grabbed one of the other girls' hands and she screamed and our councilor had to literally sweep the raccoons out of our tent with the broom she grabbed to hit intruders with lol. we made extra sure everything was zipped all the way closed after that

#I keep forgetting that raccoons are an actual existing animal that people come across like it's no big deal #as you may know I'm from Finland and we don't have raccoons here so to me they feel very ~exotic~#same for opossums and skunks #the american trash mammal trifecta #also armadillos those are extremely cool #“patting my ass through the cot” how rude #answered #anonymous #I've said this before but would love to see an opossum one day they are Such Creatures

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cerise-on-top · 4 months

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Hugging, Kissing and Cuddling HCs for König

I'm trying to see him in another light again after everything I've seen about him, so I decided I'd write something fluffy and nice for him. And then came the realization I never wrote some HCs like these for him in my original posts, so I decided I'd change that! He's Austrian, so naturally I have to love him!

When it comes to hugging someone, König is a bit hesitant. Considering he’s not the most physically affectionate person out there, it’s almost an honor to be receiving an unprompted hug from him. Whether his hugs are long or short depends on the occasion: If he’s proud of you for accomplishing something, then the hug will be rather short lived. Though, he might pick you up and spin you around until you’re dizzy. If you’re sad and need some comfort then his hugs could last a while. He’s not the best with words, he prefers to listen to other people, but if he knows a hug is what usually helps you then he’s willing to do so. Despite being a big and strong lad his hugs are surprisingly gentle, he’s worried about crushing you. He could put his all into them, but then you’d likely end up with a few broken ribs and he doesn’t want that to happen. König is also surprisingly warm, so receiving a hug from him is a rare, but nice experience. Although he does go rigid at the beginning, not knowing what to do, but relaxes into the hug eventually.

Again, he’s not a very physically affectionate person, but isn’t opposed to the occasional peck on the cheek or on your lips either. There is some anxiety whether you’d actually want a kiss from him or not, so he doesn’t kiss you very often, even if you do reassure him that it’s quite alright. He’s a bit tense at first when he presses a kiss to your lips, but calms down eventually. It’s especially bad during the beginning of your relationship, but he’s since gotten better at being calm about it. Since there’s a good chance he’s taller than you he loves giving you a kiss on the forehead. It’s a small but sweet gesture. He doesn’t need to bend down entirely to reach you but he still gets to be affectionate with you. However, if you’re on the taller side, or just as tall as he is, then he’d love to receive kisses to his temple from you. It makes him smile every time you do it. If he’s in the mood for receiving a kiss then he’ll lay his head on your shoulder and nudge you a bit. Or try to get his head in your closer vicinity. Kind of like that one bunny video where the bunny stretches to receive some kisses.

Cuddles with him are a bit more common than hugs actually. However, he refuses to lay down on top of you. If you’re shorter and weaker than him then there’s no chance he’ll put his weight on you, he’s just that afraid of hurting you. If you’re taller or just more muscular, then he might, but he’s still a rather heavy lad. Most he’ll do is put his head on your shoulder while you’re cuddling in bed and are both lying down. Although it’d be a lie to say he doesn’t want to be held. König is alright with being the one to hold you, but sometimes he would prefer to be the little spoon as well. That urge gets especially bad if you’re roughly the same size as him. Sometimes just nuzzling into your chest does the trick for him as well, though. Loves it when you run your fingers through his hair as he does so. Another thing he adores is you sleeping on his chest as he holds you. He gets to hold you close, he gets to protect you and he gets to doze off a bit himself, it’s bliss to him. Sometimes he leans down to press a kiss to your head and accidentally wakes you up like that. He feels bad about it and apologizes profusely, but does chuckle a bit when he sees your disheveled hair and your tired expression that shows you just woke up.

