After Earth fixes the Sun, they send a manned mission to Erid to say hello. The crew doesn't expect to find Ryland Grace still alive and kicking - least of all Dr. Olivia Nelson, who just so happens to be one of his final students on Earth. Olivia, who was just expecting to do some cool extraterrestrial science, now has to reorient her life around that fact.
Or: a story about a teacher and the student who followed his comet's trail into the stars.
Chapter summary:
The Odyssey arrives at Erid, and Olivia comes face-to-face with her teacher for the first time in forty years.
Excerpt:
Rocky looks pretty much the same as I remember him from the Hail Mary’s video logs, though it’s through a filter of what looks like an almost skin-tight (rock-tight?) xenonite suit, a major evolution of the ball he rolled around on during the Hail Mary’s mission. It’s a trip to actually see him in-person— it’s the first time we’re seeing any Eridian in-person, I realize. The inherent alienness of him is off-set by the similarity to the picture of him I have in my head.
It’s the complete opposite for Dr. Grace. His sandy-blonde hair is going gray in a lot of places; he’s much thinner than I remember, not unhealthily but noticeably so. There are starbursts of old burn scars peeking out on his left hand and on his neck, just barely reaching onto his jaw (I remember with an ugly jolt how he got those burns). He’s wearing his old orange jumpsuit from the Hail Mary’s original mission, now very faded and with signs of mending and patching through the years, but with little adornments added— long strips and round beads, of various materials that look like metal or glass, that hang off of draping and dangling chains (distinctly Eridian additions), as well as little bits of embroidery (distinctly human additions).
“Welcome to Erid,” he says with a grin.
After Earth fixes the Sun, they send a manned mission to Erid to say hello. The crew doesn't expect to find Ryland Grace still alive and kicking - least of all Dr. Olivia Nelson, who just so happens to be one of his final students on Earth. Olivia, who was just expecting to do some cool extraterrestrial science, now has to reorient her life around that fact.
Or: a story about a teacher and the student who followed his comet's trail into the stars.
oh yeah i guess i should post this here. check it out :3
Video games have spent many many of the last several years trying to understand what makes game protagonists relatable or understandable or charismatic, giving them deep backstories and trauma and romance, when in reality Armored Core and Ace Combat figured out two decades ago that all your need for good protagonists is for them to be bloodless freaks who run in, murder everything, then run out, leaving the rest of the cast to freak out and develop on their own because of it
youtube with ublock origin experience of the 20 second gap between every video on a playlist where youtube desperately throws itself against the impervious ever-evolving uncaring face of the adblocker's wall screaming and clawing and calling PLEASE! PLEASE, OUR AD REVENUE!! DON'T YOU WANT TO SUPPORT THIS CREATOR? DO YOU NOT CARE ABOUT OUR WALLETS? AND THEIRS? into the vast and empty sky before the adblocker gently raises one of its many iron-banded arms and flicks youtube away into the void just to hear its wails fade slowly into nothing
It's funny when I get the "You seem to be experiencing interruptions. Find out why" popup as if two unskippable 30-second ads wouldn't feel way more intrusive and annoying than a slight delay for a video to start.
When people argue that food from Chinese and Mexican restaurants in the US are not 'real' representations of that culture's cuisine ignore the historical reality that these dishes were developed by diasporic communities striving to recreate the flavors of home with available resources. Such criticism frames adaptation as a loss of authenticity, rather than recognizing it as a sincere and evolving expression of culture by people separated from their homeland.
Mahoyo's ending makes me wonder if Goetia's plan at the end of FGO Arc 1 might have been flawed in some unforeseen way.
Goetia's methodology for time manipulation was essentially a larger and more complex version of Aoko's; consume a specific span of time (all of human history) and then use it as fuel to make a jump (to the beginning of time).
But Touko quickly figures out that the Fifth Magic isn't Time Travel itself, but is instead fudging it through destructive means and claims this is incredibly dangerous and has a heavy price attached.
Now if the consequences are "this could destroy all of time" then it doesn't matter for Goetia whose goal is to make his own time with blackjack and hookers. But if the price is the creation of some fundamental flaw somewhere in existence that you can't run away from forever, then Aoko inviting catastrophe for messing around with 5 minutes would be peanuts compared to Goetia wiping 2 million years (if Panhuman History includes the whole Homo genus I guess). Did he know this could happen? What if he won and remade history only to accidentally replace the dimension of time with strawberries?
It wouldn't be too out of the question, not when there's a running theme in Type-Moon of intricate magical plans tending to hide some contradiction (The Holy Grail War's true purpose requires the death of all seven servants to reveal the Greater Grail, but only a servant can touch the Greater Grail making it pointless; Mystery grows weaker the more people know about it making mages secretive and hostile to others in a bid to protect their power, leading to their slow extinction anyways). It's not like being the (literal) servant of the creator of magecraft makes you impervious to missing these contradictions — the head of the Clock Tower is Solomon's direct student and it's not been an efficient institution.
