there’s very few things that drive me up the wall in fandom as much as this weird new assumption that fandom is primarily a space for younger people that older folks are only accepted into in a trial basis if they promise to centralize and accommodate younger fans, and further, anything else is creepy and predatory. IT’S OKAY FOR ADULTS TO PRODUCE CONTENT FOR OTHER ADULTS.
if I have to read “women in their 30s” used as an insult one more time I swear I’ll - step away from that user and just hang out with the other grownups who consistently create good content because I’m also an adult and too busy comparing car insurance to fight with teenagers on the internet, but goddAMMIT I’ll be annoyed
it's forever fucked that refusal is associated so strongly with cowardice and cowardice is almost universally uncontestedly seen as an existential failure that disqualifies you from the right to refuse anything when being able to admit that you're afraid and say "no" are some of the most powerful things that anyone can do
"why don't you want to? are you scared?" yes. is that so bad? to be afraid and unwilling? why should that be worth less? why should i hope to be the richest corpse in the graveyard?
Those scenes of Mizi being very close with men made me so uncomfortable this poor lesbian girl who is getting abused and exploited, sexualized and objectified is now being forced to be physically close to men to further sexualize her and there’s nothing she can do about it
And Sua my precious precious girl, she literally has not done anything wrong in this eps (that I’ve seen yet) and she gets treated so badly. She doesn’t get to debut which was also her dream. She has to watch HER GIRLFRIEND be close with men and be sexualized knowing how uncomfortable it makes her. She’s watching her love spiral and when she tries to step in she’s hit. Physically abused (I don’t blame Mizi but seriously 2 for 2 atp, stop hitting her) never getting her dream then having her love her turned into a zombie. So she decides to also become one because Sua cannot live without Mizi and she will always die for her. So she becomes a zombie gets abused and exploited and then dies for her love as she gets chopped up to be sold.
Wether it’s all of her or just her arm is unclear, eternal means it goes on for ever so maybe it’s just her arm and they’ll have her still preform, like how it’s implied Mizi lost her eyes (they were sold) but she still preforms, we will probably have to wait and see. Or if they chop everything up and once again Sua dies for Mizi. But in this universe Mizi doesn’t seem sad at first but I think she just isn’t able to express it because of the audience. Once she finished her sign song it seems her face drops or maybe not.
Sua my girl you have done nothing wrong and yet you are always the victim. Mizi my girl you are never treated right and you will always be villainized for having reactions to your trauma because you are a woman.
I BETTER NOT see ANY lesbian Mizi deniers because of those few frames when it’s about how she is getting EXPLOITED AND SEXUALIZED
The contrast of the music and the visuals, how even the visuals contrast with each other. The switch to the black in white towards the end. Everything was done so well, I really enjoyed it some parts made me uncomfortable but that’s the point. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE BECAUSE IT IS A DIRECT CRITIQUE AND CRITICISM OF THE IDOL AND MODEL INDUSTRY AND THE PARASOCIAL AND CREEPY RELATIONSHIPS PEOPLE HAVE WITH IDOLS.
In my opinion Alien Stage was about the grayness of humanity both the good and bad but mostly about how humans can always love and how beautiful that love is. It comes in different ways and forms but no matter what humans will always love. I think Zombie Stage is going to be the other half the humans can’t love without exploiting and will focus on mainly the harms of humans. No matter what humans will always exploit. It will be a contrast of love and exploitation but that’s just my prediction.
we're moving to an internet where children would be banned from reaching out for help and friendship online but abusive parents can post their children's every second online to humiliate and expose them for money with no pushback
It's always "stop harming yourself or we'll have to lock you up!!!" and never "what do you need to change to want to harm yourself less and how can we help you make some of these changes?" and that's why we're not getting anywhere
Like many of you, I woke up to the AI slop It Lives Within "TV show" on the Choices app. Having spent thousands (no joke) of loving hours on the fan-made It Lives Within, I admit it felt like a bit of a kick to the gut, especially since I'd stayed up until 2 AM the night before, meticulously working on improving the programming of textbox animations for the updated version of the game.
But at the end of the day, the people are what own stories. It doesn't matter what PB puts out, especially when it so blatantly disrespects a series we all hold close to our hearts. We can choose what to support, what to value, and what to be our true version of these stories.
As such, I wanted to provide an update for "It Lives Within: The Obsidian Cut." We are working extremely hard to finish rewrites, and I apologize it's taking so long - but real work takes time. We take so long because we don't use AI to do our work for us. Our testers have found hundreds of bugs, which have been corrected. I'm currently working on some rewrites for chapters 21-22, and once that's finished, I'm going to play from start to finish with different MCs to include more complete personality variants for your MC.
While our game was highly beloved (which I am still so wholly grateful for three years after the final episode aired), I know some of you tried the original version and decided it wasn't for you. Others maybe never heard of it. But, with the news of AI It Lives Within dropping today, I just wanted to invite everyone to give our fan version a chance. If you tried it before and gave up, or haven't played it yet, I recommend waiting until Obsidian airs to experience that version for the first time. And if you did play the original, stick around! You'll love Obsidian when it airs. All of our testers are highly enjoying it and say that it improves on the story with every change, while still be the story they knew and love.
