anyone sometimes remember the final feast trailer and get pissed off bc of how they did fucking nothing with arlecchino

I support O's asexual wrongs.

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random violetta thought

when we're talking about the possibility of tomás staying at the end of season 1 and ending up with violetta, most people always bring up the "and what would've happened with him, diego and león?" and honestly i feel like diego wouldn't have showed up in season 2.

Season 2 would've mostly been just another tomás vs león showdown (ending with tomás going away [like in season 1] and león and violetta ending up either together or as "friends" [🤨 as they say] after breaking up) and in season 3 we would've had diego vs león with diego entering as a substitute for clement (that was absolutely useless, let's be serious)

+ leonetta would've still been endgame because i feel like it would make more sense

If I have one wish for Hazbin season 2 it's please, please let Charlie go apeshit and just absolutely destroy someone.

Season 1's been teasing us with how powerful Charlie is and how much potential she has only to basically nerf her into the ground for the final battle so Lucifer could be all badass and shit.

Alastor's been allowed to go berserk so many times in season one and he's canonically weaker than the Morningstar family so can we let Charlie have the spotlight now?

"she met a pinecone's fate" was hysterical the first time around and it's still funny but the longer I think about it the more unsure I actually am about the line

the thing abt andoain that fucks me up is that hes actually a good person, but hes still a sankta. hes pious and he wants laterano to share not only their resources but also their religion and their 'miracles' with others. he still thinks the sankta are divine messengers or whatever, and he thinks that their god must be kind and righteous, as any believer does of their god. so its unfathomable to him why laterano didnt help rocamarea even though the inhabitants were religious. he thinks that other races are just as deserving of lateranos help because theyre also people, but most importantly, theyre also faithful, and if they werent, then they could still be shown the right path or whatever. what he was absolutely not ready for was the fact that the god he worshipped did not care about any of that and could not be convinced to do the right thing. it literally cannot extend its 'miracles' to non-sankta people bc it doesnt consider anything non-sankta or even half sankta to be under its jurisdiction. therefore, those people are not necessary for the survival of the sankta, and it doesnt see why it would be necessary to help them. its ideas cant be changed because it doesnt evolve. all of the sankta laws are just interpretations by the popes throughout the ages of its one and only order: ensure the continued existence of the sankta. and if the pope does something that it might see as being detrimental to the survival of the sankta, they'll lose their halo, their wings, their empathy, and their gun; the things that make them sankta. they'll fall and become sarkaz with horns and tails, the very sarkaz they hate and are still at war with, for reasons unknown to even them. andoain was ready to fall when he shot the pope, but he didnt, and it wasnt because they were both right, it was because the pope was necessary for the survival of the lateran sanktas, and andoain was a devoted missionary.

This might not be anything, but while writing about your fics, the way you have the characters' mannerisms down PERFECTLY got me thinking about mirroring...

There's a lot of it in 7 (Horii is a directorial genius etc etc), most of it more intentional than these probably are, but there's something so interesting about mirroring that takes the tone of a (relatively) fond memory, a familiar gesture, and inverts it in the way shown here.

OH I'M GLAD YOU'VE NOTICED THESE TOO I think I mentioned it months back (or I drafted a post 'bout it but didn't think it was anything noteworthy) but I always really did like how the Arakawa Family mimicked each other's mannerisms (also circling back to how Jo and Masato calling Ichiban 'Ichi' presumably after picking it up from Arakawa)!

Aoki actually does the same sitting gesture too! I went back to double check and skim through the rest of the game's cutscenes, and as far as I could tell unless I skipped a scene, it really is only these three that do this specific pose:

It's such a small detail but I love it immensely and it really does highlight their connections with each other and it drives me insane

I think Dirty Little Secrets is interesting so far. And I’m surprised I haven’t seen more about it. It feels different than PB’s usual in some ways

The moment when you, an aroace, have a crisis over your own OC

Honestly I think I'd hate Arthur Cantabella less if they'd simply removed the whole "Yeah no this is a government-condoned psychological experiment" aspect.

