[bubblingbeebles]

obligatory interests post:

- touhou

- otherside picnic

- twinstar cyclone runaway

- void stranger

- star trek

- japanese stuff

- gay stuff

- trans stuff

if u know me from Outside holler. or whatever.

[bewilderbark]

blazing bloodlines

please play zeroranger

[kimpining]

this bit. immense. more vast than the sea.

[vitalrabbitstudies]

i am delighted

[have-you-been-here]

Kyu-Furukawa Gardens, Tokyo, Japan

Have you been here?

I have been here

I have not been here

Remaining time: 22 hours 49 minutes

[bubblingbeebles]

[ouroborosorder]

the problem with writing fantasy is that i have to constantly stop myself from having people say "jesus fucking christ." jesus didn't exist here dammit. i need a fake swear that means the same thing i think

[dominostodoomsday]

This and baseball metaphors are the hardest things to avoid, I swear

[ouroborosorder]

I think I’m gonna let baseball slide. baseball existing in my canon is waaay funnier than catholics existing

[bubblingbeebles]

i think this was pretty much the plot of deep space nine on both counts

[bubblingbeebles]

void stranger and "some things are never explained"

i have a theory about void stranger that the flaws and unexplained parts of its lore and how it relates to its prequel are actually part of the artistic statement of the game.

spoilers for all of void stranger AND for its narrative connection to zeroranger. basically spoilers for everything.

i have a friend whose vs playthrough i was vicariously enjoying and who just beat the true ending and kind of complained that a lot of the parts of the lore don't super make sense, and while they're willing to accept when a narrative is sloppy if it's like called out explicitly in game as some sort of authorial intent, if there's no evidence to distinguish that truth from "the authors were just sloppy" then they default to dismissing it as the authors were just sloppy.

now, this friend jumped to that conclusion without playing zeroranger, so doesn't know anything about despair, or erasure, or reincarnation, or timelines, and even in game didn't figure out stuff like "gray is add" or "cif can't see B000 because of the seals". but even if you ignore those things i think it's missing the point.

and to be clear, what i'm about to say is entirely my interpretation of the art, i have no evidence that it's what the authors intended or what anyone else things, but that's kind of the point, because:

"some things are never explained and you have to make your own meaning" IS THE POINT of void stranger.

to be more specific, each of the following things:

some things are clearly explained

some things are explained later only through great effort

some things are never explained and you have to make your own meaning

is true in different ways for each of the three protagonists AND for the player.

the player, in relation to the game's puzzle mechanics.

clearly explained: you're playing sokoban, stair go down, ok do it again without infinite lives.

explained through great effort: the void contains secret information - brands and ui manipulation - that allows you to bend these halls to your will and unlock the true ending.

never explained: the karma mechanic (determines whether the Failures show up or unlocks certain credits text). i always wondered about this, it creates this sense of mystery while you're playing the game that there's still puzzles you don't understand even after you think you know all the game mechanics there are. of course, karma also ties into the game's samsara theme, but it has this ludonarrative harmony as well.

gray

clearly explained: you're going into the void to save lily.

explained through great effort: who are these void lords and why have they taken the only thing you've ever been devoted to in your life? (they made a deal with johann and they'll allow you to make a deal with them too.) what does it mean to be a mother? (limitless devotion, choosing lillie over lily on the crazy hope that it will eventually save them both and escape the sophie's choice, having a turbulent relationship with your child, eventually trying to have your own life again in the real world.)

never explained: who are you? why can't you remember your own past? (because you're add who intentionally stripped themself of their memories.) (at least, in the lillie storyline where gray doesn't go herself to dis.)

lillie

clearly explained: gray is your mother, gray isn't your mother, you're in this void now whether you like it or not.

explained through great effort: what are you doing in this void? (saving lily.) what are you doing in life? (coming to terms with your relationship with gray.)

never explained: why is the void so tied up in your family history? (because gray is add.) why did cif bring you back to the void? (because cif wants to see out the end of your story to better understand humans.)

cif

clearly explained: you're a void lord, these floors B197-B224 are your domain, carve statues and supervise your sisters.

explained through great effort: who, or what, is DIS? (erasure finally tells them.) why are we still here? (to defend it from any human or traitorous void lords who'd try to reactivate it.)

never explained: what does it mean to yearn? what makes add's creations unable to burn as brightly as the humans? (this post basically.)

the player, once again, in relation to the game's lore.

clearly explained: the void lords' war, lev's betrayal, add's reincarnation, who or what is DIS.

