Gender: Male, Birthday: November 3rd 1998, Age: My B-Day is right there do the math, Zodiac: Scorpio, Favorite Animal: Dogs (I have 2), Favorite Color: Blue, Hobbies: browsing online, talking peoples' ears off about my favorite franchises. High functioning autistic, taking the form of Aspergers. BS in Mechanical Engineering from UIC as of May 2022.
Mainly using this as a Master Post so if/when I make more Hero/Protagonist Artifacts I won't need to link all of them
The idea behind them was something similar to the Sacred Gears from High School DxD, because I love how modular those are. A lot of the shit that the MC Issei's Sacred Gear can do is connected to a bunch of connected to him. Be it having Ddraig the Welsh Dragon within, having 3 Ascalons, a jewel from his rival Vali's Divine Dividing, using the Evil Pieces for the Triania and Cardinal Crimson Promotion, and the power of Great Red and Ophis for Diabolos Dragon, and Apocalypse Answerarms with Ryuuteimaru.
As my friend @rex101111 said:
"some of these powers sound like they came out of a power fantasy isekai, but a really fun one that knows to limit the mc at first before really letting them go ham in the last few episodes"
So I wanted to make some kind of symbolic weapon with other protagonists from throughout fiction.
Recovering from autistic burnout as a high-masking adult:
To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler
You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it
If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life
If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.
Go through a sensory checklist.
SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights
SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.
TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?
TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?
SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?
INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.
Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.
This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.
If you want to recover, you need to relearn your whole body. And get over your idea of "normal" and just wear the damn sunglasses and put on the headphones. If people stare, fuck em. You're disabled and they can deal with that.
my high school english teacher would often critique our literature analysis work by pointing out: "you're treating these characters like they're real people. They're not. They're characters". And it took me a long time to understand what he meant by that. Because I always thought "isn't that the point? That writers want to write characters to be so three dimensional that they act and feel like real people?" but that's not it.
Characters are tools a writer uses in service of a story. Of course characters can be written with depth to the point they feel real to us, but they exist in service of their narrative. Something real people aren't beholden to at all. When discussing characters, I think it's easy to accidentally see these characters as "real people" and not extensions of the author's beliefs. Tools for a narrative. Means of storytelling.
BlazBlue: Central Fiction DLC character Trinity Glassfille revealed - Gematsu
Following an initial announcement earlier this week, Arc System Works has officially announced BlazBlue: Central Fiction new downloadable content character Trinity Glassfille for the PlayStation 4 and PC (Steam) versions of the game. A release date was not announced.
The announcement reads, “Trinity Glassfille, a key character who has appeared since the early stages of the BlazBlue story, will finally be joining the roster as a playable character. The illustration released today was drawn by the series’ creator, Toshimichi Mori. Stay tuned for further updates regarding the update timing and details!”
Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
I am glad this has made the rounds. Some people feel a dense misunderstanding or misinterpretation concerning gentrification, and I think it helps to hear a description/explanation of what gentrification is from those who are both affected by it and educated by the culture from which it hails. I and many others enjoy some of the delights of gentrification while simultaneously having their livelihoods threatened by it.
OKAY, somebody in the comments called Teddie a "perv" again and NO NO NONONONONO I can't believe how much damage localization crunch has done to the perception of this character in the west. Teddie is CHILD. He's mentally no older the Nanako. He acts like that because he is lonely and wants attention by being mildly annoying and kinda funny, not because he's a predator! Vote Teddie to spread the truth. I love Koromaru, but I am sure best doggo would not stand for this slander of his bossom buddy.
It's not your fault, it's kinda a result of how the game was localized way back in the 00s... There used to be an article about it on the internet (the site has since closed down unfortunately), but the localization team for Persona 4 went on the record stating they were heavily crunched when translating the game, being given basically only 1-2 months for the entire job (which is insane for a game of that length), and while a majority of the translation came out amazingly well for those circumstances, Teddie, who had to be localized last due to executive meddling regarding his name and gimmicks, did suffer immensely from the crunch.
