"be young, be dope, be proud, like an american"

comforting myself with some teenage!kenstewy scheming about taking over the world

LOOK WHAT I FOUND

so naturally this happened

and while I was on this train after what FEELS like a while, I decided it's time I explore more of my version of Dadbastian

Dadbastian is not at all cruel(to the phantomfam mhmm), but being that he is in the end a demon being introduced to human emotions, and has not read The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, I imagine that he can at times still come off as toxic... so, sorry. but, I thought it was a good step of growth that I wanted to shine light on.

Chapters: 19/? Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar), Aang/Katara (Avatar), others to be tagged later - Relationship Characters: Sokka (Avatar), Zuko (Avatar), Aang (Avatar), Katara (Avatar), Toph Beifong, Jet (Avatar), Suki (Avatar), Kyoshi Warriors (Avatar), Iroh (Avatar), Jee (Avatar), Hakoda (Avatar), Bato (Avatar), A bunch of OCs, Long Feng, Joo Dee (Avatar), Azula (Avatar), Mai (Avatar), Ty Lee (Avatar), Ozai (Avatar), General Fong (Avatar) Additional Tags: Violence, Blood and Injury, War, Minor Character Death, Rape/Non-con Elements, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Attempted Sexual Assault, Major Character Injury, Amputation, Implied/Referenced Suicide, possible major character death, themes similar to the first two books, Sexism, Racism (like has already been written in first two books), dark themes, Human Trafficking, Slavery, Just a lot of dark war-like themes, there will be a battle, Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Injury Recovery, Healing, Underage Sex, Underage Drinking, Animal Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Warnings each chapter, Hopefully some healing for Zuko finally, no promises, but that’s the goal, Reunions, hopefully a happy ending, Sokka gets some healing too, Non-Consensual Drug Use Series: Part 3 of Leaving It All Behind Summary:

-This is the last book of the series LIAB, please go read the other two books before this, or you will be very confused-

Zuko has been taken by the Earth Kingdom army to who-knows-where, and Sokka is determined to get him back.

But he can’t do it alone.

With Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors by his side, Sokka is headed to Ba Sing Se to find Katara and Aang so they can go rescue his fire bender.

Things aren’t as easy as he had hoped. Corruption, lies, and unknown horrors await them inside the city’s walls. None of this is helping Sokka’s mental well-being.

Hakoda and his men face a problem of their own as Azula approaches with the intentions of making it rain fire.

Sokka and Zuko will both find themselves having to reintegrate back into a life they thought they left behind, with people they hardly remember. It isn’t easy for anyone, especially when they don’t recognize the person standing in front of them.

me when one more person passive aggressively comments on ASOH:

Deacon loves two things: Ymber and digging himself a grave.

Fulj hates one thing: Deacon.

due to things lining up Horribly, no stream this weekend! and maybe not the next, either!

https://www.tumblr.com/the-obnoxious-sibling/735283406764752896/thats-also-how-i-always-saw-shanks-reaction-but

Anon from this ask!

I’m so glad I decided to send that ask to you. You’re so right.

But I must admit my “But I wonder what he would think if he knew the real reason why Buggy left him?” Was worded wrong, I’m sorry English is not my first language and I have troubles with expressing myself. What I meant is if that knowledge would change shanks view right now, like he founds out the reason. I wonder if he would be less accepting of buggy just choosing his way vs knowing he broke his heart

But your answer made me wonder so much about everything. I wonder if anyone in shanks crew knows about why he waited so long. And exactly what you pointed out. How would Buggy react to “actually I NEED to wait”.

WHY THEY CAN’T JUST TALK GOD DAMMIT

hello again, anon! (i have been wondering how many of you are unique vs returning askers! it's nice to know at least one of you has come back for more~)

please don't feel any need to apologize for your english! i was the one who misunderstood that you meant shanks learning the truth now, not shanks being told the truth at the time. that’s on me!

so. shanks as he is now—thirty-nine, an emperor of the sea, boss of a good ship and crew, protector-captain of a massive fleet, finally going after the one piece—learns that the reason the first person he asked to sail with him refused was because shanks didn’t want to go after the one piece when he was fifteen.

would shanks think differently of buggy for feeling rejected by shanks’ decision, and not sincerely wanting to go his own way? i think he must! if your best friend leaves because they have their own plans that don’t involve you, that’s one thing… if they leave because you failed to live up to their (unspoken!) expectations of you, that’s quite another!

thinking about it like that, i wonder if shanks might be mad, or disappointed, to learn that buggy left because shanks wasn’t the person buggy had been imagining him to be. because on one hand: shanks isn’t responsible for the shanks buggy made up inside his head! he isn’t beholden to the way buggy thought that false shanks would act, or the things buggy imagined he believes. that’s on buggy! and on the other: if the person you thought knew you best can misjudge you so badly they run away from the real you… it must shed a dim light on your whole relationship.

