can any ship be considered a rarepair if the media is obscure/niche enough that you struggle finding fanworks for anything related to it online

A question for the philosophers. :)

I know how you feel.

Lemme give u all:

FF7Rebirth countdown - Shinra's edition~

Reeve, sir. Lookin good!!!😭🙌

FFVIII Anniversary Week: February 11th - February 18th

FFVIII Character Week is very proud to announce the FFVIII Anniversary Week!

Let's celebrate together the 25th anniversary of this game we all love so much, creating amazing fanworks we can gush about for an entire week (and even more if we want, because why not?)!

Below, you can find a set of prompts you can use, but there is also a free choice for all those creative bunnies you can't keep in check, so have fun :)

Bonus

Submissions can be posted in the AO3 collection (you can find it here) and on tumblr after February 11th, by tagging @ffviiicharacterweek and/or using the hashtag #ffviiicharacterweek, or sending your link through ask/messages, so we can reblog and spread your work!

And remember: HAVE FUN, AND SHARE THE LOVE!

So, have you already started working on some prompts?

Let me know in comments or tags!

How Intimidating Am I?

Poll playoff!

So, there was a draw in the previous poll, and I want to let you choose the next character. So here's another poll to declare the winner!

Keep in mind that character's birthdays will take precedence, so we're talking about April's week here.

Ellone smashed the playoff poll, so May's characters week is officially hers!

6!

18!

Memory a little fuzzy but around 2 , 4 , and 6

7 or 9..

6 and only because my parents kept their console

was my first.

Knowing a fic author through AO3 is like attending someone’s thesis presentation and politely clapping at the end, knowing a fic author through this hellsite is like going over to their house at 3AM to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar

Sometimes I attend somebody’s thesis presentation and I’m so impressed that I follow them home to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar at 3am.

Sometimes I watch someone eat mayonnaise out of a jar at 3am with such fervour I am compelled to attend their thesis presentation

“how do you support multiple ships”

there are infinite timelines. in my mind.

Hey while I’m yelling about chocobo biology, I really don’t think they’d be food animals, despite the trend in fanfic to depict them as such. I mean, I’m sure there’s some rich indulgent asshole that insists on chocobo steaks, but I feel like this is very much the exception and not the norm, and probably a gross display of wealth than anything else. When you take into account the elements of this world in a purely story-driven environment, Cloud breeding infinite chocobos for racing purposes exists almost entirely within the bounds of the gameplay, and it’s for that same reason that I can conclude they’re very likely not raised for meat. 

I mean, what even is a chocobo? It’s a bird. It’s a big bird. I dunno if any of you have ever hand-reared any birds, or owned birds, be it budgerigars or owls, but birds eat a lot. Like, a lot a lot. They’re presumably warm-blooded, which already increases their caloric demand to something that would not only support their cell function, but something that would allow them to maintain their internal body temperature. Most birds can eat half their body weight per day, and some easily clock more than that, especially the ones that fly. Flying is an expensive activity, after all, and burns calories like a motherfucker. A 250 pound bird eating half its bodyweight per day absolutely cannot be used to turn a profit if you’re just gonna kill it, period. 

Let’s be fair, though, and try and look at this from another angle. Chocobos are flightless (usually, depends on the game), so we’ll be generous and say they’re not burning as many calories as something that flies would. They’re sprinters and will likely be very restless, but presumably you’re never letting these things out for exercise because you don’t want the meat to get tough. Ostriches eat about 5 pounds of food per day. We’ll use that as our baseline. 

So, how much does a chocobo weigh? How much would you have to invest in a chocobo before you got your money’s worth out of it in terms of meat?

An ostrich (a bird that actually is raised for meat on rare occasion, but more on that in a moment) is about 9 feet tall, and about 250 pounds. You can ride an ostrich, but even though jockeys tend to be small anyway, they’re really not built to carry humans. Chocobos, on the other hand, are primarily for riding, though their heights vary from game to game as well, from apparently 5 feet tall (those poor birds) to what seems to be closer to 14 feet in XIII. We’ll split the difference and say 10, which seems to be about the average size depicted anyway. Their backs are obviously a little longer than an ostrich’s as well so it’s practical to ride them, which could add to their weight as well, not to mention the added bone strength they’d need. We’ll be extremely generous and say you now have about 275 pounds of bird, which would yield (again, generously speaking) about 200 pounds of chocobo meat if raised to an adult over a period of 2-4 years. 