To make matters worse, for some ungodly reasons every localization team on Persona since then has decided to stay CONSISTENT with those localization errors and actively butcher Teddie's character for that purpose alone, and I honestly am baffled by the insane ripple effect this has had.
The damage done to his character was 3-fold:
1.) Miscasting
In Japanese, Teddie is voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi, a character actor known for his amazingly consistent falsetto, among other things. He was probably cast for his prior performance as Flappy in PreCure Splash Star and uses the exact same voice as for Flappy to voice Teddie. Accordingly, in Japanese Teddie sounds like a *creature*, not a person, a childlike, alien being that could never be mistaken for a regular person, voice-wise.
Meanwhile in English, Teddie has been consistently (mis)cast and misdirected with voices that sound like adult men doing an annoying falsetto that doesn't make them sound any younger. The voice actors themselves are incredibly talented, but they are completely the wrong match for the role and ruin the impression the character is supposed to give off, making him go from "cute but annoying and misguided" to "pest".
2.) Mistranslated jokes
God, if I went fully into this one, we'd be here ALL WEEK, but, like, every second joke involving Teddie, especially the running gags, was mistranslated in the English version. Like, his bear-puns in English? They're an attempt to carry over the fact that in Japanese he has a heavy vocal tick that causes him to replace sentence ending floskels and sometimes even parts of verbs and nouns with "kuma" the Japanese word for "bear" (which, incidentally, is also his name in the Japanese version, because in the Japanese version YOSUKE NAMED TEDDIE. Teddie didn't have a name until he met the party, and since Yosuke got so annoyed with how hard it was to get straight answers out of the awkward little creature, he just ended up naming him after his vocal tick. This is, by the way, one thing executive meddling changed. The localization team initially wanted to keep Teddie's name and vocal tick the same as in Japanese.). However, this does not necessarily come across as Teddie trying to make jokes in Japanese, and more as a cute speech impediment that makes him resemble typical Japanese corporate mascots even more than he already does. In the Japanese version, the only time he snaps out of this tick is when he thinks a dear friend of his has died (if you've played the game you know what I mean) and is in absolute despair over it.
But this isn't really the thing that ruins the character. The way his actual jokes were translated is a lot more damaging. Most strikingly, there is his infamous running gag about wanting to "score" with girls.
Now, as it is written in the English version of the games it does come off as very sexual and inappropriate, however you slice it...
The problem is: This is NOT how it is in Japanese
The word used here is not "scoring". It's "逆ナン" ("Gyakunan").
"Gyakunan" is a Japanese slang term referring SPECIFICALLY to women or girls aggressively flirting with men/boys. NEVER the other way around!
Why is Teddie saying it then? Well, he caught it from Shadow Yukiko. Shadow Yukiko talked about her concept of a person she could completely rely on and wanted to be with forever as someone she wanted to do a "gyakunan" on. And that STUCK with Teddie. Teddie has intense abandonment issues, so the idea of being someeone to someone else that they want to rely on and forever be with is something intensely powerful to him.
In other words: Teddie does not know what the word means. That is extremely clear in the Japanese version (and also goes for 100% of other "inappropriate" things he says. He's always just parroting stuff other people said or the media, never actually speaking out of knowledge. His voice actor pointed this out in a talk show even. He does that because he is a needy child.)
The fact that he doesn't know what it means is even directly spoken about in Ultimax, where this dialogue happens:
Teddie: "I wanted to Gyakunan so badly, I did my very best to grow this. Hi there, Junpei~!"
Junpei: "Ahh... Ahem... YOUR. JAPANESE. A LITTLE. BAD."
Junpei: "HUMANS CANNOT BE GROWN. ONLY GIRLS CAN GYAKUNAN"
Since P4's localization had completely messed with this joke, the second part of Junpei's second line here was completely dropped from the localization, as you can tell.
