#like HEY VIDEO GAMES STOP TAKING CHARACTERS LIKE THIS AND MAKING THEM ANTAGONISTS AND MAKING THEM TAKE THINGS SO FAR THEY START DOING EVIL | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thestraggletag · 3 years

Text

Roll for Initiative, a Rumbelle D&D Fic

Summary: Tales of the Enchanted Forest was the hottest online D&D game, in part for its charismatic players, in part for the twisted turns of the DM's mind and in part because of the outrageous chemistry between its greatest OTP, the party's beautiful bard and the Dark One, an anti-hero side-character who is there to provide information and uncomfortable levels of UST. Mr Gold thinks it's a harmless flirtation that could never become anything else, just like his silly little crush on the town librarian, Belle French.

He's wrong.

Rating: Explicit.

Author’s Note: Surprise, @argoslight, it is I, your Gifter! Sorry to make you wait till near the end but I just had way more banter to write in me than I thought. I hope you enjoy your gift. I’m so sorry to not be able to add more D&D elements but since I don’t play I don’t have a lot of idea of what could be done. Also I apologise for any mistakes! And thanks so much to @little-inkstone for her help and D&D knowledge.

The castle was quiet when she entered, her steps echoing against the stone. It was gloomy inside, curtains obscured and decor sparse and sombre, the castle living up to its name. But there were flowers on the table, moon lilies, her favourite flower. They bloomed only in the Eastern Mountains past the Old Wall, but she had long since suspected he grew some on one of his enchanted hothouses, with the excuse of using them for potions.

“Where’s the rest of your pretty little troop of do-gooders, dearie?”

The voice came out of nowhere, echoing around the empty halls of the castle. Thankfully she did not need directions, knowing exactly when to turn and where to go. Soon she found herself in a vast room, with a table on the centre and curios filled with oddities and the like. Some others were displayed on pedestals, including a rather fearsome sword and a nasty-looking crown made of thorns. None of the artefacts were what she sought, but she was not there to bargain for an item, but rather for information.

“Off on their own quests, taking care of other things that need doing.”

The voice tsked, seeming not to approve.

“They let you enter the lair of the beast alone? Some heroes.”

The woman lowered the hood of her cloak and walked towards the unlit chimney. Immediately a fire blazed to life, as if the castle itself was trying to cater to her comfort. The fire provided much-needed light as well, revealing the profile of a man in the shadows. Or something that looked like a man, at least, if not for the reflective scales that covered his body and its strange eyes: gold irises around catlike pupils.

“I asked to come alone. I felt like we could talk more openly this way.”

She removed her cloak, ostensibly to drape it across a chair near the fire and let it dry. The creature, however, seemed to read more into the gesture, tsking again.

“You come here all alone, a pretty little lamb, and take off the only real bit of protection you have. Reckless, dearie, most reckless.”

The creature stood up, walking slowly towards the light, revealing more of its form as it approached her. Leather pants and a long, reptilian-looking vest and coat. It wasn’t particularly tall but power emanated from it in suffocating waves. She closed her eyes, finding his cloying presence strangely comforting. Then again, she had always been odd.

“Once again your pitiful little party of friends needs my help. How they weigh you down, Beauty.”

He stepped fully into the light then, revealing a being more creature than man, the reptilian skin and claws as off-putting as his unnatural eyes. She should’ve taken a step back, should’ve gone for her blade or the dagger tucked into her left boot, but she didn’t. As much as she knew she shouldn't, she felt at ease in his presence. Well, perhaps not quite. She certainly felt a strange sort of anxiousness in his presence, a fluttery sort of feeling that she attributed to being particularly attuned to his magic. None of the other members of her party felt that way. If anything, he repulsed them, which wasn’t something she could understand. To her he was… magnetic.

“Are you in the mood for dealing or not? I can trade for information.”

He snorted.

“With what? Your little band of misfits is dirt poor. That idiotic paladin of yours ruined your last mission. You really should think about ditching the man. All brawn, no brains. At least your rogue is a smart woman.”

His gaze left her briefly, running down the length of her clothing: sturdy black boots, a nicely-cut dress that stopped around the knees and a sturdy belt with a few pockets for her spells. But the clothing, as well-made as it was, was dated, old. Looked worn and was signed and stained in places, and it left a lot of her frail human skin exposed. She had not been able to afford an upgrade in a while, preferring to spend her coin in what could benefit the group.

His moue of distaste disappeared once his eyes fell on her cloak. Well, his cloak, since he had been the one to make it. It was a lovely thing in varied shades of green, shot through with golden thread, his trademark. She had bought it off him a long time ago, a simple thing to keep her warm during cold nights and dry when it rained. Miraculously, though, it also did not sustain damage, looking exactly the same as when she had first put it on.

“I’m glad at least my protection is serving you well.”

He ran a claw along the seams of the cloak, making it glitter, like to like, magic calling for its own. He looked smug, as if pleased she was wearing something he had made.

“It does more than we bargained for. I’ve been blasted with magic strong enough to burn through most fabric but it has not even frayed. How strange of you, Rumplestiltskin, to lose out on a deal.”

He shivered when she said his name, walking behind her to the safety of the shadow she cast next to the fire.

“Can’t help it if my magic is just that powerful, my dear. I’m glad you are a happy customer. Always thought that cloak was a nice bit of magic. Can’t fault you for always wearing it.”

She felt him close in on her from behind, to the point that it almost felt like they were touching.

“It smells like you. That’s why I wear it all the time.”

The noise he made behind her was inhuman, a cross between a whimper and a growl. His claws scrapped against the back of her dress, the feeling muted by her stays, but she could feel his breath against the back of her neck and that alone was-

“Hey, this is a decent stream! Keep it PG for the kids, you weirdos.”

“Damn it, Grumpy, I wanted to see how long it would take them to snap out of it!”

“Sorry, Snow, but I ate a big dinner and I aim to keep it down.”

The messages in the chatroom wheezed by, mostly disgruntled complaints about their OTP never catching a break. The other participants in the stream were mostly silent, their mics muted likely to hide the amused snickers. There was no video feed on any of the members of the party, all of them represented instead by artwork to preserve their anonymity. Once upon a time that had been a fanciful choice, and perhaps a way to stay safe when interacting with strangers on the internet. Now it was mostly to keep their private lives from being overtaken by the popularity of their stream. “Tales of the Enchanted Forest” was shaping up to be one of the hottest D&D online streaming shows, already on its third campaign and counting.

“Beauty is just trying to get us some answers, Grumpy. We can’t just go stumbling about hoping to run into some fairy wand by chance.”

“Oh, it’s that what the kids are calling it these days?”

“Enough! Can we get back to the campaign already? It took me weeks to plan and it kinda hinges a bit on the Dark One helping, which needs to happen today.”

“Fine by me, dearie, if the dwarf can curtail his temper.”

The party was composed of five characters, a paladin, a cleric, a bard, a rogue and a thief, which along with the Dungeon Master made up the regular cast of every weekly stream. But given the popularity of the show, and the amount of time they had been playing, they had managed to amass a good amount of side-characters, guests invited every now and then to help the campaign move along and keep the interest of the audience. And by far the most popular of those guests was the Dark One, a wizard of unknown lineage and tremendous power that served both as an antagonist and a pseudo-ally depending on the situation.

His presence was likely the reason why the livestream’s numbers looked so robust. He had amassed quite a fanbase, due in part to the commitment the player put on the character (the voice-acting was above and beyond what anyone could’ve expected from an amateur performer, and the backstory was quite complex, revealed in bits and pieces fans had meticulously assembled together) and in part to the chemistry he had managed to develop with the group’s bard, a half-human named Beauty.

“Okay, let’s all go back to what we were doing.” The DM’s voice was authoritative, though also more than a bit pissed off. “Okay, Beauty, you were about to try and cajole the Dark One to sell you the information you needed in return for a vial of water from Lake Nostos. Though the water is valuable, it’s not guaranteed to be enough to tempt the wizard. You have to roll at least a 13 in persuasion to make the trade. Roll when you’re ready.”

...

Rumford Gold stretched within the confines of the small backroom of his shop, where he had his computer stuff set up. Initially he’d bought the computer to better conduct his online business. His laptop at home wasn’t cutting it and it was better to photograph the antiques, update the website and handle the deliveries from his place of business. He had bought a good camera, some light fixtures and, on a whim, a microphone, for instances where he might need to virtually communicate with clients. It was something that was happening more and more, especially because a lot of his clientele was European. The internet had truly turned his antiquing- more of a hobby than a profession originally- into a profitable business.

He had gotten into watching D&D while waiting late at night for a client to become available in Austria. He had played as a lad, one of the few happy moments he could remember from his childhood in Glasgow, but had given it up once he had met Milah. And after they were over he had been too involved in making something of himself to remember past childhood enjoyments. But apparently D&D had evolved with the times and he had gotten into the habit of searching for and watching online D&D campaigns in his spare time. From that to actually being a side-character in one of them took almost no time. It was frightfully easy to go back to that frame of mind of playing make-believe, only now he had a distaste for the clean-cut heroic types and more of an affinity for the morally-grey, shady characters.

So he had auditioned for the role of evil-wizard when there had been an opening for a side-character in his favourite D&D stream, The Enchanted Forest. And though the DM had written what he considered to be a very flat, uninteresting character, he had been able to give it his own spin. He knew the DM hated him for it, hated when he deviated from what was expected of him, but people loved him. It was half the fun, pissing the DM off.

The other half, he had to admit, was Beauty. The one with the brains in the group, clearly, a half-human, half-fairy bard with an uncanny ability to think ahead, and arm herself with knowledge. Most of the other members of her party were more apt to try and decapitate something than negotiate with it, or even befriend it. Beauty prided herself on more of a gentle approach, which sometimes got her treated as the “fragile” one. He thought it just made her all the more interesting.

Their flirting had just kinda happened. He was half into it before he realised it had begun at all and by the time he had grown conscious- and self-conscious- of it fans were lapping it up and loving it. Even the DM, as loath as he was to admit it, found the banter engaging, even as if stole the spotlight from his story and where he wanted it to go. So every now and then he got invited into a stream, sometimes to interact with the whole party and sometimes, like the session he had just finished, to speak only to Beauty. And what was supposed to be a brief conversation before the party moved to greener pastures became a whole session, with the chatroom full of engagement and the view count off the charts.

But the DM had had a short tolerance span tonight, and had nipped things in the bud much sooner than usual. He felt… unfulfilled. Unsatisfied. Itchy, almost, in a way. So he was more than happy when he received an email from Beauty, who seemed to share his dislike of how the session had played out. They had started doing that more often, sharing emails after a session, even when he did not participate in it. It was harmless, he thought. Just an innocent online flirtation that could never realistically turn into anything. Not that his more in-person romantic overtures could ever pan out. He was in his third year of being completely smitten by the local town librarian, and in his second year of being able to put two words together in front of her without the help from Scotch, something he was perhaps a bit too proud of. And though he had decided very early on that the whole thing was utterly hopeless he had not been able to steer his thoughts or affections away. Realistically he was perhaps more in love with the idea of Belle French than the reality itself, given how little he had personally interacted with the woman. But he knew just enough to fill in the blanks and create a beautiful picture of how he imagined her to be: bookish- an easy assumption given how many times he had caught her in public places absorbed in a book-, kind, generous and delightfully able to hold a grudge and enact revenge when the time came. A bit reckless, and sometimes quick to form opinions, but also quick to revise them. A tactile person, with a great sense of fashion and a carelessness about what was expected of her.

He saw her in his head as clear as day, but little of that image was based on any personal knowledge of her. So, perhaps, he had found in Beauty a fictional substitute, someone he could talk to, and flirt with, without consequences, adopting the persona of someone more confident, more at ease with that sort of thing. The Dark One was comfortable in his skin in a way that he could only pretend to be sometimes. All the money and power he had accumulated over the years had helped him evolve from the spineless, cowardly lad he had once been, but when it came to certain situations, especially those that necessitated a level of vulnerability, he was still hopeless.

Perhaps, he wondered, it was better to think about his online liaison with Beauty as the real thing. They wrote to each other often, in and out of character, and over the course of their correspondence he had confided in her more than he had in any other person alive. Small things at first, every day peeves and details. Nothing that could identify them, certainly, but surprisingly intimate nevertheless. And over time it had grown to stuttering confessions and barings of the soul on both sides. She had told him of her teenage years in a mental asylum, the product of an overwrought widowed father trying to do right by his grieving daughter. He had had a few choice words to say about that, uncharitable thoughts about her father prompting his own willing sharing of the sad story of his childhood, neglectful father and all. It had felt nice, to confide in someone, someone he trusted.

He glanced at her email, where she lamented how their scene had not been as long or as satisfying as she had wanted, and saw she was proposing to meet later in a private stream to finish it the way they had both wanted. She had proposed something similar once or twice before and he had politely declined but now he wondered why not take her up on her offer. What was stopping him? His imaginary idea of Belle French, who in reality had never given him more than a polite smile in passing? Too young, too good, too beautiful to ever see him as anything other than an old cripple? Whatever he had built with Beauty felt infinitely more real, and attainable. A relationship without ever meeting in person seemed ideal in many aspects and, perhaps, if and when it came to meeting in the real world, his physical shortcomings would not be relevant, nor would it his rather uncharitable reputation.

He sent her a quick reply to arrange a meeting, feeling like a bit of roleplaying was, in the end, quite harmless. And if it were to lead to something a bit more meaningful, well, perhaps it was about time.

…

“Water from Lake Nostos. A key ingredient in most powerful potions and even some spells. I’m sure it could prove useful to you.”

The bard showed him the glowing crystal vial hanging from a long chain around her neck, with the glowing milky-white water from the cursed lake in it. He made a move to get closer to inspect it but the woman took a step back, tucking the vial back inside her bodice. The wizard’s eyes lingered there, hiz gaze growing intense. The bard felt her skin flush in response, something that felt a bit like fear but wasn’t running down her spine.

“And I’m sure a new wardrobe could prove useful to you, dearie. You’re practically wearing rags.” Rumplestiltskin made a show of running his eyes up and down her form with just enough disgust in his face to make it seem as if he was only noticing the rather sad state of her dress.

“It’s my best gown, I’d thank you not to insult it.”

He made a moue of disapproval, shaking his head for good measure.

“You’re far from your days as a princess. I hope seeing the world is worth putting up with your band of idiots that waste most of the gold they earn with your wit in pointless goose chases that you know will lead nowhere.”

Beauty didn’t respond. There was nothing she could say to contradict what he thought of her party, none of which was charitable to say the least. And she also knew that he was aware that all of it was worth the freedom she had won when she had left her life in her father’s castle behind. She did miss one or two things, perhaps. Her mother’s vast library being one and, perhaps, some of the fashions. Not so much the silhouettes- she had never liked how the sea of petticoats she was always forced to wear restricted her movement- but the fabrics and colours, certainly. And the shoes.

“I’m here to make a deal, Dark One. Are you doing business today or not?”

