Characters who are Chinese: Exusiai Texas Big Bob
Characters who are not Chinese: Blaze Alter Ch'en

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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@oltammefru
Characters who are Chinese: Exusiai Texas Big Bob
Characters who are not Chinese: Blaze Alter Ch'en
damn the new priestess questionnaire got weird
Since you're apparently so into catgirls now, she's decided to humor you. Now be good and come back to her side, okay? She can even give you back that pesky Ama-10 if you want it so bad
When Kal'tsit emerged from her cocoon, I hesitated too, but her eyes seemed strangely familiar. After she donned the black crown, I saw her from time to time… I thought, perhaps we don't have to be enemies. I'm so glad I thought that.
Putting on the Demon King Crown of Unending Anguish that makes you want to yuri it up real bad with Kal'tsit
Oh hey cool the CE paradox sim is Amiya fighting by her side on the BB-9 map!
Chat is it fine when the narrative device that exists to take the shape of the grief everyone feels about Theresa & be a stark reminder of her absence is also feeling that grief and is also being affected by the absence of the person she is not supposed to be
(From Civilight's Eterna's new lines)
"The more I look at all these cherished memories, these pleasant memories, the more I feel another kind of emotion. This emotion must be called "mourning." I mourn... her."
a stage is cleared when all enemies are defeated, so the most valuable thing an operator can do is damage. you cannot win a stage without dealing damage, and everything other than damage that an operator can do, be it healing, buffing, debuffing, crowd control, etc, is ultimately all to facilitate the dealing of more damage.
the more endgame you get and the more enemy stats bloat up, the less viable it becomes to defeat enemies with a quick burst of damage, and the more valuable these non-damage abilities become in ensuring you get the opportunity to deal the required damage.
because nearly every operator deals at least some damage, and new operators that primarily deal damage will continue to slightly outdo each other at dealing damage as somewhat inevitable consequence of new releases in a live service format, damage is also the most replaceable thing an operator can do.
consequently and paradoxically, damage is the least valuable thing an operator can do in terms of staying relevant in "the meta" in the long term.
EXAMPLE: ch'en the holungday was the dps god of her release era, but her high instance physical aoe damage and crowd control on s3 have been completely outdone by wis'adel, who additionally has wider range, more survivability, and a cheaper deployment cost. now all ch'en has to set herself apart is her ammo saving talent for snipers, but most of the operators who can make use of it overlap with her role of high instance physical damage and have other more effective support options, so there's very little reason left to use ch'en over other units in terms of combat efficiency.
EXAMPLE: suzuran herself deals negligible damage, but the wide area slows, heals, and fragile debuff on her s3 mean she's never not been relevant since her release at the end of year 1, and it's unlikely she will ever become irrelevant. similarly, ela's ability to drop slow and fragile nearly anywhere on the map would make her an evergreen operator even if her personal damage were to fall off.
this is why new 6* operators all bring their own unique busted utility to the table these days, it's to future-proof them. even if their damage numbers get outscaled eventually, be it in one year or in another six, the particular unique bullshit that they can do is going to remain as a reason to use them over other units. you don't use mostima for her damage, you use her because she's the only operator who can tell a big chunk of the map to stop moving for 27 seconds and/or you want to have sex with her.
this unique bullshit approach means the way powercreep looks in this game isn't just a new operator who does the same shit but stronger, it's a new operator who interacts with the game in a new and creative way. rather than just killing enemies harder you get to kill them in increasingly unusual and peculiar ways. new units aren't just offering easier stage clears, they're offering more interesting stage clears. 6 years in arknights continues to keep making new ways to approach the game instead of just repeating a proven formula, not just in operator design but in mechanics and gamemodes too, so I personally don't consider the way each new unit feels more cracked than the last to be a problem when the way they're cracked shows this degree of investment in the way the game actually plays.
(which isn't to say numbers bloat isn't also happening, but I do think it's happening at a slower pace than it otherwise might thanks to the emphasis on unique bullshit over raw damage)
I also think these mechanics are striking a decent balance between expanding mechanical depth and being appealing to players who aren't strategic geniuses. a lot of the unique bullshit we're seeing on new operators is also stuff that can serve as a panic button for unskilled players. that's a balance arknights Wants to hit, because it's an in-depth strategy game but also a visual novel and also a gacha game, and ideally every new operator appeals to each of those demographics. that's a difficult thing to actually achieve but I think they're feeling it out pretty well.
this is because, at least for now, none of the unique bullshit that these 6* can do has ever been, like, necessary. it's all very powerful and completely extraneous. yeah lemuen can track enemies anywhere on the map but it's not like they're designing bosses to never come into your range otherwise now. exia alter can immediately redeploy an operator for you, but on any map where your operators get mauled so fast that you actually need that, the problem is going to be with the way you the player are approaching this stage. sure, pramanix alter can freeze your blue box to turn it into a 3 block unit enemies have to defeat first before they can enter, but like, there's a melee tile to put down an actual defender too you know. these things are primarily relevant if you the player either don't know what you're doing or know exactly what you're doing.
well, all of which is a long way to say, i hope they keep making shit that is busted in a funny way
(link to clear + my comments on it if you want):
HER ATTACK NAMES HELLO???