#cod #cod x reader #konig #könig #konig x reader #könig x reader #he actually kind of scares me these days even if I don't want that to happen in the slightest so I'm trying to desensitize myself again #I know people always joke about fanon könig vs canon könig but I think I will write him a bit softer with his s/o again #just to combat all those awful things I've seen about him that I don't want to be true and that I also want to forget about #könig is a big lad so I knew from the beginning I wanted him to be good at hugging because this is self indulgent #I feel like if it weren't for his anxiety he'd be much much cuddlier #because that's the case with me even if I have other things going on as well #and what is a funny character you write about if not another piece of yourself?#I've put so much of myself into some of these characters and yet people keep requesting them so I must be doing something right #it's more fun that way as well when you put your characters through something you've gone through. more relatable too #but I think that's something pretty much every writer does. that's why some requests are so difficult to write #I got one about marrying Laswell and Nikolai and that was a difficult request for me because the last wedding I went to #was my parents' and that was almost 18 years ago. man time flies I was 4 years old back then #so naturally I don't remember much either. But I tried and that's what's important!#either way please enjoy this piece of fluff I wrote today!

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aroaceleovaldez · 5 months

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i stand by that a better, more sensible, and more intriguing plot for TSATS would have been, instead of retconning literally everything:

Bob is dead (because he was very explicitly absorbed/killed by Tartarus Himself in House of Hades, alongside Damasen), and nobody is going into Tartarus to save him. He made his sacrifice and is gone. However. Remember how the Titans, including Bob, were just kind of kicking around for several years? Particularly. On a cruise ship full of mortals. And Bob happened to be kicking around in general for an extra year versus all the other Titans. And he mythologically sometimes has a mortal demigod son who partook in the Calydonian Boar Hunt (Dryas of Calydon). Yeah.

So turns out, Bob/Iapetus leaves behind a demigod (demititan?) child. And because Nico was pretty much his only friend, he named Nico his child's godfather. And while he's not being left in charge of the child, as a son of Hades and godfather to this kid, Nico is duty-bound to fulfill Bob's last will and go find this like 2 year old to make sure they're safe. So Nico has to undertake this very unusual quest (that raises many questions, such as "demititans are a thing?" and "DOES THIS MEAN THERE'S POTENTIALLY MORE-?!" and "SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED ABOUT THIS?") and is kind of freaking out because. He's the son of Hades! He's notoriously bad with living things, and animals, and definitely small children! Even if he does find this kid and assure they're safe, he is the last person who should be undergoing any kind of quest involving even potentially having to babysit. Fortunately, his boyfriend is the human embodiment of sunshine and calmness and good vibes, and also once helped a nymph give birth, so he feels Marginally More Confident in theoretical demititan babysitting and offers to come along on this Epic Journey of Figuring Out What In Hades' Name Is Up With This Demititan Baby Business.

Proceed with wholesome epic shenanigans quest of Nico and Will scurrying around trying to locate this random OP baby while Nico has an existential crisis about the nature of his powers because he doesn't want to let Bob down! Both for Hades Kid Honor Reasons and because Bob was his friend! But what if he's destined to fail this quest just because of who he is? Because he's simply not built for hanging out with the living/mortals? And Will reassuring him that He Will Probably Not Traumatize The Weird OP Titan Baby And It'll Be Fine, and simultaneously getting a peek into the weird other life Nico leads hanging out with immortals much more than the average demigod, which Nico considers his norm. Bonus shenanigans of both of them getting caught off-guard and culture shocked from where each other's respective worlds (Nico's mostly-immortal versus Will's mostly-mortal) cross over and learning to navigate those for each other - Nico finally starting to make some mortal connections and get glimpses at modern mortal American life, and Will trying not to get his brain literally incinerated while Nico's happily casually catching up with some of his old friends who happen to be literal gods.