Lesser creatures would’ve rather bitten off their tongues that throw cheek at the Dark One, but Beauty did not even bat an eye, lips curling in a defiant little smile that had the wizard smirking, something like admiration blooming in his chest. It’s what he loved most about his little bard, her spine of steel. And perhaps her blue eyes, but that was neither here nor there.

“I don’t do business with raggedy urchins, dearie. If you want to sit down and negotiate you’ll need a bath.” He made a face, as if he could smell her across the room. “And a change of dress, while I put your current outfit to wash… Or set it on fire, I haven’t decided yet.”

She could tell that he was pulling his punches, that he was playing at being repulsed by her state of dress and hygiene just bad enough that she would see he did not really mean it, not in any real way. She would’ve been able to tell either way, but it was nice that he thought it important to spare her feelings. And she couldn’t deny that a bath sounded heavenly after so many weeks on the road, sleeping out in the open and washing in freezing-cold creeks whenever possible.

“Well, if you insist…”

He took her to a well-lit and spacious bathing chamber, with the biggest copper tub she had ever seen, already filled with warm, soapy water that smelled of vanilla. She wasted no time after the door closed behind him, stripping quickly, careless of her worn and mended garments, and slipping into the tub. It was heaven on her tired muscles, and her dirty skin, and though she would’ve stayed there for hours she knew that every minute spent bathing was a minute less with the Dark One. Their time was limited. If she didn’t return to camp in the morning her party would venture into the castle, likely thinking the most dreadful scenarios. She could picture Charming attempting to kick the front gate open and getting hurt for his troubles. She could not let them worry for her, or risk the rapport she had developed with the Dark One by coming in unannounced.

She got out of the tub with only a bit of reluctance and found a towel that she was convinced was enchanted to dry her faster than possible. She found clothing laid out in the adjoining dressing room, the undergarments soft and made of pale cream fabric and the dress of a lovely velvety, forest-green fabric, with a belt embroidered in small pearls that matched the detail about the neckline. She put it on gladly, twisting every which way to lace it up at her back. Living a less princessy life had made her acquire a number of small skills, including the ability to dress up mostly by herself even in gowns that did not lace up at the front, like most of her travelling clothes.

She did not spot her mauve travelling dress or her boots, but she was sure that Rumplestiltskin had whisked them away and would subtly mend them with magic, though she was sure he would deny it if she were to point it out. The green dress was accompanied by matching slippers, butter-soft and silent as they touched the stone floor. She made sure to dry her hair out, noticing how it shone red-gold in the flattering light of the candles, and took her time brushing it and styling it out of her face, so it fell flatteringly down her back. Her neck and most of her upper torso was bare but for the chain keeping the vial of water tucked safely against her breasts, the wide neckline of the dress dipping low enough to leave her collarbones bare, but she didn’t mind it. She was inside the Dark Castle, with the Dark One. She was safe there. On the road she always had to think about not attracting unwanted male attention. Here she rather felt like the opposite.

It was a silly infatuation, and many would argue any interest or desire on her part was due to the wizard’s power, which some would say was an aphrodisiac potent enough to make some look past the Dark One’s rather unfortunate exterior. No one would ever believe her if she confessed she rather… liked his appearance. The green-gold skin, the wild hair, the talons, but also the exquisitely-tailored pants and vests, the frothy cravats, the slim coats. A beast and a gentleman. A rather enticing combination, she had found.

She went downstairs into the trophy room once more, where two massive chairs were pulled up next to the roaring fireplace, the main source of light. The Dark One was sitting in one of them, a snifter gingerly held by a clawed hand, containing some sort of brown-gold liquid. He glanced at her the moment she entered the room, unwilling or unable to hide his appreciation for what he saw. He had removed his coat, leaving only his high-collared vest and one of his open shirts to cover his upper body, no forty cravat in sight. He seemed less guarded, more adventurous than he usually was when it came to matters of intimacy.

“You clean up well, dearie. Wish I could say the same for your dress. A wash will only do so much for it, but I refrained from throwing it into the fireplace. You’re welcome.”

“Good, as it’s not your property to destroy.” Beauty sat down, with a poise that betrayed her royal upbringing, and primly crossed her legs at the ankles. “So, Dark One, are you prepared to deal with me now?”

She had dealt with him dozens of times before, she had no idea why it all sounded so much like innuendo now. She couldn’t say she minded it.

“Of course, my dear. I’ve had time to think about our deal whilst you were splashing about in the tub.” His sing-songy voice broke, getting suddenly deeper for a second or two, as if he was struggling to retain his composure. “The vial is certainly a good start, but perhaps not quite enough. Now, I’m prepared to be generous given our long and fruitful history of dealmaking together, but I must also keep up certain appearances. So I thought I would also demand… an evening of your time.”

He tried to make it sound sinister, but she was past getting scared of him. At least in the traditional way. She raised an eyebrow, adopting a rather coquettish expression.

“And what would an evening of my time entail exactly?”

“Oh, well, you know. Companionship, perhaps a game of chess, some good wine, conversation and the like.”

She made a show of thinking it over before offering her hand, which he shook without delay.

“It’s a deal.”

Several hours later she had won two games of chess, one game of checkers, and was sipping from her third coupe of sparkling wine as she listened intently to a story about a deal the Dark One had once made with a king from a distant land. He was a gifted storyteller, engaging and funny, knowing exactly when to pause or gesticulate to keep the flow of the story just right. The king in his tale was rather unfortunate, in the sense that his hubris and arrogance had led him to make a deal with the Dark One that he did not understand. Most of Rumplestiltskin’s deals seemed to be like that, Beauty thought. And when he came to collect people dared be indignant that he demanded what they promised in the first place.

“The king was furious. Never let go of the grudge. Hired several assassins to try and kill me. A waste of gold, of course.”

He let out a trilling laugh, which soon proved to be contagious. Somehow, over time, it felt like their chairs had moved closer, because if she stretched out a hand she could easily touch him. Odd.

“Serves him right, for making such an open-ended deal. What a rookie mistake.”

She didn’t recall removing her slippers but she must have, because her feet were enjoying being pressed against the soft cushion of the chair. He made a gesture for her to lean close, which was a bit of a balancing feat, but she managed. Her heart skipped a bit when he leaned close too, almost pressing his mouth against her ear.

“You have no room to talk, sweet. You struck a very vague deal yourself, committing to an evening of conversation, chess ‘and the like’. That little turn of phrase is an invitation to all manner of sins, even the darkest and most decadent of debaucheries.”

He hissed the last part, making her shiver. Not content with letting him have the upper hand she turned her head so their lips were inches apart.

“That’s what I was hoping for.”

She could tell she had shocked him into inaction. Cocky Dark One, always in control of the conversation, always one step ahead of everyone else. It was nice to see him floundering, to catch him unprepared. Finally he gulped and put a little distance between them.

“Aren’t you the bravest little poppet.”

“My mother always said ‘Do the brave thing and bravery will follow.’ I’m a firm believer of the principle.”

Slowly, almost painfully so, both his hands clutched at the armrests of her chair, effectively pinning her to it. She knew she was supposed to be scared but she felt nothing but excitement, a buzzing just beneath the skin that made her strangely needy for something. Touch, perhaps, or more. The feeling was so overwhelming she did not realise at first that the laces of her dress were coming undone, as if invisible hands were painstakingly pulling them loose. She tried to make eye contact, but he ducked his head, pressing his face against the base of her neck, where it met her shoulder. She sighed, noticing how gentle he was, his touch feather-light, and discovering that she would not mind a rougher treatment. He was restraining himself, she realised, trying to be a gentleman. Sweet, but not what she wanted from him at that moment. Feeling bold Beauty carded a hand through his hair, pressing his face more firmly against her skin.

“Please, Rumple.”

Those two words seemed to have a magic of their own, producing a sudden and radical change in him. He moved too fast for her to see, wrapping her up in his arms and depositing her on the long dining table on the other side of the room. She did not know whether he used magic or simply moved inhumanly fast, but either possibility excited her, reminded her of the power of the creature looming over her, claws tugging at the unlaced bodice of her dress, dragging the velvet down to expose her undergarments. She was wearing the underbust corset he had provided over the snowy linen shift he had also left for her, so it was easy for him to simply tug the shift down a bit to expose her breasts. He leaned forward, nuzzling the space between her breasts, making a sort of satisfied purring noise as he sniffed up her clavicles and down her throat. Then, once he was happy with the level of squirming she was doing, he finally gave her what she wanted, closing his mouth, with all of its sharp teeth, around one of her rosy nipples. It was a strange feeling at first, more unfamiliar than pleasant, but when he began to suck it changed completely, little shocks of pleasure running from her nipple to between her legs. It was amazing, more than she had ever achieved with her own hands whenever she could get some privacy at night, and the feeling doubled when he grasped her untouched breast, his long claws estimulating the other nipple.

She sunk both her hands in his hair, fisting it in an effort to keep herself from squirming too much, feeling both aroused and impatient. She kept waiting for him to tire of her chest and move further down but when he was finally done sucking her nipples his head moved north, his lips blinding searching for hers till they were kissing. It wasn’t anything like any kiss she had experienced before, not even the unpleasant smack her former fiance had forced on her. Though it was just as forceful there was a wild quality to it, one she had never associated with the affectionate gesture. It was heavenly, the release of passion, far from cooling her down, setting her on fire, stoking her need for him till it felt like she would explode if he didn’t give her relief.

He must have sensed it, her desperation calling to him like a siren song, because at some point he let go of her mouth to travel south, past her aching chest, and velvet-covered belly to where the skirts of her long gown kept her modestly covered. He wasted no time dragging the heavy fabric up, letting it pool around her hips along with the white linen of her shift. She did not have any other undergarments, having not been provided with any, so she was completely exposed to his gaze, from her milky things to her round hips. She squirmed, trying to picture what he must be looking at, the trim thatch of chestnut curls at the apex of her legs, obscenely drenched by this point and making a poor show of trying to hide the pink, glistening flesh beneath.

“What a lovely cunt you have.” His voice was dark, guttural, a monster trying to speak like a man. It thrilled her. “Let me drink from it, precious.”

He didn’t wait for her reply, choosing instead to simply bury his head against her flesh, his tongue rough and wide as it lapped at her field parting them to seek out the bundle of nerves that was throwing for attention. She arched her back, feeling like it was only her firm grip on her thigh and hip what kept her anchored to the table. She fell into a rhythm of sorts, her body seeking out something she could not find but his mouth striving to compensate, to give her what she needed. It was heavenly and seemed to last an eternity, the sensations building up till everything but them faded away, all sensations muted. She felt him move to, thrusting his hips against the edge of the table, making it rattle in a way that spoke of his sheer brute force. It was heady to have someone like Rumplestiltskin, who had always strived to don the mask of a gentleman around her, be so unhinged, so animalistic. More than anything it was that complete loss of control what drove her over the edge. She cried out, feeling her inner muscles coil and her senses spiral out of control, her orgasm leaving her dizzy. It seemed to last forever and not nearly long enough. She laid there for a while after the feeling passed, feeling satisfied and wanting at the same time. A few seconds later he also keened, slumping against her still-parted legs, his hair tickling the soft skin of her inner thighs.

They lay that way for what seemed like ages, while they scrambled to try and collect themselves. The afterglow did not feel awkward or uncomfortable, and it loosened up her tongue enough to venture out that she had hoped for an even more intimate act, a joining that was even deeper than what they had done.

“A deal for such a prize would have to involve all my deepest secrets, my most valuable truths.” He paused, pressing his forehead against the silky inside of her thigh, like a penitent would. “One day, perhaps.”

...

“Do you want to meet? I think it’s time.”

The orgasm had mellowed him out, otherwise he was sure he would’ve at least panicked a little bit. But in the afterglow of what they had just shared, albeit virtually, a meeting did not seem like such a bad idea. In hushed voices they arranged the time and place, tomorrow at a café and bistro in Boston. Nice and public, for both their safety. They knew both lived near Boston, so it seemed natural to pick the city. The drive wasn’t too bad, and he hoped it wasn’t a great inconvenience to her either.

Reluctantly they said their goodbyes, both trying to prolong the moment a bit more till they were both close to nodding off. With a final, reluctant goodbye they both disconnected, leaving Gold to clean himself up and make his way home. With his rumpled suit, disheveled hair and five o’clock shadow it must have looked like the walk of shame. It certainly didn’t feel that way.

...

He woke up in a happy mood, perhaps the best in a long time. Far from feeling stupid or embarrassed about his little bit of roleplaying-turned-porn-session he felt smug, empowered by the notion that he had made a smart, desirable woman come with only his voice and imagination. He felt like he was on the brink of something, as if an exciting possibility was opening up for him.

He went about his day with a bit of a spring in his step, though most citizens of Storybrooke would be pressed to notice. It was only when he saw the book on gardening he was due to return to the library that afternoon- his two Moth orchids had developed small water-soaked spots on the leaves and he had wanted to consult some verified sources instead of relying exclusively on Google search results- that his mood dampened somewhat. As nice as last night had been- bloody fantastic rather- it did make him sad, somewhat, to give up his crush on Belle French. However unattainable it was still nice to have it, that bit of feeling that did not need to be reciprocated to be real. It had been nice to feel something for someone for a change, to look forward to each smile and each small conversation. But it wouldn’t be right, and what he had now was more valuable in any case. Perhaps, with time, he would grow out of his infatuation with the librarian and they could be friends. That would be rather lovely.

He crossed the street towards the library around three o’clock, wanting to beat the rush caused by children being let off school, a busy time for one of the only kid-friendly places in Storybrooke. There were some patrons about, and the afternoon light made the library look truly beautiful. Miss French truly worked miracles with her limited budget.

He found her easily, shelving a few books in the poetry section, and tried not to preen when she smiled widely at him.

“Mr Gold, hi! Always a pleasure. Here to return a book?”

The librarian was always sunny and welcoming, but she looked even happier that day, an excited sort of energy practically rolling off of her in waves. Thank goodness he had decided to give up on his silly little crush, otherwise he might have buckled under the power of her brightness.

“Yes. And you look particularly happy today, Miss French, if I might say so.”

The librarian smiled even more, if possible, and leaned close, as if to tell him a secret.

“I have a date tonight.”

It hurt, the slightest bit, the shock making him take a step back, but less than it would have yesterday. And perhaps, he reasoned, this would be good. This would put them both in the path of becoming friends, allowing him to leave his crush behind much faster. He forced himself to enquire politely after the lucky man, listening as she talked about someone she had been flirting with for a long time now, and it seemed like the relationship was finally ready for the next step.

“I’m really happy. And very nervous. It feels like such a risk, after all this time building something that could easily fizzle out with a first date. But I’ve always believed in doing the brave thing, and bravery will follow. It’s what my mother always said.”

