hsquinlan’s hyperfixation stache

Q/Quin ~ 21F she/her ~ Multi-Fandom

[hsquinlan]

~ Bio Post! ~

Name - hsquinlan, but q or quin for short

Info - 21F, she/her, aro/ace

Very much a multi-fandom enjoyer. Ask me about:

Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss, Pokemon, MHA, Umamusume, Arcane

An amateur artist and fanfic writer!

Also find me on AO3: hsquinlan

[kyoukorpse]

The Fourth Sanctuary.

[m4g0hun]

their light

[meltesh28]

animated a krusie moment... can't believe this is a real scene that happens

[meltesh28]

let's hangout together for the rest of our lives or something dude

[noswaith-eats-glitter]

SEA OF SORROW TOMORROW

DELTARUNE TOMORROW

[sunnytanny]

DELTARUNE TOMORROW

[aro-ace-culture-is]

Aroace culture is being entirely uninterested in real life sex and romance, but then yumeshipping so hard with a rotten fictional man that your love for the character transcends that of normal human relationships— neither platonic or romantic or sexual or queerplatonic, but a secret, insane fifth thing that is somehow all of the previous and also none of them at once.

.

[rcntlydcccased]

king of the lanes 👁️‍🗨️

[aphel1on]

never stop being obnoxious about fictional character online. you will find like-minded people and it will literally save you

[hsquinlan]

Serious Silksong analysis/critique under the cut!

Trigger warning for sexual harassment.

So, I wanna talk about Silksong, not really in terms of the gameplay (that’s a whole other can of worms), but instead about the treatment of women/female characters. Specifically, I wanna look at Hornet’s gender, why the fuck the game keeps sexually harassing her, and the themes/presentation of gender in both games.

Hornet, compared to Ghost from HK 1, is explicitly female. She/Her pronouns, Princess of Hallownest, runs about in a goddamn red cloak/dress thing instead of being naked (like most bugs) or clothed in a long grey ankle length cloak (like most Vessels). She is Woman Character.

And so, as a Woman Gamer, I find it really unsettling how Hornet, the Woman Character, is getting harassed by the other characters in Silksong: Nuu, Kratt and the Flies of The Slab. Yes, each time it happens, Hornet gets a badass prison break montage (The Slab) or bitch-slaps them (Kratt and Nuu), but considering that it adds no narrative or gameplay value, I’m confused why it’s included at all and worried about the implications.

In Hollow Knight, the female characters are pretty much only mothers or wives, except for Hornet. Iselda (wife). Herrah (Hornet’s mother). The White Lady (mother, wife, strangely hyper sexual). Gruz Mother (it’s in the name). Queen Vesta (already dead, later retconned to be another of Hornet’s mother figures, and as a queen bee, she is also defacto a mother of all the other bees in the hive, thats how bees work).

Hornet is pretty much the only female character whose femininity isn’t the only aspect to her. She’s cool, mysterious, badass, right? Well…she’s also Hallownest’s caretaker, basically playing nanny to the Dreamers and Black Egg Temple and killing all the other Vessels that escape the Abyss.

This only gets worse when Hornet becomes the main character of her own game. The female characters in Silksong are a little more nuanced, but so many are still kneecapped by motherhood. Grand Mother Silk (it’s in the name). The Broodmother boss fight (the name). Characters like Lace and Shakra escape their fate of just being Woman Character in Video Game…

But in her own game, Hornet doesn’t.

This probably doesn’t seem terrible on the surface, but twice across this game, Hornet is stripped of her cloak/dress thing and left naked - when you get the Drifter’s Cloak upgrade, and during the Slab sequence (not that the Slab isn’t sick as hell). Why does Hornet need to be naked during these moments? Why does she need to be shown putting the cloak back on when she gets Drifter’s Cloak? When you get upgrades in Hollow Knight, like Mothwing Cloak, Shade Cloak etc, you don’t get naked. It just happens. So why does Hornet get naked when she gets Drifter’s Cloak?

Why, when she is captured and taken to the Slab, is the Main Female Character stripped naked and locked in a cage? Couldn’t they just have taken her needle and tools? Why did she have to get naked?

As well, Hornet gets weirdly harassed by both Nuu and Kratt. I’ll talk about Nuu first.

Nuu, the little pink sadistic hunter, is confirmed in game to be young, to not be a mature adult. She needlessly emphasises how Hornet is a mature adult, and how cool it is that Hornet hunts down all these monsters. Then she…wants to taste the juices of Hornet’s foes, and approaches her with a weird kissy face and tries to touch her. Hornet slaps her away, and Nuu seems decently chastised. Nuu, being young, gets a slight pass for being creepy, but not much.

With Kratt, it’s even worse. He offers Hornet access to his hot spring, and then tries to peek on her bathing multiple times, until the player slaps him away. He has the audacity to whine about her/us hitting him, insisting he was innocently doing repairs, but the entire scene is so uncomfortable.

(There is another instance where an NPC tries to creepily touch Hornet and she slaps them away, Grindle, but I can excuse that since he was trying to pickpocket her, not assault her)

I really just want to know: why? What do these moments add to the game’s narrative? What would we lose from not seeing Hornet’s body? What would we lose from cutting Nuu and Kratt’s harassment? Not a lot, since both of them are entirely missable moments, and literally don’t affect the game at all.