…but maybe it’s been long enough that it would just make him sad. it’s a decades-old hurt by now, and with the way shanks dislikes and avoids conflict there’s no way he keeps grudges or clings to hurt feelings. so it might just be a passing feeling of sadness—ah, so even buggy thought too highly of me, huh?

i think benn beckman must know at least a bit of shanks’ plans. that’s his first mate, after all! there has to be trust there, or the whole crew falls apart! as for the rest of the red-haired pirates… i don’t think we know them well enough to say whether any of them would need truth to offer trust. i suspect most of them don't, that they trust shanks unconditionally, and will follow his lead wherever it takes them.

and buggy… i don’t think he wants to trust shanks, but for a long time trusting shanks was as easy as breathing, so it's a hard habit to break. (though shanks makes it easier the more he betrays that trust, however good his motives or minor the deception.) i think if shanks had said, back in roguetown, that they needed to wait, buggy would have whined and complained and begged shanks to reconsider, but he would’ve gone along with it. if buggy found out about that now, i think he’d snap that you could have just said so back then! stupid shanks, didn't you trust me?!

to which the answering silence must be a new flavor of the old heartbreak, because no, apparently he did not.

Would love to hear ur thoughts on Hades game sometime because I too loved but had beef with the game and I think we are the same ….

yessss, disclaimer I haven't played it for like 3 years and I only played 10 hours/got to the end once before I dropped it so i might be misremembering some things but I stick by my opinions! under the cut cuz this is long as fuck 🫣 my haterism has no limits

ok so basically my grievances w hades can be split into 2 main areas: gameplay + narrative, I'll break them down in that order.

firstly gameplay - roguelikes/lites are my fave genre so I was predominantly approaching hades from this angle + its failure here is the clincher for me.

I found the gameplay repetitive and stale. this isnt a criticism of its permadeath like ive seen some ppl make - I usually relish repetition/grind especially in permadeath-based games bc I find tactical challenge fun + love the learning curve, its soooo rewarding. but hades is ultimately just a glorified button masher. mob/boss movesets are boring + unoriginal, and can generally all be fought the same way. trying to do otherwise drags out fights; it actively discourages emergent gameplay so theres little variance WITHIN runs. the pool of rooms for procedural generation is far too small so theres little variance BETWEEN runs. there's no real challenge to combat, difficulty is mainly increased by heightened mob tankiness as you get further in a run. movement/combat doesn't flow well, its mechanically very weak, relying heavily on its permanent upgrade system instead of developing skill in the way you approach the game. all the weapons feel clunky and don't really offer any unique challenge/benefit so theres virtually no point switching between them and the grind to unlock them all is so pointless… god there are just SOOO many hack n slash crawlers that keep it fresh even for hundreds of hours and hades fails miserably at keeping it fresh for even 5 measly hours :^/

I didnt like the boon system either - its far too simplistic + shallow. its fine to rely on chance, this is part of the random generation, and I think it had a lot of potential in that it was a good way of combining aesthetic w gameplay itself. but this is pretty much the only form of resource management - and theres barely any management to it! theres no reward for exploring different builds, they dont really synergise BETWEEN gods in interesting or useful ways, so the game encourages you to just stick with one god throughout, and biases random generation towards boons youve already collected. part of the fun for me is learning HOW to design a build, and working with the randomiser to play flexibly, but hades just isnt interested in that at all...

also - I don't like the permanent upgrade system, I think this detracts from it as a rogue. every time you should be starting on square 1 - maybe you pick up health upgrades etc throughout each run, and maybe you unlock new weapons etc for the random generation pool, or purely cosmetic upgrades, but the point of permadeath is that it RESETS! zags base health + dmg should be the same 50 hours into the game as when u first open it. make a different genre of game if u dont wanna do that lol. I also think IF youre going to say fuck it and add a permanent upgrade system, you should also add unlockable permanent biome shortcuts bc ur just making it boring as fuck to have to waste time grinding thru earlier biomes with unskippable combat once youre op for them.