She had turned back to shelve a book as she finished the last sentence, so thankfully she did not see his jaw drop and his eyes widen, his surprise so visible no one could’ve missed it. His heart lurched in his chest, sheer and sudden panic making it difficult to breathe. Fuck. Fuck. It wasn’t possible. Belle was Beauty. Belle was Beauty. He tried to contradict the notion in his head but he had known Beauty’s British accent was passable but fake, and it made sense for him not to have identified her voice when she usually spoke with her natural Australian drawl, something he associated so closely with her. Everything else he had ever found out about Beauty, in and out of the D&D setting, coincided with what he knew, or thought he knew, about the librarian, one of the reasons why he had developed a crush on her in the first place.

The initial shock was followed by a spike of elation and then a sinking feeling of dread. He needed to cancel. She would be disappointed, but more disappointed if he didn’t and she realised her crush was a man a good deal older than her that was known for being the town monster. It would be awkward and she would not be able to escape him after it, both doomed to meet each other often, given the small size of the town. He could not put her through that.

He stopped himself then, noticing the familiar dark turn of his thoughts, dipped in so much self-loathing it was almost stifling. And he wondered if he really was thinking about Belle or about himself. Being a coward, taking the easy way out. He thought about how he had woken up, the world full of promise and the future bright with the possibility of something great on the horizon. And how he had felt brave last night, to leap into something that had been so worth it. Perhaps it was time to be brave more often. Do something, however small. Put the ball in her court, somehow.

“I wish you the best of luck, then. Perhaps some other time, if you’re not too busy, you could pop into my shop. I have a few antique books I feel you would appreciate.”

It was a nice recovery, and he was happy to see her smile, apparently welcoming the proposition. Everyone knew Mr Gold’s shop was only to be entered when making deals. He didn’t really allow idle perusal of his stock and no one had the money or interest to buy his antiques. His business was conducted mostly with people from major cities on the East Coast.

“Wow, an open invitation to traipse into Mr Gold’s shop, that’s not something one sees everyday. What do you want in return? I hear only deals can grant you access to the shop.”

She made sure to make it clear she was joking, something he appreciated. Feeling emboldened by her kind gesture he adopted a slightly higher pitch and replied:

“Oh, nothing much. Companionship, perhaps a game of chess, some good wine, conversation and the like.”

Being close enough he got to see as it dawned on her, as her brain quickly processed what he had said and where she had heard it before. And he knew, knew because of the way she looked at him, as if she did not recognise him, as if he was a brand new person to her, that she understood the implication, what he had meant to tell her without actually telling her.

“Hope to see you soon, then. Good luck with the date.”

He turned around before he could second-guess himself, feeling terrified by what he had exposed but satisfied at the same time. This way it was Belle’s choice to show up. For all she knew he had no idea that she was Beauty. She could make up an excuse and simply not meet her, and their worlds would never merge. If she did not want to pursue anything between them all she had to do is cancel the date, or not show up. He would respect her decision and never push for anything, or acknowledge their online relationship in the real world.

He sent her an email just as he was about to get into his car, letting her know that he understood that this meeting was a bit of a risk and he would understand if she backed out at the last minute. There were other things he could do in Boston, and he was not adverse to having dinner by himself. And they could still be friends, no matter what she decided. He was halfway to Boston when he heard his cell phone ping, letting him know he had a new email. As he expected, it was from Beauty:

“I’m on my way. Can’t wait to meet you! See you soon.”

He smiled.

#argoslight #rumbelle fic #rumbelle #Roll for Initiative #Thestraggletag fanfiction #Rumbelle Gift Swap

41 notes · View notes

itsclydebitches · 3 years

Note

Was planning on making this my own post, but I thought you would be more suited to discussing this sort of topic. Something I've noticed when it comes to the more prominent/important/strong female characters (Nora, Pyrrha, Penny, Robyn, Emerald, Sienna) is that RT often has the tendency of giving them masculine allusions (Thor, Achilles, Pinocchio, Robin Hood, Aladdin, Shere Khan) as if they are unable to stand on their own as characters unless they have that connection to a male character. 1/3

It is worth discussing! Yeah, I hesitate to call it a pattern just because, as you say, Team RWBY themselves are an exception to the rule — and as the title characters of the story, they’re a pretty big exception. We also have good women allusions turned into good women characters (Glynda with The Good Witch, May with Maid Marian) and bad women allusions turned into good women characters (Winter with The Snow Queen — I don’t think she was ever meant to enter full antagonist territory, but that’s another post). So it’s not just a matter of saying, “RWBY models their strong women after male inspirations and turns all female inspirations into male characters.” It’s not that simple. But the fact that it’s not simple doesn’t mean there’s nothing there to unpack because I definitely understand the feeling you’re pointing to, anon. Team RWBY feels like it has the most thought put into it in terms of changing up these allusions, specifically when it comes to subversion: the little girl in a red hood who previously needed a hunter’s protection has become the hunter herself, Belle overcomes both her Gaston and the now evil Beast, Snow White extracts herself from her own abusive situation (with a little help from the Dwarves still), and Goldilocks is no longer lost and in need of basic necessities, but can rather punch her way out of any establishment — like, say, a club. The execution of these themes aside (how Adam was handled, turning Jacques’ arrest into a joke, etc.), there’s a commonality here that works. Or at least, it works for me. Yet when we expand the allusions past our title team, things get... very messy. That’s when we start to hit on these concerns.

I’d say the problem stems primarily from that lack of thought, not the act itself of turning women characters into men or vice versa. Meaning, as I’ve said in the past, RWBY’s use of allusions is terribly unreliable nowadays, and that’s not just in terms of plot expectations like, “Why did Penny have to become a flesh girl because Pinocchio, but Ironwood didn’t stay good because Tin Man?” It also includes these questions of why these changes were made and what sort of messages they send. As you lay out, why are so many of our heavy hitters — the most talented huntress, the lightning-immune smasher, the Maiden android, etc. — based on men? Why are many of the effeminate and “weaker” men — Jaune the untrained, Ren the emotional councilor, Oscar the kid who wants to talk it all out — based on women? Again, I don’t intend to sling any hard accusations, but rather to point out what’s likely a subtle, unconscious bias. To provide another example, I’ve seen talk recently about how RT (again, unconsciously) depicts the faunus, where all the good characters have culturally established “good” animal features and all the bad character have culturally established “bad” features. It’s cat ears, rabbit ears, sheep ears, monkey tails, dog tails, and beautifully changing skin color vs. scorpion tails, spiderwebs, bull horns, tiger ears, bat wings, and crocodile scales. Is it a perfect 1:1 divide? No, Ghira has panther claws and Fennec has fox ears, but there’s enough there for us to go, “RT tends to give the good guys cute features and/or features we associate with safe animals, whereas the bad guys tend to get ugly features and/or features we associate with dangerous animals.” I feel the same way here, that there’s a bit of a trend at play, with the caveat that there are more complications simply by virtue of these allusions being, well, complicated. But there’s enough there to make us stop and think, “What were RT’s intentions with this? If they just chose something based on the rule of cool, what might those inclinations tell us about gender norms in America?” Meaning, when someone goes, “Idk, we just thought it would be cool to change this up” there’s a lifetime of media consumption driving that choice. It’s not actually random, but based on whatever has been normalized — unless you actively counteract that by thinking through what you want the change to do.

Unconscious biases are always at work. When we analyze something like this it’s often not a matter of saying, “The author is [insert accusatory term here]” but rather just, “The author is falling into expectations, patterns, and normalized decisions based on the culture they’ve grown up in.” Which includes things like thinking, “Well, if this character is based on a male god, she must be crazy strong. If this character is based on a woman fighter, he’s probably more emotional.” Such biases may be driving a lot of decisions because, as said in the past, I really don’t think RT is putting much thought into these allusions, if any at this point. For me, Penny was proof of that — the inability to see how following her allusion utterly destroyed her character growth — but even if we don’t agree about Penny, what about Salem? Far from just using her name, this volume gave us a blatant reference to the events of Salem Trails in the 1690s. Namely, the burning of the witch.

Except references like this can’t just look cool. This isn’t a video game Easter egg with no real connection to the story, it’s a cinematography/plot choice that carries meaning. So what is that meaning? Well, the thing about the women on trail at Salem is that they were innocent. This is what that reference says: “Hey, remember that real life event where women who weren’t witches were horrifically killed because others thought they were evil? None were actually burned, but culturally we tend to think they were. So that’s the image in our collective mind: innocent women on fire.” Except... Salem is actually a witch. Salem is evil. Salem is guilty. Or at least, the questions surrounding the extent of her guilt — How much responsibility does she hold in comparison to the Gods? How much agency does she still have after the grimm pool? — has not been acknowledged by the text. Yang just yelled at Salem for killing her mom and Oscar is about to blow her up. This is not a “Question Salem’s humanity” scene, it’s a “Kill the witch” scene... yet it uses an allusion that is contrary to what the moment is trying to achieve. So what are we supposed to take away from this? Do we adhere to the subtext and believe that Salem is innocent somehow, ignoring what the actual text says, or do we uphold the text and in doing so undermine the reliability of every other allusion in the show? If we can’t trust Salem’s, why would we trust, say, Penny’s?

RWBY’s allusions are all over the place and yes, I think that lack of consideration extends to who they randomly decided to genderbend. There’s no acknowledgment of — let alone engagement with — how many of these characters and historical figures were trying to pass themselves off as another gender, nor does RWBY acknowledge how the need to do so feeds into our current and historic assumptions about gender as a whole. Why does the man dress as a woman? To keep himself safe and seen as a non-threat. Why does the woman dress as a man? To gain access to places previously barred from her and to gain the respect she otherwise wouldn’t be afforded. And, of course, in 2021 there’s the expectation that media will include trans characters, GNC characters, non-binary characters, cis characters uninterested in practicing traditional femininity/masculinity, etc. None of which RWBY tackles outside of May, a woman who references a systematic transphobia we otherwise never see in the show. May, as a minor character, is great and I am in all honesty thrilled that she exists in the RWBY canon. However, the rest of the show is built on an anime conception of gender — combat skirts and bare midriffs in the snow — while nevertheless engaging with the very complicated question of how you re-imagine canonically/historically gendered people. As a “girl power” show, RWBY has opened itself up to questions like, “Okay, it’s great that you made these four fairy tale girls kickass, but can we talk about making Joan of Arc into a bumbling guy whose presence as a blonde, blue-eyed, sword-wielding man taking up lots of important screen time has generated accusations about this being a male-centered show?” It’s not a “RWBY is horrible for doing this!” issue, but a “RWBY is deliberately playing with gender and marketing itself as a progressive show, so... let’s figure out what these individual choices are actually implying and whether or not we consider that progressive.”

#rwby #mymetas #Anonymous

33 notes · View notes

derivativealigner · 3 years

Text

Well I haven’t watched sp all the way through for about a decade now, so I thought it was time

Sometimes I wonder how accurate the fandom is when it comes to how we interpret the characters. Like, why is Stan a football star so often in fanfic and why’s Kyle always the smart one? So I thought I’d rewatch the show and make notes along the way to see where the source of all these interpretations is. I also wanted to see if I could get some fun info to analyze, but season 1 is pretty sparse in that regard so there’s not too much of that in this post, but I’ll make a post for all the other seasons too as I watch them

In summary, it’s established in season 1 already that Stan’s a star quarterback and an animal lover, Kyle’s an A+ student, and Kenny is poor and knows a lot about sex and doesn’t have many qualms about doing crazy shit. Cartman is a bit weird since he’s mostly just a naive brat in this season, but he and Kyle have a mildly antagonistic friendship already

I have all my notes under this cut. They include a bunch of small details and other observations. I also listed every Kenny death just because

Ike has freckles

Cartman says “Weak!” and “You guys” and “Seriously” a lot from the start, also “Kickass!” He doesn’t say weak or kickass much in the later seasons iirc

Stan says “Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here” three times in this season but they dropped that catchphrase pretty quickly

Bebe got named in episode 2

Stan’s been an animal lover since s01e03 Volcano since he won’t shoot a bunny or anything else. He does shoot Scuzzlebutt at the end though

Cartman’s a pathological liar but in a childish way

Randy got named in s01e03 Volcano (and it only got worse from there)

The mayor went to Princeton

South Park is next to Mt. Evanson

Kenny will literally drink gasoline

Stan’s a star quarterback in 3rd grade

Clyde’s voice is wrong as hell in S01E04 Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride and he has a dog, Rex

Garrison says Kyle is an A+ kid

Shelly seriously abuses Stan, punching him, throwing him, maiming him with a lawnmower

Cartman had a pot-bellied pig called Fluffy

Cartman’s mom smokes crack and has sex with strange men

Dr. Mephesto is probably a Buddhist since he says “Thank Buddha” instead of “Thank God”

Clyde’s voice gets kind of fixed in S01E06

A guy called Mr. McCormick is killed in a protest, launched and splattered against a network building. He doesn’t look like Kenny’s dad though

Zombie Clyde attacks Bebe, rude

Wendy gave her costume contest prize (2 tons of candy) to hungry children in Nairobi

Cartman’s mom is on the cover of Crack Whore magazine. “Back do’ ho… Five on one action!” is the headline

Cartman genuinely cries at Kenny’s grave after the whole zombie thing but gets over it because of candy

Stan knows his mom’s credit card number and has no problem using it to adopt an Ethiopian child (the boys wanted a watch that came with the adoption, they weren’t doing it to be nice)

Cartman calls Stan a vas deference, Stan doesn’t know what that is so Kenny says “Dude, it’s a pipe for your peepee” (according to a transcript). Kenny sure knows male anatomy

Kyle sniffs Kenny after Cartman asks why poor people smell like sour milk and Garrison says “idk eric they just do”

Cartman thinks poor people should die and decrease the surplus population

When the boys get Starvin’ Marvin delivered to them, Cartman says “Hey mom, we found an Ethiopian, can we keep him?” and his mom says “Sure, hun.” She rarely says no to Cartman

Kenny’s dad is an alcoholic who drinks scotch according to Cartman. I mean, Mr. McCormick is seen drinking in multiple episodes and has a hat that says SCOTCH so it’s probably true

Kenny’s family says grace

Craig’s first appearance is S01E09. Also, S01E09 is the first time Kenny doesn’t die (Coincidence? I THINK yeah but it’s still fun)

Clyde got named in S01E10

Clyde and Bebe both spit on Pip’s face, friendship goals <3

Cartman and Kyle have their first fight at Cartman’s birthday party because Kyle didn’t give the right gift. Cartman slaps his face and screams “I hate you! I want you to die! Die!” while on top of Kyle who’s not really fighting back

Satan throws a fight with Jesus after everyone except Satan bet that Jesus would lose, which leads to Satan winning everyone’s money. Mr. Garrison says “What a mean thing to do!” and Jimbo says “He is a jerk!” and I thought it was quite a laugh so I wrote it down

In S01E11 Tom’s Rhinoplasty Bebe and Wendy are sitting in the swings together and generally appear together throughout the episode, then Bebe gives Wendy a makeover so they’re bffs obviously <3

Craig first appears in the classroom, though not sitting down, in S01E11

Wendy’s not happy about Ms. Ellen taking Stan away from her, she says “Don’t fuck with me! Stay away from my man, bitch, or I’ll whoop your sorry ho ass back to last year!”

