Think about how Saria spent years in betrayal and anger, driven for justice, searching out all of Rhine Lab’s wrongdoings, developing her philosophy on what science is for, all to right the course of the thing she build together with Kristen, who she dedicated her life to.
Kristen, the child of her idols. Kristen, her first love. Kristen, who she promised to protect.
Kristen, who betrayed her.
Kristen, who took advantage of her devotion.
Kristen, who designed a weapon against her, against the formula they came up with together.
Kristen, who is harming the very people they set out together to serve.
Kristen, who she’ll judge and bring back to the right path.
Kristen, who she never fully understood.
Kristen, whose plans she needs to stop. Kristen, who might bring the whole world tumbling down as she achieves her dream.
Kristen, who she slowly realizes is going to die in pursuit of her dream, just like her parents.
She tanks an anti-tank weapon to the head. She fights against an ancient caster and warrior. She fights the very people she trained, the knights that protect and serve Kristen. She saves her kid, finally. She learns to rely on others, to communicate. She reconciles with her partner. She flies a plane up, up into the upper atmosphere (just like the Wrights), through a combat zone, and docks it on a moving station. She learns to let go of her careful control of her every move, to act spontaneously, decisively.
All this to reach Kristen. To stop her.
But when she finally meets her… That’s her childhood friend. Her first love.
She fights her, endures her power, one last time, taking step by painful step toward her. She tells her she’s wrong about science, shares the philosophy and perspective she’s built over the years to stop her from harming people, to fight the culture that birthed them.
But really, she’s trying to talk Kristen down. You were wrong to do this. Give it up. Your dream is beautiful. Come with me. You finally achieved your parents’ dream. We can still survive this. I don’t doubt that this will affect the entire world. Watch it with me. I can still save you. The escape pods are gone? I’ll calcify us together—use the arts we developed together—and we’ll fall together; maybe we’ll survive, maybe we won’t. I’ll do everything I can, even if it’s doomed. Let me save you. Please. Please let me protect you.
And Kristen, who never lost faith in her, who knew Saria would reach her, who always wanted to share the truth, her moment of triumph, the fate she had chosen for herself with the woman she loves, who knew Saria would never leave her by choice and installed a trapdoor in her dreamer’s space pod so that she could live on… presses the button.
And Saria, after her long, long climb, falls. The final stage of the rocket to Kristen’s dream, falling away.
What must it be like, as she fell, to realize she spent her whole life helping Kristen assemble her space program? That when Kristen used to look up at the stars, she was not just seeing the past, her parents’ deaths, the legacy she has to uphold; she was seeing this future she had always planned for herself. That this was always the wish that Saria devoted herself to protecting.
And she kept her promise.
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i accidentally napped and had a dream (nightmare?) where a new update for stardew valley released where everything was the same except on a random day in year 3 Evelyn would just straight up die. There was a whole cutscene that started in her house where she collapsed, and then transitioned over to the hospital where Harvey gave George and Alex the worst news of their lives. However, they got to speak to her where she said something along the lines of "Yoba will protect me, and I am sure he will let me watch over you."
Alex and George would not talk to the player for more than a few words for a full season after this event. George would spend most of his time in the bedroom, so if you had less than 2 hearts with him, you could barely ever speak to him.
And Alex... oh my god, poor Alex. If you were married to him during this event, he just stayed in bed all day. Otherwise, if single, he would just stand on the beach most of the time, staring off into the ocean. If you tried to interact with him, it would just say "Alex is grieving... Better leave him be."
There was also other NPC dialogue like mayor Lewis saying "I haven't seen the community in this state of mourning since your grandfather passed..."
there was also a glitch where you could make Evelyn live forever and there were entire guides for the "immortal Evelyn glitch" that got patched out in the next update. If you tried to perform the glitch after the patch, mr. Qi would tell you that "hey, it happens to all of us. We can't prevent it, and neither can you, no matter how hard you try."
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"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).
Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.
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I think we need to get more comfortable with the idea that sometimes shitty, racist, homophobic, bigoted people are still incredibly talented.
I feel like every time I see a post addressing someone’s shitty behavior the post also takes the time to mention that they’re not even good at [x] anyway. And that’s just not always true? Equating being good at a skill as being morally good is just not necessary. Someone can be a fantastic writer, can have a beautiful singing voice, can create breathtaking artwork, and still be a horrible person.
I know part of this is probably just the instinct to dislike everything about a person when you dislike them, but I also think this mindset leads to people defending creatives way past where they should, because if bad people create bad art, then if this person creates art that I like and resonates with me, then they can’t be a bad person!
And you know. That’s just not true. Those two things are simply completely unconnected and I think it’d be healthier if we all started disconnecting them in our heads.
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The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
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