In honor of my friend Stelle getting to the rejuv lategame, I redid the Melia Family Tree I made like, two years ago. This thing is ridiculous.

Description below the cut!

Melia is adopted by Jenner. Zetta is her clone, Maria is. Uhm. Well I dunno! and Melanie is Melia from an alternate timeline.

Melia's parents are Anathea and Vitus (who is also Indriad and Sirius). They are also the parents of Alice and Allen, who are twins, as well as Erin.

At some point, Sirius got married to Narcissa, and they adopted Gregory, who is also Geara. Yes, Geara and Melia are stepsiblings.

At some other point prior to this, Vitus and Nymeria created Kanon together using weird magic shit, and Kanon got adopted as a sibling by Erin.

This is one weird family tree!

if a ton of women* hated me i would kill myself too

oh right, m2 and erin for here also

rejuv meme dump

More silly stuff :3

Hanging out at the mall w/ Crescent was a little funny cus I almost always chose the wrong options replying to her and all I did there was.... buy potions.....

I like her though!! She may not like Iris, but she's really sweet in her own way haha 🫶

The little indicator that pops up when you lose a friendship point with her reminded me of when I played BG3 and Astarion disapproving of everything I did😭😭😭😭

So this is basically the first half of Act 2

Big spoilers for Pokemon Rejuvenation 13.5's Renegade Route below the cut, but DUDE I HAVE THOUGHTS.

Dude M2 makes me want to fucking explode, I am OBSESSED with her. Like aside from her being the exact kind of insane I love in a character, beneath that is fucking FASCINATING.

Despite the timeline differences and insanity by years worth of wandering in a desolate fucking wasteland, you can see there's still Melia beneath all that. Melia who is sick and tired of the shit she's had to go through, seen the end of the world and gotten a second shot. And what she's done is declared it inevitable and decided she's going out on her own terms, and she'll do whatever she wants as she goes down, and is taking whoever has wronged her with her.

Like and that's what I love! Her anger isn't insane! It isn't directionless, she's clearly uncomfortable with the idea of killing Talon! Her first instinct upon seeing him rift is to save him like with Aelita before realizing that he would just be forced to rift again. And with Ren! She fucking hated Ren! He was on her (s)hit list! But when she realized that this was not the same Ren as her original timeline, one who wasn't selfishly going for power, one willing to die to atone for the sins of someone who isn't him, she let him live! And this was something she pointed out with Karrina! How the worst part of her was that at the end she was still trying to save her own skin with no attempt atonement or apology.

On top of that we can still see some doubt seeping through in how she asks the interceptor if there's a chance they won't end the world, before quickly dropping the subject when it was clear they had no plans on dropping it. And I love how Amber points out M2 likely doesn't hate everyone, but is just lashing out. M2 is damaged by her timeline ending and being stuck in purgatory for years. But despite this damage, there's still Melia buried under it all! And M2 tries to keep it all buried because I feel like she knows that Melia wouldn't do what she's doing, but that's fine, because she's not Melia, she's M2.

And I can fucking see it now, after her reckless use of the Archetype has let Genisis Syndrome ravage her and she's too weak to possibly stop the end she'd once thought so inevitable, she's gonna regret a lot of what she did. I dunno if she'll regret all of it, but she might regret at least not trying to stop the end.

I just wanted to put all this out there because I feel like people are gonna focus on M2's more outlandish behavior! And I'm glad for that, she's genuinely a very fun character and you can tell the folks who wrote her had a blast doing so, and I genuinely think introducing her as your companion in the renegade route was a fantastic idea. But there's so much more there and just AGHGHGGHGHGHG HER!!!!

And I promise I'm not saying that because I absolutely fucking called an evil and fucked up Melia pre-release, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

pspsps melia enjoyers come get ya'lls food [+ august too hes cool I guess [I FUCKING LOVE AUGUST]]

you ever think about how nancy and alain died the same way

right so. when replaying rejuv for v13.5. i'm literally only on ch9 rn and forgot most of endgame but i'm having thoughts that the interceptor has wayyy more characterization than before.

like i've pondered "is the interceptor a direct player stand-in or their own distinct entity?" before but replaying made me really im favor of the latter

and i think that. the kind of core defining moment of the interceptor as a Person. is always grief. The moment that made them a person is grief.

spoilers for like, mooost of the game, maybe? primarily up to blacksteeple and terajuma though

a lot of waffling without much point other than "i love silent protagonists and unconventional explorations of personhood a lot"

So. the first time control is REALLY taken from the player's hands in how the protag FEELS is. melia's "death". because no matter how you play, the interceptor was stuck in depression for a week and just staring at a wall until they had enough energy to finally set out again in melia's name.

and, really, the FIRST thing they are defined by as a character is the loss of their mother. when the oceana sinks, the protag is the only person left, and the motivation of the pokemon journey for them amounts to "do ANYTHING to fill the void, and maybe find out what happened to mom in the meantime." They miss their mom! A lot!

Blacksteeple is of course the point where this gets even worse. When Nancy dies for them, they're catatonic again. And after that, so much of them is defined by the grief of her sacrifice. Like the optional encounter with a Nancy ghost in Amethyst Cave, right at the top of it, when the interceptor's first brush with grief came in its depths. "Why do I feel this way?" they can't comprehend the emotion they're defined by.

Even before they got a journal to snark around in, sidequests that gave them the occasional line of actual dialogue, the interceptor has always grieved, and they do not want to grieve again.

Like. Okay. The A-Gang, right? Wasn't it that they allowed the interceptor to use their souls because they were tired? this terrible catastrophe happened to them. they're all dead and gone, their home is destroyed, they just... cant go on anymore. their grief destroyed them.

in a way, the interceptor is made to grieve. and they are made to move on, again and again and again.

world's weirdest jrpg party

My Renegade OC

So, I really cooked with this gal today, and I'm proud of what I've got so far.

Astrid Mendoza(she/her, 19) is the Renegade counterpart to Adrian, effectively. She is quite self-confident (sometimes cocky), and much more headstrong than her Paragon counterpart. She's very talented at battling and can often back up her claims when it comes down to it. She's also quite a flirt and unafraid to shoot a pickup line, and is very much a tease.

Here's her picrew! I'll definitely make a proper ref for her in the future!

However, she is not good at handling her emotions and trauma. She isn’t comfortable with talking about personal issues and as such just bottles it up. She views herself as a person who needs to protect and only do that, unable to give herself the time she needs to cope. The more times she fails, the more her pent-up anger and self-loathing just builds and builds. This is in stark contrast to Adrian, who is more than willing to embrace their friends in order to get through dark times, treasuring them far more than Astrid realizes she should.

Late Chapter 15 + Renegade spoilers inbound:

In her Nightmare Realm, with Kieran and Clear’s temptation imminent, Astrid’s spirit has already been broken, and with the feeling that she can’t truly accomplish her role, she accepts, just wanting an end to things on her own terms and to run her anger loose. However, at the end of the Realm, she learns an important detail about the world she came from: there was a special person close to her long, long ago. Days later, after disposing of Adrest, Zeight’s resources locate that person in the timeline parallel to her’s, and give her back core memories: those of being with the only friend left to her before everything crumbled apart. Adrian was alive and well, doing what she couldn’t manage to do. And so, she contacted the trainer, with only one direction left to take…