explained through great effort (aka playing zeroranger): what's going on in the carcass ending, or in the shmup segment? (memories of and/or time travel to the distant past.) why does DIS accept lily? (because she's despair's reincarnation.)

never explained: who is add originally? why did dis create the void? why do the void lords fade from existence as if they've been erased from the timeline at the end of the true ending? (note: i'm not actually super clear on the boundary of what's explained and what's fanlore and what's still a mystery so please, by all means correct me or provide more examples here.)

the lore of void stranger and its relationship to its prequel is intricate and messy and some of the mess may not even be intentional on the part of the authors and yet. if it all perfectly explained itself within its own boundaries it would defeat the point. the imperfections invite the player in.

the player is part of the art.

it's the ultimate ludonarrative harmony.

[casteliamoonside]

AN APPLE DISASTER!!

Based on cubewatermelon's design. Apple Girlington has been on my mind due to recent events, and I kind of had to draw her.

Since she's a Stage 1 boss, I wanted to give her the energy of one, looking a little too confident and not at all expecting to be blown up by Reimu.

Fumo.

[theoldgvard]

if there's one thing the ds9 finale did, it was completely convince me that the only satisfying conclusion to julian bashir's arc would be him eventually ending up on cardassia

a small disclaimer: despite believing in garashir wholeheartedly and adoring the romantic undertones that would accompany julian's moving to cardassia, the narrative elements are the things making me so insane about this, and so convinced there can be no other fate for julian.

the focus on the characters who moved on (sisko, odo, o'brien, worf) made it all the more stark just how unmoored julian is in the wake of this episode, and how much of his connection to the station as home was based on the people around him rather than the physical location. he looks absolutely gutted with each departure and, unlike kira with sisko's baseball, he doesn't really have a moment of acceptance or get to fill a role that was left. in fact, the conversation he does have with ezri just emphasises how, for julian, things are never going to be as good as they used to be.

with this in mind (as well as the likelihood of things calming down professionally for him due to the war being over), it would make much more sense for him to leave the station either after helping with war casualties or staying on for longer. so the question is: where would he go?

given what i've argued about his sense of belonging being strongly tied to people, it stands to reason that the places he would feel drawn to would be the places his friends live. o'brien, of course, is on earth, but considering his tenuous relationship with his parents and his past trauma, and how much he has been able to let go of all that and actually be himself on ds9, i can't imagine it being a place he would be drawn to return to long term. what's more, a human dominated post-scarcity planet would hardly be a challenging environment for him medically. turning to his other strongest relationship brings us to garak on cardassia.

i think cardassia itself would appeal to julian somewhat after spending years slowly learning about their literature and culture through garak. i also think an alien planet would be oddly freeing for him, giving him a chance to live among a population who consider him strange by virtue of being human rather than because he's an augment or because he is (unbeknownst to them) quite an odd human so to speak. I've always seen julian and garak as providing each other a space free of the typical judgements they face from everyone else, and i can totally imagine julian having that association with the planet because of it.

my favourite reason, however, goes back to the ds9 pilot and julian's infamous 'frontier medicine' line. because post-war cardassia, with its bombed out infrastructure and millions dead and displaced, is exactly the kind of situation that would challenge him in that way. except now, julian is older, wiser, and has years of combat experience under his belt. his time on ds9 is what changed him into the person he dreamed of being, and while the reality is much grimmer than he ever imagined, he's now ready to be the person who can go to this devastated planet and help them rebuild from the ground up. in the Our Man Bashir episode of the Delta Flyers podcast, alexander siddig mentioned how the show watches julian grow up over its course. ds9 was a transitional period for julian, and moving on to cardassia is exactly the sort of thing that would allow those changes to be put to use.

i haven't properly got into beta canon (yet), but based on watching the show and the vision of bashir and his arc i've been slowly developing over these past 4-5 months of watching, i can't believe there's any other end for him. his professional satisfaction, social liberation, and emotional fulfilment all point in one direction. and if there's anything i've learnt about julian bashir, it's that he has never been put off by 'uncertain times'.

