I like how the newest Holicworks BL game protag is basically 21st century Kyouichirou.

I’m really amused to drop back in and see that people have been reblogging some of this stuff and going ‘NO! that means they’re not healthy! or good! or perfectly fine and fluffy!’

You’re right. I actually hate the uwu marshmallow fluffiness where everything is perfect for everyone and every problem can be talked out or understood, and I would try to look for things that are flawed, selfish, and human. 

It’s also hilarious to see people going, see! This means person A is evil and terrible! 

Evil? Evil, you say. 

That’s funny, because in all this time I haven’t figured out what being Evil is actually like, short of participating in hate crimes.

Is it evil to prevent someone from doing something you think they’d regret, when they think they won’t? Is it selfish? Is it right? What is right? Is it right or wrong to interfere with someone’s agency when they’re doing what you perceive to be self-destruction? Does anyone have the right to judge what’s right and wrong for others? Is there objective happiness? Is it right to wish someone happiness if it’s your own projection of happiness? Is there such a thing as wished-for happiness that is not projected?

Personally I like asking these kinds of questions more than ‘are they healthy for each other?’ ‘do they have a perfect understanding for each other?’ ‘are they supporting each other?’ or ‘how much they do love each other?’

So that’s the tone my writing would take.

Not that I write meta for fandom anymore, lol. It’s not very worth it these days, is it? There’s not even any joy to be derived from pointing out little things in translation, little nuances and such. 

This doesn’t mean this blog will come back. I might drop in again in the next year or so, it’s just that seeing all this after all this time is amusing.

News Today:

Tsukihime Remake leaves the race of “what will finish first, Tsukihime Remake, Hunter x Hunter, Berserk, or X coming out of hiatus.”

Jesus the new activity page is horrible.

I’m also not sure why new people are following this largely dead blog and most of you don’t seem to be pornbots. Welcome?

fic rec (pof spoilers)

I know I haven't been using this tumblr much recently, but I just have to post this because of how floored I am.

Guys.

I've just read the best Guild Wars 2 fanfic ever. Hell, it's probably one of the best fanfics I've read in recent years. It's one of those fanfics that feels like it could fit snugly as official material (tbh I liked it more than some of the official short stories lol). The exploration of the characters and settings is fantastic. The adventure portions are fantastic. There's pretty much something to peel and unpack every other paragraph and man, I started reading fanfics for stuff like this.

It's an exploration of what would happen if:

1) the Commander didn't revive the way they did in PoF, and the Dragon's Watch has to deal with their death.

2) the Commander did revive...but by listening to Joko instead of Nenah, and instead of recovering their name and purpose, they became his Archon.

The whole thing is written from Braham's perspective, in a scenario where he was informed of the Commander's death during the PoF timeline, and it explores him, the Commander, Taimi, and the relationships the Commander had with the rest of the world wonderfully. Honest to god, I got chills running down my spine at some point.

It's just such a wonderful fic. Despite the description there's very little sketchy content going on in there---just a pure, honest-to-god exploration of what would happen if the DW finds themselves on the other end of the sword held by the person they love the most. And it's *great*.

(In the interests of disclosure, I do know the author personally. That does not have any influence on this rec, however. If anything, it's more like 'wow I know the person who wrote this stuff, holy shit'.)

hidden-but replied to your post “The FUCK has tumblr done to...”

IT’S THE FONT. THE COLOR IS FINE.

And how the posts are now arranged by.....some sort of time based logic? Why does one page have only 2 posts and another page has 5 posts? Is there a way to just make it run through chronologically without weird breaks.

The FUCK has tumblr done to dashboard??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I do love how the main leads of the ST all seem to uniformly hate the ST, except for Adam Driver.

For the record, I am not a Kylo or Reylo stan.

(It would be nice if Disney could also pretend the ST never happened, but eh they will never do that, they’ll just double down and pretend everyone liked that trilogy.)

The thing is, I used to be a huge fan of Chris Avellone.

If you have the time to look back in my account to 2012 or thereabouts, I had a lot of gushing about the PoE kickstarter while it was active, and a large chunk of that was about Avellone. The writing in Planescape : Torment was truly something that formed an indelible part of me and how I approach fiction, and I was thrilled to see his work in a proper CRPG again.

Then the game came out, and the part that’s touted as his major contribution was my least favourite part of the game. There was something....uncomfortable about it, I don’t know how. Something....oddly self-indulgent about it. Something in how it revels about the brokenness of the female character he wrote and the difference that was compared to the brokenness of his male character, that was actually kind of at-odds with the rest of the game. It wasn’t enough to write the game off as a loss (it’s a good game) but....his parts had me scratching my head, and I looked closer at the stuff he wrote.

Without being able to put my finger on it, the stuff he wrote struck me as more and more disturbing. (And finding out that most of my favourite parts of Planescape weren’t actually by him and many of my least favourite parts were actually by him, lol. Turns out there’s a lot of importance in actually telling people who did what, instead of just screaming ‘this game is by this guy!’)

Time passed and he left Obsidian, increasingly made a point of things that have resonance with the segment of gamers that I find particularly hateful and increasingly (if subtly) enabling them, and I grew more alienated. His writing is still good, when he’s not being as indulgent, but.....there was something that disturbed me about the man and how he thinks. I ended up unfollowing his account, and to be honest, I don’t buy a game just because he’s working on it anymore. In fact, if I see his name, it’s more like an “hmmm wait and see opinions first” these days.

So. When this news came out, it feels more like.....the puzzle clicks into place.

It’s a blow to have someone you genuinely admired through much of your life and created something that genuinely affected you be like this. But hey. I can’t say it’s completely surprising.