Kenny gives Ms. Ellen a scrumptious looking sausage as a valentine’s gift and giggles deviously. Wendy’s gift to Ms. Ellen is a dead animal

Even Kenny doesn’t know what a lesbian is

Wendy’s grandma died in S01E11

Wendy gets Ms. Ellen killed by hiring the Iraqi government (?) to put her in a rocket and shoot it into the sun, then she and Bebe have a pool party (very cool, they wear sunglasses 😎) and watch the rocket hit the sun

Cartman and Pip play a game of kicking each other in the nuts until someone falls. Cartman calls it “Roshambo”

Kenny has a sack of marbles

The boys aren’t fans of Barbra Streisand, but Stan is a fan of the Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway (he’s not a quarterback anymore, he’s an American football executive and the president of football operations for the Denver Broncos of the NFL according to wikipedia.)

Officer Barbrady is a fan of Fiona Apple (who was 20 at the time and had only one album released called Tidal)

Ned knows how to pilot a helicopter

Kyle’s mom is a fan of Streisand unlike literally everyone else, she even gets an autograph from Mecha Streisand

The boys are fans of Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure. Stan says “Robert Smith is the greatest person that ever lived!” and Kyle says “Disintegration is the best album ever!” and Cartman says “Robert Smith kicks ass!” and Kenny’s dead so he doesn’t get to have an opinion

Cartman has tea parties with his toys: Polly Prissypants, Clyde frog, Peter Panda, and a dragon called Rumpertumskin

Kyle wants to make fun of Cartman for the tea party but Stan stops him because he’s concerned that Cartman needs help

Craig is in front of the school counselor’s office in S01E13

A young miss Cartman drinks like a motherfucker at the 12th annual drunken barn dance where Cartman was supposedly conceived

Stan lets Cartman borrow his bike like a good friend

Garrison wanted to have a threesome with Chef and Cartman’s mom. I don’t know why I’m making a note of this but uh… yeah.

Cartman’s mom has had sex with everyone at this bar that Garrison’s drinking at, including principle Victoria, the mayor, Father Maxi, and Jesus (and maybe Kenny’s dad since he’s at the bar but the camera doesn’t pan to him when Garrison says they’ve all slept with Liane). Later Gerald Broflovski is a possible father to Eric, so he fucked her too. Also Mr. Mephesto and his friend Kevin, that little guy, are candidates along with a lot of other people, including the 1989 Denver Broncos (and Mr. Tenorman is included in that later)

Cartman doesn’t make fun of Kyle for being Jewish much at all in this season even though the Christmas episode is all about Kyle not celebrating

Clyde and Token appear very early on and Clyde has always been in the classroom (along with Bebe, Red, Kevin Stoley, Wendy, and Pip and uhh DogPoo too I think). Craig appears later in the season and Tweek’s not in season 1 at all, so Craig’s gang isn’t really a thing yet

And here’s a list of the ways Kenny died in this season. He dies in every episode except episode 9, and he dies twice in episodes 2 and 3. Altogether he dies 14 times

S01E01 Killed after alien shoots him, cows stampede over him, then cop runs him over which finally actually kills him

S01E02 Killed in a play by a falling teepee, then a second time shot by Garrison which sends him in the air and he gets impaled on a flagpole on the way down

S01E03 Killed by a volcano rock that burns him then rolls on him but he’s alive again in the end but gets shot by Ned’s gun that he drops and it accidentally goes off

S01E04 Gets his arms and head torn off in an American football game

S01E05 Stan’s clone punches Kenny into a microwave where he gets cooked alive

S01E06 Death touches Kenny

S01E07 Kenny gets crushed by a Russian space station and turns into a zombie because he gets Worcestershire sauce in his veins, then Kyle chainsaws zombie Kenny in half, then zombie Kenny rises from his grave and is crushed by a statue and a plane

S01E08 Kenny is killed by a bunch of turkeys. His eye gets plucked out. It’s dark blue

S01E10 After Kenny gets turned into a duck-billed platypus, Jimbo and Ned shoot him

S01E11 Ms. Ellen throws a sword through Kenny’s face

S01E12 While Mecha Streisand and a giant robot Leonard Maltin fight, Kenny plays with a tetherball and gets the rope wrapped around his neck and it strangles him

S01E13 Kenny gets stuck on a go kart and it drags him around but stops and he’s still alive! Too bad the go kart stops on train tracks and a train runs him over. Stan’s grandpa sends a video of the event to America’s Stupidest Home Videos and wins $10,000

If you read all that, first of all hello. I’m not new to the fandom even though this is the first thing I’ve posted on this tumblr blog. I’ve been writing a fanfic called Caffetamine though so I’m not a complete non-entity. Anyway, I’ll watch season 2 soon and post my notes on that too probably.

#south park #sp rewatch #i made way too many notes #kenny used to get dialog in almost every episode #poor kenny #he really gets shafted later

62 notes · View notes

nintendylan64 · 3 years

Text

My problems with FNAF Lore

Hey guys. I felt like I wanted to explain my problems with the FNAF lore, and how the lore was ruined for me years ago.

My history with the franchise and the lore Now, I discovered the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise back in 2014 through DanTDM's Let's Play of Five Nights at Freddy's 2. It was the first time I had ever been introduced to the jumpscares and characters in-game. But I actually discovered the first game through a YTP someone made of it. With how little I knew from discovering that YTP, I assumed that Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy were anthropomorphic animals that ran the place, and that Freddy just liked to leave scary stuff in his office because he was a horror guy. That assumption was way off and DanTDM's Let's Play let me discover that the antagonists weren't anthropomorphic animals. I then discovered Markiplier's videos on the games in 2014, and fan-animations of the games like SMG4's Freddy's Spaghettiria series, and Piemations' 5 AM at Freddy's series. Besides the surprising jumpscares, what really got me hooked on the FNAF series was the 80s-90s aesthetics, and the lore behind it all. Around late 2014 and early 2015, I had discovered the hidden lore series by MrCreepyPasta, which was what got me interested in exploring the lore. I loved the FNAF lore when it was just, "Man kills 5 kids in pizzeria joint and the animatronics become haunted by the spirits of the kids". This made it feel much more realistic, as murder of kids in a place like this can happen in real life. The fact that the staff weren't behind any of it, and that the guards were originally just some average joes who got hired for a night guard position without knowing the dangers of it was also very realistic too. And the inclusion of another tragic event known as the "Bite of '87" was also interesting. But the biggest thing that made the lore have a charm to it, was how there was an implied history of Fazbear Entertainment, and FNAF 2 showed us the history of the place before the tragedies happened, as well as implying that the negative impression was stuck before the murders was also interesting. The lore was interesting back then because of how realistic and mysterious it was. And when the third game came out, it was a great conclusion to the franchise, in which the killer got his comeuppance, leaving the kid's souls to rest in peace. And the killer haunting the suit he died in as an attempt to escape his torment of being trapped in a suit, eventually leaving him to be burned alive in the location he was at was a very nice way to end things. But the way it had expanded on the story by taking place thirty years after the events of the first game, with the unsolved mysteries of Fazbear Entertainment trying to be recreated by people was a good way to expand upon the story. So basically, I prefer the FNAF lore when it was the story of how kids were murdered in a pizzeria joint, and how they eventually got revenge on their killer, while room was made to show us how the pizzeria joint handled this, and how the alleged hauntings were shown through the animatronics being possessed. Because of the lore being so interesting, I tried making up my own timelines to tie the story of the first three games together. And seeing as how the lore was concluded, it should've just ended there, right? Well... it didn't.

Where the problems crept in I think that the problems with the lore crept in with the fourth game. Now, this game could've had potential, as it could've taken place in the location where the withered animatronics were used in before FNAF 2, but it didn't do that. We got instead a child suffering through nightmares, with animatronics that have particularly stupid designs. Plus, what made it worse was that the Bite of 83 was introduced, making the topic of the Bite of'87 confusing since it was implied it happened in the second game, but now it was happening in the fourth game? But then it was revealed to be a separate event, why two separate events of the same thing? What constitutes the idea of establishing a similar event to the Bite of '87? It had nothing to impact the games itself at all. The bigger thing that was confusing is this, Fredbear's Family Diner was implied to have been closed for longer than 1983-1987, and the fact that you see the unwithered versions of the withered animatronics in Fredbear's makes it all the more confusing, since Fredbear's was established as a separate, and early location before it was later re-enfranchised as Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. So why retcon what was established in the previous games? Why not just show us in the fourth game what happened with the withered animatronics before they became withered, and then make a fifth game that took place in Fredbear's Family Diner? I don't know why Scott felt the need to retcon things, especially since most people thought that the franchise had already ended with the third game. Later on down the line, Sister Location came out in 2016. And I honestly hate Sister Location, lore-wise that is. The reason I say this is because Sister Location fucked up everything more than the 4th game. This time, there was more retconning, the horror tone and 80s-90s aesthetic was gone, the game felt like Sci-fi and less like the older games. Worse, Purple Guy was given an actual name, and turned from a cold-blooded killer that killed kids because of being a psychopath, into a mad scientist obsessed with placing souls into animatronics using soul juice in an attempt to create murderous animatronics, and he killed kids to do this, but most of them were his own or his friend's kids, Fazbear Entertainment was actually started by this maniac, and Mike Schmidt from FNAF 1 was no longer an average joe working a night shift job, but instead the son of the killer and later became an unrealistic purple zombie that somehow got hired for night shift positions. Jeremy and Fritz were no longer average joes either, and were now aliases for the purple zombie who's actual name was Michael Afton, making Mike Schmidt another alias for this zombie. And now, this was more about a family that was insane to begin with trying to put their own personal demons to rest, rather than the story of the murder of 5 children in a pizzeria joint, and the killer gets his comeuppance while the faceless pizzeria chain tried keep its reputation afloat, eventually failing which lead to the closure of it. All of this shattered how I interpreted the lore. The biggest things that Sister Location fucked up were the following. 1. Taking away the 80s/90s aesthetic. In the first and second game, the game has an 80s and 90s aesthetic with the looks of the locations and decor, as well as the camera sounds sounding like cassette tapes, and the first took place in the early 90s, while the second took place in the late 80s. FNAF 3 kept the 80s/90s aesthetic, and I'd argue FNAF 4 kept the old aesthetic too, such as how old everything looked in FNAF 3, and how the house looks particularly old in FNAF 4. FNAF SL's aesthetics look way too futuristic for a FNAF game, especially since it's said to take place before the first 4 games. 2. Making it more sci-fi. The original FNAF games, and the fourth one were meant to be horror games, and they established this greatly with audio and visual cues, as well as the storyline having a horror-esque feel to it during the first 3 games, and even the 4th game kept. The focus on sci-fi traits or elements in SL kind of kills the horror-esque feel that FNAF originally gave off, especially the whole soul juice and mad scientist part. 3. Making Fazbear Entertainment have an owner. Fazbear Entertainment should've just been left as a faceless corporation that had nothing to do with the murders, the type of company to try and cover up the damage done to their reputation by cutting costs or not batting an eye when a man kills children in their restaurant. 4. Making Mike, Jeremy, and Fritz into aliases. It doesn't make any sense as to why a company would hire a foul smelling zombie who kept changing his name. I think that Mike, Jeremy, and Fritz should've just been average joes that got night guard positions not knowing that their jobs were dangerous and not knowing the hauntings of the pizzeria they applied to work for. And 5. The Afton Family. The Afton Family completely ruined the idea of the children being killed at Freddy's by an unknown man, since now it's just about a family killing his own for a dumb mad science experiment and the son is trying to stop his own father, making it so you no longer play as an average joe that discovers the dark secrets and hauntings of a pizzeria joint, but instead you're just playing as a zombie that needs to kill his own father in order to stop his father from killing anyone else. Seriously, it feels less like a horror game, and now feels more like a badly written self-insert sci-fi story with some bit of horror mixed in. The FNAF series is way too complicated to figure out now due to loads of retconning and unnecessary changes made to the story. Worse, the Nightmare, Funtime, and other animatronics that have been added to the franchise just seems like an excuse for Scott to just add new characters simply to keep the franchise going. Now, let's look at a FNAF fan-game series with a better written story.

Five Nights at Candy's Five Nights at Candy's has a much easier to understand story than FNAF. In the first game, you play as a female night guard at a burger joint where an unfortunate incident occurred between an animatronic and a customer, and an incident involving two kids at the factory where the animatronics were made. The backstory of everything, such as the original location and the burger joint's opening are explained in FNAC 3, showing how two unfortunate incidents at the puppet/animatronic theatre led to the closure of the place. We also learn more about the main character from the first game, and the one who caused the murders as well as the victims. In the second game, everything is concluded with the daughter of the guard solving the mysteries of the old factory. The reason is because Emil Macko managed to actually tell the story in an effective way, without retconning anything and without relying entirely on twists and misdirection.

Conclusion So yeah, I can't stand FNAF lore post-FNAF 4, because of how it became way too confusing to understand, and with how the series started retconning tons of things and making unnecessary changes. And it's amazing how a FNAF fan-game was able to tell its story better than the actual FNAF fan-games. So for me, I'm sticking with the FNAF 1-3 lore, which is my interpretation of it. Before I end this blog though, what's annoying is that no matter if you mention the FNAF 1-3 lore on YouTube, people will instantly start bringing in the modern FNAF lore and correct you, even if you're following you're headcanon.

#fnaf #rant #random rant

8 notes · View notes

wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 4 years

Text

Psycho Analysis: Jason Voorhees

(WARNING! He’s back! THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK!)

...ki ki, ki, ma ma ma...

The slasher subgenre of horror has plenty of villains, but the key to any great slasher movie (aside from quality kills) is having a memorable slasher who sticks in the mind of those who watch the film. You can’t just have some generic evil guy and expect the killer to be cool and memorable; you need to give them a fun gimmick. And in the scores of slashers who populated the 80s, there are few out there who are quite as legendary and iconic as Jason Voorhees. Jason is one of those few villains who, even if you’ve never seen a single one of his movies, you’d know on sight.

Even now, with him being absent from cinema for over a decade at the time of this writing due to legal disputes (though not from other mediums such as video games), Jason is still a household name, still remembered as one of the coolest, creepiest horror villains to come out of the 80s. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say Jason might be the greatest slasher villain of all time. So let’s take a look at the man behind the mask and see what we’ve got here.

Motivation/Goals: Jason as a villain is motivated by two main factors: a desire to make his mother proud, and a desire to get vengeance for how he was treated. The first few movies are all Jason taking out his anger over his mother’s death on anyone near Camp Crystal Lake. In earlier movies, he’d really only kill anyone who invaded his territory, but later sequels had him expand his killing range by going to Manhattan, Springwood, and even outer space. Basically, Jason is motivated by revenge against a world that persecuted him, and a desire to impress his mother. The simplicity of his motivations is actually a great strength, because it means there doesn’t need to be constant time in each new film adding on to Jason’s lore like they do with Freddy, Michael Meyers, and so on. Jason kills kids who have sex, that’s it. Simple, clean, effective, and a vehicle for cool kills.

