Most Beloved (non-canon) Queer Ship Tournament - Round 4
Which queer ship do you love more?
Poe x Finn (Stormpilot) (Star Wars)*
orufrey (qifrey and olruggio from witch hat atelier)*
how dare you make me choose
Remaining time: 6 days 14 hours
Disclaimer: This tournament is based on submissions! Please respect all identities, characters and fandoms! Hate or aggressive language (even if jokingly) will get you blocked instantly!
on multiple occasions i have seen people on socials excited for palworld 1.0 and it has taken me a moment to realize they aren't doing a bit and are genuinely excited
Do you know nothing about capitalism. This is coming from an avid anti-estabishment. More competition is good for us. This is a marathon, not a fucking sprint. Read a book.
see, here's the thing: it is absolutely possible to create a monster capturing game that could compete with Pokemon. It wouldn't win, it wouldn't even come close, the sheer market dominance of Nintendo and The Pokemon Company is too overpowering for any competitor to have a reasonable chance of doing that.
The problem is that nobody is going to do that because every attempt to do so is an attempt to compete with the superficial elements of what Pokemon is now, rather than following the how and why that led to Pokemon to become what it is. The objective they are chasing is how to compete with Pokemon, which is no objective at all. The only way to create a true competitor is to build the equivalent to Pokemon again from first principles.
There are plenty of other good monster catching games (as people have mentioned in the notes) and if anything we could do with more of them - it's an underexplored genre IMO. But Palworld isn't that. Palworld is Pokemon as imagined by a modern gamer who believes Pokemon should have completely altered its gameplay style to match modern trends. It's the sandbox gameplay loop soup idea of what Pokemon should be. It's slop. It's the gaming equivalent of a protest vote.
The thing is, I would not have beef with Palworld if it weren't for blatantly ripping off Pokemon for its monster designs. I wouldn't like it, but that's for the same reasons that I don't like most contemporary AAA action RPG games. But incorporating a more modern combat style into a monster collecting game is an idea that genuinely has legs.
The problem is that it's not trying to be a monster collecting game with guns, it's trying to be Pokemon with guns. If it had actually built up a unique set of monsters specifically to fit the tone, setting, and style of the gameplay ideas they were building off of, they could have made something really interesting. What they actually did by stealing Pokemon designs was communicate that the monsters in this game don't actually matter and could have been replaced by anything.
This is the difference between Palworld and previous monster catching games like Youkai Watch and Cassette Beasts. Those games actually care about their designs. The monsters were made as part of the games they were for, whereas in Palworld they're a box to tick.
"there were major systemic problems in that era of the past!"
"yes!"
"so nobody in an oppressed group was ever happy!"
"no, some of them were sometimes"
"oh so the oppression wasn't real then!"
"no, it very much was and needed to change"
"but...if they were happy..."
"humans find ways to be happy in even bleak circumstances. it's kind of a defining trait of humanity. they had to live their lives in the world as it was, even while fighting to change it, so. yeah. they made happiness for themselves the way everyone does, even now with the problems we have today. there were good things in their world, too, alongside the bad. even some things we could learn from now, though definitely not their macro-level social attitudes!"
"...ohhh you're a shill for conservative values and you wish you lived back then! got it!"
Who is Yvette and may I please know more about their streaming career? 🙏
Comtesse Yvette Preux is, for lack of a better word, one of the ‘iconic’ investigators/PCs in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. She appears in a lot of art in the rulebook, as do many of the PCs of the A.N.I.M. team and our friends.
(both by team artist @chaospyromancy)
She’s also the first ever monster PC to ever be played in Eureka, back before Eureka even had official monster PC rules. The incredible success of that campaign is what set the precedent for what monster PC gameplay would come to be in Eureka.
You can read a bit of an origin story for her in this post
is there a book series or other piece of fiction you’d recommend for someone who really enjoys the way Eureka specifically does its vampires
In the 2010s and 2020s, she has a fairly successful twitch streaming/influencer career, with her gimmick being that she claims to be a real 800+-year-old vampire, and allegedly never breaks character. Her twitch and YouTube channels cover competitive gaming, challenge runs, advanced math, firearms, and urban exploring.
In-person she is.. a little harder to get along with. She’s.. old-fashioned, and her values are very distinctly those of someone who grew up rich and Catholic in the 1200s, which ironically means she has little in common with a modern “tradcath.”
The contrast between the modern world, the modern world’s pop culture idea of the Middle Ages, and the actual Middle Ages is a major theme in the parts of her story where she’s actually integrating into the society of the 1990s and 21st century.
Many would expect her to be virulently and openly hateful, but that’s the pop culture Middle Ages. The actual Middle Ages were oppressive in different and more interesting ways.