#pjo #riordanverse #nico di angelo #will solace #solangelo #long post //#LISTEN I JUST THINK WE DONT NEED TO BE RETCONNING THINGS WHEN THERE IS A HIGHLY INTRIGUING MYTH RIGHT THERE #listen. *listen.* Iapetus in myth has a demigod child? and we're in the series? that's all about demigods?#and had titans running around for 4 years? some primarily on a giant ship mostly full of mortals?#and Iapetus himself was running around for closer to like 5 years?#I AM JUST SAYING. that is enough time. and the right conditions. that there are perhaps demititans now.#that alone is a fascinating plot set-up that ties in basically all previous series inherently and has a reasonable starting point #of *course* Nico would be named Bob's child's godfather!#of *course* Nico would consider it a very important personal duty to see out Bob's final will and go on some quest about it!#and under those conditions it makes *perfect sense* for Nico to want to bring Will along! and that he would be very helpful on said quest!#bringing along a lot of skills and abilities in areas that Nico lacks! that are crucial for a quest like that!#also then immediately the plot becomes Will reassuring Nico about his powers being cool and not evil and him being spooky is okay #while Will is also trying to not literally have his brain melt cause Nico's casually introducing him to a trio of death gods or something #forgetting that Will cannot look upon a god's true form #and Will's dragging Nico across the US while Nico is struggling to keep up cause Will forgot that Nico's not American and not from that era #its cute! it's interesting! it immediately begs the question of a next-gen series focusing on a main cast of demititan kids #dont go back to Tartarus that's lame and overdone and ruins a ton of stuff. dont retcon everything that also ruins a ton #give us the fluffy roadtrip comedy that they clearly wanted to write instead anyways #you can even keep the elements of Nico feeling out of his depth and Will constantly on the verge of death. except it makes sense this time.#and it's kind of funny cause Nico's just freaking out over babysitting and it highlights how much tankier Nico is vs Will #even just in casual interactions. yeah Nico can casually look upon a god's true form. dont worry about it #meanwhile Will is slowly collecting sunglasses the entire trip and layering them up for whenever Nico introduces him to another deity

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stemmmm · 5 months

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Close to a year and four rewrites later, I present to you...

Stem's Thoughts on the Game Design of Harvest Moon on SNES

I’m not going to lie, if you don’t like farming sims, you won’t like this one. At their core, every farming sim (at least in the rpg genre) is nearly identical, and that’s because of this game. In a way, I might dare to say that Harvest Moon for the SNES is the perfect farming sim because it has every one of the usual elements in their most simplified form and it just works straight from the get-go. It works so well in fact, that after this game came out in 1996, four more entries to the series were released before the year 2000.

If you are someone who does like farming sims, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s simple and to the point, with a fast pace and enough random events and points of intrigue that the game kept me relatively engaged for my whole playthrough.

Also, by nature of this being the first game and therefore hard to cover concisely and by nature of taking so long to write this... it's long as hell! Enjoy! :) <3

I can’t say my appreciation of this game doesn’t come with a few caveats. I’ve intermittently played HM games all my life, starting with the GameBoy port (GB1) all the way to Pioneers of Olive Town, so while I don’t know exactly how the series has evolved, I’ve seen it at some of its earliest and at its latest. My vague childhood memories of GB1 (a game I didn’t own and didn’t play much of) were that it was pretty sparse and bland, so knowing that this original game was allegedly the same thing but with a little more content, I was expecting the bare minimum. I was prepared to never even be able to leave my farm, but the first thing the game did was shuttle me off to the nearby town and blocked the exit until I talked to everyone there.

(Maps of the town, mountain, and farm via The Spriters Resource)

You learn everything you need to know about the game right here at the beginning; Firstly, that this town is small as all hell and has hardly anyone in it aside from the five girls you can marry and their immediate family members. The next thing you’ll learn is that there’s a fence on your farm, and you need to be taking care of that. Of the few repetitive lines of dialogue any given person in town has to share with you on any given day, a fair amount are devoted to reminding you to fix your fence, to make sure it’s in good repair. There was just a big storm so watch out! Remember to check it every day! Are you chopping enough wood? Because you’ll need it for that fence!

I’m being dramatic of course, you aren’t reminded about it that much, though the thin variation of dialogue means it comes up a lot. The emphasis on your fence does exist, and it isn’t for nothing: while it doesn’t matter as much if all you do is grow crops– if you keep animals, the game tells you that the ideal thing to do for yours and the animal’s happiness is to put the animals outside to graze. Animal feed bought from the livestock shop will keep them fed, but it's nothing compared to fresh grass grown on your farm. You can’t even buy animals without a certain amount of grass planted! And sure, you can cut the grass to store for later, but it’s at its best straight out of the ground. However, the way the game is programmed, the animals only eat when the day rolls over, so putting animals outside for the day and taking them in at night isn’t an option, and on top of that, there’s things that come out at night that can hurt your animals. This is where your fence comes in.