Performance: There are a LOT of people who have put on the hockey mask throughout the franchise, but perhaps the most well-known name is Kane Hodder, the hulking actor who portrayed Jason in the seventh through the tenth films. He’s certainly the Jason that will spring to mind when thinking of Jasons, but he’s the obvious one. His actor in Freddy vs. Jason, Ken Kirzinger, was chosen because he had kind eyes and could tower over Freddy, and amusingly he actually appeared in Jason Takes Manhattan as a huge chef Jason tosses aside. Then of course we have Ari Lehman, the man who cameoed as Jason at the end of the first film in the Carrie-esque jump scare, most notable because he is so proud of his role that he named his punk rock/heavy metal band First Jason.

And these are just the few I wanted to highlight here; the original continuity is ten movies worth of actors playing Jason, and he even has multiple actors in some films.

Final Fate: It depends on the movie. His mortal life is ended by a young Tommy Jarvis in The Final Chapter, but then he comes back in Jason Lives as a zombie, a zombie who is only incapacitated until Jason Takes Manhattan where he is seemingly killed off for good by the nightly flooding of the Manhattan sewers with radioactive sludge (likely a safety measure against C.H.U.D.s). But then he comes back in Jason Goes to Hell where his original body ends up obliterated for most of the movie until the ending, but soon after he’s dragged right down to, you guessed it, Hell. But then comes Jason X, and he’s brought to space where he finally ends up obliterated for real by falling through the atmosphere of a planet and burning up. And this isn’t getting into the numerous deaths from games, comics, and so on; Jason is a man who is very hard to kill.

Best Scene: What does one pick for the best scene? His sleeping bag kill from VII? The liquid nitrogen kill from Jason X? The numerous amusing scenes he has when he actually reaches Manhattan in Jason Takes Manhattan? It’s a tough choice, but honestly. I might just have to go with his corn field rave massacre in Freddy vs. Jason. It’s just so damn cool.

youtube

Final Thoughts & Score: Jason Voorhees is one of the great early slasher villains and, most impressively of all, he managed a remarkable level of consistency until the very end, at least compared to some of is peers. Compare to Michael Meyers, who had to constantly be rebooted because filmmakers kept trying to find ways to humanize and explan his motivations to the point that franchise has a fractured timeline to rival the Zelda series, or Freddy Krueger, who deteriorated from a terrifying psychopath who treated killing like a game to a non-stop quip machine that spent more time slinging one-liners than kills. Jason, while certainly going through some odd phases – recall the time he was a weird demon worm that could surf between bodies, or the time he went to space and became a cyborg – never really lost sight of the things that truly made him effective as a character.

Yes, Jason is a silent antagonist, but he says a lot with his deeds and actions. He’s a killing machine, but he certainly isn’t mindless, and he usually seems to have some sort of ethics that perhaps we don’t understand, but Jason certainly does. For instance, in later films Jason does not hurt animals, and once he’s a zombie he doesn’t kill children either. A lot of this likely stems from Jason essentially being a child in a deformed man’s body, and this goes a long to making him an interesting, tragic figure. Jason almost certainly doesn’t understand what he’s doing is wrong, and if he does, he’s almost certainly too blinded by rage to care, especially after becoming a zombie.

I think the underlying tragedy of Jason simply being a monster who only wanted to please his beloved mother and violently lashes out at those he sees, through his warped perspective, as the ones to blame makes him an interesting and complex character… and here’s the great thing! Unlike other slasher villains, this is all established very early on, and rather than continue piling on more and more backstory, the series decides to throw Jason into interesting situations. This is a problem that befell his slasher sibling Freddy; as cool as Freddy managed to be, every new film added more and more convoluted backstory rather than trying to put Freddy into an interesting scenario he could have interesting kills in. And the less said about Michael Meyers, the better. But Jason? They gave him all he needed in the first two movies, made him a zombie in the sixth, and then spent the rest of the series getting weird and creative. Jason is a villain effective because his simple characterization and motivation means he can slip into any sort of situation, be it fighting a telekinetic girl, going to Manhattan, fighting Freddy Krueger, fighting Ash Williams, slaughtering camp counselors en masse, or going to space.

It should be incredibly obvious Jason is an 11/10. He’s a testament to what makes a slasher villain great and memorable: he has a simple yet flexible mindset that allows him to be thrust into a variety of situations, he has an iconic outfit, he has an awesome weapon of choice, and he is parodied, referenced, and known throughout the world to this day. He has killer video game appearances in the likes of Mortal Kombat X and his own Friday the 13th game, he has tons of comics including ones where he takes on Freddy, Ash Williams, Leatherface, and even Uber Jason, and despite the obnoxious legal battles currently keeping him from appearing in any media to any great extent, you’d be hard pressed to find a person without even passing knowledge of Jason.

Here’s a few interesting notes, though – a lot of shout outs to Jason have characters using a chainsaw, which as we all know is the tool of Leatherface. Jason uses a machete for the most part but is very versatile, but even so the closest he ever came to using anything remotely like a chainsaw was in VII, where he used a weed whacker. Jason also didn’t gain his iconic look until the third film; in the second movie, Jason wore a burlap sack over his head. And finally, there’s a bit of trivia I’m sure most are aware of by now: Jason was not the killer in the first or fifth films. In the first film, the killer was actually Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees, and the fifth film Jason was still kind of dead so a copycat killer named Roy Burns took his place. So hey, while we’re here, let’s talk about these Jason adjacent killers:

Pamela Voorhees is one of those rare female slasher villains, and the fact she is so absolutely amazing makes you wonder why there aren’t more. She’s basically to Friday the 13th what The Boss is to the Metal Gear Franchise – an all-important female figure whose actions completely and totally changed the course of history. Her quest to avenge her son’s death led to her slaughtering people at Camp Crystal Lake, which led to her death… but then it turns out her son had lived all along, and her death served only to make him into a violent, vengeful monster. Add on the fact that Pamela was using the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis on her son to empower him (supported by Jason Goes to Hell and Freddy vs, Jason vs. Ash), and Pamela is indirectly responsible for every murder in the series. Or perhaps even directly, if it really is her voice Jason hears in some of the movies and the Friday the 13th game. Betsy Palmer absolutely kills it in the role (pun intended), and it’s a shame she was annoyed by the role for years, though she apparently did eventually come around and embrace it. As one of the great ladies of horror, Pamela definitely earns a 10/10.

But now let’s take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum with Roy Burns. The idea of a Jason copycat killer is not entirely without merit, and for the most part, the movie is incredibly solid, with good kills on Roy’s part. The issue comes with the ultimate reveal of his identity, which turns the entire movie into an utterly convoluted mess that makes absolutely no sense. The lack of buildup of any kind, save for two brief scenes prior to his unmasking, makes the twist lack any sort of punch, and his reasoning for killing people is just absurd. Hell, he isn’t even targeting the one person responsible – that guy gets away with a jail sentence while Roy butchers innocent people!

Basically, Roy fails at being an engaging replacement for Jason due to the film’s finale, which goes out of its way to undermine him and everything you just watched. It should come as no shock that he’s a 1/10. Still, unlike most villains with this rating, he does have a little bit of redemption due to being playable in the Friday the 13th game. You’re just controlling him as he kills without any worry about stupid backstory, so hey, I’ll give Roy that at least, and I can’t deny his mask is pretty sick.

UPDATE: Ok, I was way too hard n Roy. Yes, his motivation is stupid and poorly explained, his killings are absolutely ridiculous and make no sense with his motivation, I still stand by all that... and yet, I’m watching this movie for creative kills, right? And boy does our boy Roy provide. He slaughters his way through these oneshot characters with gusto! I think I’m just still bitter he’s not Jason, but I like Season of the Witch even if Michael Meyers isn’t there, so maybe I’m just too harsh on Roy and his movie in general. I think his dumbass motivations hold him back, but I think the correct score for him is a 6/10. He is most certainly not abysmal enough for a one and I was really foolish to issue a score like that. Sometimes even I have trouble overcoming my biases.

It’s interesting, though, that both of these characters tend to be forgotten, overshadowed by Jason. In the intro of Scream, Drew Barrymore’s doomed character accidentally says Jason is the killer of the first film, rather than Pamela. And I think that while that is likely a common misconception, it’s less because Pamela is forgettable but more that Jason is so overwhelmingly cool that he overshadows anyone else in these films with few exceptions. Jason may very well be the greatest slasher villain of all time, and if you disagree, well, who won in Freddy Vs. Jason again, hmmm?

And more importantly, what slasher villain has an Alice Cooper song dedicated to him?

youtube

I rest my case.

#Psycho Analysis #Jason Voorhees #Kane Hodder #Friday the 13th

20 notes · View notes

kob131 · 4 years

Text

https://rwdestuffs.tumblr.com/post/625278536172879872/done-dirty-shipping

Maybe it’s because I’m still not over how the writers just up and offed Clover and are trying to use the ship he had with Qrow for marketing purposes, but still.- If they hadn’t done that, maybe there wouldn’t be as much backlash for what they did?

*looks behind Dudeblade to see all the Arkos shippers still trying to burn RT to the ground for sinking their ship.*

I highly doubt that.

They promoted Qrover (And that’s the name I’ll be using to avoid getting into the proper ship tags) for the sake of merchandise. They do the same with Blang (The name I’ll be using for the Blake x Yang ship to avoid getting into their tags as well), it simply seems as if these ships are just there to keep an audience invested in the show for the hope that their ship will become canon before the final episode of the series.

Ah huh-

Let’s check RT’s merch store shall we?

https://store.roosterteeth.com/collections/rwby

This is the store showcasing RWBY merch by the ‘Featured’ selection. Notice something...unusual?

Yeah, the front page of their ‘featured’ section (which would tell you how they market the show) has three pieces of possible shipping merch...and it’s Renora and White Rose. NOT Bumbleby OR Fair Game. And I do mean ‘possible’ because one could debate that since Ren and Nora are always paired together and considering White Rose is so ignored by the fandom equally ‘shippy’ moments are widely ignored- it’s not inherently romantic.

In fact, none of the three given pages have Bumbleby merch. The closest is the Yang Vs. Adam hoodie...which excludes BLAKE. SO it’s closer to Yang X Adam merch.

But maybe that’s not enough for you. Let’s switch to the ‘Best Selling’ selection. Of that we have...one shippy piece of merch. The same Renora piece from before. Odd, considering if they’re using shipping to sell the show: Why isn’t the merch, the open support of the show, flooded with shipping merch? Why is both the stuff they are pushing people to buy AND the stuff people are buying NOT showing up?

Seems rather counter intuitive ...unless they AREN’T doing that.

This post was made about a month after the finale. If miles pulls the same thing that LoK did with the LGBT+ characters in his show, not only is that hypocritical (As he would be doing the exact same thing that LoK did), but it would also be significantly worse.

Actually he fundamentally can’t. Because Miles wrote in at least three LGBT characters already into the show. So he’s being better by your standards.

Not only was LoK screwed by the network numerous times in regards to their budget, but they were also forced to not make the relationship between Korra and Asami as overt as they would have liked.

And so was RWBY screwed with budget AND resources by Gray. Andd yet no word from you on that...

And again- Already showed at least three characters being lesbians, if not five since Scarlet and Nolan are gay in Before The Dawn, a book written under Miles and Kerry’s supervision.

What network is keeping the writers from doing the same thing with stuff like Blang, Qrover, or whatever the ship name is for Terra and Saphron? Why do they only get hand holding, soft looks™, and confirmation outside of the canon show?

Bumbleby- Canonical status unconfirmed.

Fair Game- Never intended to be a ship. It was just a reference to the waitress back in Volume 4 along with the usual shipping exaggeration.

Terra X Saphron- They literally have a fucking child together.

Other shows like She-Ra, Steven Universe, and Black Lightning managed to have LGBT+ Representation in their shows despite the networks trying to reign them in. So a show that has no such restrictions can’t do it because…?

They have. You’re choosing to ignore it.

To say nothing of the quality of these since Steven Universe is the only respected one and is rather unique in comparison.

Nora and Pyrrha can forcibly kiss Ren and Jaune respectively, but Same-Sex couples have to settle for elementary-school crush stuff?

Terra and Saphron have a fucking kid. And two of your examples are bullshit.

Meanwhile, how are those ships fairing again? ... One is permenantly sunk and wasn’t even confirmed considering Jaune’s feelings for Pyrrha are not confirmed to be romantic and the other is having massive issues that could sink any romantic connections?

And how do people like you react to any kind of strife regarding same sex stuff? ... Called Illa a psycho lesbian despite being significantly more stable, regretful and safer than her straight counterpart Adam?

Yeah, why don’t YOU tell me why a fanbase known for being abusive towards the creators and hounded them for YEARS about this shit isn’t being fed?

Also, this is a dick move. $16.00 for a sunk ship? Not only that, it’s a sunk mlm ship. A kind of representation that hasn’t gotten any real representation outside of Scarlet? And even then, that was confirmed in a different book.

More like a set of pins that can be used for cosplay.

TBH, mlm shippers have every right to be upset about this.

Straight shippers have had the biggest ship sunk and permanently in limbo (Arkos) and the second one is going through a massive rough patch (Renora) while the third and fourth are regularly decried as pedophilia (Lancaster and Rose Garden) if not outright abuse (Tauradonna).

The others get confirmed ships but not the ones they wanted. Boo fucking hoo.

Whether the writers intended to or not, Qrover was coded, and they queerbaited.

Queerbaiting is a marketing technique for fiction and entertainment[6] in which creators hint at, but then do not actually depict, same-sex romance or other LGBTQ representation.[7] They do so to attract ("bait") a queer or straight ally audience with the suggestion of relationships or characters that appeal to them,[8] while at the same time attempting to avoid alienating other consumers.[6][9]

They literally CANNOT do that by definition. There are same sex relationships AND characters to connect to. If you try promoting this vague and broad definition of queerbaiting-

Well, what’s to stop the Snowbird shippers from claiming they were straight baited with Winter and Qrow or Blake and Sun?

Do you REALLY want to cross that threshold?

P.S. ‘Coding’ effectively means ‘I see stereotypes’ so you’re kind of being a douchebag here.

Let’s also remember that Pyrrha’s entire existence literally revolved around Jaune and she was meant to die to further his development. Jaune x Pyrrha was literally made to develop Jaune and pretty much only Jaune, with the other characters’ reaction to her death being an afterthought.

*cough* Ruby has gotten more development from Pyrrha’s death than Jaune *cough*

Then there was also that one Blang bag that cost like… $60.00. The writers are using these popular ships for merchandising usage and to try and reel in fans who are wlw or mlm with these ships.

