IM PUTTING DASNER ON BLAST BECAUSE IM STILL SCREAMING?????? CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY BABY IM GONNA BE RIDING THIS HIGH FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS.... THANK YOU DASNER LOVE YOUUUUUU /P
also this forces me to make a post about celest because.
*stares at the over 100 hours of time i have probably spent dedicated to writing/drawing/thinking abt these guys*
yeah. i should probably talk abt her
(dont look at this i accidentally reblogged this to the wrong acct twice)
Happy 1 year anniversary to In Stars and Time. I usually don't do sappy shit for stuff like this, but words cannot express how much this game has fundamentally altered my life in the *checks watch* six months since I first discovered it.
ISAT came to me at a time when I was at the lowest I've ever been in my entire life. I won't really wax philosophical about how "this game saved me" or anything. But it helped. Not just because I saw so much of myself in Siffrin (For once, that isn't an overexaggeration- we share an unnerving amount of the same qualities)- My art production has skyrocketed, I feel confident in it, in ways that I never did before. I wrote my first fanfiction in over a year, and listened to people cry about it live on call. I made friends that I'm happy to talk with every day.
Thank you to insertdisc5 for making this game. Thank you to the community of people who have gathered around it. Thanks to those of you who followed me because of it and sit around watching me put these characters through the wringer for my/your entertainment.
I think it'd be really cute if Siffrin had little nicknames for everyone and everyone only finds out about them when he's high on painkillers and fever while recovering from craft exhaustion.
Mirabelle visits "Starshine! Help me! They're trying to steal my blood!"
Odile visits "Bright moon, is it rude to tell the people next door to shut the blinding star up so I can sleep?... Oh... Can you tell them for me?"
Isabeau visits "*reach out for them but is told to put thier hands down because they're redoing bandages* MY LODESTAR! I want cuddles but I am being rudely denied!"
Bonnie visits "*in tears* Little sun I miss your cooking so much, I'm tired of eating broth and crackers"
When they're fully well, he has no memory of every doing this and curls in on themself when anyone mentions it
isafrin meet cute where they're both standing outside a bar and siffrin is smoking and isabeau is kinda staring at him because he's beautiful, and siffrin is like "... did you want a smoke?" and isabeau panics and says yes because he's so normal and that's definitely why he was staring, so siffrin passes over their cigarette and isabeau takes one hit and starts coughing his lungs out and siffrin laughs at him
isat thoughts: siffrin vs. act 5 "friend quest" ptsd
this is mainly referring to mirabelle and odile's reactions to siffrin's actions during act 5. don't get me wrong. what siffrin said to them is. horrible. and absolutely warranted them being upset at him. do NOT misconstrue this as me thinking that siffrin was innocent in this case because they Very Much Were Not.
BUT they were also in the middle of a very extreme mental health crisis and-
now listen. listen to me very closely, com'ere.
yall can't tell me that this does not have a lasting impact on how siffrin deals with the party in postcanon. you can't. especially not after the epilogue convo between mirabelle and siffrin, where siffirn outright states that they'd let mirabelle scream at them when she finally decides to be angry at them. and mirabelle is justifiably upset at siffrin for thinking that she'd automatically resort to that, but?????????
just imagine if you will. Mirabelle making a move to touch Siffrin's face like she does in SASASAAP. and siffrin flinches. not like they usually do, where they're startled- this is a genuine moment of fear, like in Memory of Confession.
And Mirabelle just. stares. and Siffrin immediately starts apologizing and making excuses, but he can see it slowly dawning on her the reason why he moved... and she feels awful. Because how could she have known? in that moment, she believed that she was severing her ties with Siffrin, that she was retaliating against a person who had never truly been there for her, and was just toying with her feelings. But that wasn't true. And yes, she apologized, and yes, they're back to being friends, and yes, Siffrin loves them, but that doesn't negate the fact that it happened, and sometimes you can't shake things like that off, even when you know logically that the other person didn't mean it like that.
Ough. Siffrin would feel guilty and probably play it off as justified on Mirabelle's part because yeah! He said something horrible! He deserved that! Meanwhile Mirabelle feels guilty because not only did she hurt her friend during a point at which they needed her most, but she also is still hurting them, even in ways she can't control or make up for?
rambling about songs my brain associates with isat (pt. 1)
[woe, spoilers be upon ye!]
i have a 250+ song isat playlist. I am unhealthily obsessed with finding new songs to put in it. Here's a few that make me go absolutely batshit insane.
I've already rambled about this one on my art account a while back, but this song is so insanely loop-coded....
I'm standing on a stage
Of fear and self-doubt
It's a hollow play,
But they'll clap anyway
You could give me any song that has some kind of reference to plays or theatre and I could probably find a way to make it about isat. but specifically this makes me think about twohats and how loop views their place in the world as a performance, a pawn, not even a character but a plot device... yeah
I'm living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head
I'm living in an age
Whose name I don't know
Though the fear keeps me moving,
Still my heart beats so slow
I probably don't have to break this one down for you, but yeah, Island North of Vaugarde, the forgotten language... "still the shapes fill my head" has always in my mind referenced the stars and constellations, and how they're familiar but foreign...
