Guess who had jumped on the Ferdibert ship & not planning to get off anytime soon hopefully never? This gal! I am in all seriousness really loved this ship & I express that with this fanart. 🖤🧡

BONUS: Making thumbnails! I decided to go with the latter option because the first one would highly be suggestive for YouTube, but my heart will always choose it.

Speedpaint Video here —> https://youtu.be/5axU1nCjYKg

"Our job is to find truth, no matter how painful it may be."

The tragedy of the women of the Indoh family is how they lose their sons. Hikaru’s grandma losing Hikaru’s dad, Hikaru’s mom losing Hikaru.

i really struggle to understand where the interpretation of gaster as a villain came from, to be honest. like okay, maybe when we only had a weird mystery man behind a gray door and not much else, i can kinda see why. in a game where villainy often doesn't seem to exist, i guess it only makes sense to ascribe it to someone who is literally intangible. but now... i just don't get it!

based on everything we've seen in deltarune, the impression i get of gaster is just a strange skeleton man, stuck beyond the boundaries of spacetime. he's someone that distantly appreciates the beings in the world he most likely had a hand in creating, and wants to share this experience with the player. at the very worst, he's just "mildly unnerving" due to the mystery around his (non)existence.

my best guess is that this might stem from a misunderstanding of the gonermaker sequence? recall that it's gaster guiding the player to create a vessel for themselves—a vessel meant to inhabit the light world. he's not the one who forces kris under the player's control; the vessel is discarded by a third party, who then asserts that "no one can choose who they are". the vessel is discarded, kris's body is seized: autonomy is stolen from both parties. this exact thing seems to be what gaster was working to prevent.

there are two opposing forces here: one on the side of the player, and one on the side of 'fate'. seeing the appreciation gaster seems to have for the player as well as their ability of choice, i REALLY don't think he's particularly fond of fatalism. don't forget that gaster seems to be aware of the nature of SOULs, including the power of determination: the force that drove the entire plot of undertale; the power that allowed the player to survive death—to subvert fate—and the ability to choose what 'route' they went on. fundamentally, deltarune's metanarrative appears to be about the immutability of a set story contradicting the inherent interactivity of a game: determinism vs. determination. neither side is 'evil', but each has its own narrative to push.

that being said, i don't definitely don't believe these interpretations of gaster stem solely from a metanarrative misunderstanding. unfortunately, i'm 99% sure the main motivation behind the vilification of gaster is simply that it gives the story an overarching 'antagonist', which it currently lacks concretely. this isn't a bad motivation, i guess... but it's just so hollow to me. gaster is the villain because the story needs one. he's just fulfilling fate. it's not that this WOULDN'T work at all—there are some circumstances where it might. i mean, forcing someone into a narrative they're desperately trying to subvert seems like a pretty bad situation to be in. maybe they'd start to crack. maybe they'd have no choice but to succumb. who knows! the possibilities are endless...

Sorry I couldn’t do my homework professor, I was languishing under the crushing weight of knowing that Destiny is burdened with the knowledge of everything that will happen until the end of Time, every decision, every birth, every death, and yet he cannot do anything to change it; he must wait and watch and live in the sweet agony of his own wretched foretelling coming to fruition

My fave thing about this official art is that aside from Guda and Mash, you can see which servants came to support a particular person on stage, and I love that the ones that came to see Medb are Fergus and Tomoe

Tomoe is especially noteworthy for having the most consistent back and forth convos with Medb that I like to think it’s lowkey canon that she’s the only one in Medb’s inner circle that has no connection to the Ulster cycle

i've always found it odd that stone knows everything and yet their plan failed so hard. like there's no way in hell that was the optimal sequence of events to rescue the contestants. maybe they aren't as omniscient as they claim.