TESTING WHAT?! No, genuinely, what? Using the contaminated groundwater/weirdass Silver Fainting Allergy and/or the flower ink as a drug? Because uh, if that's the case, then I'm pretty sure using them both in conjunction contaminates your results.

Is it something about mob mentality? In-groups and out-groups with the elaborate tech crew made of convicted witches and victims maintaining the whole illusion? In that case, I think the fact that you're drugging and gaslighting the entire experiment group is also contaminating the results.

Also the whole fantasy setting is probably a confounding variable for Something.

Okay sure parents could consent to taking part in this experiment for their children, but uh, I'm pretty sure some of these kids were born AFTER the experiment began. Given the aforementioned Large Amounts of Drugging From Multiple Origins going on here, I have some concerns!

No seriously. Please. PL vs PW writers. Give me the grant proposal Arthur Cantabella submitted to get anyone to fund this project. I know it's Bill fucking Hawks, but even he's got limits! I don't see how he benefits from half this shit even if he wants to use the other half (I assume the drugs.) Why is he paying for the rest? There's a reason why Clive is established as being a lone schemer with obscene amounts of money who's keeping all his scientists in the dark and/or coerced to keep building, and it's so that we don't have anyone there questioning why he's building an elaborate fake town populated by actors in addition to his Underground Vengeance Mecha!

The fact that you somehow managed to get this cleared as a psychological experiment establishes that you know the field of psychology exists. Why in the name of all that is holy did you think building an elaborate fake fantasy town with an elaborate magic system which you make real through the power of drugging people, knocking the ENTIRE TOWN out every time a spell is used, changing things around them to simulate "magic" using the most ridiculous Renn Faire stage crew ever, and manipulating the clocks so no one's aware time is passing, with a system that prosecutes witches and burns them so that they can join the Renn Faire Stage Crew along with their victims, and positioning yourself as the all-powerful Storyteller who writes their reality into being would be a better solution than therapy?

Honestly I'd respect "I had a god complex, lol" more. Especially for that last one, but like. In general. Descole's out there living his worst life, he KNOWS he's an asshole supervillain agent of chaos, and I respect this because he has clearly CHOSEN to be Like This. You do you, man. Ditto for Don Paolo but like, less effectively.

This is not how any of this works.

Okay, setting... ALL OF THAT aside, you're doing this because your and your best friend's young daughters are understandably incredibly traumatized because they wanted to ring the bell early and the Weirdass Groundwater-Induced "Allergy" That Makes You Faint When You Hear Silver Ringing caused them and everyone else to pass out, and as everyone in the square below was having a fire festival, this caused a massive tragic conflagration. Okay. Yeah, this is bad. (I have. MANY questions about how this bell was made, excavated, and mounted in the square without anyone ever ringing it and realizing something had happened, but we're going to gloss over those for now, it's Professor Layton and I would otherwise be all over this incredible bullshit. It's great up until it asks us to think THIS was ever a remotely reasonable idea.) One of your daughters is all but catatonic because a story you told her earlier has convinced her she either is or will be taken by The Great Witch Bezella. Sure. (You suck.) Why the FUCK is your solution based on the other one unpersoning herself to her best friend and doing all the work to make the magic real? Yeah, sure, she agreed to it. SHE'S LIKE EIGHT TO TEN. HER BEST FRIEND THINKS SHE'S AN AWFUL MONSTER AND WON'T REACT OTHERWISE. OF COURSE Eve's gonna help, but that doesn't mean you should put the entire burden on her! She is ALSO horribly traumatized to the point of repressing what happened. Get her help too. The fact that the game seems to put their actions on remotely even footing when one of them has been treated like shit since she was TEN and one of them was an adult who PURPOSEFULLY AND INTENTIONALLY set up a system that would put her in this shitty situation means that yeah, no, they fundamentally are not. Of course her decisionmaking is misguided and terrible! She's a twenty-year-old who's been horribly mistreated for more than half her life! HER DAD JUST COMMITTED SUICIDE OUT OF GUILT FOR HIS ACTIONS IN SETTING UP THIS SYSTEM.

