#apollo-cackling

[st-just]

🖊️ zomeone from Shadows or Abhari maybe?

Sir Almeric Lionel DeVayne is a very handsome young man originally sent to the imperial court with at least half an eye to finding an advantageous marriage. He's also very, very, very good at gutting people with a pigsticker, to the point of finding gainful employment for several years as different nobles' champion of honor.

The combination of these two facts is - you know the meme about 'if he writes you one sonnet, he loves you ; if he writes you sixteen sonnets, he loves writing sonnets'? Almeric is that, but for valiantly challenging people to duels to defend the honor of eligible women he was seen in the company of.

It is perhaps unsurprising that he has been both knighted as one of the Queen-Empress' bodyguards and champions and 'honored' with a job guarding an ambassador traveling to the ass-end of creation for a year or two.

[txttletale]

what's up with Leviathan eu4? searched it up and like wow that's the lowest rated thing I've seen on steam... pretty much ever lol

as-released it was so badly bugged it made the game unplayable

its features were ill-conceived and broke a lot of existing systems

its features were so mind-bogglingly strong that they trivialized the game

generally a lot of this is attributable to a new studio coming in and the natural problems that are gonna happen with a new studio's first release. however unfortunately, and most importantly for me:

4. it set the tone for the rest of the game's life cycle, which was 'we've reached the absolute limit of what we can meaningfully do with the game's engine and core framework, so here's a bunch of dumb bullshit that lives on top of all the other systems without meaningful interaction with them'

like, people joke about hearts of iron mods trying to turn the game into a visual novel, but that's essentially official paradox policy now wrt eu4. every update is just like 'new mission chain based on some wacky althist to give france massive bonuses for colonizing siberia or annexing singapore or some bullshit'. it's a boring and uninteresting design philosophy to me that goes against everything that i like about paradox games so i'm basically not interested anymore

[literary-illuminati]

yk it's interesting that you say it's absurd to call murderbot 'cozy fantasy' bc the series is so solidly in my mental category for 'cozy fantasy' that a while back, I was surprised when you mentioned liking it lol

granted, this might change if I read something by becky chambers/tj klune (iirc the only comfort fantasy I've read is legends and lattes?) and my idea of the default/an enjoyable amount of pain in a book maaaay be a little (very) skewed, but. idk I've always seen the series as... ig the type of hurt/comfort where most of the former is in service to the latter, which in my head rounds out to just being comfort if that makes sense

is it that the series isn't saccharine about it/doesn't fall into normative ideas of what 'comfort' is? (ex. like you said murderbot doesn't angst at all about not being 'human')

Becky Chambers novels rarely involve the protagonist being disemboweled or losing limbs or racking up double-digit body counts, lets say.

...okay, being more helpful - Murderbot is just much more plotty than any of the central examples of the genre I've seen? Much more emphasis on doing things and getting into trouble and solving problems, compared to the more sedate slice of life/travelogue stuff you see in e.g. Chambers or Klune.

and just generally the 'hurt' in 'hurt/comfort' is, like, bolded and underlined and in 72 point type, compared to House on the Cerulean Sea or whatever.

[st-just]

oh what's going on with house of the dragon?

I am merely floating in a dingy trembling in the wake of the shadows swimming beneath.

But no just, bizarre amount of, like, stereotypical fandom blorboing and viciously defending the honor of your fave by proving that they're totally in the right and the other guy is a monster for a show where everyone is a parasitic feudal aristocrat bringing ruin to the land because they can't get over their own entitlement and family drama (and, like, this is clearly the major theme of the work).

also a deeply surprising amount of reader-insert porn with wannabe elric of melnibone

[txttletale]

not trying to go to bat for hbomberguy or whatever just trying to understand what you mean - what are other things he could/should have done? (genuine question) because I saw the tweet as him responding to his followers interpreting the absense of a Take from him as a purposeful stance in and of itself, yk trying to dissuade them from that, and so from my POV it looked tacky but understandable, if that makes sense

if he strongly felt the need to say nothing, he could have simply said nothing. lots of youtubers haven't said anything. yes, people expected him to say something--that's a fair expectation of them to have, considering those people are the fans he attracted dunking on paul joseph watson & company.

if he was going to tweet anything at all he should have probably acknowledged the impending ethnic cleansing and not framed the people who are outraged and upset about it as 'gaining points' or whatever the fuck he said.

if he absolutely had to make a song and dance about how he wasn't doing a song and dance i also think there were much better ways to do this. shannon strucci who is similarly a vaguely socdem youtuber made a much better tweet with a similar sentiment:

i'm also disinclined to be charitable because the only other thing he did was retweet bernie sanders' godawful statement. idk. i'm not trying to cancel mr. bomberguy or whatevsies idrc but i just personally think that making a tweet to say "im not making a tweet" is obnoxious and embarassing

[st-just]

💙 CK2/Mass Effect?

Crusader Kings remain the greatest romantic fantasy villain simulator ever made. Where else can I arrange to have my 16-year-old-niece marry a famously ugly brute three times her age so they can have kids that will inherit his claim to the throne of Hungary once I assassinate him?

(Also Paradox Games are, like, unironically some of the best avenues of education for history/geography with any sort of mass audience. Which like, not an amazing endorsement, but better than most alternatives! Not like I was going to learn about who the Mamelukes or Komnenoi were anywhere else. My mental image of political geography is still the EU political mapmode.)

Mass Effect - the Tuchanka mission of Mass Effect 3 is literally the greatest sequence I have ever experienced in any Triple A video game. Unironically high art.

[st-just]

what do folks mean when they say wildbow's really bad at pacing? I read on a really wonky pace so I'm always curious what folks mean when they talk about pacing lol

Hmm, so this is one of those things where different people reading different serials will give different answers, but in no particular order:

Endings and natural breakpoints - his stuff isn't anywhere near the longest web serial fiction out there, but the fact that it isn't divided into books/doesn't have any explicit organization above the arc level makes it seem much more meandering and endless.

Tension - Wildbow is great at ratcheting it up and writing rising action. And letting it rise, and rise, and rise, and... - for as titanic as his stuff is, there's very little wordcount devoted to just, breather episodes, letting the protagonists enjoy their victories, etc. Which is a shame, because the lower-stakes and less heart-pounding stuff he does write is pretty reliably great imo.

Action scenes - there's too many of them and they go on too long. Both relative to how good WB is at writing them and just, like, generally. The last big action setpiece in Pale was literally longer than most standalone novels, I think.

[st-just]

voted for baru/hu but in fairness are they rlly toxic tho? but baru/shao lune on the other hand-

(I haven't gotten very far into monster but yk looking at the memes + her few scenes...)

Different kinds of toxic. Baru and Hu are toxic in a glorious capital-r Romantic way that involves betrayal and massacre and using the fact that you were betrayed and are about to be executed to emotionally blackmail your apparently-not-ex girlfriend to swear to destroy the empire she's selling you out to from within, which she initially interprets as committing to "The End. The ruin of everything. A great jet of blood across the face of history".

Baru and Shao are toxic in the more pedestrian way where you are not over your breakup and end up falling into bed with an utter bitch as a combination coping mechanism and form of emotional self-harm, and also because you have basically compatible kinks.