-
thanks to @/ricecaqes and their trust ceremony animatic, this song lives in my head rent free. Even just as a whole this song is SO isat for me. literally from the first fucking lines:
Will I know when I’ve gone too far?
Or frozen myself in time?
An impossible brain with impossible wants
Lost and astray, with impossible thoughts
like. it really can't get much more nail on the head than that?
then you got this:
So cold, I’m freezing
Every piece of praise and sign that I’m believed in
Solid in a crystal ball
It bends the waves of the light to mend the rest of my life
and literally the first time I heard this song i paused it and said, out loud, "OH FUCK." Because. it's act 5 siffrin. Like, the slow descent into despair followed by the determination that the only way to perserve the life and the family they love is to keep them with him, to do the exact same thing the king did...
Do you also see your future starting with the farthest part?
Live your life to close the space between the end and start
And when it’s hard, do you hang onto any chance
That you might be in control? That you’re the one who owns
For one, once you reach the end of act 2, you're constantly aware of the head housemaiden being as far as you can go, and then you're planning around it the entire time.
And then, you have. siffrin grasping for any kind of control they can have over the situation, desperately. and failing repeatedly because they simultaneously think that they are undeserving of getting what they ultimately want... yeah...
i won't go into the rest of the lyrics because honestly it's pretty well covered by the animatic but. yeah trust ceremony my sweet beloved.
-
rest in peace siffrin no middle no last name, you would have loved the mountain goats.
yeah uh. this one is also pretty high up on songs that make me go "damn that's siffrin alright".
I am this great, unstable mass of blood and foam
And no one in her right mind would make my home her home
My heart's an autoclave
i think for me it's the idea of siffrin feeling like they're nothing, and even if they are something or someone, they are bad, worse than bad, worthless. also referencing homesickness.... yeah...
When I try to open up to you I get completely lost
Houses swallowed by the earth, windows thick with frost
And I reach deep down within, but the pathways twist and turn
And there's no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn
I mean, this one is also pretty self-evident. siffrin losing hope while being stuck in the house... wanting to connect with the party but being completely uncapable of doing so out of the sheer terror of being left behind... act 5, with the house literally warping...
I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls
On a cliff above the ocean, howling wind and shrieking seagulls
And the dream went on forever, one single static frame
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name
siffrin feels responsible for the loops, every aspect of them. their deaths, their party-member's deaths, their failures, everything. and in the end, all they really wanted was for someone to truly see them? to have a family, to not be left behind and forgotten by the world.... the importance of names and siffrin's name in particular in the story also makes this hit home for me.
-
for brevity's sake i'll just start with these three- if people are interested in hearing me justify my insane music choices i'll probably do more.... for now, see ya!
thinking about this post today and wondering if siffrin would feel more jumpy postcanon if he has phantom sights. seeing something out of the corner of your blind eye after. yknow. *stares at act 5*. that's gotta do something to ya
also i imagine that siffrin got really good at navigating the house unconciously, mentally mapping it to where they could get by without running into things (save for. the cursed kitchen counter), but postcanon he has a harder time getting used to unfamiliar spaces and navigating them...
writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.
other things I'm bitching about but which could still be useful as writing advice for 1 eyed characters:
2. they're going to favor their sighted side, obviously, but it doesn't always manifest in the way you think. when I walk down a hall I walk much closer to the wall on my sighted side than on my blind side. which is the opposite of how it might seem logical to do that bc it means the world at large is on your bad side, but the reason is I can't fucking See the wall if it's right next to me in the blind side and I end up knocking into it.
3. door frames and poles are my enemy. If your character is smart this will not be a problem but for me it is. I am King of walking into shit I could absolutely see but couldn't tell how far away from me it was. on this note, their blind side hand is getting bashed into every jutting out thing in a 5 mile radius.
4. having 0 depth perception is less of a big deal than you'd think it is. Especially with driving. I've become a Much safer and more wary driver because I can't tell how far the other cars are from me. however I fucking suck at parking now. because I can't tell how far the lines are from me either.
5. you know how people who lose limbs get phantom pains? that happens with eyes too but like. phantom sights. for me it's like. a lot of bugs. like every so often my brain will just put something suddenly skittering beside me there. hate that.
6. it is completely possible to "get stuck" somewhere because your ability to tell how wide a space is is just Gone. shopping isles especially where bumping something or Someone is matter of embarrassment or potentially breaking something. it can be legitimately paralyzing and also irritate everyone around you because they can tell there is Plenty of space for you to get your cart through even if you can't.
7. if the eye is still in their skull it can still be the normal kind of painful. Glares off of shiny surfaces causing weird sharp pains you can't figure out the cause of are genuinely one of gods greatest tests of my patience.