SKULLCRACKING ELEGY!!
ce/kal'tsit + some doodles and an old priestess/kal'tsit wip i will maybe finish (lie)
lowk in the future I really do wish that arknights would tackle on Priestess before she joined the Oracle and others because I find her introduction as "someone who listened to the dying stars" (something along those lines) to be utterly fascinating bc I feel like. All jokes aside, that explains a lot about her. Bc I do think her framework is probably heavily impacted by what she experienced, she knows of the end and death of all existence within a world far better and intimately than anyone else, and so as a result she wants existence to continue into eternity but to her this means to nip off any and all potential for a future in the bud by crystallizing the present and everything else into the originium.
And like aside long time isolation she experienced before the oracle she probably already had this idea planned in the first place I think, and it's why she probably felt the most joy too when Oracle shared her sentiment and why it stung so much that her Ama-10 and oracle especially no longer was on her side at the present but stood opposite to her.
Anyways what I'm saying is I need more priestess content arknights please. Especially pre-oracle meeting.
Yeah! I really like how Priestess is both someone who sucks as a person, and often does so in ways that are just incredibly petty or unpleasant or nasty or cruel, but at the same time like. She is a romantic, she is really cute in a dorky way, she is someone who has gone through and survived a lot, and has a really strong drive and determination to overcome the destined End of All that awaits them all. Despite all her very apparent nastiness, she has a lot in her background that's really compelling and sympathetic!
I sort of get the impression that Priestess is like, perhaps meant to be someone who's role in the story is a complement to Theresa:
She's someone who's been foreshadowed for quite a while now and has been haunting the narrative in the background. She is someone who is well-intentioned with strong beliefs, a very complicated person full of hypocrisies and contradictions, someone who is capable who is capable of incredible acts of goodness but also immense harm to others. She is someone who so strongly rejects the inescapable fate that awaits them that everyone else has already consigned themselves to, and is willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen, yet is unable to surpass their own limitations and truly does what it takes to achieve this.
The big difference here between Theresa and Priestess here is that Theresa is someone that, despite all she's done, despite all her sins and crimes, despite all the ways she's hurt the main cast, is someone that we are sympathetic to, and someone who is foundational to the ideology of Rhodes Island and central to the themes of the game. Priestess to me feels like the reverse of this.
Posting random screencaps from the Elite Op manga I thought were cute.
Blaze, sheepishly asking Mon3tr while making her pleadingest expression
Now that she ATE SHIT and DIED we can finally give her the maid outfit skin (themed around her long long life of course)...
this may be a bit of a stretch so don't pay it any mind if it's stupid but i think it's kind of fascinating how priestess, co-creator of originium, the Cool Rock that preserves information kind of exerts influence on the world the same way that collapsals, the Cool Void "Demons" that are antithetical to information do or i guess more accurately just originium vs collapsals in general i guess, clear and largely irreversible influence, especially to the land and life itself, very similar in spite of being theoretically absolutely antithetical to each other
yeah! i thought in particular those few bits in ep15 about like the concept of "knowledge" that in some sense elevates you but also irrevocably changes you:
I'm not quite sure if it's quite right to frame what collapsals/originium have going on as like direct opposites; at least the way I'd see it, the collapsals are less "anti-knowledge" as much as they are like "knowledge of a different kind" or maybe something like "knowledge of [the void]."
For the collapsals, the best way to mitigate them is to be wrong / unaware / stupid about them. In Shu's event, due in part to Ji's abilities being able to make the abstract concrete, the farmers are able mostly rationalize them as slightly more fucked up common field pests and are able to overcome them in that way. The Sami mostly rely on these various heuristics against the collapsals, many of which are deliberately somewhat irrational about it. None of this makes sense, because this is not something the human brain has the capabilities of making sense of. If this is starting to make sense, this you need to flee from the current situation as soon as possible without looking back. A feeling of familiarity and understanding here is proof that you are being hollowed out like a dead branch so your corpse can be puppeted by something from beyond.
The whole thing with the collapsals is very thematically similar to the various bits about "forbidden knowledge"; the way I see it, they are probably talking about (broadly speaking) pretty similar "kinds of knowledge."
This is how it feels every time I pre-empt one of the PRTS hand deploys.