not trying to sound rude or aggressive or anything i swear, but what exactly Is it abt like. eclipse and ruin in general that you have critiques of? i'm still trying to figure out exactly what i think of it myself - it wasn't ANYTHING like what i was expecting, and to be perfectly honest i was also one of the Book Doubters(trademark pending) so that was a huge culture shock to me as well. idk i go in-between being really impressed and really liking it, to being salty that it wasn't what I think a good chunk of ppl including myself were expecting? looks like there's gonna be more down the line as far as this SB storyline goes so i'm curious and cautiously optimistic. i'm not totally sold on the mimic yet but thats probably bc I haven't been reading the tales books. guess i should start now lmao

i should make it clear that i actually haven't finished ruin yet, which is why i've been holding back on talking about it -- i'm up to bonnie bowl! so i'll refrain from commenting on that, except to say that the gameplay is a massive improvement from sb and only has more minor design flaws vs the base game's... fundamentally broken, lmao. they listened to criticism, refined their ideas and executed them with the resources available, and they did it well! i have mostly positive things to say on that front, which is nice. :)

eclipse is harder to talk about because... like, to give you an idea of how badly it effected me: it pissed me off so bad i started dissociating for the rest of the night, gave me stress stomach-aches when I refused to stop playing and then woke me up at 6am this morning nauseous and in pain. and that's not me being a wimp, that's me experiencing somatization, which is a real thing that i struggle with a lot, so hopefully you can understand why I'm not exactly keen to talk about this? especially when literally every time i even try to someone gets mad at me for breathing. please keep this in mind as i go on to say: eclipse is ableist as fuck and completely inexcusable.

as presented within ruin's visit to the daycare, the dca is left in a state of disrepair after the earthquake and subsequent abandonment left the pizzaplex to fend for itself. they're trapped between their two personalities, with both of them insisting that they are the one who knows what they should do; sun wants to be a good boy and do arts and crafts and whatever, and moon wants to send everyone to bed, blah blah you know the drill. as you complete the segment sun and moon regularly argue with each other, with sun holding the upset moon back from attacking cassie as she reactivates the generators, turning the lights on and stunning moon long enough for her to whack him with the faz-wrench, forcing a system reboot... and he's immediately reborn as eclipse, a lovely and kind figure with no memories of anything that happened who gently escorts you out and wishes you well. he's fixed now, you see! you did it! you got rid of his evil split personality, you've made him normal again, and without the aberration that is plurality he has not a cruel bone in his body!

the implications of this are incredibly fucking obvious and deeply deeply upsetting, and why i'm gonna point-blank say i'm not entertaining further discourse over whether this is reaaaally ableist or if they reaaaaally meant for them to read as a system or... nope, it's done, we're not fucking going there. it doesn't matter what they intended -- what they intended is pretty obvious, actually; they've decided to tackle a subject they're incredibly ill-equipped to handle, and the result is a character -- descended from the visual language and cultural canon of tales like split and psycho -- whose arc concludes with the reveal that it was being a system that made them violent. and the boss fight was dumb and bad and ignored all the previously-explained mechanics of this character to do this. it is aggressively stupid fanservice that turns what was once simply "poor taste walking the line of good faith" into "actual offensive caricature with zero room for doubt", and the only thing more despair-inducing than this twist is the community of people gleefully eating it up as their yummy angst fuel for their ultimate comfort character. and i shouldn't be surprised, considering it's coming from the "how dare you ask me to examine why i find it scary when the dca experiences altered identity states" crowd, but i am, unfortunately, an idealist doomed to be let down by normies. huzzah.

as for the mimic: I'm perfectly fine with afton getting laid to rest (he deserves it!), I'm not one of those guys, but in its current iteration (and from my understanding of it) it suffers immensely from having literally zero reason to be doing any of this shit and being yet another rejection of the supernatural in favour of sci-fi bullshit. because it's from the novels and the novels are allergic to ghosts. and having your entire story drip-fed in mediocre spin-off novels filled with blatant fetish content marketed to naive twelvies is so obviously bad storytelling that i don't even think i need to get into the piss-poor prose and legitimately cruel messages to explain why i hate that one