No one's going to hold them responsible for the deaths. This was a sequence of events so thoroughly unforeseeable that literally no one could have predicted it. It won't even reflect poorly on you and Belduke, because you two somehow managed to find the bell, excavate it, and mount it without ever ringing it and realizing it knocked you out and you all had an environmentally-induced silver "allergy" and at that point this goes into "acts of a cruel and malicious Writer-God" territory.

Also it was totally predictable that this elaborate system of misogyny would not actually help Espella in the long term as she instead repressed her memories and further internalized the whole witches = evil thing so that when those memories inevitably came back she would be in EVEN WORSE shape, this is why you should have gotten an actual psychologist who could have told you this whole thing was a terrible plan to write your grant.

No like does he drug all his requests to whoever he reports to (it has to be directly to the person signing checks) in the mind-control ink? This is my only explanation here.

Why. In God's name why. Did you not. Simply. DESTROY THE FUCKING BELL TOWER. You have a crane here! What possessed ANYONE to think just covering it up with Vantablack and gaslighting so people couldn't see it was a reasonable solution to the Trauma Tower? (There may be an explanation for this, it has been ten years, but this man's problem solving has been established to be so poor I award him no points.)

And if you were going to do this, why didn't you tell Newton? Or was it just that the lightning strike burning up the Vantablack was itself a reminder to him that you can't repress the past away and he was suddenly aware of how overwhelmingly POINTLESS all this suffering was? (Edit: I think it was this. No but seriously you could’ve just taken a fucking wrecking ball to that thing while you were rebuilding the town.)

Seriously why the fuck did Newton Belduke go along with letting you use his traumatized daughter like this? What the hell, man. What an asshole.

Also. Your problem was that you had two severely traumatized little girls (even if you only acknowledged one of them was traumatized.) Your solution was... to traumatize a shitload more young girls?

TO THE POINT WHERE AT LEAST ONE OF THEM ATTEMPTED SUICIDE?!

And then your best friend actually committed suicide?!

Like. Seriously. If these are the actions of a single, seriously traumatized person, the fact that you are making Literally The Worst And Most Inexplicable Decisions Ever Which Make The Problem Worse For Literally Everyone Involved is more... well, conceivable. I buy a traumatized eighteen-year-old with an obscene amount of money building an elaborate fake London that is allegedly London ten years in the future, hiring actors to populate it, kidnapping scientists, making them build an Underground Vengeance Mecha to destroy the city, and then kidnapping the Prime Minister who is the source of that trauma and hooking the engine of the mecha up to his heart. And then roping in the one guy who could conceivably solve the whole problem and stop him and Clive would let it. It's a bad idea on EVERY conceivable level, don't get me wrong, on an UNPRECEDENTEDLY terrible scale, but it's a bad idea in which it is very clear no one at any point has asked the person what the fuck they think they're doing here, what they are trying to accomplish, and why they are doing so with this objectively absurd method. Because they have not let anyone in close enough to key them to The Full Absurd Terribleness. It's either this or become Batman.

But Arthur? Apparently his decisions have been vetted by OTHER PEOPLE, and this just boggles my mind. I refuse to believe this. I refuse to believe NO ONE went "have we considered this is like eight hundred terrible ideas bundled up into The Worst Idea Ever?" And I refuse to believe he's anything but a massive asshole when his plan had so many awful consequences for literally everyone BUT himself!

Like, don't get me wrong. There are SO MANY examples of unethical experimentation on human subjects in the real world, psychological and otherwise. But most of them are not this incredibly convoluted, implicitly expensive, and we all generally recognize these days that they were bad.