the way i see, they actually ARE as omniscient as they say they are!! the thing is, is that it seems that their ability to know future events isnt set in stone (pun not intended), because it also accounts for EVERY variation of events, every way a person could act, how stone THEMSELF acts (given that stone DID predict most things, down to who would be the best people to have eliminated first, that the lightning on the smokestack would kill liam and bryce, etc, but also, stone is shown having to check what others are doing, likely to gauge what possibilities are currently possible based on the environment, to check how things are developing). because he can see everything and every possibility, he can STEER things a certain way, but i dont think that actually enables them to get things towards the Best outcome. i think stone was also operating on the best possible outcomes, but that said outcomes are EXTREMELY hard to put into place exactly, and had to cast a wider net that allowed for the best possible chance of things at least mostly turning out okay, rather than anything highly specific that would ACTUALLY be the best outcome

stone themself can alter events, but he cant fully account for how others will act, because there are infinite possibilities. they just had to pick the best ones, and hope for the best. hell, we dont actually know IF liam this was what stone wanted. the note with the five on it kinda indicates that the outcome was mostly the same, but who knows if everything was how 100% how stone intended. there are hundreds of ways liam couldve interpretted the notes, stone just had to set him on a path where it was more likely that things would turn out okay (and i think statistically there WOULDVE been at least ONE course of events that wouldve turned out good for everyone, but while it exists, i dont think stone had the power to put it into action all on their own. they cannot account for others, only nudge people as best they can)

wrow this is just like how fate works in the aeneid :-)

What should I know about Caligula?

the thing about caligula appointing his favorite horse incitatus as consul was likely a joke at the expense of the roman senate because his full time hobby was humiliating roman senators, which was extremely funny of him

Caligula, Incitatus, and the Consulship, David Woods

and for alternative interpretations of the Incitatus Incident:

The Roman Emperor Gaius 'Caligula' and his Hellenistic Aspirations, Dr Geoff W Adams

I’ve remembered I’ve now both gotta figure out teams for: Dawn, Emmet, Barry and Hop - and put them all together.

Luckily Odessa and Markoth have their team sorted, and Dawn’s starter is at least there, and well Barry has at least a Starly/Staraptor. Tiso,,, doesn’t have a team he’s got a Darkrai following him (which i can’t get because I don’t have the remakes and I don’t want to buy them) and just a Shieldon/Bastiodon

Saw Oppenheimer

holy fuck

this fucking sucks i need to get rid of these tits

mood: nerky so i was brewing up to make a complaining post that implied there was some new irritating behaviour in a ten year old fandom but actually no people saying Lucina is their favourite character has been a red flag from day one. it's never followed by any reference to anything in the game it's just an excuse to spout their personal fanon with full confidence that whatever they are projecting onto her is absolute fact. "i love Lucina she's such a lesbian" (she is?????) "i love it when she's so sad about having to kill her possessed brother" (really???????)

offence intended: cite your fucking work on this. also. this goes beyond the fact that she would not say that, the evidence in the text is so massively stacked in the other direction maybe um like maybe. maybe read one of her supports with another girl sometime because her reactions are pretty lukewarm to actively hostile compared to how she speaks to MRobin, Gerome, Laurent, Yarne etc. then compare this to like. Kjelle's supports with the same people. if you're thinking about the future kid who is heavily implied to be a lesbian that's actually Kjelle. furthermore lucina's ENTIRE thing is her commitment to doing something she acknowledges is horrible if it serves the greater good! IF she had a brother and he was possessed she wouldn't even hesitate!!! better that she does it and everyone hates her for it than she puts her feelings first and harms anyone else by her passivity. that's... that's her entire character. that's her backstory motivation personality and thematic role in the story lmao

What upsets me astrology isn't when it attributes certain traits I have that I'd blame on genetics or smth to the stars, like ''oh you're forgetful bc you're [star sign]" no lol it's bc I have adhd but whatever, I find that silly but it doesn't upset me, it's the same as if you said "you're tall bc you're [star sign] not bc your mother is tall" like lol but okay