The alternative is that the consequence for messing with time is someone comes to kick your ass, which now feels unfair. Aoko erases a small amount of time to save a person (and maybe a cat's) life and gets a terrifying, red-hooded specter stalking her out of the corners of her eyes for the rest of her life. Goetia incinerates every human being to have ever lived and gets a random Japanese teenager with no powers doing the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs sprint at him
i NEED someone to talk to about The Thing I Enjoy <- says the person who shuts down and says nothing when they get the chance to talk about The Thing They Enjoy
Sometimes criticism/analysis of character arcs/plot decisions in destiny is hard because you can absolutely tell when the writers wanted something to happen so badly or DIDNT want something to happen so you’re just like. Yeah this part of the story didn’t work for me. It didn’t work for you either. We’re both very aware you have to work within the confines of a looter shooter live service game where the story is never going to be #1 priority. I still wish you didn’t have to kill Rasputin off though
Like sometimes I see people complaining about everything a campaign didn’t do and stuff that was glossed over (that are often explored more in the lore books) and it’s like. I get it. If it were up to me I would want campaigns to have the time to delve into everything but we have to recognize that destiny is not that kind of game and manage our expectations. And if you’re not down for that maybe destiny isn’t your game lol
And just before people start misinterpreting me: no destiny isn’t above criticism because of its format. Just be mindful of what is feasible and base your analysis on that
This is from Robert Brookes in the Ishtar discord server (shortly after layoffs). Not that we need this to be spelled out, or at least I don't think we should, but developing a story for a video game like this comes with certain limitations and barriers. Pretty much everything everyone came up with as "it would be cool if..." was also thought of by the writers, but it was for one reason or the other impossible to execute.
I feel like a lot of the time the assumption is that the writers are stupid or uninterested in certain things and that's why something was done this way or that way, or something wasn't done when it should have been. And the truth is that we all want the same thing, it just usually isn't possible (or it's only possible in written format, which is why like 90% of all story in Destiny is told in lore).
Just wanted to add this because I remember it pretty much every time someone offers "critique" which boils down to "writers bad because they ignored or forgot something." And that's just not what's happening. Nothing is being forgotten or ignored, it's just not something that can be done for any number of reasons.
With Fate/Strange Fake’s anime adaptation finally airing weekly, a lot of people have been wondering, “Is this a good jumping-on point for someone completely new to the series?” If you’ve been eyeballing the series for a while but didn’t know where to start, I’ve prepared an easy list for you:
Read the visual novel.
Seek the root of the Fate franchise. Return to where it all began.
Buy Fate/stay night REMASTERED and shop other great Nintendo products online at the official My Nintendo Store.
I was going to write this on 31 Dec, but whatever. I doubt any will happen more than the Foreigner chapter.
I became an FGOer in April 2018, when I realized all about the game after seeing the CM and getting hooked. Come for the design when my ass still thought Gao Changgong was a woman. My first SSR is Anastasia (I love my daughter). My favorite event is Summer 2020, where they gave us Yu summer. It's evident that this game has been influencing a major part of my stupid ass life. Without it, I would not even draw as I am now.
Come to think. This game always has something for me to get back. The community, the fandom, friends. I thank it to inspire me with many things. But that isn't what the game actually delivers, and I doubt I can stay for long if the source material is shit. So I think.
Maybe it's the way this game is written? Fate series and Nasu himself are always praised for their writing. I thought it was because the game gave you food, used your brain for it, and delivered what the food actually serves later on. LB6 shows it clearly as Oberon is the major culprit but act as ally until the mask is blown off in part 3. ngl it's still my favorite moment. Summer 2020 did it too with the whole "Hourai Mountain actually has two sides and there are two Yu" thing. The problem is that FGO writing is not consistent because it is combined with many people's work with only bare minimum supervision. The Requiem collab showed us how supervision can't save everything. This shouldn't be what attached me to it.
Then the last chapter hit, revealing all of Chaldea's purpose and Marisbilly's plan of human domination. Then it finally hit me. Marisbilly only loves one thing: the beauty of humans. He doesn't like the nonsense humans have, their failure, their emotion. He doesn't like Charles Darwin, either, because that man accepts that humans evolved from it. Calling it the ugliness. That's when something hit me. Because clearly that isn't love. Or maybe at least a healthy love.
FGO is, you know, the messiest experience in the Gacha industry a human has ever come through. It comes from this cheap 2D turn-based cash grab, and for some reason hit the popularity so much that this fuckass game still has the highest revenue of all games in Appstore in 2025. This game is 10 years old as I am writing this. But this thing is evolving. Delight Works used to not have a Game Department at all, and now we have Lasengle. 2D animation becomes prettier. No-name artist participated as the official artist and now gets many jobs. What I like about FGO is that they always tend to pull the most obscure thing and present it in the spotlight. The artist, the voice actor. Hell, even history and literature. LOOK AT MANDRICARDO. HE HAS A WIKI PAGE NOW. LOOK AT MY BOY. This messy thing has now grown; it is still ugly, but you can't ignore how beautiful it is.