I’ll give a few interesting examples
In the Middle Ages, women were considered the more “lustful” and “sexually aggressive” sex, a bit like men are thought of today. It’s women who were considered basically responsible for lust in the first place, to the point that it was considered a public health issue. Lust with no outlet was thought to be detrimental to one’s overall physical health. Sex or even masturbation was sometimes prescribed by doctors to combat this.
This is a comedic exaggeration/oversimplification but in the medieval world being around women would gradually fill up a Dark Souls-style Lust meter and if you didn’t do anything to reduce it it would take a chunk out of your health, making you sickly and prone to other health problems. Women were more resistant to this because they’re the source of lust in the first place. Medieval women covered their legs and their hair in particular for everyone’s protection.
This manifests in Yvette as her not caring at all about being naked in front of female friends, but being careful not to look too sexy around male friends. And then awkwardly telling them to masturbate later if they need to because it’s better to sin and live than to avoid sin to the detriment of one’s health. (In fact, knowingly damaging one’s health is a sin.)
In the art, you can see her not only wearing pants, but even wearing pants that show her ankles and legs, and wearing her hair down. It took her a long time to get comfortable wearing anything but full-length skirts around men, but these risqué (to her) outfits are symbolizing her character growth from someone who is accommodating to others to a fault, to prioritizing her own comfort, even at cost to others.
In the Middle Ages, they did not conceptualize homosexuality like we do now. No one was gay, and neither was anyone straight. Attraction wasn’t a trait of an individual, it was a fact. Homosexuality wasn’t really considered a thing that you were, it was a thing you do. It’s really hard to explain so I’m just going to hope y’all get it along with the example. Sodomy was sodomy, and that was considered to cover basically any irregular form of sex. Irregular sex between a man and woman was as much sodomy as sex between a man and another man. This also means that there was no presumption of homosexuality in the Middle Ages. You didn’t have to say “no homo” before you touched your same sex friend’s hand. Close friends would kiss each other on the mouth and stuff, and that was considered normal. (Though something you would want to avoid was spending more than a few minutes alone with an opposite-sex friend, because that could be used to call the woman’s virginity into question, which could hurt her eligibility for marriage.)
As Yvette understands it, in the 21st century, people have constructed entire communities around their enjoyment of sodomy, like how she’s a member of the gun club. She has complex feelings about that but it isn’t like she’s never engaged in sodomy before either. (She brought this to confession and did her penance so it’s fine.)
What really aggravates her is how she can’t touch or kiss any of her friends in the 21st century without it being considered sexual.
She argues it’s not “gay” for her to feel attracted to women either, it’s normal. Women are naturally attractive to everyone.
Where it really gets abrasive though is probably the classism. She’s from the noble class and still considers that to really matter, it makes her a little bit better than everyone else, and more qualified to be making decisions for people.
She does love commoners, though. All her friends are commoners, and she’s very protective of them. She’s too autistic to get that noblesse obligé wasn’t supposed to be a real principal she lives by and even back when she was for-real managing a fiefdom she was an advocate for the comfort of the peasantry.
I'm gonna have to stop listing all her quirks here because if I don’t stop then it’ll go on forever. If you want to read some short stories that feature her, subscribe to our Patreon.
I’ll segway by saying that two more major aspects of her are generosity and power. She revels in power in all forms, including the power to solve the problems of people who are helpless to solve them themselves. Like I said, she takes noblesse obligé very seriously. Jesus Christ had the power to multiply the fish and bread for the hungry, so he did. She can help, so she will(whether you like it or not). She hardly even considers it a “duty,” it’s more like why would she ever do anything else? Sometimes this means giving away staggering amounts of money, other (more exciting) times it means getting involved in a Eureka adventure/investigation, the more challenging and dangerous the better, because it makes her even cooler. This is what gets her into Eureka adventures. She’s going to help the helpless, what does it matter if it also fuels her ego?
I also just realized I’ve said very little about her actual twitch streaming career. Like I said, her gimmick is that she’s a real vampire. In the 2010s and 2020s, she is more or less “out” as a vampire, openly identifying herself as such and doing almost nothing to hide any aspect of her vampirism(except the part where she sneaks up on people in the night and drinks their blood, but she doesn’t hide that because it’s a vampire thing, she hides that because it’s an assault charge). Most people just think she’s weird, or really really dedicated to the persona. And if somebody does actually see her not reflecting in a mirror, or some other unexplainable proof of vampirism, what are they going to do? Go online and say “hey everyone I think that this popular e-celebrity whose gimmick is that she says she’s a vampire actually is a real vampire!”? Vampires aren’t real, idiot.
If you want to read short stories about her, you can get them with a $5 subscription to our Patreon,
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and she and her exploits in Eureka campaigns are also talked about a lot in the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club.
Check out the A.N.I.M. RPG BOOK CLUB community on Discord - hang out with 410 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
The Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook will also have a section that will probably be called “the making of a vampire” that will detail some of her actual living life and shine a little more light on how a vampire actually comes to be in Eureka’s world.