What upsets me is when ppl claim I have a trait that I worked really hard for, bc I am this star sign. Like. I worked so hard on becoming more compassionate and understanding of other ppl, it was difficult, it's still hard sometimes, I've worked so hard to not blurt out every rude "joke" my mind comes up with so I don't hurt ppl accidentally, I was such an inconsiderate bitch as a teenager and didn't even know it and now? Now ppl come to me with their problems it is wild, I still don't know how to deal half the time

But you'd give all the credit for my hard work to the stars. It's so rude. I did that. I didn't have to either, I could have grown up into one of Benedict cumberbatch's asshole genius characters. That I didn't is bc I had friends who called me out when needed and bc I chose to learn how to be better. The stars had nothing to do with it

There's also an aspect of "[star sign] are like this and this" that feels so static, like the universe decided you are this way so you do not get to change and if you do change? Haha yeah actually that's also a trait of [star sign] actually lol

Of course most of the time when I say any of this to someone who believes in astrology I get a "you know that's exactly what a [star sign] would say" so....

i love the extras of dungeon meshi in how it fleshes out the world because they make it so much more evident how race affects every part of the story while avoiding the zootopia racism problem. like obv a main theme of the story is like, humanity and desire, 'to eat is to live', etc, but since the majority of it takes place in the dungeon isolated from society and thru the lens of laios, the racial aspects play out more like shadows on a wall for most of the story.

then in the extras we get comics like this

which at a glance fleshes out the racial aspects via a character explaining the racial rules of universe - humans have x amount of bones, while orcs and kobolds have more. however, if u take it less straightforwardly, it points out how the concept of 'human' is a constructed concept in the world. the fact that there are different categories of human in different parts of the world based off of what types of humanoids occur there is already a demonstration of this. in response, the bones explanation seems to kabru and the characters as an objective way of measuring humans vs nonhumans.

but obv, when the culture was deciding what humanoids were humans and nonhumans, they weren't blindly analyzing skeletons and then deciding. just visually, one can glean that orcs and kobolds look less like the ingroup of tallmen, elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc. the bones explanation appears as a justification for that immediate prejudice under a scientific guise - I'm sure that one could come up with the same number of physical differences between a gnome and an elf that they would find between a tallman and an orc. it sounds a lot better to say 'well, an orc has 230 bones while a human has 206' then 'well, an orc looks ewwww yucky yucky to me while a human looks normal'.

and what i like abt the comic is that the characters take the explanation at face value for the most part. when a contradiction is brought up in the oni, kabru can neatly slot them into the predetermined number of bones framework. bc that's kinda how it works irl - there r cultural prejudices that we can posthumously justify, and if we find something outside of it, we can twist it to fit into our predetermined binary. however, since the reader does not live in a world where there are orcs and kobolds to be prejudiced against, we can see that flaw in the cultural logic. when the party encounters the orcs, the number of bones has no bearing on their humanity. They r shown to be cliquish and distrusting of outsiders, but not any more than the elves are later in the story.

tldr dungeon meshi worldbuilding is so good

I'm not sure what to do with the fact that my memories seem to have excised the existence of the Player in Undertale's story. Largely this isn't an issue- almost all of the Player's role in the Neutral and Pacifist routes can be handwaved away; it's very easy to cast them as little more than a quiet mediator between Frisk and I's conflicting impulses. Any agency they have can be parceled out between us with very few hiccups.

Of course, this falls apart in the Genocide Route, in which the Player tears up Undertale's story by its roots. But I'm not a post-Genocide Chara; I am not the demon that comes when you call their name. So the discrepancy must still be minimal, right? Well... I think it is. But like with W.D. Gaster, memory is unreliable, and it's very difficult to prove an absence.

For whatever reason, acknowledging that I am canon-divergent isn't enough to dispel the occasion feeling that I might have been, to some extent, a puppet on strings I never got a chance to see.