You cannot love something and discard a part of it. Yes the humanity is ugly and full of shit. But this is the shit you're bearing with. So it is natural to love it. Yes, this is the shitty ass gacha game, but this is my game. And when it comes to the last boss, your account, your friends, everyone is helping you. Anastasia and Kadoc show up. Yu and her horse husband and Gao Changgong. wait where the hell is Henry Jekyll? Jason can't bid you a farewell, and he's lying about him not remembering shit, being a coward like he always is. Xu Fu said you're at least as bearable as her first love, so she said a last goodbye. The animation of everyone helping you. That fuck ass insect Oberon. Those are character you've grown up with. You have leveled them, increasing their bond. You study the background of these characters and why they're designed that way. Who is Mandricardo? The guy from Matter of France. What does he do? Finding the sacred sword. You know all of these. The community has been restore his history bit by bit. You admire all of them, the process, the people working for it.
And in the end. Everything ends. It is just a clear sky, and no one remembers it. Just like that. Someday, FGO will go to EOS, and your account will be lost forever. The character you love will be gone. And at some time, you will move on and forget them. The only thing left will be a fragment of it. Even if the game is archived, it will not replay the experiences you got from this 10-year-old ass game. That's just how everything works. History will be forgotten and written by someone. Humans will move on. Everyone will.
But it's undeniable that it makes you grow. You learn something from it. That's the beauty of it. Your experiences will shape what you are. Even if it is forgotten, it is not completely gone. And what you should do moving forward. Evolve.
It was like this is what Nasu intended to write FGO ending as is to speak to us how it felt. It was the same feeling when I watched every Nier Gestalt's route walkthrough. It is meant to be displeasing. You're fighting for something that will perish no matter what. But you do it for your own sake of yourself because it means something to you. You cannot love something and discard its ugliness. The coin has two sides. You should be aware of both of them.
Annnnnd we should revoke Kinoko Nasu's human study degree because holy shit
bro not marisbury paralleling guda even in the meta sense as like, an empty player character in a gacha game. guda is the gacha protagonist always accused of being a nothing/empty character who only acts out a meaningless choice decided on by us the player and then marisbury is the actual empty individual making meaningless choices in his copied world his literal alt account of the actual fate world where the one we meet isn't even marisbury himself because the real one already long died (his abandoned game) with the ideological struggle of guda/us the player appreciating the story that the game had to tell us whereas marisbury finds it meaningless and wants a self contained eternal world. marisbury is literally the type of player who doesn't read fate/grand order and just fga auto farms events and thinks it's good enough as a game
when a game i dont like gets a pointless cashgrab remaster: wow. truly shameless. do they really think we’re dumb enough to buy this? honestly yes, as its fans are already idiots who love slop
when a game i like gets a pointless cashgrab remaster: wow. so excited for more people to experience this masterpiece. accessibility of games is SO important
Shout out to the (many) times I got called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that the only real way to fully understand a work of fiction is to experience it firsthand and that summaries and reviews are not a replacement for that
This is the main reason I left the wider mecha anime fandom, it's packed to the brim with people who go "um actually I don't have time to and/or don't want to watch these anime I claim to be a huge fan of and you're a snob for suggesting I watch them"
Society may produce un-traumatized autistic people.
They just can't get diagnosed. Because an autism diagnosis requires problems: Difficulty with communications, with managing emotions, with physical behavior constraints.
An autistic child raised by compassionate parents who don't mind that their kid won't meet their eyes to talk, who don't get upset at hand-twitches, who avoid clothes that the kid doesn't like, who help the kid understand their own emotions and how to recognize the emotions in the people around them ("see how his forehead is crinkled? That means he may be upset, or he may just be thinking hard, but either way, he's probably not happy")... may not have noticed that the kid is autistic.
There's a reason a lot of autism isn't recognized until school - because parents that just pay attention to their kids and adapt their communication to what the kid needs, may not set off any of the "problem indicators." And a compassionate school may manage to bypass them as well, especially for girls, who are less likely to have the "fidget" behaviors, and for whom "speak softly while not making eye contact" isn't usually considered a red flag.
According to the DSM-5, autism is characterized by:
difficulty communicating and interacting with others
repetitive behaviors and a narrow set of interests
symptoms that affect quality of life and functioning in areas like work and school
...if the person's symptoms don't "affect quality of life and functioning," they don't get diagnosed. If their surrounding community is supportive, they may not have "difficulty communicating and interacting" - just a different style than most of the people around them. And their interests may be seen as "well, that's what they're interested in; it's cool that they have a hobby."
Autism is only officially labeled when it causes problems for neurotypicals in the autistic person's community.
Non-traumatized autistic people are just "a bit odd," and the medical industry doesn't recognize them.
An Asexual Walking Disaster @commanderpacis - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