The Utility of Fences

At the entrance to your farm is a cluster of buildings: your house, a small lumber shed, a barn, coop, and silo, a tool shed, and an old, dried up well. Just barely surrounding all of these is a little wooden fence that looks more like a row of upright logs than anything else. Despite this farm having presumably been abandoned, the fence is in perfect repair. You’ll quickly discover that the fence as it is won’t work out; there’s hardly space to plant anything within it, and with the well dried up, you’re forced to hop it to get to a water source to fill up your watering can. It’s pretty clear that you’ll need to expand your fence, and it’s easy to do with all of the tree stumps littering the massive field that it’s blocking off.

On top of needing to expand the range of your fence, the individual planks eventually will rot away and leave useless stumps. They show up more frequently after rain or a large storm. The posts don’t rot away completely so they have to be manually removed, but replacing them is as simple as smashing the old post with a hammer or ax and popping a new post in its place. It becomes a very natural part of your daily routine to run a lap around the farm’s perimeter before you go to bed to make sure everything looks safe and secure. It’s a good way to ensure your animals are put away and debris is cleared out, too! It slotted very nicely into my daily schedule until a certain point.

With how much time you have to spend hopping over the logs to get to the rest of the area too large to fence in, you might be tempted to leave one out of place for easier traversal. When night comes, it’s clear why that would be a mistake. Sometimes when you go to bed, you’ll hear your dog barking. It’s a small detail, one that took me a long time to notice because I didn’t always play with the sound on. There are wild dogs that prowl around the wilderness surrounding your farm, and only at night do they dare to come close. Your dog, if left outside, isn't able to do anything other than warn you of their presence if they show up. There’s nothing to notice during the daytime if it happens, unless you happened to leave one of your animals outside. There was one night that I left my chickens outside, having thought my fence was in perfect order and repair. I went to bed and heard the dog barking, followed by a horrible crunch. When I went out in the morning, I saw where my chicken had been before, it had been replaced by a pile of feathers. On the north side of my farm was a rotted fence post I’d failed to fix.

The Reality of Fences

After losing my chicken, a cluster of pixels on my screen it may have been, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my animals outside. I didn’t want to take a risk again, the sound and sight of feathers was upsetting enough. On a more logical note, the chickens didn’t even lay eggs if left outside so there was no value in it. Cows were a pain to put back inside the barn too, because of some silliness with the game’s collision. As much of a disappointment as it was to not have my animals roam around, it was just easier. At the time, I was focusing on upgrading my house anyways, so I didn’t have time to take care of my animals outside where time would pass when I could use that time gathering wood, and everything I had was being saved up for the house so I didn’t have any extra materials to repair my fence with. My fence was all rotting away. Because it was inconvenient for getting to my crops, I started smashing all the old posts as they went, too. That’s when I noticed something: the wild dog wasn’t coming anymore.

I didn’t pay much attention to it until I was looking up a completely different mechanic and discovered a forum explaining how the fences were broken. Rotted posts attracted the wild dog, they said. It didn’t matter if you had gaps in your fence, or even a fence at all–in fact no fence was the best kind to have because the mere existence of posts that could rot was a liability.

I was hesitant at first to test this concept, after all there wasn’t much I could gain from it. My chickens wouldn’t lay outside, and my cows would be too challenging to get back in if the forecast called for rain. The thing that got me to finally try it was when I was trying to hatch more chickens. My coop felt like a nightmare to navigate due to its current population. I wanted less animals inside that I had to feed, so I threw a couple chicks outside–they weren’t laying yet anyways. Lo and behold, the dog didn’t come. More days passed and more animals were left outside, and it never came. My fence had rotted until there was nothing left at all. No dogs could ever come to my farm again. And I realized that the game’s own insistence on its mechanics was all a lie.

How You’re Told To Play - How The Game Lies

Of course, my animals didn’t stay outside. For a minute it was fun having a crowd of cows milling about while I tended to my crops, but letting them wander free and uninhibited made it impossible to find and milk all of them without any trouble, and there were the rainy days to watch out for. After the novelty wore off, they went back inside and stayed there. The thing is, that didn’t make a single bit of difference in how much they liked me compared to how they were living in the barn. On top of that, they didn’t seem to care whether I was feeding them grass or store-bought food either, though I mostly stuck to the grasses since they were cheaper and easier to get. Nothing about how I was told to care for animals really mattered past feeding them every day, petting it and maybe brushing it, if it was a cow.