Which is why they...don’t...show...up on...the...merch store...

Fun Fact: Dudeblade never shows the so called 60 dollar bag despite CLEARLY being able to screen shot images. So we’re expected to take his word for it despite not being honest in this very video.

They didn’t even have enough self-awareness to feel bad about it.

So how exactly are we supposed to trust them when they don’t realize what they did to the community?

He says as he ignores aspects of LGBT rep in RWBY, outright called a lesbian a psycho for daring to be an antagonist despite a much more unstable person to compare to and ignores the LGBT rep in other RT shows, including Camp Camp which has two heroic gay married men in the show.

Whether you ship Qrover or not, this was a massively dick move to pull. And these idiots have a lot of things to make up for it. If they choose to do it at all.

You know, that dick move you forced onto them.

And yet you doing worse (’Hey when is Miles gonna die so he can be replaced?’) deserves no making up?

Where were the guys who said that revealing that Pilot Boi was gay before offing him was a bad idea? Why did the writers not realize that this sort of stuff was going to come off as queerbaiting?

Probably because Eddy did it himself and didn’t know about this.

But really… Way to go RT. Your dumbass decision has now turned off members of the LGBT Community and caused some of them to cancel their subscriptions.

Hope that shock value was worth it.

Just like with Pyrrha, something you yourself even said before.

I fail to see how this is RT’s fault outside ‘you dared to exercise free will!’ considering that your logic would dictate changing the show the minute an LGBT ship becomes popular.

Even as you’ve spoken out against this kind of thing with Death Battle (accusations of sexism).

Way to go with the hypocrisy Dudeblade.

6 notes · View notes

themattress · 4 years

Text

My Top 11 Danganronpa Characters

I love many characters in the Danganronpa series, but these ones are truly the Ultimate.

11. Monomi

Don’t get me wrong, Usami is a sweetheart and all, but on her own (as seen in DR2′s Island Mode) she’s pretty bland. While her forced conversion into Monomi caused her no end of grief in-universe, it made her a much stronger and more memorable character outside of it. Her interactions with Monokuma and position as his good counterpart / “little sister” are just perfect, as is the voicework done by Rebecca Forstadt. She, like her “big brother”, is iconic.

10. Sakura Oogami

I may love Nekomaru and Gonta too, but neither of them hold a candle to the original “tall, muscular giant who looks scary as Hell but is actually the nicest, most loyal friend you could ever hope to have” in the franchise: Sakura Oogami. Her lower placement on this list is only because she kind of recedes into the background among the cast until the reveal at the end of Chapter 3 (which is fitting given the nature of that reveal), but once Chapter 4 centers around her she easily steals the show as a powerful, noble and tragic figure who is nonetheless such a beautiful human being that she successfully ends the Killing Game.

9. Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu

A textbook case of a character you hate at the start and love by the end, Fuyuhiko’s development from a perpetually angry wannabe-thug who refused to be friends with his classmates and routinely threatened them with violence as a cover for his insecurities to a humble, honorable, brave, supportive team player was amazing to watch unfold, and Derek Stephen Prince sells it magnificently with his most touching performance since Ken Ichijoji . He may still be rough around the edges, but Baby Gangsta has always got your back.

8. Byakuya Togami

If you merged Sherlock Holmes and Seto Kaiba, and in the process filtered out all of the redeeming qualities, you get Byakuya Togami: an elitist prick of the highest order who has a dangerous intellect to back up his ego. As despicable as Byakuya is, he is also fascinating: I both hate hanging around him due to his constant insults and love it because I’m drawn to watching him work as he displays just how well the Togami family-sponsored education has served him. He’s as useful as an ally as he is formidable as an enemy, and once he learns there are some things beyond his sociopathic grasp and that it’s best to stick with those who know it, he mellows out into a reliable anti-hero. So yeah, awful person, fantastic character.

7. Chiaki Nanami

Hey, hey! Chiaki, as portrayed in DR2 anyway, is such a lovable character, at first seeming like an anti-social girl who would rather play video games and sleep than converse with people, but steadily revealing just how big a heart she really has and what a great friend she is once she connects with someone. As naive and weird as she is, she quickly picks up on things once she learns them, and is consistently one of the most perceptive people to have around in a class trial. And just when it seems like she’s becoming a tad too perfect to be realistic, we find out that she isn’t real and suffer one of the biggest emotional gut-punches in the series as she is cruelly taken away from us...except that even then, the bond she and Hajime forged is strong enough to keep her digital spirit alive within him. And Christine M. Cabanos brings it all home with her vocal performance. Chiaki, we will never forget you.

6. Nagito Komaeda

Who would have thought that a guy who at first seems like a weird, equally bland retread of Makoto from the original would end up being one of the franchise’s most famous characters? But it’s super easy to see why - when he shows his true colors it is bone-chilling, and the creepiness factor that Nagito brings with him only keeps on growing from there, as he shows how far he’s willing to go in order to create despair just so that hope can triumph over it. The story of DR2 would not nearly work as well as it does without Nagito in the role of the arch-antagonist for the other characters, all while he develops as a character too in a deliciously negative way which ends up culminating in what is probably the best class trial in the series.

5. Celestia Ludenburg

In a mystery-solving game like Danganronpa, Celestia honestly stands out as one of the most complex characters because she herself is a mystery. The game doesn’t really spell out her backstory, motivations or character arc given that as the Queen of Lies she has to keep a poker face about all that, but does allow the player to decipher it by themselves. While those unwilling to indulge their minds write her off as “crazy evil gambler lady who just wants money in order to become a vampire queen”, the people who pay attention to everything she says and does across the game (including / especially in her FTEs) can separate the truth from the lies and uncover the sad, pitiful reality of the character, a reality that haunts her all the way to her final moments. Call her Celeste or call her Taeko, that kind of depth deserves respect.

4. Gundham Tanaka

That’s right, my favorite DR2 character isn’t Monomi or Fuyuhiko or Chiaki or even Nagito - it’s GUNDHAM TANAKA! This man is a fucking legend, with Chris Tergliafera’s voice-acting perfectly capturing how endearing he is with his persistent delusions of villainous grandeur. But as funny as Gundham may be, he ends up not being a purely comic relief figure, playing a serious, emotional and noble role at the end of his run that gets me and many other players choked up. He may play at being evil, but in actuality Gundham is too good for this Earth.

3. Junko Enoshima

Do I need to explain myself here? It’s Junko fucking Enoshima! One of the most unique Big Bads in recent video game history! From the fact that the ultimate evil is a teen fashionista to the bizarre way she keeps changing her personality just to keep from getting bored to her ungodly despair fetish that has no rational basis for existing but simply does, Junko is less like a human being and more like a force of nature: gleeful, nihilistic despair incarnate. And though it’s true that she wore out her welcome past DR2, in her prime she is magnificent.

2. Kyoko Kirigiri

As far as I’m concerned, Kyoko Kirigiri is the real main character of the original Danganronpa. Makoto is just the POV character; the Watson to her Holmes. And what a character she is; truly one of the greatest female detectives in all of fiction. What I love best about Kyoko is what a unique take on the Emotionless Girl / Ice Queen trope she is. It’s made clear quite frequently that she isn’t really emotionless and that she’s just really good at masking her feelings as a necessary part of her job, and that this doesn’t stop her from being a kind and compassionate person toward others in her own straight-faced way. The narrative doesn’t condemn her for the way she is and she doesn’t have to change it either; what she has to change is her distrust toward others and reluctance to rely on friends, plus her hypocrisy regarding that and her personal goal vs. everyone else’s. It makes her such a rich, nuanced character and I love her for it (fuck the Danganronpa 3 anime though, it did her so dirty).

1. Monokuma

I think I’ll just conclude this post with a screencap:

#Dangan Ronpa #Opinion #Analysis #Comparison

6 notes · View notes

dractastic · 4 years

Text

I know no one asked but I’ve been stewing in this so here’s some 4 am ramblings about how I would fix my problems with Sally Face

-first, take out the racist “native american” BULLSHIT and also the grimdark violent nudity, death and suicide. (it’s very obvious portablemoose decided to write it because the characters were finally old enough for torture porn shit to happen to them and it not be seen as questionable at best)

-it doesn’t have to have a happy ending (let’s be real it was never going to) but it’s possible to have a sad ending without making it painfully edgy

-also Larry isn’t a gnome anymore just because I don’t like that (woo creative freedom)

-lesser the stakes (or more, make the series smaller)

-BAM! And the aliens are gone

-entirely rework the vibes of episode 5, bring back the Addison Apartments?

-fix the fucking plot twists

-going off this, don’t put central plot points behind side puzzles you could miss if you were only playing casually

-it was a game about kids solving mysteries, bring that back. -I feel like some of the disconnect between the first episodes and episode 5 is because it was originally told through flashback building up to when it will be told from first person and then suddenly there was both a tense and perspective change. narratively at least it would make more sense for it to be told from Sal’s ghost perspective straight up.

-red eyed demon? make that the antagonist? (it was built up to be this fucking scary threat and then they just go “swiper no swiping” and it’s never brought up again)

-the cult is there but less…blatantly culty (seriously they mention bringing politicians into it when they all wear cloaks and have an underground temple and sacred jars of whatever, of course there’s always exceptions but that’s not how cults work)

-Travis escapes! barely! how about we don’t keep bringing back that Abused Kids Will Only Grow Up To Be Their Parents subtext?

-stop with the plausible deniability. you only find out that Travis likes guys if you choose to find out. you either make it explicit or you don’t put it in there at all stop fucking skirting around it.

-I have no idea what to do about Todd and Mapel but they’re getting reworked too.

-Ashley gets a fucking character finally! instead of just being the Pretty Character who relies on every other character to get things done even when she’s the Main Fucking CHARACTER

-HEY CAN WE TALK ABOUT DOCTOR ENON?

-Rosa is the afterlife lady, not fucking JiM JOHNSON (I hate Larry’s dad I’m sORRY)

-speaking of Jim, he still left but he was murdered by the cult. replacing him would be too dangerous.

-the video game cult exposition thing is dumb (there was probably a way to do it better but I don’t think it would mesh thematically)

-Sal was mauled by a dog, his mother was shot BAM FIXED (I realised that was semi foreshadowed but the twist was still stupid)

(Sal: I know my mum was murdered!

Literally everyone else, staring at a lady who was obviously shot: yeah nah)

So! What Happened:

Sal wanted to pat the doggy, it was the cult guy’s hunting dog, dog attacked Sal, guy freaked out, wanting no witnesses he shot Sal’s mum and let the dog attack the unconscious body (covering the evidence and all)

#sally face #fix it #there are...a lot of things I don't like

23 notes · View notes

the-desolated-quill · 4 years

Text

The Quill Seal Of Approval Awards - The Best Of 2019

Hey guys! I’m still alive!

Sorry for my two month absence. Things have been pretty difficult at home lately. I’ve been having a really hard time at university lately, my mental health has suffered as a result, and oh yeah, there’s a worldwide pandemic going on and we’re all probably going to die!

So thanks to this Coronavirus, my uni has been shut down, which means I now suddenly have a lot more free time. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to catch up on things I’ve missed. Yes it’s once again time to hand out the most coveted and prestigious of awards that every writer, producer and director so desperately craves (or at least they would if they actually knew this existed). The Quill Seal Of Approval Awards. Where I list the very best the creative industry had to offer over the course of 2019. (yes I know it’s now March 2020, but if Jon Campea can release a best of 2019 list in February, then I should be able to get away with it). For there is no greater honour on this planet than to have your work of creative artistry praised and acknowledged on an obscure blog by an anonymous snob. That’s the dream, isn’t it?

First a couple of parish notices. Obviously due to various other commitments, I haven’t had the chance to experience everything 2019 had to offer, so this list will be limited to the media and literature I personally got to experience. So sorry that HBO’s Watchmen TV series won’t be on this list. I know everyone loves it, but I’ve only seen one episode so far (and will be posting a review on that soon) as I’ve only just gotten around to watching it. Also bear in mind this is my subjective opinion. If you disagree with my choices, that’s fine. Go write your own list. I won’t be upset. You have every right to like what you like.

...

But if you disagree with me, then you’re a philistine and a poopyhead. That’s not my opinion. That’s a scientific fact that’s been proven in a lab by grown-ups. Sorry. The truth hurts, I know.

Shazam!

Do you remember the days when superhero films used to be fun? When they weren’t some heavily militarised, dark and angsty loners with all the charm and charisma of a pub toilet at closing time? If you do, then you’re going to love Shazam. A funny and moving film about a kid that can transform himself into a Godlike chosen one figure through space magic.

Joking aside, Shazam is an exceptionally good movie with a strong cast, great writing and a very personal and intimate story about self worth and finding your place in the world. For those who have grown sick of these soulless, big budget, CGI heavy superhero flicks with world ending conflicts that end up meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things, Shazam serves as the perfect antidote.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

I’m very much late to the party when it comes to John Wick. I’ve never exactly had the highest opinion of Keanu Reeves as a credible action star and I’ve always found the Matrix movies to be overrated trash with delusions of grandeur, but after constant nagging from my friend @dicapitoe I eventually gave in and watched the first one. I loved it so much, I watched the second one immediately afterwards, and then the following day I went to see Chapter 3 in the cinema. Now I think it’s safe to assume I’m a fan.

I actually don’t want to say too much because I want to do in-depth reviews of these films at some point, but needless to say, John Wick: Chapter 3 earns its place on this list. Hell, the whole franchise deserves a Quill Seal Of Approval Award. John Wick is a masterclass in visual storytelling and worldbuilding, and Chapter 3 continues this exciting and dramatic narrative with great confidence and skill. Oh and Keanu Reeves, I take back every snide comment I’ve ever said. You sir, are a national treasure. Can’t wait for more :D

Joker

No! No! Stop! You, yes, you, the one who’s about to comment saying how wrong I am and that Joker is a derivative, dangerous movie. May I remind you once again that this is my list. It’s fine if you don’t agree. In fact I can understand completely why some people really don’t like this film. That being said, I very much enjoyed it and I feel it represents a unique achievement for the comic book movie genre. As superhero movies from The Dark Knight to Captain America: The Winter Soldier to Black Panther have been slowly and steadily proving that these films can not only be socially relevant, but can also be considered high art, Joker represents the genre’s apotheosis. It’s a smart and sharply written film that doesn’t shy away from exploring its themes of mental health, social neglect and narcissism, and it demonstrates the reason why characters like Batman and the Joker have been a staple of popular culture for so long. Even after all this time, we’re still finding new ways of reinterpreting them and exploring them. Combined with Hildur Guonadottir’s amazing score and a career defining performance from Joaquin Phoenix, Joker is truly a force to be reckoned with, much like the title character himself.

Elementary - Season 7

CBS’ brilliant adaptation of Sherlock Holmes sadly came to an end in 2019, but not before one last excellent season.