AI It Lives Within is frustrating and offensive, but ultimately, we never needed their blessing, and neither do you. Our story started small, with a team that never made any money. Everything was done out of passion and love for this series and these characters, and we were and still are, devoted to creating truly player-drive stories where your choices matter. A LOT. That passion is something that can never be generated in any machine. Stories from the heart speak to the heart, "canon" or not, and what really matters is how theses stories impact and inspire us.
We understand that gut-punch feeling completely.
There's something uniquely painful about watching a book you've poured your heart into get treated so carelessly by the people who should be protecting it.
But you said it perfectly: the people are what own these stories.
To anyone out there thinking about starting your own fan project: please do it. The community needs more stories made with actual love and care.
We are SO excited for The Obsidian Cut and cannot wait to see the incredible work you've all done.
A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.
A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.
That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.
This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writers’ plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.
With all this in mind, let’s go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and don’t want to get it spoiled.
Major things they stole:
Their villain, Silas, is Matthias. Literally, that's it. He's Matthias.
Silas is an immortal man who's been alive for almost 200 years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Matthias is an immortal man who's been alive 200+ years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Silas wants to sacrifice redfield Noah due to his connection to the Power as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to... I'm not quite sure what, exactly, as the story was a bit hard to follow. Matthias wants to sacrifice Rowan, due to their connection to the Power, as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to gain more power and freedom and heal the corrupted Power. Silas thinks he’s all manipulative and the main crew states that "He’s getting us to do his work for him!” Matthias thinks he's all manipulative, and gloats about being a "puppet master" and getting people to do his work for him.
And then there's his appearance. That's literally the same hairstyle - even has the part on the same side and the same curly swoops. He's the same age. Same race. Literally, just like Connor in their story is a recognizable AI-version of his in-game sprite, that's what Silas looks like to Matthias. All he's missing is the beard.
The gang's base of operations is Cora’s cabin
This one is interesting. It's such a tiny detail, and I'd grown so used to the cabin being their safe place that when Connor was like "We need to get back to the cabin" it literally took me a moment to realize - wait. They had nothing to do with that cabin in the original series. Using that as a home base was literally our idea, an It Lives Within original.
The main enemies are mind controlled townspeople working for Silas
Instead of following the precedent of the previous games and having the enemies be Power-twisted animal monsters, they decided to make their enemies humans that are mind-controlled into zombie-like beings with that attack the gang in hordes. This is a rip-off of It Lives Within's horrors, which are power-corrupted townsfolk that Matthias takes advantage of to oppose the main crew. And on top of that, they copied the carnival scene where Harper drives through a horde of horrors, including a scene where Devon drives through a horde of mind-controlled/zombified townsfolk.
Noah and Devon's relationship
Their relationship in this '"TV show" has suspicious similarities to their friendship/romance routes in ILW. They made Devon be redfield Noah's anchor to reality, and even had Devon use memories to help ground Noah, which we showed in the cabin scene where Devon and Noah play baseball together. And I know there were Noah x Devon shippers outside of me before ILW released, but it was never PB's plan to canonize them. So the fact that they are seemingly changing course to canonize them after they grew so popular in the fan version feels a bit too coincidental.
Scraping fan art for their AI animation frames
But what's even more egregious is that they have even stooped to scraping from fan artists, who have nowhere near the same following or exposure as our project does. Seriously, what are the odds that the MC they choose to use matches this artist's MC's race, gender, hair, and outfit exactly, that they used Noah's old outfit, that they are literally positioned on the same sides of the image? It's blatant plagiarism, and it's despicable. @errajay I'm so sorry they did this.
These are the biggest similarities, but considering that it was only like 15 minutes of content, that means that a high percentage of the story was stolen. Sure, the exact details of "Silas's" plan are different (he's like a horcrux for the "entity" aka power and he was split into 43 parts and Noah's one of his parts and he needs to kill him to get it back and be free or something) it's the same concept: immortal man who's trapped making a complicated ritual requiring sacrifice while manipulating people to get everything into place.
If you want to see for yourselves, please find it on YouTube. Do not support them with clicks or traffic on their app. Thank you! Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, no AI was used in the drafting of this post 💖
my that one friend that's too woke opinion is that in a similar vein to how you almost never see fat people or women without makeup on tv you never really see anyone experiencing incontinence issues unless it's a humiliating comedic moment at their expense and that's kind of scary
like sorry to be the bearer of bad news but people piss themselves. when they're afraid. when they've experienced mental and/or physical trauma and their body needs a way to express that stress. when they've been sexually assaulted. when they get older and their muscles start to wear out from a lifetime of service. a not insignificant majority of people Will experience incontinence in their lifetimes and while there are steps you can take to manage it for your own comfort and others', there's simply no moral dimension to it whatsoever. & like i'm not saying every show and movie needs checkhov's bed wetting scene but we have seriously got to get more okay with acknowledging that somehow.
so as long as tumblr keeps this, here's the tumblr version of etiquette that was maintained when twitter's quote-retweets affected artist visibility/notes:
for art that someone has added reblog commentary to (or removed the caption from), reblog from the source
otherwise, avoid adding reblog comments to art (as this will affect the artist's notes/visibility)—utilize tags and replies to provide commentary (which artists will absolutely appreciate)
reblog comments are comments added to the body of a post, not the tags and not replies.
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