It gets worse. The most basic aspect of the game is the fact that time passes. The story takes place over 2 and a half years, running through each day until the end, and these days last from 6AM to 6PM according to the game’s own internal time setting. After 6PM, all of the shops aside from the bar will close and you lose the ability to sell anything as you’re told it would rot in the shipping bin overnight, so there’s nothing to do but sleep until the next day. Issue with this is that when the days stop at 6PM… they just stop. Time doesn’t flow anymore. The game doesn’t give you any kind of clock to know the exact time it is until after you’ve upgraded your house, so all you have to go by before that is the color of the environment and whether or not your character has played an animation to eat something (you’re automatically fed when you wake up, at noon, and at night). I discovered this because I was curious if I could actually see the wild dog by staying out, and left the game running for probably 20 minutes in real life only for nothing to happen. Because of the time freeze, the time after 6PM actually becomes really valuable for farm logistics. You can’t sell anything, no, but you can pull up all the weeds on the farm, water your crops, fix your fences, feed and care for animals if you hadn’t already, and harvest wood for fences and house upgrades which would have taken a lot of valuable time to get during shipping-hours. The only thing that gets in the way of doing all that is you running out of energy.

Your energy is what allows you to use your farming equipment like your ax or watering can. Running out of it doesn’t mean you fall unconscious or anything, but your character will play an animation of them stumbling over and will fail to use any tools. The most obvious fix to this is to simply go to bed, as sleeping gives you a full recharge. You can also, however, recharge it by going to the hot spring on the mountain, or by eating food bought at the restaurant in town or foraged for in the forest. You can’t tell easily how much is refilled, as there’s no visual indicator like a health bar, but you’re able to eat more than once, and jumping into the hot spring seems to count whether you did it or not more than how much time you spend in there, so you can hop in and out a couple of times and call it good.

Individually, time freezing at 6PM and energy being endlessly replenishable aren’t bad things. Even together, they’re not the worst. Having free time to focus on profitless chores is nice, and I think it’s important to be able to replenish your energy in case you have a limited amount of time to do things like for example, cut all of your grass before winter kills it. What makes an exploit out of these is the fact that the resources in the forest will never run out. Every time you re-enter the forest, all forage items and tree stumps are respawned. The infinite amount of forage makes for infinite energy refills, and could also make for an incredible money exploit if you didn’t have a very limited amount of time to ship things. You don’t have a limited amount of time to cut up tree stumps though. If you wanted to, you could run up to the forest after 6PM, chop every stump, then simply reload the area, and everything’s back. You can get all of the wood you would ever need to fully upgrade your house in one night. It’s a bit of a grind to do all at once, but it’s a grind you’d be doing over time anyways. It’s not the worst exploit in the world, since you still need money to pay for the house upgrade, but arguably because of how you have to focus your energy elsewhere for most of the game, the wood is the harder thing to get. Additionally, when the game has very little to do in both fall and winter due to the lack of crops, this exploit takes away just about any reason to play those two seasons other than to take care of animals. It’s an optional exploit of course–as all exploits are–but once you learn about it, it’s hard to resist the desire to get the grind out of the way all at once and mess up the pacing of the game.

The Charm of the Game

Learning that the fences were completely broken as a mechanic was a huge disappointment for me. From the moment I got a grasp on how the game was supposed to work, I wanted to eventually surround my whole field with fencing and keep my animals outside so I would have some life on my farm while I worked. I didn’t just want this, I was excited for it! This was something I’d never done in a farming sim that didn’t already manage putting animals in and out for you like Stardew Valley or newer Story of Seasons games do. My routine is always the same: I go into the barn and coop to tend to each of my animals, I take care of my crops outside, then run straight to town to talk to everyone, and go to bed. The change in routine that would come from taking care of the animals outside and patrolling the fence every night felt fresh to me. It made me feel that even though this was the first game of its kind, it was different and required new things of me. But in the end, I played it exactly the same.