Elementary has always stood head and shoulders above its BBC counterpart in terms of quality, but personally I always felt that the show never managed to live up to the heights of its very first season with Moriarty. While Moriarty ultimately doesn’t return sadly, we get a great substitute in the form of Odin Reichenbach, a tech mogul who uses social media for his own ends in his misguided pursuit of justice. He serves as a great source of moral conflict for Sherlock and Joan, who have been known to use morally questionable tactics themselves, and is a compelling antagonist. Under showrunner Rob Doherty’s expert direction, Elementary ends on a high as we see the stories of Holmes, Watson, Gregson and Bell conclude in an emotional and satisfying finale. It’s sad to see a great show like this end, but it felt like the right time to stop and I’m glad the Elementary team kept their high standards throughout and were allowed to finish the show properly on their own terms. You will be greatly missed.

The Outer Worlds

Have you heard the news? Single player video games are dead! Nobody wants RPGs anymore apparently! It’s all about ‘live services’ and multiplayer looter shooters. Nobody wants a story driven, single player RPG these days.

Wait! What’s this? A story driven, single player RPG?! And people actually like it?!?! OMG!

Yes, from the people that brought you Fallout: New Vegas comes a new IP that makes a mockery of the AAA industry and their greedy trend chasing. Introducing The Outer Worlds. Set in the Halcyon Colony in the far future where rampant capitalism has taken over and disrupted society, you play as a colonist that’s been recently released from cryogenic suspension and has been tasked with saving the colony from the Board who are hellbent on taking away humanity’s civil liberties and destroying lives all for the sake of profit. The lore and setting is beautifully realised and the writing contains the same wit and satirical charm as Fallout. It also boasts a wonderfully diverse cast of characters, including a very unorthodox vicar and an openly asexual companion. Add to that some super smooth first person shooter combat and a great amount of freedom in customisation and roleplaying, The Outer Worlds proves definitively that single player isn’t dead. Take note Bethesda.

And there we have it. 2019 is finally over and done with. Now we can finally look forward to 2020. Assuming we’re all still alive by the end of the year :S

#the quill seal of approval awards #the quill seal of approval awards 2019 #best of the year #review #opinion

6 notes · View notes

medea10 · 5 years

Text

My Review of One Punch Man 2

#one punch man #one punch man 2 #Saitama #genos #garou #fubuki #bang #king

22 notes · View notes

ripples-in-the-river · 4 years

Text

I'm posting this here (with the last one to show I really did write that) so I don't take like an hour of everyone's time in the comments to just rant about things.

So! Even Alphys admitted she was going to stop you but she didn't, because she felt it was an adventure. Basically, her love of anime saved you. And she tells you that. It's unclear how long this has been going on, I mean, we could argue that, in the light panels puzzle, Mettaton was there to rig the puzzle/spy on you. I mean, Alphys probably hacked into it to make it safe for you, you know? It was programmed to be random. But yeah, Mettaton tries to kill you -- to save humanity, which is honestly a great motive, I feel that, have fun.

But yeah! Undyne, Sans, Alphys, Mettaton -- Papyrus didn't know what would happen, he only thought you'd be captured. Dude's innocent. Doesn't even kill you at all. I mean, he does beat you up, and I doubt that if we saw him in any other context, any character whose motive is to capture your playable character would kind of be a bad guy, you know? I mean, I'm not going to go around town beating people up and locking them in my shed so I can impress people and crap. But it IS a video game so whatever. Ethics are butter.

But yeah -- most characters have had a motive to kill you, like, they WANTED to kill you except you beat them/out-determined them -- or something stopped them from it. But Asgore is the only one who has no motivation whatsoever to kill you. Like, everyone goes in detail about how killing you would BENEFIT them, how it's part of their life goal, their plans, their persona. But Asgore tells you he feels SAD, he's upset that you won't get to pass, he tells you to go live your life, he asks you to go prepare. Asgore is the only character whose motive is to help you, and whose agenda ISN'T like, all strung around killing you. His only reason is that the day his two children died, he yelled "this is war," and people took that seriously. I mean, maybe it was like, metaphorical? Maybe he didn't even think they'd actually want to kill all humans? Maybe it was more in a "darnit they killed our kids I hate them" way? But SERIOUSLY -- we know the only reason Asgore is doing this is because he wants to be there for his people. We know that he's only agreeeing because it makes his people happy. We see monsters as sweet people, which they are at some point, but also -- these people are the same dudes who keeps going on about "hey, have you heard? we're gonna kill another human and get out, sick". How many times do they talk so nonchalantly about killing humans who fall down? Like, it's been established that killing random kids to get to freedom isn't ethical. Toriel says it, everyone eventually tells you that, even freaking ASGORE keeps showing he believes it sucks, too. Yet the only reason it keeps happening is because, just like Undyne, the people of the underground are GLAD it happens. They WANT to get to the surface. And yeah, humans sucked, they hurt an entire kind of people just for some crap reason, they slaughtered them until they could only surrender, then they freaking SEALED THEM UNDERGROUND and left them there to die???? Like seriously????

And the game tells us that, and obviously you feel terrible. You're a human, you have to make things right. You can't leave them underground, you can't just do that. You feel part of those guys who hurt them. You're a human, you're the bad guy, you're their enemy, you hurt them. They're freaking justified, you say. Honestly, who doesn't want revenge? Who doesn't want freedom? Who doesn't want out of that situation?

Okay so edit: Asgore said that "every human who comes here must die". Textually, right? He did say that? Okay, so yeah, scratch that other thing. No reason. But he's still been the only character to not want to do that like, immediately after saying it. Everyone else had CONTINUED. Everyone else doesn't have that excuse that they're honor-bound to keep their promise to the people. That's only ASGORE. Yet you have Undyne CHOOSING to kill, you have a place where it's so mainstream that people like Papyrus can think that getting a place in the guard will make you COOL, you have kids talking about freaking UNDYNE in school. Like, can you believe if Toriel was here, they wouldn't even talk about that? Have you seen how she reacted, how horrified she was? She ran away for crap's sake, she even fought you to keep you safe, she came back to you and confronted Asgore. I don't think she would ever have worshipped the Guard like everyone does. But yeah, that's the thing. It's kind of part of the moral of the game how, when you do something for a long time, you lose your morals a bit. You become desensitized to what happens; Flowey explains how resetting made him bored of the world, and it's the same phenomenon that made the killing easy. So maybe after so much time talking about what the guard did, the underground started to normalize it, until there were no Toriels left to say, hey wait, these are kids, these are people, we can't murder them.

So yeah. And nobody really opposes it, except Asgore. Undyne fights you to save her people, just like Asgore. And maybe everyone does want to do that. Maybe that's just it, maybe it's kind of justified that they kill people who pass down? Right?

So yeah. We're left with that big moral dilemma at the end, becahsd we can't prove either point without disproving rhe moral of the game. Killing random kids is wrong, but the monsters are justified in killing them. So is it good or not? You're the bad guy since you're a human, but you're also just a random kid who fell down. Feel bad for what humans did, but also you shouldn't be killed, but also you should.

I mean, eventually, we can just say, yeah, Flowey's bad. Chara's bad. Whatever, you know? The few antagonists we see that you can't really befriend are the only ones we portray as evil. Everyone has a reason -- Flowey's bored to an extreme, Chara hates humans, we know and we support, they're all wonderfully crafted antagonists we're almost happy to see at this point. I mean, see how sympathetic we sjow them in comics or art? Flowey is grumpy and kind of a sarcastic, annoyed lil thing, who yells threats and might kill you sometimes, but overall he's fine. Chara's almost not scary after all those AUs where they're this killer whose violence is mostly used for dark humour or just comedy, they have a knife and threaten you but it's mostly dumb, and they like chocolate and screw around with Flowey. And whenever they're threatening, they'll be against Sans, or Frisk, to show the duality between them. And yeah, I guess it's just that there are no easy answers in this game so we make up our own. There's a reason things are called dilemmas, it's because they're hard to choose from.

#undertale #undyne #dr alphys #metatton? mettaton?#queen toriel #king asgore dreemur #gerson boom #frisk the human #chara the human #flowey the flower #dr w.d. gaster #writing #pictures

4 notes · View notes

96percentdone · 6 years

Text

Anon if you’re wondering why I’m doing it like this it’s because I don’t want this showing up in the shi//rog//ane searches. I am going to rail very hard on her character. If you like her, you were warned.

To be quite frank I think literally anyone would have made a more interesting ringleader. Okay, that’s a lie. Except for Ouma and Harumaki and Yonaga, I think anyone else would have made a better ringleader. I’m gonna explain why, first starting briefly with why I think Ouma and Harumaki would have made worse ringleaders.

Ouma is quite simple: his entire character gimmick is “pretending to be an obvious mastermind only to end up NOT being the mastermind and is fundamentally against the killing game to begin with.” This is is just too good to ruin. Harukawa’s is less complicated in that she’s an assassin, so making her the ringleader would be boring and obvious. Like yeah okay of course the surprise assassin was the organiser of the killing game big fuckin whoop. And finally Yonaga, and the big reason for that is her character gimmick is “scary exotic foreigner” and cults and it’s a lot of racist shit and tbh I think even if you took a lot of that out, making the one foreign coded character (in a Japanese environment) your ringleader is asking for trouble. Don’t do that.

The biggest reason I think shi//ro//gane fails not only as a DR mastermind, but as a character, is because she’s boring as shit and has no personality. It’s not even an accident she has no personality. in v3 characters tend to revolve around a gimmick, and her gimmick is literally being a non-entity. She constantly talks about being plain, and for most of the game her big thing each chapter is just...going with the gimmick of the chapter. That and she makes anime references that feel kind of forced and personally not how people tend to make references. And then in her big chapter, where she was the revealed to be the mastermind, she spends most of it pretending to be other pre-existing characters with more personality.

Some people think the center of her personality is on fandom, and it’s a commentary on it, and on passion. To which I say: fucking where. Okay, I understand exactly where that potential lies, and in her free time events there’s definitely more of that. But I personally think that if I need to read the free time events (which are entirely optional you could play v3 without ever doing a fte, nevermind specifically hers) to feel like a character has a personality, then you didn’t write a well written character.

What is there in the main story to suggest this? She makes constant poorly done anime references, and there’s one forced fanservice consplay scene. I’m blown away by this. It never feels like this is important to her, because it’s always played as like a joke or an event where her talent is just the excuse for fanservice in the ch1 scene. What else is there? Does she talk about her love for fandom and cosplay? Is she looking for excuses to dress people up in her various cosplays in the main story? No! Fuck I mean we even unlock her room and the mandatory conversation you have with her with that weird ass cg is about her bar life, not her fandom life. Like they go out of the way to not talk about it meaningfully in the one place it would be more than apt to do so. Seriously?

Chapter 6 is better at making her fandom commentary. You could argue that her constantly shifting into previous characters and rambling on and on about her love of dangan ronpa is fandom commentary. And yeah I guess it is. But it’s weak as fuck. It’s backed by like jack shit from the earlier chapters, and she has to talk about this because this is the big plan for ch6. It’s the ch6 gimmick! And then ch6 is an inconsistent mess of lies and contradictions that canon can’t explain, and she says some things (like the cosplaycat killer line) that imply she faked all that too so like. More following the chapter’s gimmick? would you believe? I would!

That’s the big problem with Shi//ro//ga//ne. Her gimmick is her entire personality, and that gimmick is not having one. That’s why she just does the big thing of every chapter, that’s why she’s so forgettable and doesn’t stand out and is “plain”, that’s why she constantly cosplays as other dr characters, and that’s why at the end of the chapter she goes “haha I pulled another great trick” without elaborating. Her thing is having no existing personality. Just being whatever the story needs. And maybe someone out there will be like “but that just shows her passion for DR and--” no. No what it is is just cheap and lazy writing, and again possibly not even true.

And this has bad effects on writing a meaningful mastermind, particularly since we spent the entire game with her. She does nothing the entire time and doesn’t stand out, and particularly with v3′s writing where characters generally only become important in the chapter they die, by the time you get to ch6 it’s so obvious she’s going to be the ringleader. Harukawa’s had an arc (albeit a shitty one), Yumeno had an arc, Saihara is your protag for realsies who had an arc (albeit half-assed and not focused on what would have made it strong), and Kiibo is clearly having his big moment right now, so that leaves Shir//o//gane being saved up for something huge. Like the ringleader. She becomes obvious because she’s nothing. And then her reveal means nothing because she had no personality to get invested in because her gimmick was having no personality. And also they do nothing with her and chapter six is a poorly written garbage fest that makes no fucking sense.

She’s a bad mastermind because she’s a bad character, and she’s a bad character because her personality is a nonexistent thing that’s entirely up for grabs since she’s faked it all and her gimmick is just not being an interesting person.

And this makes effectively anyone else a better ringleader, because anyone else in the game has more to their personality than she does. I’ll even explain why everyone excluding the previously mentioned three will make better antagonists before getting to my main ideal pick. In order of deaths!

Amami: he’s a mystery man right? that kinda seems to point against him but like play up the he died first trying to stop the killing game angle and it turns out he faked it or something just to get it started. He could take or leave killing Akamatsu off, but she chose trial, so she had to go. revise his videos a little so he looks a little sketchy, but even more like a victim trying to do good.

Akamatsu: if you just take out the fuckin “she has a twin bit” in ch6 and have it turn out she faked like her entire execution just so she looks like she’s entirely uninvolved, only to turn out she did kill Amami but with entirely different means, would that be cool or what? like it’d be the triple Akamatsu twist whammy. also wouldn’t waste her as a character cause she wouldn’t die for manpain to be your wife.

Hoshi: so yeah he’s kinda got the “I’m depressed because i’ve killed” shit working against him but you can easily rework that into a big old lie (hey look it’s the themes of the game some more wild). he’s still depressed in real life but his outlet for that was violence, so killing game.

Toujou: literally she gets power hungry and sick of constantly having to tend to the whims of everyone around her. her loving serving people was the big lie. she’s more interested in serving herself and the audience. Simple. Effective. Subverts her character in a meaningful but still relevant way.

Chabashira: she’s super honest and open about her emotions right? To an almost childlike way? fuck yeah you could make that ringleader shit. She wants to bring out the best in people emotionally, except she actually thinks the best way to do that is trauma. But she doesn’t really actually care about your emotional wellbeing, and that becomes apparent throughout the trial. her big fuckin lie. amazing.

Shinguuji: see this is tough and i’m tempted to put him in the not-mastermindable category because of chapter 3 which was. eugh. But okay see we’re just gonna take out all the weird incest serial killer shit. shinguuji’s gimmick anyway is that he’s detached and more interested in observing the people around him like an onlooker than he is partaking. smart but doesn’t give much a shit. this is easily played up to ringleader levels just. “I wanted to put humans in a society I made myself to play god and observe them to my heats content” simple. not as thematic, but hey it’s consistent.