[ridl]

dispirited deaf girl x life-changing closeted lesbian

[vitalrabbitstudies]

kinda fascinated by how if you translate Japanese -> English, some sentences contain like 30% words that have no direct impact on the translation. honorifics, a lot of sentence-ending particles, a lot of auxiliary verbs but especially あげる and くれる, some of the uses of も, sometimes words like なんて...

a lot of this can be pretty directly converted if you want to explicitly include it. but a lot of the time an English translation of a Japanese sentence will effectively leave some words on the cutting room floor as total scrap. this isn't a complaint about Wicked Localizers Hiding The True Meaning Of Anime or anything. a lot of that information is purely extraneous from an English perspective, or just straight up doesn't have a direct translation and doesn't alter the sentence's meaning that much.

translating between the two languages is basically the art of smashing a sentence apart, then using the scrap to build a new sentence in the other language that expresses the same idea but is like 50% words with no direct analogue in the original sentence, I'm pretty sure

[cerastes]

Average Reimu Experience During An Incident

Reimu: "Uoooh the weather is so good to laze about and sip tea, I am confident today will be a fine, calm day."

Yukari: "Think again. You are the brown and white Shrine Maiden now, in case you didn't notice."

Reimu: "What in the world are you talking abo--

Reimu: "--oooh, yeah, huh? Actually, where did the color Red go?"

Yukari: "That's what you will be figuring out today, Reimu dearest. This is an Incident, the missing color Red. Remilia is having an existential crisis now that Sakuya started calling her Reimilia Beige. Reisen's kinda bummed out that she has Brown Eyes of Mild Irritation now. You yourself will only be known as the Brown And White Shrine Maiden of Paradise if we let this go on."

Reimu: "Which is. Not terrible? I actually kind of like this. But, sure, it does hurt my marketing in the Human Village. What's my gear gimmick this time?"

Yukari: "Take these glasses, they temporarily return Red to the world around you when you wear them, letting you see things as you normally would... But maybe they will obscure other things only visible while Red does not exist."

Reimu: "Sounds conveniently geared towards danmaku trickery! Well, do we have any leads?"

Yukari, with a smile so bright that it could make the sun burst green with envy: "Absolutely none."

Reimu: "Standard procedure, then! See you later."

*Reimu heroically picks a random direction, rolls up her detached sleeve, and starts beating the tar out of absolutely everyone in the way, including Brown Sekibanki who was the midboss for some reason*

Minor Youkai: "Hiiii! Whatcha doing around these parts?"

Reimu: "I'm trying to find out where Red went. Do you know anything?"

Minor Youkai: "Ah! You are on her trail, I see! I see a lot of people pass through here, given my ability is to detect movement flawlessly in a large radius and poison it conceptually so that my target's movement quite literally dies, so long as we have eye contact. I'm told... Not to let anyone go after her for today!"

Reimu: "I see. But I don't know who 'her' is, and that doesn't really help me, so,"

Minor Youkai: "Hah! You can't fool me! Wait, what those long and cruel needles for?"

*Reimu beats the absolute tar out of this youkai with a suspiciously insane ability by dragging her face across every single surface in a 40 meter radius*

Minor Youkai: "Owwww ok ok I don't know where Red is but I heard the lake west to the Human Village has some weird stuff going on!"

Reimu: "Good enough!"

Obscure Youkai: "Not so fast, Brown and White Shrine Maiden."

Reimu: "Not my name, but who are you?"

Obscure Youkai: "I heard from the people you've been ragdolling that you are looking for my mistress."

Reimu: "No, seriously, who the hell is your mistress, I have no idea--"

Obscure Youkai: "A deft attempt at subterfuge, Brown and White! But a futile one, as well! I will never give away my mistress' location! You know too much, and for her sake, you must DIE."

Reimu: "I don't know a damn thing, my girl, also not my name."

Obscure Youkai: "My ability is that I always know exactly how many steps there are on a staircase or a ladder! Now, have at you!"

Reimu: "Psh, that sounds silly."

*Reimu barely survives an outrageously difficult battle against the most nothingburger ability in the world with a well placed Yin Yang Orb Concussion*

Reimu with a purple brown eye: "Ok! Maybe not so silly! Holy hell."

Mastermind: "I should've known you'd figure out my ploy, Brown and White... Heh. Well played!"

Reimu: "Where. Did you come from. I have no idea who you are. And not my name."

Mastermind: "Hah...! Playing the bumbling fool until the end! Formidable! My name is Ishihara, As In, The Color Blindness Test!"

Reimu: "Hold up, are you the one that stole Red?"

Ishihara: "Indeed!" *the absolute hardest and most climatic track you've heard in your life starts playing* "And no one, not even the STINKY Brown and White Shrine Maiden of Paradise, can take it back!"

Reimu: "Not my name! And that changes things!"