Harvest Moon is still very different from all of the games that followed it, though. In many ways, it’s because it has less “stuff” in it– both in terms of items and things you have to do. But I wouldn’t say that it feels incomplete. Harvest Moon runs over the course of 2 and a half years before your work is evaluated. Until that happens, you have the ability to farm four different crops, you can raise both cows and chickens, you can upgrade your house to have more features, upgrade your working tools, build relationships with the townspeople to a small extent, go to town festivals that happen each year, and you can get married to one of the five girls living in town with whom you can have up to two children. Everything that you would come to expect as a fan of games like this is already here from the very first iteration. The most notable lack this game has, and one that seems to be completely unique to this game, is that there aren’t any crops in the fall or winter, which means that unless you have animals, there’s a whole half of the year that you don’t have anything to do. The game is clearly aware of this though, because in an average playthrough, this is where you’ll start to run into the story events.

There isn’t much of an overarching story in the game, past the general concept that you’ve run away from home to work on an abandoned farm. The conclusion rests on how good of a job you actually do. In between those two points are smaller events, usually tied to when you get tool upgrades or special ones for each of the romantic interests. The first event you’re likely to run into happens on the very last day of summer, where one of the woodsmen comes to your house in the morning to ask if you’re okay because he heard a huge crash at night and you should check your farm. What I found was that a tree in my field had fallen over, and its remaining stump had a big empty hole in it. When I inspected the stump, I was suddenly underground in a cave filled with loud and industrious music, and I was faced with two, little green people–Harvest Sprites, though I don’t know if they’re called that yet here. One asked me if my scythe worked well, and when I said yes, told me that they had made it and that I should check my shed tomorrow for a better one. Other tool upgrades are obtained in similar fashion; one comes from feeding a starving sprite a mushroom and another comes from another hole in the farm opening up to reveal another part of the cave system that has a couple of hints on how to unlock other things.

The events for romantic interests happen at less scripted times, as they’re tied to how strong your relationship is with each girl. Each girl only has one event, and it only triggers when your relationship is high enough that you would ask her to marry you. The events usually take up a whole day, and don’t necessarily add much to each character. Ellen’s revolves around how she’s no good at keeping pets– something established on your second day at the farm when you get your dog from her, Eve’s hammers in her fraught relationship with her grandpa, and Ann’s is about losing the chicken weathervane, or “weathercock” which sits on the roof of her workshop and goes missing every time there’s a storm. Conversely, Nina and Maria’s scenes bring up entirely new events that bring up a number of questions while providing no answers. Nina disappears while looking for a medicinal plant because her mother is apparently sick, and Maria vanishes for days until you find her hiding away with the woodsmen for some reason. All of these events, whether they share new information or not, manage to add some greatly appreciated depth to each character by giving them more room to speak and be sincere than their short and repetitive day-to-day dialogues do.

The dialogue in this game is simple, to the point, and sparse– probably because there was only so much memory that could be reserved for approximately 15 people who all have multiple lines of dialogue, and only so much money to pay someone to write more. There is simple dialogue that doesn’t tell you much more than “hello, how are you” would, more dialogue that I’d label as tutorial text, and a few lines that I truthfully couldn’t understand well because of the sub-par translation this game received for english. The dialogue that exists to inform the world really manages to create a unique vibe though. Nina’s dialogue, almost always about plants, goes into forays about how they’re creatures with wills to live, too. Ellen’s uncle who runs the ranch shop tells you that it’s much better to feed your animals fresh grass if you try to buy any from his store, and if you decline to purchase he laughs as if he’s won something. There’s even dialogue referencing the silent player! Multiple lines exist to comment on him not paying attention, and inspection prompts have people telling you not to touch something rather than being an item description. It was the last thing I expected, to get the same level of personality out of the main character as I did from each of the girls, albeit very subtly. He went from a kind of nothing, self-insert into being what I perceive to be a hyperactive boy, akin to a border collie who was let out into a field of sheep for the first time–the exact kind of person crazy enough to take on an abandoned farm and succeed.