Iruma: okay so canonically. Iruma is kinda a bitch. I mean this positively she’s kinda funny even if the sex jokes gross me out. She’s paranoid and kinda narcissistic and super weak to criticism and bites people in an attempt to make them not bite her. So what if it turns out like that’s just...fake. she’s actually just rude mean and crude not as some kinda backwards defense mechanism (we’re taking out the kink) it’s just because she likes being mean and crude. She seems so weak willed as a person but it turns out she orchestrated and “invented” the killing games just to keep attention on her and put people through hell. I’m not totally confident in this one I’m sure others can come up with better but fuck I mean it’s not shi//ro//ga//ne.

Gokuhara: this is easy he’s not actually a gentleman at all! it’s a big lie! a ploy to make him sympathetic and likeable! He went along with Ouma’s shit just because he thought it was amusing! The world at large decided he couldn’t be a gentleman, so he decided to be the biggest brute you can find and run killing game where he makes himself look good in comparison to everyone else. you’d have to rewrite ch6 a lot but it’d be better than canon anyway lmfao

Momota: now Momota’s my second favourite ringleader choice not gonna lie. This is just because the narrative plays him up as your shsl best friend and you get very invested in him (despite his uh....glaring toxic masculinity problems which we’re taking out because they add nothing to his character). His big thing is being a supportive believer. a shounen protag. but it’s all bullshit! Have the real Momota be the audition tape asshole. Or he doesn’t even have to be that it’s just his big thing will be that huge punch of betrayal that won’t compare except for with my #1 pick. But we’ll get to them very soon.

Kiibo: Y’know those posts that talk about how AIs are actually going to be very pure with their best interest in being serving humanity? I want that for Kiibo, but in a super warped and twisted way. Kiibo in his desire to be seen as a human and respected by them, starts feeding the twisted desires of the masses with the torture porn they crave in the form of a killing game, because this will make him be accepted as one of them. But he still ends up being a kind of subservient AI who never escapes that role, so now the killing game runs partially on hate, and partially on the thin remains of hope he has. I think this is kinda fun.

Yumeno: Yumeno is great because she has that whole arc where she learns to be open with her feelings and honest with herself right? Well we’re gonna make that just. a big old lie. She just doesn’t give a shit, so fuck it she’ll do this killing game shit too.

And finally, top pick: Saihara. Saihara would be the literal best option. Keep the protagonist switch. Akamatsu dies, we take Saihara as protagonist now. He gets played out basically the same. We play thinking we’re playing an insecure detective with some issues with the truth (and some issues with lies that aren’t capitalised on as well but hey that’s not actually entirely necessary for this scenario). We think Saihara is trying to carry on Akamatsu’s wish, because he says he would, and he solves all the cases and seems to be interested in saving everyone.

But...it’s a lie. Like in chapter 1 we were playing with an unreliable narrator the whole game. Saihara’s focus on the mystery versus trying to guarantee their lives in the game now gets played for “of course he’s focused on those this is his show. It’s what he lives for.” Saihara created a killing game to have an endless set of murder mysteries to solve, and he doesn’t really care about the people, but their potential in creating a good story. Maybe he’s even the pre-game fanboy too if we’re keeping that trick. And the narrative insisting on framing him as good through the use of the cast becomes a clever trick to hide his motivations.It’d be another unreliable narrator, and the best way to capitalize on the themes of the game. More lies.

Not to mention it would make the Akamatsu thing especially brutal, because you play as him to frame her for a crime it will turn out she did not actually commit. The replay value of the game at LARGE would be through the roof, all because of this trick. It’d be fucking fascinating, and it would just destroy dangan ronpa formula. We’ll have not only a murder protagonist, but a mastermind protagonist. Listen. LISTEN. This is the best possible ringleader selection. I will fight you. dkgjrngdjkn

Okay I went on long enough we’re gonna call it a day. I hope this more than answered your questions!

#hope.txt #dangan ronpa #ndrv3 #saihara //#my meta

54 notes · View notes

mythgendered · 6 years

Text

Archie Mega Man: No, it’s ACTUALLY about ethics in video game robotics!

Alright guys, cards on the table: I’ve talked a big game about what I like about the comic so far, with words like theming and worldbuilding and fleshed out characters, but now we’re really getting into it. We’re about to take our first real dive into the story that Flynn has been prepping for us. We’ve had fun in the first three arcs, setting up the stories to come with talks of free will and what it means to be a self aware robot, mashed in with fun adventures and at least one robot dog.

But now the kid gloves are...well, they’re still on, because this is still the super fighting robot comic and we have a lot of goofy adventures left in us. But! we’re switching to something cool, something that says less Mickey Mouse and more...Sonic the Hedgehog.

So let’s put on out fingerless kids gloves and dive into Spiritus Ex Machina, or TERRORISM AND THE ETHICS OF CREATING FEELING MACHINES!

Heads up, this is a long one.

With Dr Wily foiled again and seemingly off the radar, the Light family is afforded some relative peace -- and just in time for the Advanced Robotics Trade Show! It’s a time of meeting new faces and reuniting with old friends, and we are introduced to two of Doctor Light’s oldest friends and fellow roboticists: Dr. Mikhail Cossack and Dr. Noelle Lalinde.

The trade show isn't just about exchanging ideas, as Doctors Light and Lalindre take the stage to debate robotic ethics; namely, is it right to give a thinking, feeling AI to a robot meant for dangerous tasks? Is it ethical to let a robot feel emotion, even negative ones?

The debate gets heated, but before it can continue, the convention is hijacked by a terrorist group known as the Emerald Spears (ha, ha). The Spears are a militant anti-machine group, and they seek to put an end to the field of robotics through any means necrssary-- first through debate, then with the explosions they’ve planted around the convention center.

That leaves Mega Man, Roll and his new companions Pharoh Man and Quake Woman with little time and fewer options to save the day-- because while they’re programmed to help, how can they when they can’t harm humans?

And here we are! We’ve finally arrived at the meat and potatoes of Archie’s Mega Man, and what Flynn has been working toward for the past few arcs. Everything I said I loved about the comic takes shape here, built atop the foundation laid in Time Keeps On Slipping and even the first four issues.

There’s a lot to enjoy here, so let’s take things part by part.

Since Mega Man X introduced repolids and their free will, the franchise has had great potential for a conversation about the ethics of robotics, about how far science can go, or how far it should go. This is a conversation that Ian Flynn is clearly interested in, and the comic is all the better for it. It’s these questions that, while in the background of the last three arcs, are now irrevocably hanging over the cast’s heads, looming over everything they do.

Is it right to create thinking, feeling robots? If we give them the ability to feel and choose, are we putting a gun to our head? Conversely, if we limit those choices, are we condemning thinking, sentient creatires to a shackled, hollow existence? Is it fair to take away that independence, especially if they won’t be able to care about what you’ve taken? At what point does the gift of life become a cruelty-- and to whom is it the most cruel?

If I’m sounding a bit pretentious, I hope you’ll forgive me--but these are the kinds of questions that drive the comic from here on out. And while Rock and his allies continue to struggle against the forces of evil, at times those supervillians merely serve as merciful distractions from the real, troubling implications of he world Thomas Light has ushered in. A world that, by series canon, arguably ends up hurting more than it does heal.

It’s a wonderful level of nuance that Flynn brings to this setting, and one that grounds the otherwise cartoony classic era in a way that more naturally leads into the darker X series-- while still preserving the fiun spirit of it all. I’ll admit, I’m something of a sucker for these “soft existential crisis”angles in scifi stories, and the comic manages to balance it out with the super heroics admirably.

In fact, it’s that balance that drives the arc’s central conflict!

Rock isn’t fighting a group of rogue, reprogrammed robots, here. The Emerald Spears are wholly human, and that doesn’t just tie our heroes’ hands, it shackles them. Elec Man openly gripes about his uselessness, even bringing up that if he still had Wily’s evil programming, the story might have ended a lot sooner.

(Which, itself, is very relevant to the arc’s proceedings)

The conflict is something of a puzzle-- how do our heroes save the day without breaking the one rule they literally can’t break? The answer becomes working around he Spears, tricking them where they can and disarming them to reduce their threat. Ironically, it isn’t until the Spear’s impromptu new leader, Xander Payne (who we’ll get to in a moment), loses his patience and gets trigger happy that our heroes can fully fight back.

All the while the doctors trade words with the Spears’ leadership, continuing the ethics debate started at the arc’s beginning.

It’s a brilliant blending of physical and philosophical conflict, each joined together for a coherent, compelling storyline. This is easily the best the run has seen, with a gripping and intelligent arc that also sets up the stories and themes to come.

I know I’ve been repeating that a lot over the course of these pseudoreviews, so here’s the best time as any to just lay out our themes -- Flynn’s themes. Themes of what it means to be a living, thinking machine, and of what impact living machines have on the world. Themes of scientific progress, and where we should or even can draw the line. Themes of forgiveness -- who we can forgive, and who we maybe should stop giving chances to, and can we forgove ourselves? What consequences do our actions have, and at what point do good intentions stop mattering?

These are the questions the comic asks time and again, and rearely do they have clear cut answers, because these arent questions that can be answered simply. But they’re questions that need to be asked, and are asked, and the comic is just...so much better for it, guys.

Hey, I said up top this reread would be a lot of gushing.

But let’s start talking nice about other stuff this good good arc does right!

As I said back in the first storyline, Flynn makes good use of his Mega Man lore to worldbuild. In three arcs, we’ve gotten references to Blues and Mr X, heaps and heaps of foreshadowing to the X era, and now we sre formally introduced to the Cossacks and future Mega Man 4 boss Pharaoh Man. It really ties the setting together-- of course these titans of robotics would know each other outside of Wily attacks. It’s also just nice to see these characters have a tangible presence in the workd prior to their “intended” introduction in their respective games.

Plus, lookit that big hug Thomas gives his friend. That’s cute as heck!!

But even with the worldbuilding, it also gives us that sweet, sweet dramatic irony we love.

Yeah Pharaoh Man, thats sounds like it would be rough!!

Flynn gets a little cheeky with the irony and he foreshadowing, but it honestly gets me every time and I love it.

But this arc doesn’t also just bring out the goods with established characters/- we also get a whole feast of brand new original characters!

Spiritus Ex Machina introduces us to Dr. Noelle Lalinde and her own robot master, Tempo, also known as Quake Woman. And guys? You know I talked a lot of love for Agents Stern and Krantz. I love them. They were great characters when they were inteoduced, and they will continue to be great characters in every story they feature in.

But I absolute ADORE the Lalinde family, and Tempo herself may just be my favorite of all the comic’s original characters.

(Also, say hi to Pedro in the corner there! He’ll be important soon, and meshes the comic’s strengths of OCs AND established characters.)

In addition to adding a much appreciated female presence to the Mega Man Universe, Tempo and Lalinde embody many of the comic’s themes of sentient AI, robot emotions and familial forgiveness. Theirs is a tragic, but ultimately happy, story of pain, loss and growth. I. Love. Them.

This arc primarily focuses on Dr Lalinde, and how Tempo’s accident affected her and hew worldview-- explaining the hard stance she took against Thomas “my robots are my children” Light during the debate.

Tempo is more of a...presence than a character here, which is the point-- Lalinde took something from her, something unimaginably precious, and left her literally a shell of what she once was. Future issues will focus more on Quake Woman herself, and we’ll get to see how these same effects impact her, so I’ll save that discussion for later. This post is already getting long enough, and I haven’t even touched on the bad guys yet!!

The Emerald Spears are...alright antagonists. They serve as effective bad guys in Dr Wily’s absence, and their more realistic approach to terrorism contrasts well with the Mad Doctor’s own theatrics and literal mustache twirling. I don’t see Xander payne chainsawing a Japanese cyprus with a cord plugged into it.

They also provide a more philosophical counter, by harshly and violently pushing back against the pro-robotics ideals of Dr Light and his colleagues. They fear and hate the dangers advanced robotics pose, and are working to prevent the undermining and extinction of humanity. And honestly? Take one look at the X series -- heck, the Zero series!! -- and tell me they’re not a little right to worry.

I mean, they’re absolute monsters who threaten countless lives in pursuit of a bruitish, self serving and discriminatory worldview but uh...things really arent great for humanity in any of the multiple bloody robot wars that consume the planet over several series and centuries.

What I’m saying is, theres another layer of dramatic irony when your shortsighted, idiotic doomsday cult happens to be right, you know? This never happens in the Battle Network timeline!

The Emerald Spears are bunch of preachy, annoying jerks, but their presence is welcome in this setting, even if Xander Payne is an absolute weenie!!

In what appears to be a soft retcon, Xander Payne is (re)introduced to us as this sunglasses dude from Issue #2. Since hen he’s become a fanatical, robot-hating terrorist leader because, uh...

Because Elec Man zapped him and now he’s got a sick robot eye??

Ok, so Xander’s is not exactly the most...tragic of backstories, especially by this comic’s standards. He might be, in fact, 100 percent a dick. And yeah, that mostly has to do with him trying to bomb a bunch of innocents and his own men, but its really informed by him being such a baby about it all!

I’m of two minds with Payne-- on one hand, he’s kind of a whiny baby throwing a tantrum at advanced robotics, and he has a really gross pencil stache. But again, there’s a certain narrative beauty to a major antagonist being this much of a weenie while, again, kind of also being right!

His presence is not as irritating as it could be, and he largely justifies himself with later, far more interesting revelations than “I never asked for this sweet robot eye.”

But enough about that! lets talk about he really interesting bad guy!

Dr Wily rules the B Plot of this arc, which sees him exploring the mysterious Lanafront Ruins and discovering several ancient technologies-- the largest of which begins building for him a brand new army of robot masters.

This is largely set up for future arcs, the Super Adventure Rockman adaptation in particular, but--

Actually, can we take a moment to sppreciate how cool it is that the comic adapts Super Adventure Rockman of all things? And well before Mega Man 3! That is just so wild to me, and reson #413,612 why I adore Ian Flynn’s writing.

But anyway, In addition to setting up future arcs and adaptations, Dr Wily’s subplot here lays the foundation of the...well, of the Wily Family. The Wilybots had loads of personality in the MM2 arc, and that doesn’t go away when Ra Moon ressurects them. They banter, talk with each other, welcome in the newcomer MM3 bots and...it’s really solid setup for character beats to come. Wily and his robots have been fairly straightforward antagonists to now, but once he Curse of Ra Moon takes its toll, the character development train barrels toward them at full speed.

But we’ll get to that.

For now, we leave the arc with one last character introduction, though we’ve seen him at least once before.

If it isn’t apparent by now, I think Spiritus Ex Machina is a wonderful, wonderful story arc. It’s a kind of turning point for the comic, where the storytelling steps away from the face value of super fighting robot antics and really considers their consequences and implications.

It’s where the comic’s world really comes alive, with more characters and a more realized setting. Things are different from here on out, in exciting and wonderful ways. Like I said last time, hearts will be broken, allies will be made, and worlds will collide -- and I’ll be loving every second of it.

God bless this comic, y’all.

#for archielasting peace #mega man #megaman #this is where i get REALLY wordy guys

12 notes · View notes