(Incidentally, this is honestly why Cloud chocobo breeding is more or less entirely confined within the bounds of gameplay only. Not counting actually training and racing the damn things, that’s six years of investment in bird-fucking to get a gold chocobo, IF you get lucky and get the bird you want on the first try, which is not really how genetics OR the RNG for the chocobo breeding system works. This means that Cloud doesn’t even complete the main events of the game until he’s at least 27 years old, if not older, since you still do have to train these birds on top of everything else. Sephiroth sure is patient! Man, you’d think Shinra would have found him by then. It’s not like chocobo racing is a low-profile activity.

So, as much as it pains me, I honestly leave out chocobo breeding from stuff I write because it just raises too many questions for me. Sorry, fellow bird enthusiasts. It hurts me as much as it hurts you.)

Anyway, meat yield. 

Over a period of 2 years, you’re feeding this bird 5 pounds of food every day. Again, we’ll be generous and say you’re getting them the cheapest green possible, the gysahl – these are bare minimum chocobos, after all, being raised for meat and nothing else. Why give them the fancy stuff? Gysahl greens are based off the daikon radish, so we’ll use that as a size/weight reference. I actually have a few of these in my fridge, and the average weight between the ones I actually weighed is 1.5 pounds. (Admittedly, I did use a bathroom scale, so someone else can feel free to refute this bit, but I do feel like this more or less tracks with what I know about large root-y vegetables.) So, a chocobo would eat three or four of those per day. We’ll also ignore other nutritional needs the chocobo might have, such as supplemental grains or meat or calcium needed in its diet, as well as medicine it might need to ensure the meat is free of parasites. 

So that’s about 3.5 gysahls per day, 365 days per year (assuming the Planet has the same calendar year), for two years. Each gysahl costs 100 gil. 

((100 * 3.5) * 365) * 2 = a 255500 gil investment in food alone for this bird. 

You would have to sell the meat at 1277.5 gil per pound just to break even. It’s unclear what the exchange rate between US$ and yen and GIL is, but considering you can get lunch in the poor part of town for about 70 gil, we’ll say lunch costs about $5, and that the exchange rate could plausibly be about 14 gil to one US$. So that’s $18,250 in food over a period of two years for for one bird that will yield maybe 200 lbs of meat that goes for $91.25 a pound just to break even. You’re not even turning a profit with that price. 

There’s a reason ostrich meat isn’t exactly widespread. 

It’s for a similar reason that we don’t eat horses. It’s a big animal that requires a lot of space to run around in, eats a shitload, and is intelligent enough to be of use in other lines of work. You don’t spend ages raising and training a horse just to eat it. Yes, there are parts of the world that actually do eat horse, but mathematically speaking it’s a huge investment that absolutely does not pay off considering how much they eat, how restless they get if you try and pen them up like more docile animals not built for sprinting could be, and how long they take to mature. I mean, shit, beef’s slowly becoming more unsustainable as time goes on, and we’re not even as far along the nigh-apocalyptic shitworld progress bar as Shinra is by the time the events of VII go down. 

Like… eggs, maybe? I feel like that could supplement the cost a little, but then you have to take into account the calories needed to produce eggs and the cost for food goes up and so do the medical requirements and probably the dietary ones too and buhhhhhhh

So, honestly?

one man's hyperfixation is another man's blocked tag

people need to have more fun with shipping again. have an otp. support multiple ships. enjoy the Big ship of the fandom. indulge in a rare pair. make a crack ship for shits n giggles and end up really into it. ship oc x canon. hell, ship an oc with your friend's oc. make a polycule of your favorite characters. have fun with it!!!!!

Apple.

what they dont tell you about strategy based games is that its hard if you’re stupid

Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intend to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.