So why does he keep saying it even when it's obvious that the others are uncomfortable with it? Because Teddie wants attention. He's like a little kid who has no idea how correctly express their emotions. When he feels alone, he lashes out by making bad jokes, even when he doesn't realize WHY they are bad.
This also directly ties into ANOTHER mistranslated joke from Vanilla P4, which happens right before Rise's dungeon:
Kanji: "It's... a striptease, huh."
Teddie: "A "striptease"!?"
Teddie: "Aha! I get it... That's when you're all stripey, right!?"
Chie: "...."
Teddie: "I said... It's when you're all stripey, right!?"
Everyone: *sweatdrop*
Yukiko: "I hate these neon lights... I think not even these glasses can keep my eyes from hurting from that."
Teddie: *unhappy*
Teddie: "You guys, when I make a stupid joke, somebody is supposed to get mad at me for it like in a comedy skit! C'mon, one more time..."
Teddie: "So a striptease is... when you go all stripey..."
Chie: "I wish he'd stop talking..."
Yukiko: "...Huh, stripey? Sorry, were you talking, Teddie?"
Teddie: *sadly* "N-Nevermind... Let's just go inside..."
In English, this was mistranslated badly:
In English, it was played as Teddie genuinely thinking it was a funny joke, when in Japanese he himself says, that he is just trying to lighten the mood by making an intentionally bad joke.
This also messes with the reason WHY this scene is here: Teddie is feeling useless and out of place the entire time throughout this arc and is afraid that if he can't even keep the others' spirits high by being annoying enough to distract them from the seriousness of the situation, there is absolutely nothing left he has to contribute. That's why he gets so intensely sad when nobody reacts to his dumb joke. This is part of why his Shadow manifests at the end of this dungeon.
God, I could go further with how the localization also kinda messes with the way the shadow encounter is written too, but that belongs under another point, namely:
3.) Misunderstood Arc
The English localization messes up a lot of small details about how Teddie acts and speaks even aside from his jokes. He often says words in Katakana to make it clear he's hearing them for the first time and doesn't know what they mean. It's made very clear that, just like Nanako, he's prone to quoting TV and commercials after he comes to the human world. Sometimes the English dub makes him sound overly eloquent in dialogue boxes that had him basically just make toddler noises in Japanese.
This all combines to the complete misunderstanding of his arc:
Teddie does, in fact, NOT have amnesia in Persona 4.
He has dissociative symptoms.
This first becomes apparent in the Japanese version of his Shadow encounter, when Shadow Teddie says this:
Shadow Teddie: "At the bottom of your heart you realize [the truth]... But you cannot accept it. Therefore, all you do is trying to create another "you" to bury it..."
Shadow Teddie: "You never had any lost memories at all."
Shadow Teddie: "The only truth is that you are trying to make yourself forget that very fact itself."
Teddie: (shakily) "N-No... No, you're lying..."
This dialogue is still there in English, but the phrasing is off and less clear, and it sounds like Shadow Teddie is just clarifying the type of Amnesia Teddie has, rather than saying that he has *no* amnesia whatsoever.
What Teddie actually has is some manner of dissociative condition. His sudden gain of self-awareness as a Shadow was so traumatic to him that he completely dissociated and can't connect himself to his existence before that point in time, because being a Shadow, in his mind, would completely and entirely isolate him from humanity forever, which would force the desperate need for human connection that birthed his self-awareness in the first place to go eternally unfulfilled. So he can't allow himself to even for a second think of the fact that he's a Shadow, because if he did, it would break him. (And in the bad endings, it DOES. There's a reason his "goodbye" letter reads like an, ahem, certain type of note that starts with "s". It's pretty clear that Teddie is, in fact, not alive in the end if you get a bad ending.).
That's also why his Persona awakening status line is different from that of every other character.
He'd never actually "faced the truth about himself" at this point. He brute-forced his Persona awakening because he was so desperate to be with his friends that the feeling was strong enough to bring his Shadow under control.
