#middlethought

[tonytamales]

MissingNo Armor

Get a taste of what a glitch pokemon c̴̝͂a̵̘͠ṉ̵̍ ̵̢͒d̶̬͊ŏ̷̮ Commission for Middlethought (2024)

[animarune]

Watching Infinity War with my dad and brother

Me, during a break: The next one comes out in April.

Dad, pausing in his search for snacks: The...Infinity and Beyond War?

Me, processing that: ...No, Endgame.

Dad: I like mine better.

Me: Me too!

[animarune]

My mom can't put the tinsel on the tree because Zelda has claimed them as her bed

[animarune]

Yes hi in order to avoid studying for my CLT practical tomorrow I’m instead hyperfocusing on figuring out what the ever-loving HECK Gohma from LoZ Ocarina of Time even is. She doesn’t have eight legs so she’s not an arachnid. None of this is really important to anything anywhere but here I am spending a few solid hours researching and bothering my friends about it anyway.

So in a serious conversation with @bowserblr​ I’ve gone through this series of thoughts on the subject. With his permission, I’ve included the whole silly thing under the cut.

Me:

in English Queen Gohma's subtile is "Parasitic Armored Arachnid" and the only parasitic arachnids are mites and ticks, which prey on warm-blooded animals, not plants

and in Japanese it's "Shell Parasite Beast"

and there's scale insects which have shells, but they're leaf suckers, not root feeders

actually wait, still not scale because they're leaf suckers, but maybe a parasitic borer?

okay so there are parasites that eat boring insects but no parasitic boring insects lol

Bowserblr:  

I always thought it was just edgy to be cool

They came up with a spider-like concept and then named it like it was the creepiest thing imaginable

I suspect if anyone has any insight, it would be the Zelda wiki but you've probably checked there already?

It's also weird to call something that feeds off of plants as a parasite because so many insects do that in so many different ways

Me:

I know, right? and arachnid isn't too far off, it does look like a scorpion, but regardless, it needs 8 legs to be an arachnid, which gohma don't have at any stage

I did check that site, which is where I found the Japanese name

You're right, it probably is just to be edgy lol

So dropping the "parasite" from the search, we have "arachnid" in the English name, none of which eat plants, and "shell" from the Japanese, which I'm gonna check for again now

Okay so a case could be made that OoT Gohma's model has maybe six legs rather than the four it looks like she has, so she's potentially a (giant) insect, which, cool, that narrows it down from arthropod to insect instead of arachnid, but, y'know, insecta is a huge class of animals lol

Bowserblr:

I didn't even make the connection that Gohma was feeding off of the roots and that that was the source of the Deku Tree's strife

Like I had always assumed that Ganon came there, fucked his shit up, and Gohma happened to live there and became super bad 

Me:

I mean that's a good interpretation too, and she might not even be a root feeder, i mean we kinda have to go back to arachnid for the reason i think she's a root feeder in the first place: the giant webs in the "ceiling" of the boss room in the 3DS version, which are threaded around the ceiling which consists of the giant roots of the tree

but then there are insects that create webs, for example: tent caterpillars

I can't recall if those webs in the boss room exist in LoZ64, but there are plenty of other webs inside the Deku Tree

and I have conflicting thoughts about the reasons the Deku Tree is so hollowed out, too:

- obviously there's man-made things within, like ladders and bars and doors and that waterway with its gates and....water..machines...turbines...?? (I'm blanking whoops) But that could be the tree growing on top of and "absorbing" those things, as trees do irl 

- but something had to have hollowed the tree out so much, unless magic made him grow that way lol That is a lot of heartwood missing man. But trees can potentially survive losing much of its heartwood and even thrive that way, so whatever Ganondorf's curse did to the Deku Tree and/or Gohma, it must have affected its roots, because roots are v important to plants lmao

Me:

Okay let's broaden our scope of study from OoT to LoZ as a whole lmao 

-the original LoZ is a six legged one eyed creature the Zelda Wiki refers to as a giant arthropod (not wrong, but not specific at all)

-"As is traditional for the species, Gohma's appearance is that of a large arachnid with one eye." Zelda Wiki says about only the second game in the series to have Gohma at all (Link's Awakening). The sprite for Gohma may or may not have 8 legs, going by those 4 little appendages, but could just as easily only have 4 legs with 4 weird spikes

-Oracle of Season's Gohma sprite gives them six legs, two of which have pincers like a scorpion 

-Wind Waker's Gohma boss looks like motherfuckin centipedes (which uh, hey, they're venomous, so like, poor Valoo??? Or I guess, spewing lava out of your mouth could be considered like venom I guess lol). But this Gohma also bears a strong resemblance to the Magtail enemies in this game, which aren’t Gohma, obviously, so maybe Gohma is just the boss’s name in this case? Let’s count this one out

-Twilight Princess's young Gohma have four legs and the boss has 8 (and pedipalps and chelicerae!!! wow! real spider morphology!!!) 