I GET that they did this to make the game more accessible* to players who dont typically enjoy rogues, but it just makes it really disappointing for those of us who DO love rogues, and it always feels cheap to me when games are like "well of you want challenge then set the difficulty yourself with these modifiers 🙄" like just make the base difficulty TOUGH up front and then add an easy/story mode and accessibility features* for players who don't want the challenge.. if you're gonna call yourself a rogue the gameplay should be the PRIORITY not a throwaway option

one of my biggest peeves with hades is how people now laud it as one of the best rogues - whenever I mention I like the genre I almost always get asked "oh, like hades?" and it pisses me off so much… its a rogueLITE not roguelike, ie. it has rogue ELEMENTS but its not a true one and imo, it does a pretty shit job implementing them! I would have a lot less resentment towards it if it wasnt marketed as the forefront of the rogue genre - frankly its a very basic rogue with very mid gameplay, its characters/design are by FAR its strong point and it should be sold as such. its misleading and makes me sad that this is what most people think of when they hear rogue :-(

*(side note - accessibility in this game is another major flaw. theres really no excuse for a game as popular as this to be so lacking in accessibility options. allow people to bind keys together or use coloured outlines or have colourblindness settings or alter font/text size etc - its not that hard! dead cells did a great job of this lol)

anyway... moving onto my second criticism - narratively, its also unsatisfying.

the hades plot is, loosely, about a cycle of abuse, so the 2 natural directions to go in with this are either: #1: escaping the cycle, or #2: continuing it forever.

#2 is the easiest to do with a rogue format - bc of permadeath the game is already cyclical, so all you have to do is create an ending which loops perfectly back to the start (smth like 'its impossible to truly defeat/reconcile with his father so even after zag beats him, hades drags him back to the start again). obviously this is a miserable story to tell, but tbh I think it wouldve been interesting + fitting - so much of greek mythos is about cycles and the unchanging nature of the gods, and they LOVED eternal cyclical punishments. plus theres smth rly tragic about zag gradually helping everyone else while no one else can save him from his family LOL

#1 is a bit harder to do - this is the story they WANTED to tell but I just don't think it worked… the driving force plot-wise is his desperation to escape. realistically for this to happen the game needs to be finite, which it can't be due to its rogue nature - somehow you have to end up at the very start again. the main solutions I can think of for this are:

a) after the final boss, insert some time travel shenanigans (easy to fit into the worldbuilding using a character like kronos) and all of zags progress with hades is unspooled. this can be completely out of his control, or it could be a choice the player makes (to end the game here or choose to go back and relive zags past in order to progress npc questlines). eg. what happens in dead cells. again, tragic but it makes more sense to me

-or b) bite the bullet and give the game a completely finite ending after beating hades. if players want to go back and play more to complete other npc questlines, they pick up play from before they beat hades. this isnt explained "narratively" bc the plot is already concluded and now theyre just playing for fun (eg. what going under does)

I also think for a character-focused story-rich game, roguelite was a really terrible choice of genre as it locks every interaction behind pure chance and hours of grinding - just really baffling why they decided to do this, especially when theyve had such success previously making games within different genres (transistor, bastion, pyre). the core of the issue for me is that the devs wanted to create a game that was both story rich AND a rogue - and these things arent mutually exclusive, but the best features of each contradict each other when you try to balance them in a way to appease their respective fans (ie. the challenge/complexity of the gameplay is heavily restricted by keeping it easy for ppl unfamiliar with rogues to pick up, but the strength of the narrative arc is simultaneously weakened by the fact that as a rogue it has to be perpetual bc of permadeath + you're working with procedural generation…)

I'm not going to beef with the artstyle or music bc I rly loved them both (even if I wish the body diversity was better!), or with the interpretations of greek gods bc literally every piece of media abt greek mythos has to decide how to interpret them and I think its silly to be like "this isnt CANON" - since we actually dont HAVE a strict "canon" for many of these stories bc theyve been retold/translated in so many conflicting ways lol. I've just heard ppl complaining abt that and I dont think its worth complaining about 🤷‍♀️

ANYWAY tl;dr: hades should've been an action-heavy isometric metroidvania… it wouldve made it far easier to focus on character questlines (ie. with respawn points + a fixed map), unified the story they wanted to tell with the gameplay SO much more effectively, and allowed them to reach the full potential of both, whilst also playing up to supergiant's previous game-making strengths. but thats my 2 cents!

Do you think your sims would have survived the lockdown part of covid? I know we all pretty much lost our minds. Do you think any of them would have been the type that "took advantage" of the time?

honestly i don't know when 2020 would've fit into the timeline so i'm basically fudging this whole thing lmao

oh beth & caroline would've been REALLY close to filing for divorce. with cara being a tattoo artist, she would've been completely out of work and beth would've been working from home (she's a children's therapist) but there are no extra rooms in the house to use as an office, so she would've had to either use the computer in the living room/dining room/kitchen which would be a major privacy issue, or set it up in their bedroom which is super small. they were already having relationship issues at that time, but being trapped in such close quarters..... they would be at each other's throats... and they wouldn't even be able to have crazy makeup sex (the only tried and true solution to their problems fjksjd) because asa is in the next room doing virtual school 😭 btw asa definitely started making bread from scratch and promised himself he would keep doing it after life went back to normal (he did not).