The time when he actually DOES face it is when he awakens to Kamui, after a certain someone wakes up in the hospital in the game's endgame. That's because at this point, Yu had convinced him that, regardless of his nature, who Teddie gets to be is up to nobody but Teddie himself. He's not bound to any "destiny" prescribed to him by his "nature". He can choose to grow up into and become whoever he wants regardless of how he started out. In that way Teddie is a heavy foil to Ryoji Mochizuki from the previous game, who never got to have this revelation and, as a result, didn't survive. (RIP Ryoji, my boy...)
Teddie's dissociative symptoms are why he gets more and more bratty the later into the game we get, right up until stuff goes down in late November. He does not make a secret of it towards Yu that he's anxious and dissatisfied with his progress in "finding out" who he is, and all the time, his Shadow is pressing on the back of his mind, probably only exacerbated by the fact he actively has to keep holding it down, since he didn't have a proper, stable awakening like the others yet. So he tries to overplay it by acting EXTRA annoying in fall, and his characterization in the PQ games (both of which are set in Fall from P4's perspective) suffers from it, something he directly admits in the endgame of PQ1, when he apologizes to Koromaru for the way he was acting to him and admits he admires him.
(Note: I only ever played Persona Q in Japanese, so I have NO idea how this scene was handled in English. Given people only ever talk about how bratty Teddie was to Koromaru in that game, I assume it wasn't translated well, unfortunately. I at very least know that his dismissive nickname for Koromaru in PQ was badly mistranslated. In Japanese, Teddie calls him "Inukoro", a slightly dismissive version of "puppy". Not rude, just mildly dismissive and punny because it has "koro" in there. The English translation went with "mutt", which is just... No. Just no. That is NOT how this should have been translated.)
ANYWAY, this turned into a Teddie essay, so let me end this on:
Vote for Teddie. Unlike Koromaru, he has been actively slandered in the west for years, and I think if Koromaru knew about this, he would want it to stop.
People always told me he was just childish and didn’t understand what he was saying but I had trouble believing it. Also if he had blatantly said “guys you’re supposed to get creeped out cmon” in English too I might’ve actually understood (hell, I myself love annoying people for laughs)
From this it really sounds like he’s one of the most butchered characters I’ve heard of. Im tempted to feel bad for not knowing but tbh I can’t read/speak Japanese so I pretty much had no way of knowing he was mistranslated like this lol
EDIT: WAIT THAT ALSO EXPLAINS WHY HE KEEPS HITTING ON NANAKO
For one he has no idea what flirting is and just says things the teens around him say, and along with that it sounds like he’s basically meant to be her age
I was in the middle of learning Japanese when I first played P4 some 10 years ago, so I had more contact to the Japanese version than the English version right from the get go. It took me a while to realize just how much damage the localization crunch had actually done to Teddie, because in the Japanese fanbase he's actually fairly popular as a symbol of the "cute" side of the franchise. His Japanese character profiles always emphasize his loneliness and neediness too.
BTW, a lot of the genuinely creepy stuff Teddie does is kiiinda Yosuke's fault. (Sorry, Yosuke, I love you, but you suck at raising this child). Note how Teddie never mentions anything like swimsuits or nurses or anything genuinely sexual aside from the "scoring" joke (which I explained above) for the entire time, right up until he first leaves the TV World. Then... he moves in with Yosuke.
To drive the point home, Arena shows us what Yosuke's room looks like, and wouldn't you know: Posters of happy, smiling idols in swimsuits on the walls. Stacks of playboy magazines everywhere. Golden even added a scene where Yosuke gets mad at Teddie for bringing his (Yosuke's) playboy magazines down to the Hanamura family breakfast table with him and loudly asking Yosuke about them in front of his parents, at which point Chie even points out its Yosuke's fault for keeping stuff like this in his room when Teddie lives there too.