*Ishihara launches an entire arsenal of spellcards with an optometrism and color blindness theme danmaku, like Deceit Sign "Green Blind Perdition - Deuteranopia"*

*But Reimu picks her up by the legs and slams her left and right like Bamm-Bamm in the Flintstones until she explodes and the screen goes white*

*Cut to Ishihara, Obscure Youkai, Reimu, and Komachi for some reason sipping tea at the Hakurei Shrine; the color Red is back if you 1cc'd*

Reimu: "So you are telling me you stole Red because of apples?"

Ishihara: "Indeed! I love the taste of red apples, but I like green apples more aesthetically, so I was wondering, huh, if I seal away the color red, then delicious red apples will look more like beautiful green apples!"

Reimu: "Right, that's pretty reasonable. But never do it again."

Ishihara: "Even though you wear a lot of red, you are pretty interesting, Shrine Maiden... Maybe I ought to pay a visit more often."

Reimu, knowing full well she has no say in this matter: "Don't."

Komachi: "I, too, am in this episode."

Aunn: "Aunn."

Marisa in her route: *Made at least one new girlfriend with the Stage 3 or 4 boss.*

Obscure Youkai, the Stage 5 boss: *doesn't become playable for years.*

Minor Youkai: *Outright kills Reimu in real life with an unreasonably difficult Stage 1 Lunatic spellcard on the next run.*

[becherdireinen]

nobody talks about how exhausting it is to live in that space between "things will get better" and "i can't handle this anymore." it's like your emotions are constantly swinging. leaving you both hopeful and defeated in the same day.

[briarleoht]

Because it's baseball season and I've been recently thinking on the phenomena of sports and games in human culture, I want to reflect on the particular choice of baseball as an aspect of Benjamin Sisko's character. Any game would have worked as the initial example to explain linearity to non-linear beings in the first episode of Deep Space Nine and there are two other sports that are associated with American culture more than any other (American football and basketball), so the choice of baseball cannot be wholly explained by the metaphorical requirements for explaining causality and or to establish a particularity of place of origin for Sisko. Also, no American sport is especially associated with New Orleans in the way that Cajun and Creole food and language and music (Jazz) are or the way that baseball is associated with cities in the northeast of the U.S., like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. So it's the game itself and its close mythic abstractions that are characterizing Sisko.

It is significant that in the show baseball is a forgotten and lost game. In the narrative reality, the game hasn't been retained in the culture like, for example, tennis, which is shown to resemble the game as we know it now but still evolved in a futuristic speculative form. This gives Sisko's care and attention to baseball an even greater temporal frame. Sisko's hobby--through which he explains his reality, the key objects of which he holds as psychological anchors in his daily work (working the baseball in his hands while he works through the various problems presented to him the series), and by which he invites others to connect to him personally (his son, Jake, who extends this pattern of friend-making with Nog; Kira; the rest of the DS9 crew)--is a thing representing how Sisko is a character constantly struggling with and accepting and swallowing the matter of time.

Baseball isn't the most popular sport in the U.S., not now or in the 90s when DS9 aired, though it was the most popular in country's history at some point and that popularity has embedded itself in the American vernacular and given the sport itself such a sheen of nostalgia that most Americans have convinced themselves that it's a sport of the midwest, of the country and cornfields, of an idyllic past. The most americana-elegiac film ever made, Field of Dreams, features not just the spirits of old baseball stars from past ages, but the spirits of baseball's greatest villains, the 1919 Chicago White Sox who threw games in a gambling scandal that disgraced the franchise: in the film, in the fields of Iowa, they were cleansed of their sins against the game and allowed to play again. It's a powerfully sentimental mythic treatment of the sport, when the MLB was declining in popularity especially in comparison to the NFL or NBA. But the pastoral elegy is a false history--baseball's origins are in the urban, in the working class neighborhoods of industrial cities of the northeast, and it was spread to other parts of the country mostly during the Civil War among Union camps. But the prime image that people conjure regarding the game is one of pastorality, history, and nostalgia, all of which is also helped along by the fact that baseball is a summer sport and a slow-moving one at that. The play of baseball, composed of long stretches of tension followed by quick bursts of action, not timed, will go as long as needed, ends up being figuratively linked with the cultural-feel of the game, as a past-time now passed into an idyllic mythic past.