I just think it’s disappointing that, even today, we still receive games (as fun as they are) that have very weird attitudes towards their female characters, and very unpleasant attitudes about harassing those female characters and stripping them naked. It’s creepy at its most innocent and borderline sexual harassment at the most extreme.

We’re still telling stories to this day that frivolously include undeveloped female characters, and the female characters that are developed, are still treated like this. These moments of gendered discrimination and gendered stereotypes are really concerning. The moment with Kratt, and the escape from the Slab, smack of some serious internal misogyny and the casual attitude the world still holds about women.

I think we should demand better from our games, especially when they have an explicitly female main character.

[hsquinlan]

heyy, just posted a short little fix-it fic for how I wish good omens 3 had ended!

The Bookshop At The End Of The World

https://archiveofourown.org/works/84796946

[hsquinlan]

Good Omens 3 spoilers below the cut!

they really gave ineffable husbands/aziracrow the jayvik treatment huh…

[hsquinlan]

I’m throwing my hat into the ring to talk about Good Omens 3

I really don’t like the ending they got, and I have spent the entire day since I watched GO3 rewatching season 1

Like oh my god, how did they get it so wrong?

I can understand the themes. Two characters who adore humanity so much they’d do anything to protect it, right? Both of the previous two seasons boil down to Aziraphale and Crowley’s desperate attempts to protect humanity from the end of the world, right?

So explain to me how on earth the ending we got involves the instantaneous death of the world both of them actually fell in love with, and the destruction of each other, too?

They didn’t save the world they spent 6000 years tending to. They killed EVERYTHING. Including each other

Surely there was another way

[frenchublog]

[hsquinlan]

Bro look at this concoction

[gildedpomegranates]

Ideas for Season 2 I Would've Liked to See/Explored More:

Ambessa explicitly acting as a motherly figure to manipulate Cait, who's grieving a mother. Especially since Cait had a complicated relationship with her mom, centered around Cassandra being overly protective/unsupportive of her choices, with Ambessa being everything her mom wasn't.

Jinx and her relationship with Zaun. In s1, she doesn't have much of one due to isolation (encouraged by Silco as well as self-imposed), other than the fear and discomfort she inspires. She doesn't have to become a revolutionary (although its odd that there was so much marketing and set-up for it), but at least explore that. People who love her, people who blame her for Piltover's retaliation, people who are unsure. This could also be a great chance to establish more about in-universe Jinx and Ekko, since Ekko's character is very centered around the people of Zaun.

Vi as a person. Having a chance to explore who she is outside of being a sister-mother and a prisoner. Struggling with making choices for herself as someone either completely robbed of them (as a prisoner) or who couldn't afford to make selfish choices (as a caregiver). Exploring her immense untouched trauma, as well as her relationship to Zaun. Her guilt as an enforcer possibly causing her to double-down in support of the revolution, maybe by joining the Firelights and supporting Ekko.

In a similar vein, Jinx as a person. She's established as a character that latches onto one person (her main caregiver) and has a tendency to absorb parts of that person (morals, behaviors, etc). I would've loved to see her without a main person, possibly as a parallel to Vi. Vi discovers who she is without someone to protect while Jinx discovers who she is without someone protecting her.

Cait and Jayce's relationship. It was completely thrown to the wayside. Overall, s2 tended to sideline platonic and familial relationships for romantic ones.

Ekko as a person outside of his relationships to other characters. We know like? Nothing about him and his time during the time skip in s1. Does he like being a leader? Does he not know how to define himself outside of being one? Does he resent being forced into the role and having to grow up way too fast? A combination of all of the above? How long has he been the leader? Was it him alone that established the Firelights, or were there originally older rebels that passed long ago, leaving only him? Like please, let him be a character. I know people joke about him being perfect and universally unproblematic, but a lot of that is because they don't give him enough screen time or any realistic flaws or let him organically develop beyond being a plot device.

Jinx and Ekko's relationship. This doesn't have to be romantic, just them and their in-universe dynamic please. At the end of s1, we had this big moment where Ekko, who had been coping with it by insisting Powder was dead, realizes that Jinx is just grown-up Powder, and that he can't kill her. s2 then does nothing with this, fobbing him off into an alternate universe with an alternate Powder. I would've loved to see Jinx and Ekko struggling to work together, getting to know each other in a capacity other than enemies. Ekko emulating Vander's 'we don't give up our own people' and protecting Jinx from Piltover despite his better judgement.

Y'know what? Ekko and Sevika. Both two people desperately fighting for Zaun, in two wildly different ways. I would've loved to see them interact. They probably would've gotten into a fist fight, but just imagine the Ekko-Sevika-Jinx power trio heading the revolution.

The Wolf vs the Fox. Mel as a formidable politician, working in the shadows to undermine her mother. Her putting everything she's learned in Piltover to use, weaponizing the lessons learned from her banishment. If they were so desperate to include the Black Rose plotline, they could maybe have Mel becoming obsessed with protecting Piltover from her mother and going so far as to ally with her brother's killers.