It’s these short little character details that bring life into the game. Each day, you’ll really only see one line of dialogue from each character, be it new or old, with that dialogue usually only changing if there’s a change in season or festival coming up. The repetitive, pretty mindless routine of the game can turn into a sort of meditation if you let it, where you spend your time working thinking about the folks in town and what they had to say to you the previous day. The developers took this concept in stride and gave the side characters loads of dialogue about life, about God and religion, and about… very basic morals, but morals nonetheless. It’s a children’s game after all. When you take the thoughts, questions and prompts the characters give you back to the farm to do your long and tedious routine, you have to ask yourself– what are you working so hard for? For the feeling of accomplishment? Recognition from your peers? For the sake of some higher power, if you worship one? For me personally, it was to write this essay, but it was also for a good grade on the high score screen at the end, so to be honest a lot of this stuff was lost on me until just now when I was reviewing the game to get screenshots.

Setting The Standard - Why You Should Play HM SNES

You may read all of this and still think, well, it doesn’t sound like the game has much in it. And you would be right, it’s a very small game, but it’s also extremely quick. On average, my days only lasted about three minutes of real life time. Everything flew by, and I think I finished the game in 20 hours or less. I barely got a chance to notice that there wasn’t much going on because every second of my day was spent busy doing something, and when I wasn’t busy, the break was appreciated. I didn’t start to run out of things to do until I was finished with the second year, and when I looked up what I needed to do to get a decent ending, I was already most of the way there. It was easy to push through those last two seasons to get to the end, and it was so, so worth it.

As I mentioned earlier, the game ends with a high score screen, meaning it has to track all of your accomplishments. These include, but are not limited to: the number of things you ship, number of each crop you grow, number of animals you have and how much they like you, how upgraded your house is, who you married, how much all of the girls in town like you if you didn't get married, how many kids you have (which basically equates to how long you were married), your happiness score (increased by going to festivals and decreased by having animals die), and how many times you’ve pet your dog. In addition to these being tallied up and presented to you, you get special cutscenes not just for each one of these accomplishments, but additional ones for if you managed to do even better! I got a cutscene for having a cow, followed by one for having lots of cows, followed by yet another for having cows that loved me! Watching them play one after the other felt like taking a victory lap even without getting the best possible result. Seeing all of my numbers come up at the end made me want to try again to actually get those other cutscenes, not to get to see them, they’re so easy to find on Youtube, but because the game made it feel like an accomplishment! If I weren’t following this game up by immediately playing its GameBoy port, I absolutely would have started a new file right away. I’ve been playing the Harvest Moon series since I was a little kid and this was the first time I’d actually managed to beat one of these games. I struggle to think the finale of any game following this will feel as good as this one did.

I started writing this whole thing about the fences because it was an easy and silly entry point to get into my core issue with the game, and so I could have an opportunity to dig into game mechanics and the way the knowledge you have of them will completely alter your playstyle, because that’s all fun and interesting for me to talk about. Another reason why I focused on that was because it was near impossible for me to pick any kind of focus point when talking about this game. After all, I’m trying to study a whole series of games that spans multiple decades, and this is not only the first game in that series, but a game that created the whole genre of farming sims and defined that genre so thoroughly that you can see its DNA in every single game that followed.

I didn’t expect much to come out of my experience with this game. My expectations for it before I even picked it up were that it was going to be basically featureless, as informed by my experience with one of the first games I ever played as a child, Harvest Moon GB, which I will get into next. This game was not that at all. I think that everything it did manage to get working right came together just about perfectly. Harvest Moon is exactly what it wanted to be, and where it wasn’t, it lied about how it worked to try and make you play the correct way anyways. When I believed that lie, my time playing was even more enjoyable. Maybe if farming worked just a little bit more like how you’re told it’s supposed to, and if there was just a little bit more story, those would cover the things I felt wanting for the most. But maybe a little flexibility and ambiguity is a good thing. Maybe actually maintaining a fence is just too hard, and maybe if the girls were more fleshed out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy filling in their gaps in my head.

There are many more things I could say and wanted to say about this game, but this has grown far too long already so I'm cutting myself off here. I'm sure my later entries aren't going to get near this length. If you managed to get to this point, thank you so much for reading!