Also, none of them were enacted as an elaborate setup to (incompetently) handle the trauma of the experimenter's daughter after he told her if she was bad a scary evil witch would possess her and then she and her friend accidentally enacted a tragedy whose scale and fundamental absurdity rival the Boston Molasses Flood, but without corporate greed. There were solutions to this that were so much easier, less convoluted, less EXPENSIVE, and less harmful to... well, everyone else involved, except Arthur Cantabella.

i love the bias + the fan pairings so much because on the surface its very "oh, well, the bias just has to fall for the fan and then its happily ever after" but no! its way more fun than that!

the fan isnt in love with the bias. in fact, the fan doesnt view this world as reality, nor do they even view their bias as a human. the fun part of this pairing is the fan having to recognize the world they live in as their new reality and the people around them as people! the bias falling for the fan is just part one, the fan falling for the bias as an Actual Human Being is just as important an element

If people don't get themselves together, it's gonna force me to become a Makima stan, and trust me, that is not a world anyone wants to live in.

No cap if they actually break up EJ and Gina I will be so devastated

cheese

Honestly I know I haven't ever stopped talking abt this but it's so hard not to when it's so blatant but the sexism in the tfa fandom is So Obvious when talking abt Wasp and BA in particular bc of how similar they are in character, at least on some level.

Like whenever I say Wasp is a piece of shit whose never been shown to have anything but condensed malice and need to hurt ppl esp in bootcamp I always get replies saying 'oh well it probably came from his own insecurities' or 'it likely came from his own truama' but then I say 'Maybe BA lashes out at Optimus and Sentinel bc of the fact the show has shown us they had real responsibility in the accident' Or "Maybe BAs constant body issues manifesting in her doing things that actively hurt her a lot is concerning and shows deeper issues' and suddenly it's me giving a character more sympathy than their canon version deserves or that since it's never stated or shown those events can't possibly be linked.

So like. Making up shit that's never even hinted at in canon to make a male character more complex, sympathetic and seem nicer despite their bad actions is fine but you're not allowed to even point out a link that could exist between canon events that makes a female character read as more sympathetic. Like. What??

If Wasp was 'probably dealing with insecurities' never even hinted at in canon why can't I say BA is dealing with insecurities that Canon hints at and shows. Why does Wasp get to have his character explored and given this whole expansive idea of a backstory and Complexity in fanon but BA is always put down and under explored despite being a more complex interesting character From The Start. I don't think I have to make the link but God.

Vent ig

Fandoms will always be more willing to humanize and excuse the male antagonists but will take any chance to further demonize female antagonists (or just female characters in general lets be honest) and turn them into cartoonishly evil ppl.

I hate making everything about RQ but Elara is what sparked this from me, or at least something I remembered pushed me to want to vent about this. It kills me that ppl in this fandom will sit and make excuses day in and day out about how Maven actually isn't to blame for any of it and how it actually isn't that bad that Maven killed thousands of ppl and physically and mentally abused Mare and Iris (and hell maybe even Evangeline who knows at this point) but will then turn around and exaggerate what Elara did to the absolute extreme. I am NOT saying that Elara didn't do anything wrong or should be excused cause I don't think that! What I am saying is, I loathe when ppl will talk about her and erase parts of her character in order to turn her into a cartoonishly evil stepmother. You don't have to like her, you don't have to think she had anything but bad intent, but don't talk about her if ur just gonna ignore or change part of her character because for some reason u can't fathom her not being 100% rubbing her hands together maniacally laughing evil. (Especially considering Elara barely has any character so like how r u just missing shit that easily?) And it doesn't just stop with her. It happens with characters in every media! Alicent Hightower gets half her character IGNORED because god forbid she not be 100% evil and u feel anything but hatred for her! Sansa gets demonized for shit she did at like 11 like come on. I mean hell, even characters from children's media get demonized for existing (like I'll never forget hearing that ppl HATED Mable Pines for being what? an annoying 12 year old?)

Ppl also love to claim they stan or love female characters but in reality they only love that character in relation to their male love interest. If she ever goes against her male love interest then it turns into "she's such a bitch" or "she's so selfish" like I mean thats literally what happened to Mikasa the moment she "turned" on Eren.

Idk im so tired of ppl stanning and loving evil male characters and finding every which way to justify their actions but then going out of their way to make female characters WORSE than they actually are.