You can tell a lot about a person by what kind of books they don't think they need to have read in order to criticize them. Unfortunately, 75% of the time what you can tell about them is "They are a misogynist", while the rest of the time it's either "They think literacy should be reserved for "smart" people" or "they hate children".
I've had this conversation 4 times this week but characters in stories aren't SUPPOSED to be bluntly verbally confronted by other characters about their bad behavior.
I get that a lot of people naturally have difficulty with non-literal communication but in *serious* storytelling, the morality of the characters is supposed to be "addressed" symbolically and wordlessly. If a character is mean, and then gets eaten by a dinosaur, that *is* supposed to be enough acknowledgement that they were an asshole. The author, their god, metered out karma.
I scrapped a much longer post about this but it's only mostly in kid's media, and frankly only recently, that characters explain in words what was right or wrong about one another's actions, and that only happens because Disney Channel forces the writers to shoehorn that in against their will. Writers expect you to be smart enough to already know right from wrong, and the "justice" experienced by characters is often expected to be partially or completely meta.
“Transphobes just think trans men are confused girls while they want trans women dead” hey what do you think they do to confused girls? It was only a generation or two ago when they stopped shoving ice picks into our fucking skulls.
I remember I was once talking about drug users, in the context of who needs access to tests which determine whether certain drugs have been cut with fentanyl or nitazenes, and one man I was talking to corrected me because I used the phrase "people struggling with addiction". He told me this label was not only stigmatizing, but also inaccurate because not every person using a drug necessarily has either a physical or mental dependency on it. People who are not considered "addicted", even according to the definitions used in medicine, still need access to tests for their drugs. He also pointed out that not all people who are addicted to drugs in some manner are "struggling" with it.
I don't think he has any idea how often I think about that correction. He didn't moderate his tone or worry about embarrassing me; he was harsh in how he said it and did so in front of others. He knew he was right and there was no good reason to coddle my feelings. I appreciate that, because it make me take it seriously and really reflect on it. I already knew that you could use drugs without becoming addicted (I have) and that you could be addicted to something and have that addiction not be a problem (I have had a physical dependency on drugs which were a net positive for me to use). Yet, despite knowing that, when I was doing advocacy work I was defaulting to language with fucked up implications. Partially to seem respectable and partially because I was mentally distancing myself from other drug users.
I was thinking about him again today, and how he's permanently changed the way I speak about drug use when I do activism. He's had a knock-on effect, for every person I reach, and I'm sure he has done the same thing with many other people he's corrected.
Anyway, shout-out to him for his advocacy for drug users!
like, obviously Paradox games are 'teaching tools' only in a narrow and specific sense, a lot of things are simplified and streamlined for the purposes of making an entertaining video game, but I'll never forget about how many times I read about the Investiture Controversy and tried to understand it, and I always thought "it's about 'secular versus spiritual authority?' it's all about who gets to give a special ring to bishops? Why was this such a big deal?"
and then I played CKIII and went "ugh, it sucks that the Pope gets to appoint my court chaplain. Council positions are so important for managing my large vassals and keeping them happy, and besides, I have so many capable and learned vassals who would be perfect for the job and the Pope keeps sticking me with these Italian midwits who don't even... OH SHIT THAT'S WHY"
god save me from people with a platform being confidently incorrect about my field of study online
this Youtuber best known for (very funny!) videos mocking luxury fashion brands posted a video about the history of "poverty-core" fashion
I was immediately concerned
her thrust was the Consumptive Chic quasi-myth (ARGH NO BAD), but she followed it up with "women were literally taking poison to look like this." End Video.
thing is, if she was talking about what I think she was talking about. it IS an example of Poverty-Core! just a different, more commonplace kind of Poverty-Core!
in 1851, Johann Jakob von tschudi published an article in a Vienna medical journal documenting a village in Styria where the inhabitants took small, regular doses of arsenic. this practice, he claimed, made the women's complexions beautiful (in what way, he didn't specify). cue cosmetics companies in cities jumping on this idea and producing "arsenic complexion wafers"
this ad also specifies that the wafers are free of certain abortifacient herbs. just in case ladies think it's that kind of coded Female Irregularity ad. fascinating
note that these ads generally tout the product as "safe." the idea, not so foreign to us today, was that a tiny dose of a dangerous substance could have a beneficial effect. Botox, anyone?
...except not like Botox, exactly, because a Boston medical journal tested some popular brands in the 1870s and found that they were mostly dried lactose with no detectable arsenic. womp womp.
Oh For the Simple Country Life :3 was a really common kind of Poverty-Core in the 19th century! and it was being used to scam people into buying products they thought contained poison, with only a random ad's assurance that the products were safe! this Youtuber could EASILY have talked about that and been 100% factually correct!
but I guess Oooooh they Wanted to Look terminally Ill!!!!!! gets more views. ugh