Inserting this particular game into a story about a man consistently reckoning with his relationship to a place of beyond-causality, who is ultimately consumed by this place and forced to abandon the material of time as he was built to understand it, characterizes Sisko with an underlying structure of elegiac reflection. As a character, he, frequently enough, engages with traditional knowledges and practices, sometimes with a sheen of nostalgic yearning, mostly with an ethic of celebration and respect. He cooks and passes down his particular subculture's food, he builds a starship based on ancient Bajoran epistemes in a rhetorically decolonizing effort, his favorite game is one that has technically died out. He also is sometimes angled in his personal relationships towards the past: reaching emotionally for his dead wife; his closest friend being a re-version of an old friend from his youth (Dax); being wrenched away from a love-interest by the nature of an established system trying to maintain. He's centered as the voice of a primary speculative ethic in an episode surrounding a nostalgic-futurism, a mid-twentieth century speculative fictive frame of imagining grand explorations for any and all people in a time where half the U.S. was living in an apartheid state: the character is in many small character-detail ways and large narrative-theme ways a character of historical reflection and temporal consideration.

The narrative conclusion for the character is to, in a way, leave behind this depth of signifying through temporal matter. At the end of his story, the wormhole-people he had so reached out to and explained himself to through baseball, a nostalgia, who had confronted him with the lived-reality of grief, another form of yearning for the past, fully claimed him and he entered entirely into the space where time was such that everything that characterized him up until that point had to be redefined on a fundamental-matter level. The story-end for Sisko was a full subsumption of the self. Narratively, it can be argued, because it's Sisko and because he is characterized the way he is throughout the series, because from the very first episode his character is set up in a friction through which he is frequently prompted to handle and/or solve time itself, the story claims that Sisko was uniquely positioned to be the figure so subsumed and changed. He both had to have the rich-causality (a growing temporal and creative son, a new love with progressive thought and movement, a new child still in the process of becoming, a traditional and nostalgic bend to him, a lifelong interest in a forgotten game) and he had to leave exactly all of this in order to materially change the outcome of an existential fight for his pluralistic civilization. It's a competing tension resolved by the fact of leaving causal understanding.

One can read that by the end of season 6, start of season 7, Sisko's character is fully committed to rewriting the depth of his temporal significance. He lost the first re-version of his friend Dax, a character whose specific relationship with time both reifies Sisko's and challenges it, and meets the second re-version of the "old man", and, in a sense, this change represents the tension at the center of Sisko both losing everything and gaining everything, reformed at a fundamental matter level, by the end of the series. Sisko's religious posture in-narrative for the Bajoran people becomes more and more substantive to his lived-reality and the expression of his person. He becomes the messenger, the "emissary", the wing-footed carrier of temporal significance, handing over the character-specific and narratively-thematic composition of himself over to the people beyond the threshold of causality. It's not so much that he leaves anything behind but that he takes with him every rich temporal aspect in order to satisfy the story-tension of a place with swapped-time-and-space existing without enough narrative weight: to the imagination of the audience, the wormhole nexus, where conscious beings live and affect the cosmos beyond them, is an impossible/improbable place. To solve it, the character who has been its agent and, in equal depth, the agent of the changing, historical reality outside its bounds, must enter it and claim its episteme and affect for the whole story.

Sisko leaves behind but also, through his substance, carries: his son whose in-narrative power is storytelling, a wife who is associated with building and futuristic progressive hope, an old friend of constant death and rebirth and memory, another friend of equal pluralistic leadership to whom he also leaves his baseball.

As episode one demonstrates, baseball has no place outside of causality so of course the object Sisko can't take with him is the ball itself. But due to how Sisko's presence has manifested in the story, many times referenced through that object, Kira picking up the baseball at the end of the series is the still-presence of Sisko and thus a portrayal of how Sisko has remade himself to be both atemporal and omni-manifest. Baseball, the forgotten sport of the past, can only be played now by the characters because Sisko sank himself into it and swallowed its temporal reality and put that substance into a position where future-and-past are right-and-left. He reformed the mythic nostalgic yearning of the sport into the memory of his self and into the metaphor of his self and life as he entered into a differently-woven plane of reality. No longer occupying one point in time, Sisko has presenced baseball and himself and made a game of temporality and looking-back and myth-making simultaneously a way of speculation and futurism and progressive-movement by forcing the game's cause-and-consequence across the threshold of linearity through the matter and narrative-nature of his being.

[heki-sui-rain]

こころちゃん🎭

[0mirorim0]

doodle

[jadendoes-stuff]

i love you cif void stranger 🗣️🗣️🗣️

Idk theyre just fun to draw ^_^