Writing Request Blog | Occasional Reblogs & Video Posts | Multi-fandom & Multi-shipping | Current Focus on Final Fantasy series, | Persona | Tales of | Tokyo Ghoul | Misc.
It's kind of tragic how homophobia affects insecure men.
Like sometimes they want to experiment with a bit of anal and instead of just buying a sex toy and some lube like a normal person, they instead shove random objects up their ass that inevitably get stuck and then they try to get them out by themselves which makes things worse and then they lie to doctors about it and like this all leads to all kinds of extra complications like internal damage, risk of infections, bleeding, the fall of Yugoslavia, etc.
Come on guys, just buy a dildo. It's way safer and it leads to way fewer problems.
Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!
Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.
Modern writing advice: Make sure your POV character goes through a significant arc! Make sure they are changed by the narrative! Make sure they learn a lesson!
Narrators of every book of the 19th century: the lesson I learned is these people fucking suck, sayonara you freaks
Modern writing advice: It’s all about the character overcoming obstacles and learning! They learn their lesson so they can fix their mistakes and make good choices in the future! It’s a character arc! It’s called growth! Readers love it!
Everyone from ancient times through the 19th century: would you like to watch a Guy fuck up twenty times in a row
This isnt a joke my favorite piece of writing advice that I’ve ever seen is someone that said if you were stuck with a fic and couldn’t figure out why or what was wrong, your problem is actually usually about ten sentences back. Maybe there was something wonky about the tone or the dialogue or you added something that didn’t fit but it’s usually ten sentences back. And every single time I get stuck in a fic I count back ten sentences and it’s always fucking there
Genuinely can’t stand the new favouritism towards video format. You want me to spend a whole two minutes listening to someone say out loud a paragraph I could read in 20 seconds?
It’s not just tiktok, it’s everything. I’m tired of clicking on news articles and instead finding it’s a video I have to watch. I’m tired of being sent to a video when I want to learn about a new thing instead of an article I can skim in less than a minute. You mean you want me to sit through an entire video, listening for the one kernel of information that’s buried in there that I’m interested in? Nah, man, life is too short to waste it like that. I don’t know why any of you like videos lmao.
OH MY GOD I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE. It’s almost a clinical avoidance at this point. I really hate video when I am just trying to read or look at pictures. Unless it’s animals doing something cute in 15 seconds or less I don’t want it. The sound irritates me. The movement bothers me. I get irrationally angry. If I want to look at videos I will go do that later on YouTube or some shit
I read so much faster than people speak. And that’s true even if they were as concise and organized as an article, which they generally aren’t.
We spent the first ten years of the internet figuring out how to shut off auto-blinking banner ads and now sites are throwing those at us and claiming they’re content.
i’ve just seen someone ask, “ao3 is problematic, tumblr is problematic, is there nowhere to go, is nothing sacred???”
like…. no.
it’s not.
there is nowhere sacred for fandom-at-large to go. and i don’t think there is anywhere sacred that fandom-at-large can go. wherever we go, by definition, would be profane: profanus, outside the temple. doesn’t necessarily mean dirty or bad. profane is just where we are, outside the temple. that’s the space where everyday life is lived.
if you are waiting for a “perfect” space for all fandom, where no monsters can ever tread, i am sorry, but it doesn’t exist. it can’t, not out here, beyond the temple. no open-access platform (like ao3, like tumblr, like twitter) will ever live up to perfect ideals for everybody all the time. (that’s not a reason not to strive for decency, of course! and you can sensibly ban nazis and illegal materials and porn bots and harassment without doing what tumblr’s doing, which is panicking and throwing everything it owns out a window.)
but we are all just humans, from anonymous trolls to moderators: everything we can build is still just built by people. people fail. people forget. people ignore. people are too busy, too greedy, too idealistic, too short on resources, too whatever, to be perfect. so if you want a big open cross-fandom platform to play in, what you get is profanity. in a very broad sense.
if you want a perfect space, a sacred space, you have to build it inside the temple. i don’t mean that in a specific religious sense: not a Jewish or Christian or Muslim sense. i mean, you are going to have to build a pure fannish temple and keep the profane world away from it: specifically, you’d have to keep most of the world out. it couldn’t be a place for fandom-at-large: it would have to be a place for fandom-at-small. for the few. because you are going to have to build doctrine and enforce it. you are going to have to define sin and cast sinners out. and no free open social media platform is going to do that for you: you’d have to do it yourself, continuously, rigorously, defensively, judgementally, like a guard at a gate. like a god.
“that sounds like a lot of work!” oh, it is. it’s a lot of work to gatekeep. “oh, i’m not talking about being a gatekeeper, i just want bad stuff gone!” mm-hmm. i understand. i genuinely do. but let me know if you find an easy, cheap, non-exclusionary way to let hundreds of thousands of people with very different backgrounds and beliefs post millions of pieces of only universally acceptable, non-problematic, perfect content. i’ll be over here holding my breath.