stevie would still be working. KD would have let her stay home, but stevie would be desperate to get out of the house (oh my god her parents would be insufferable) and not be lonely anymore. you know that tiktok that's like "you think you can hurt my feelings but it was my job to enforce the cracker barrel mask mandate as a 17 yo butch lesbian" literally that but "it was my job to enforce the mask mandate for rural american truck drivers as a 16 yo trans girl" 🫡

elaine and jada are lucky because their bedroom windows face each other, so they could technically see each other. elaine would've fallen down the skincare rabbit-hole and completely ruined her skin in a matter of months (me too girl...... happened to the best of us) and jada would've had time to make tons of art, but she would have extreme art block and spend most of her time just laying in bed being anxious (again. me too girl.)

i guess casper would still be in high school, and sadie was still just a toddler. danny had already been working from home for years, so it would be nothing new for him

trigger warning for serious discussion of covid below

mikaela is a pediatric nurse at a hospital, so i don't really want to go into detail about how emotionally damaging that time must've been :( she would be working nonstop and i think she wouldn't even want to go home afterwards for fear of transferring germs. she might have stayed in a hotel during the peak of things

i'm gonna be honest i think 2020 would've been the worst year of coco's life because her boyfriend had cancer and was going through chemo, so obviously she could not be anywhere near him unless she was willing to be 100% quarantined with him, which she couldn't do because she needed to work. she had people counting on her. and she had.... a lot of other stuff going on too, some of which would've been affected by a pandemic but i can't really go into detail about that

and finally i have to state the obvious -- people died, no matter how careful they or their families were, and sometimes it didn't even matter how healthy they were before covid hit. i had family members who were immunocompromised get covid and i thought they wouldn't survive but they did, while other people in my life were only in their 40s/50s and healthy but they didn't survive. so in my mind, there's no point trying to guess how my characters would fare, and also it just feels icky in general. but it felt weirder to not acknowledge this at all, so. here's this ramble.

i also want to send love to anyone who continues to be affected by covid in a world that wants you to believe it's "over", whether that be from long covid, grief, being immunocompromised yourself, etc. i see you ♥

um. uh. hi every body. something evil and malevolent happened in my brain this month.

this is. um. a Jet Set Radio/Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Death joke AU, spawned out of a in-joke that started in a pokepasta discord. my apologies to both the pokepasta and jsr fandoms

the entire basis is the idea that Corn in Future retconned og JSR Beat as leader/founder of the GGs (is beat being leader in the og even CANON?) so Corn and Beat are the Myras. no it's not a joke funny enough to justify how many hours i sunk into drawing these. no attempt was made to change the setting, assign most of the other cast, or otherwise make this au hold up to ANY amount of scrutiny. if i tried to make this actually work somehow then i'd REALLY end up too far gone. also i keep calling myrtle!beat "Meat".

MEANWHILE, IN A BETTER UNIVERSE:,

This is Voidhead, a character that I draw on bad mental health nights (as of right now)

He has no lore beyond that but he's probably friendly

How can u make a post talking about how fanon tim is so much more boring than the canon character and then be so fucking wrong about canon tim

I feel like the Plinths would ultimately be okay after his rise to power, but mostly cause he had the setup for becoming a gamemaker through Gaul's internship. If Coryo came back from twelve and went through college and was setup to inherit the Plinth's munition business, he'd get rid of the Plinths, but since he was going the politics route instead of the business route and they were already supporting, funding, and endorsing him, they'd be okay. (Unless people commented on him being taken care of by District borns cause of Capital bias, then he'd distance himself in the same way he distanced from Tigris, but I don't think he'd harm them at all.)

-🐭

yeah I agree! I don’t think he harmed them in any way, I think at most he just distanced/cut off with them once he was successful enough on his own because in the end he was using them, so ofc he’d be done with them once he’s gotten to a better place.

number one pet peeve is when someone posts something that is obviously just to grab ppls attention and for them to rt/rb without just being open about it 

I think Tarzan also has one of the best setups for a villain who monologues their true intentions at the end of the movie.

Clayton’s introduction is someone we hear before we see, spending the entire time hacking through the brush bragging about his accomplishments as a safari hunter. He lives for the thrill of the hunt and the recognition, praise, and notoriety those exploits garner. It means when Tarzan is restrained at the end on the boat, it’s entirely in character for Clayton to brag about exactly what he plans to do in betraying them and capturing the gorillas. He doesn’t even have to do it for long, just long enough to break the spirit of the hero before throwing him to the lowest point he’s been in the story.

If you’re going to have a character monologue it can’t feel out of place or disrupt the flow and pacing of the movie, and it definitely can’t be out of character for that particular character to give it. Too often monologues can sound like they were written for the satisfaction of the writer instead of serving the story, and when that’s the case it’s a “kill your darlings” scenario; every word in a monologue has to be necessary, or else it needs to be cut out