Yosuke is kinda Teddie's big brother figure in the same way as Yu is Nanako's, and while Yu is nothing but a good influence on Nanako, Yosuke is... Not someone you want a little kid to use as a role model. Which is unfortunately exactly what happened-
On the plus side, the same picture of Yosuke's room also shows that next to Teddie's bed there is a stack of what looks like Ribon magazines (a shoujo Manga magazine for grade and middle school girls). So at least when Teddie spends his own money on literature it's far more age appropriate.
No, the ways Naoto's and Kanji's dungeons are handled are 100% the result of the time the game was made in and a director who "admires" queer people for being "strong" (and went on record saying so) but has no actual idea how to write them or use themes related to them directing his team to use those themes without getting any proper reference material or a queer sensitivity reader.
I really don't wanna go too much into this issue now because... bad memories, but yeah, the entire thing was basically just the director and writing team collectively putting both feet in their mouths and eating them whole. At the time, handling queer issues that way in Japanese pop culture was the standard sadly, but nowadays that absolutely wouldn't fly anymore, even in Japan. Too much has happened in the past 10 years, hence why the edits to P5Royal's script (which, despite what the internet will tell you, were ALSO there in the Japanese version of Royal) happened. If they plan to remake Persona 4, they have some serious script and dungeon design edits to do.
(My personal way of handling it would be to lean into Kanji being bi/pan and portraying that as a good thing, and portraying Naoto as female-identifying but gender-questioning-leaning-nonbinary and removing the surgery aspect from her dungeon, replacing it with something more distinctly sci-fi about "becoming an adult" instead. But I am not ATLUS, so I have no idea what the Persona team will/would do.)
immortality as theft (you have to steal life from something else) immortality as parasitism (there is something else inside You that is keeping you alive and you become less of yourself more and more the longer it stays in you) immortality as violence (everything is trying to kill you because everything is supposed to die and the universe will always try to find a way to right the wrong that is You) you understand
#at least once a month I think about that one post about laminating a paper towel#and how that makes it immortal but also forever prevents it from fulfilling its true purpose#yes you will live. but at the cost of everything that makes you You
protagonists can and will be sexist, racist, insensitive, cruel, stupid, etc, especially towards the beginning of a story. these are called character flaws and they are a surprise tool that will lead to narrative fulfillment later
And sometimes "narrative fulfillment" doesn't mean "the character overcomes their flaws" or even "the antihero is punished for their flaws"! sometimes it means the narrative says "wow was that fucked up or what? anyway i'm rod sterling"
This is how it goes: God whispers in Cain’s jealous ear, drawing his attention to the Sin crouched at his doorway. Sin has haunted eyes and a mouth that has been kissed. Let there be no doubt that Sin has been kissed, with a wet-red mouth that may taste of blood or pomegranate or the electric crackle of a stoplight. Cain looks at Sin. He runs his tongue over his teeth.
This is how it goes: Cain leaves the house at one am in bare feet and a hoodie, careful to avoid the last stair that creaks, and treks out into the Field. There are many fields in the world but there is only one Field. Cain feels the difference in the grass when he crosses the border from field to Field, the way the grey-green blades stand up at attention in his wake, the way the dirt turns ice-cold and furious beneath his heels. The earth is good with foreshadowing. The tree of Knowledge has deep roots.
This is how it goes: God says, I will take you or your brother.
God says, You get to choose.
And Cain says, “When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.”
I have never made brothers before, God explains. That is how I thought they were made. What more do you want?
“I want to steal some of his kindness,” Cain says, and shakes his pocket knife out of his sleeve.
Back at home, Abel sits up in his bed with a start, heart racing. That was close, he thinks, that was a damn close one, and does not know why.
In the Field, the ground warms as blood seeps into the dirt.
I overheard a woman at my job say "Your whole personality revolves around what you hate instead of what you love and thats an awful way to live." to the resident vocal Maga in the breakroom.
He was stunned into silence for at least 60 seconds so that was nice.
the amount of vitriolic replies to this post makes me want to analyze why people react so angrily to having an unhealthy behavior being pointed out to them.