We don’t appreciate the fact that Bruce Wayne is a Kardasian level celebrity enough. Everyone knows him. I want more one shots and crack fic moments where the League (Pre identity reveals) just openly talk about Bruce Wayne in front of Batman.
Just imagine them playing fuck, marry, kill with famous actors and such and throwing Bruce into the mix. And Batman just sits there, silently suffering as he listens to the reasons why Flash and Lantern would marry, fuck, or kill him. He prays they choose kill. They don’t.
Chaotic Neutral people believe that there ultimately is no order to anything, including their own actions. With this as their guiding principle, they tend to follow whatever their fancy tells them to. Good and evil are irrelevant when making a decision. Chaotic Neutral people are often extremely difficult to deal with. Although they promote the ideals of freedom, it is their own freedom that comes first. Chaotic Neutral individuals are free-spirited and do not enjoy the unnecessary suffering of others, but if they join a team, it is because that team’s goals happen to coincide with their own at the moment. They resent taking orders and can be very selfish in their pursuit of their personal goals. Yet their methods of achieving their goals are often disorganized, unorthodox, and almost entirely unpredictable.
Pretty much what I expected, although I was a little closer to neutral good than I had expected
What are some of these questions though? “I save pieces of information about others to use against them later?” What?! Who does that? 😅
Tagging: @amourshipper393 @only-lonely-stars @arpeggiopeg @fabro-de-omres @fedora-lloyd @goldenavenger02 @stellarxjewels @gaeasun and anyone else who wants to
Feels kinda cheap 😂 I believe in a strong moral government? Ain’t nobody gonna find that on Earth, that’s only in God’s kingdom. I’ll stick with my personal assessment of Chaotic Good.
Tags: @caitlinsnow-yayyy @srjstudios @arpeggiopeg @amourshipper393 @gaeasun and anyone who wants to (I’m too tired to think of more lol)
From the description for True Neutral: “Such people often see good, evil, chaos, and laws as simply prejudices that lead to dangerous extremes. Like the Taoist masters of ancient China, they tend to believe that the universe functions best when the light and the dark, the yin and the yang, are in balance.”
They nailed my hatred for extremism. Also, is this why I’m pushing for a Grey Jedi storyline in a Star Wars movie/TV show?
Anyways, thanks for the tag @theresistanceneverquits
Girl @ice-icebaby, you the coolest and the best person, I swear. My little rebel (sometimes)!!
The funniest thing is I had never done the test before and when I played my first DnD game (and it was the only one so far *sad noises*), my character was Lawful Good. I’M SO BORING HELP ME GOD.
Tagging these beautiful humans (tell me, I really want to know who I’m dealing with here): @sweetlike-tennessee-honey, @10-4daddyo, @frogsdragonsandcats, @embraceofday, @dehii88.
So, it’s not a bad game… but it’s not a great game either.
I had to think long and hard on how to write out my grievances with this particular title in the ‘Tales Of’ series (I’m starting to think I haven’t throughly enjoyed a title since Xillia 2, although I did like Berseria quite a bit). I’ve decided a list format was the most efficient.
Things I liked:
The world, characters, combos, and mystic artes are all very good looking (personal aesthetics aside)
Camping skits (These were nice because early on it was one of the only ways to have characters sit down and connect with each other.)
Hootle
Things I didn’t like but didn’t ‘hate’:
The absolute insistence on coupling all the characters. I didn’t like the lack of subtlety and it felt a bit shoehorned in as well. Yes, there are three heteronormative couples in a world where almost everyone is a slave and could die at any moment based on the whims of their evil overlords. Oh, look, an attractive Renan. (This kind of fits in with my rant about narrative later, mainly in how it feels shoved down the player's throat despite the fact that earlier titles have not needed to do this. )
Shionne goes from Tsun to Waifu before the second act, heavily lampshaded from the beginning, but gets blatant, by the end when you obtain wedding dress armor in the final dungeon and a bouquet gun you obtain in a subquest. Like, we get it, the two mains are going to hook up, it was kind of obvious with that whole no pain/causes pain dynamic they started off with. I honestly missed her Tsun tendencies, it helped balance out Alphen's 'good guy' personality.
Alphen’s mask coming off. Actually, I did kind of hate this, because he went from having a unique look to becoming a white-haired bishonen protag with no eyebrows (they are stupid light eyebrows that are too thin and hard to see). He looked awkward and I just wish they let me have the option of putting the mask on for aesthetic purposes, but no, once it's gone, it’s gone. Upon playing New Game + I've learned that other than in cut scenes, the helmet will stay off and it wrecks game immersion.