-Four Swords Adventure's Gohma have six legs

-And Hyrule Warriors's Gohma actually does have 8 legs, it just confused me with the shield thing lol

To sum it all up: Gohma as a recurring enemy in the Legend of Zelda series as a whole can only accurately be referred to as an arthropod, which, while not wrong, is wildly unspecific. Sometimes they’re an insect, sometimes they’re an arachnid, and sometimes they’re neither.

Regardless, um, hey designers, just so you know, arthropod young typically have the same amount of legs as their adult counterparts lol

This has gotten me no closer to deciding what OoT’s Gohma is, just in case you were wondering. I just...researched a bunch of Gohma for no reason, that’s okay. I guess I thought maybe if I could pinpoint recurring features across the series I could decide what I want OoT's Gohma to be, but that didn't happen lol

I guess she could still be a borer, but there aren’t any borers that produce webs.

It’s a fictional creature but I’mma obsess about this for hours regardless

[animarune]

Diegetic explanations for dropped plots in Marble Hornets

EDIT: I wish tumblr drafts showed the date you saved them,,, because I’m pretty sure I wrote this before ECKVA even started up. As in, last summer. I have 1500 saved drafts because I used to be stubborn about “coming back to tag this & reblog it later” and never doing it. And apparently writing posts like this and never posting them???

Also, I'm not 100% sure what I was talking about. Or if I was even onto anything. I think I just needed to vent MH feelings.

So I pulled an all-nighter for some reason and ended up watching @nick-nocturn’s Marble Hornets Explained series for the third time at around 6 or 7 this morning and I had some thoughts about the dropped plotlines from the series. These thoughts ultimately change nothing, but I think they might also put a different perspective on everything (mainly because I'm ADHD and loose ends drive me up the wall so I like to find in-universe explanations for them.)

Below the cut I’ll discuss the stigmata from season one, and Jay’s dropped skull persona from the rest of the series.

Okay, so to start off: the stigmata. Nick Nocturne said that it took four years before anyone figured out where totheark was going with that, so it’s likely that member just stopped using it because Jay didn’t understand anyway, and because of Jay's ignorance he was too late to save Brian. So why bother using it anymore

Next, the way Night Mind explained the video Alex sent to Jay at the end of season one struck me as odd. We know that Alex has been watching Marble Hornets from the start, and that he knew sending something coded would make Jay think it was from totheark. He needed the two weeks to edit the video footage to look like totheark’s as well. If I’m not mistaken and the skull mask is from a different video (which I could be, I was running on steam at the point this occurred to me) then wouldn’t it make sense that Alex, trying to copy totheark’s masked member, would don a mask in the video to send to Jay?

Of course, then the image totheark used to tell Jay “So much more than time has been stolen” wouldn’t fit, because that was Alex. Unless they realised that players of the game were theorizing that it was Jay, and so used that to refer to him and his memory loss.

And lastly, I think Nick said this as well, but the signs of Jay becoming another identity like that of the masked man don’t have to be just scrapped either. He does go into a trance many times, but the difference is his trance has no identity yet, and thus no mask or goals. He just kind of wanders around in a zombie-like state, losing track of time and memory. Which (not that they need the help) makes it really easy for totheark to hack into Jay's twitter and youtube channel.

tl;dr I’ve been following Marble Hornets since February 2010, and I have a lot of feelings about it

Thank you, and good night

[animarune]

An anon sent me this and I’m??? So grateful? What the fuck.

I was expecting a cross between Salad Fingers/Ready Err Not and “this is a family business we take our massages very seriously” but it’s nowhere near that level of whatthefuckery.

What brought this on? Why was I given this? Middlethought you have any ideas?

EDIT: @marypenelope tells me people have been trying to trigger other people by sending them this video. Anyone who's never heard of Ready Err Not and by proxy doesn't know what I'm talking about, beware loud sounds and flashy imagery? The only maybe gory thing is the clay guy's clay heart popping out of his chest for some reason. Oh and sexual imagery on his TV.

[animarune]

Funny how fandom things change as you grow up

12 y/o Me: Sasuke is cool! Kakashi is cool!

23 y/o Me: Wow, what dweebs

12!Me: Naruto is kind of annoying. And Sakura sucks!

23!Me: Naruto is precious and Sakura deserved better.

12!Me: Badass superkids!

23!Me: Child soldiers...

12: *only reads and writes OC fic*

12: *occasionally reads Naruto/Sasuke*

23: *only reads canon characters*

23: *Team 7 OT3 fic*

23: *still writing that OC fic 14!Me started*

12: Kawaii~!

23: *hyperfocuses on linguistic properties, cultural influences, pronouns and honorifics of Japanese instead of actually writing fic*

12: These guys are weird.

23: These guys need therapy.

[animarune]

I just remembered we read a shirt story about a knight who saved all the princesses and and slayed all the dragons and then at the end when we were all clearly waiting for the knight to get married to one of the princesses she took off her helmet and rode off into the sunset And like the moral of the story was supposed to be a feminist thing about not assuming the gender of the faceless protag, and to a lesser extenct, to not expect the outcome of a story before you get there But my ADHD brain just summoned this experience from the æther and slammed it over my head demanding bUT WHAT IF???? she married a princess anyway Or aLL OF THEM??? Gimme all the polyamorous wlw knights in shining armour please it's my birthday