Things that made me go “Why?”:
The narrative. The constant repetition of what needs to be done and 'why we must continue our fight' became very old, very fast. It was somewhat tolerable in the first half of the game because there were still “mysteries” to resolve, but it became completely unbearable in the second. (Why yes, I do understand the motivations of the main cast, can I move on from your twenty-minute cut-scene explanation followed by multiple character skits and other added cut scenes five minutes later that reiterate the exact. same. information? No? Well, fuck you game.)
The compilation of the game. There were many issues here. In addition to the narrative shoving the ‘plot’ into the latter half of the game and beating me with repetition, there were the following problems:
Many character stories and fun skits/side quests suffered from the game’s arrangement. Many were relegated to the latter half of the game which did not make sense. A good portion of these could have easily been added to the first half (maybe to be completed in the second with some characters) and would have offered some levity during the story (Law’s backstory regarding his part in his father’s death really needed this, possibly more than anyone else.).
Additionally, the levels of the enemy seemed far higher than they had any reason to be for character quests to be completed. (I ended up doing all of this after I had opened up the final dungeon and the fact that these were the starts of character quests is what really ticked me off.)
The characters. I realize this may not be a popular opinion, but my issue with the characters had more to do with the game’s uneven portrayal of their character stories than the characters themselves. This was an issue in Zesteria as well (I did not like Rose because she became a BAMF! way too fast and took over Mikleo’s role as the deuteragonist midway through.) In Arise, this happens with Dohalim, particularly in the second half. There were points where I outright wondered if they were switching protagonists because his character arc tied so closely into the plot. Mind you, he is a likable character, but I should never forget who my main characters are. Alphen and Shionne became so poorly characterized within their tropes that I legitimately had moments I forgot they existed.
Lip Sync during skits. I think this could have been resolved easily if mouths either didn’t move at all during skits or if they had bothered to lip-sync to both English and Japanese VA’s. This also became problematic during camping but slightly easier to ignore.
Directional attack controls. I liked having the option of which way to swing my main weapon from the past games. This may seem a minor thing but it really threw me off when dealing with flying enemies.
Things I wish I could have seen (Fanfic ideas, maybe?):
Total ‘what if’ scenario, but it would have been interesting to see Rinwell used as a tool to fight off Renan’s before she joins the party. They do dive lightly into the possibilities of Dahnan oppressors and this would have been a good way to introduce that idea early on. Especially if there was a domain Renan’s could not take over.
Another thought is having Renan’s = old-timey Dahnan mages. If they were being hunted centuries ago, it would make a lot of sense to have them willingly go with the Helganquil to later get revenge on the Dahnan populace. Even if these mages/turned Renan’s forgot the why’s, learning that info from the Helganquil would have made for an interesting way to have Rinwell face her racism. It’s all but alluded to in the game, however, it seems some engineering on behalf of the Helganquil was involved in canon.
Law having more remorse over the part he played in his father’s death. Really felt like he shrugged it off too quickly. I think I would have liked a larger backlash to occur because of his actions.
Alphen’s backstory and memory being triggered over time instead of in one very long and kind of disappointing go. It would have been more compelling to see him flashback and question his own motives earlier on.
Making him Renan with the mask suppressing his glowy-eyes also would have been interesting since he would side w/the Dahnan’s after his experiences as a slave.
Shionne either sticking to being a Tsun (zapping people on purpose more), or confessing her motivations and her fears much earlier. It was really dragged out. Hated it. Also, she became very boring in the second half.
An optional unhappy ending. Honestly, everything was too nicely wrapped up. It felt unreal.
Anyways, that’s it, that’s the list. I think if I wasn’t a Tales Of veteran I may have enjoyed this game more (although the way they beat me over with the narrative still would have killed a good 70% of the enjoyment for me). I didn’t outright hate the game as it’s fun to play, but if I’d known more about how pedantic the narrative would become, I probably would have waited instead of buying on day one.
Doctor Strange: Alright, let’s start at the beginning. How did this nexus event start?
Wanda Maximoff: Well, I learned that my sons were somehow still alive, even though that goes against the laws of nature since they were just illusions I created. So when I tried to find them, I tore a hole in the multiverse-
Peter Parker: -which led to me teaming up with my doppelgangers. (Tobey Maguire Spider-Man and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man wave to Strange)
Doctor Strange: …and you, how did you contribute to this mess?
Loki Laufeyson: Well, I confessed my feelings to Sylvie and now we’re a couple.
Doctor Strange: That doesn’t sound too bad-
Loki Laufeyson: -oh, and Sylvie’s a version of me from a deleted timeline-
Doctor Strange: -and there’s the fuckery I was looking for. Great. Peter, Wanda, Loki…I mean, seriously, what the hell?
tangentwithtanner
